A. One day a homeowner cut down a large shade tree in their own yard, but the tree was so big it also provided a lot of shade in a neighboring yard owned by Joe and Marylou.
1. Joe’s wife, Marylou, was lamenting that the landscaping they had put in that area of their yard was designed for shade and now was completely in the sun.
2. Soon afterward, one of Marylou’s favorite hostas died because it wasn’t in the shade anymore, and she was lamenting its loss.
3. Being the humorous guy that Joe is, he almost said to his wife, “Don’t pout, honey, pick your chin up and say, ‘Hosta La Vista, baby.”
4. Fortunately, Joe caught himself before he said it, because he realized it was better to say nothing than to say the wrong thing and end up dead like his wife’s hosta.
B. Many people who are grieving and lamenting wish that others would think twice or hold their tongues before saying something in an effort to comfort and encourage those going through a terrible loss.
1. I will have more to say about this later in this sermon and in other sermons in this series.
C. Today begins a new short sermon series that I am calling “Good Grief: Expressing Grief, Finding Grace.”
1. Sometime last year, Annette Warren allowed me to borrow a book that had ministered to her after Mark’s death.
2. The book is titled “Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy,” written by Mark Vroegop (Vro-EE-gop).
3. The subtitle is “Discovering the Grace of Lament.”
4. The book is the author’s deeply personal journey of loss and how he learned to lament after having a child die just days before birth.
5. Annette suggested that I might want to use the book for a class or a sermon series.
6. When I read through the book, I immediately recognized that this is a subject that doesn’t receive enough attention and that it is a skill and practice that all of us need to develop.
D. Let’s start with two words: Good Grief.
1. You all know how much I love the peanuts cartoon, and you probably know that this is one of Charlie Brown’s characteristic phrases.
2. But when you think about it, “Good Grief” is considered an oxymoron.
3. An oxymoron is a figure of speech that seems to contradict itself.
4. There are lists and lists of the things that are oxymorons, like: boneless ribs, fresh frozen, freezer burn, jumbo shrimp, small fortune, same difference, healthy tan, and good grief.
5. Why is it that those two words don’t seem to fit together?
6. Well, grief means that we are experiencing some kind of pain or loss, and there’s no way that can be good, right?
7. Well, let me say it right from the start, life is full of pain and loss, there is no way to avoid it, and so we are going to experience grief.
8. The question for us then is: will we experience grief in a way that is good or bad?
9. Will we experience grief in a way that is healthy and helpful, or unhealthy and harmful?
10. Not experiencing grief at all is not an option, but how we experience it and whether we are helped or harmed in the midst of it, does have different options and outcomes.
E. Mark Vroegop asked Joni Eareckson Tada to write the forword for his book.
1. If you know anything about Joni and her story, then you know why she was the perfect choice for such a task.
2. Joni begins the foreword saying, “When a broken neck ambushed my life and left me a quadriplegic, I felt as though God had smashed me underfoot like a cigarette. At night I would thrash my head on the pillow, hoping to break my neck at a higher level and thereby end my misery…My paralysis was permanent, and inside, I died.”
3. Joni continues, “You don’t have to be in a wheelchair to identify. You already know that sad situations sometimes don’t get better. Problems don’t always get solved. Conflicts don’t get fixed. Children die, couples divorce, and untimely deaths rock our world and shake our faith.”
4. Joni says, “After weeks in bed, I got tired of being depressed, and I finally cried out, ‘God, if I can’t die, please show me how to live.’ It was just the prayer God was waiting for.”
5. From then on, she would ask her sister to get her up and park her in the wheelchair in front of her Bible.
a. Holding a mouth stick, Joni would flip this way and that, looking for answers – any answer.
6. Joni sought the help of a friend who was Christian counselor who took her directly to the book of Lamentations.
a. The counselor showed her some verses in chapter 3: I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of God’s wrath. He has driven me away and forced me to walk in darkness instead of light. Yes, he repeatedly turns his hand against me all day long (vs. 1-3).
b. Joni marveled, thinking, “That’s me!”
7. She was amazed to learn that God welcomes our laments.
a. She would eventually learn – mainly through the book of Lamentations and the Psalms – that nothing is more freeing than knowing that God understands.
b. Joni wrote: “When we are in pain, God feels the sting in his chest. Our frustrations and questions do not fluster him. He knows all about them. He wrote the book on them. More astoundingly, he invites us to come and air our grievances before him.”
F. Mark Vroegop begins his introduction with the words: Learning to lament began on my knees. “No, Lord, please not this!”
1. His wife, Sarah, awoke him concerned that something was wrong with her pregnancy.
a. She was only a few days away from her due date.
b. She had not slept most of the night, waiting for the baby inside her to move.
c. She spent hours during that long night tapping her tummy, shifting positions, and offering tear-filled prayers, but inside her womb, the baby remained still.
2. This was the Vroegops third pregnancy – the first was twin boys, the second was another son.
a. In the four years of their marriage, they had welcomed 3 healthy children into their lives.
b. But not everything in their life had been a breeze, the demands on Mark as a young minister were heavy, but they had never faced anything like what they were facing.
3. Later that day, they went to the doctor’s office and the monitor and sonogram both confirmed their worst fears – the baby had no heartbeat.
a. Their baby, only a few days from entering this world and their lives, had died.
4. A few hours later they entered the hospital where Mark sat by Sarah as she endured hours of labor, and about 24 hours after hearing the crushing news, they held the perfect 9 pound body of their lifeless daughter - Sylvia was beautiful, but she was not alive.
5. They felt such piercing grief and sorrow, pain and fear mingled together in a jumbled torrent of emotion.
6. Thoughts about the future raced through Mark’s mind.
a. How would the boys respond to this level of sadness?
b. Would his wife ever be happy again? Would their marriage survive this loss?
c. How could he live with such pain while feeling the need to have it all together as he pastored a church?
7. Mark says that following Sylvia’s death, he poured out his heart to the Lord with desperate candor.
a. He experienced the temptation to be angry with God.
b. He wrestled with sadness that bored a hole in his chest.
8. In the midst of his pain, he began to find words and phrases in the Bible that captured the emotions of his heart.
a. The Bible gave voice to his pain and particular Psalms became his own.
b. Mark had read all those passages before, but he had never seen them or heard them like he saw or heard them in his time of suffering.
c. Although he had been a student of the Bible for many years, the understanding of biblical lament was new to him.
d. His personal quest for spiritual survival opened him up to this historic and biblical form of prayer.
e. During that year-long journey through grief he discovered a minor-key language for his suffering called “biblical lament.”
9. Mark says that he believed that God would somehow work out everything for His good purposes, but his personal grief was not tame – it was vicious.
a. Mark battled fears, disappointments, and sorrow, but in his journey he discovered the grace of lament, a song he never wanted to sing.
b. However, once Mark found himself in the crucible of suffering, he was deeply thankful for this uninvited dimension of the Christian life.
c. Looking back, he says, he can see how lament became his guide, his teacher and his solace.
10. The years that followed Sylvia’s death were a roller coaster of emotions and challenges for Mark and his wife.
a. They suffered multiple miscarriages and a false-positive pregnancy.
b. However, their painful yet honest prayers helped turn their agony into a platform for worship.
c. It was lament that helped them navigate the wilderness of their grief.
G. And I believe that learning to lament will help all of us to learn to navigate the wilderness of our grief.
1. Perhaps you have already learned how to sing this minor-key song of lament.
2. Perhaps you have already learned how to turn to the Psalms and to Lamentations in your time of suffering and sorrow to be able to voice the burdens of your heart before the Lord.
3. If you have already been through the grief of great loss and have developed the discipline of lament, then you may be able to be a teacher and guide for our church family and for others.
H. One thing I know for sure, is that if we have not yet gone through grief and loss, we certainly will during our lifetime, so we need to prepare ourselves and others to be able to go through grief.
1. When I think back over our experience with grief and loss, I see that our family has faced a lot of it over the years.
2. I am pushing 60 years of age, so a lot of loss is to be expected by this time in my life.
3. We would all expect that by age 60 our grandparents would all have passed on, and maybe even some of our parents.
a. My mother died two years ago, and Diana’s dad died eight years ago.
4. Diana and I have both have had one of our siblings die – hers was an older sibling, mine was younger.
5. At 10 years old, I experienced the unnatural and untimely death of my father to cancer.
6. Thankfully, our three daughters are alive and well, but we nearly lost Abby when an 18 wheeler hit the car she and two others were in, seriously injuring Drew Taylor, and taking the life of Nicholas Smith.
I. I am sure that all of us hearing this sermon today, have their own stories of loss and grief.
a. Some of those losses were timely and expected, and others were untimely and unexpected.
b. But all of our losses cause us suffering and grief – and although we don’t grieve like the rest of people who have no relationship with God and the hope God offers, we still grieve and the pain is real, and heavy, and hard, and long.
J. Two of the things that I believe we need to learn is: first, how to go through grief ourselves, and second, how to be with others as they go through grief.
1. Mark Vroegop discovered during his journey through grief that many Christians were both unfamiliar and uncomfortable with lament.
2. When Mark and his wife shared with others some of the struggles of their soul in the midst of their grief, some people reacted with visible discomfort.
3. Some reacted with awkward silence, or quickly changed the subject, or even physically excused themselves to escape the tension.
4. Others quickly moved to a desperate desire to “find the bright side,” and to offer encouragement.
5. This is when people meant well, but often said things that were not helpful, like: “I’m sure the Lord will give you another baby,” and “Maybe more people will come to faith because of the death of your daughter,” and “The Lord must know he can trust you with this.”
6. I have heard people say to others in their time of loss: “God needed your loved one more than you” and “He’s in a better place” or “She’s in a better place” which is true, but the person mourning isn’t in the better place!
K. Perhaps you have read about the stages of grief and what people go through or need at the different stages of grief.
1. And while understanding the stages of grief is helpful at some level, it can miss the important concept and benefit of lament.
2. While trying to find an explanation for loss or a quick solution for grief may be an admirable goal, it can cause us to circumvent the opportunity afforded in lament – which is to give a person permission to wrestle with sorrow instead of trying to rush to the end of it.
3. Mark Vroegop gives this important insight: “Walking through sorrow without understanding and embracing the God-given song of lament can stunt the grieving process.”
4. He came to see lament as a helpful gift from the Lord.
L. Psalm 13 is a good place to begin to learn the language of lament.
1. Look with me at Psalm 13, it is only six verses long: 1 How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? 2 How long will I store up anxious concerns within me, agony in my mind every day? How long will my enemy dominate me? 3 Consider me and answer, Lord my God. Restore brightness to my eyes; otherwise, I will sleep in death. 4 My enemy will say, “I have triumphed over him,” and my foes will rejoice because I am shaken. 5 But I have trusted in your faithful love; my heart will rejoice in your deliverance. 6 I will sing to the Lord because he has treated me generously.
2. Do you see how this short Psalm might be so helpful to give a voice to our grief and sorrow?
3. The first questions are so poignant.
a. We wonder how long we will suffer in our grief and pain.
b. We wonder if God has forgotten us or has abandoned us, hiding His face from us.
4. Then David, the Psalmist moves from asking questions to making requests for assistance.
5. Finally, David expresses his faith and trust in God.
a. He expresses his trust in God’s faithful love, and eventual deliverance.
b. David continues to sing of God’s generous treatment.
M. From this Psalm of lament and from other laments in Scripture, we learn how to give voice to our pain and move toward God-centered worship and trust.
1. I love this quote from Mark Vroegop: “Lament is how you live between the poles of a hard life and trusting in God’s sovereignty.”
2. Lament is how we bring our sorrow to God – without lament we won’t know how to process our pain.
3. Without this way to process our pain, we turn to silence, bitterness and anger which can suffocate our spiritual life and stifles our relationship with God.
4. Without lament we won’t know how to help other people walk through their sorrow, which might result in our offering them trite solutions, unhelpful comments, or impatient responses.
5. And without learning to lament, we may miss out on the lessons that can be learned from our suffering and loss.
N. But one thing I know for sure is that we need God.
1. We need God when the sun is shining and all seems good, and we need God when the storms and dark clouds surround us and all seems bad.
2. God wants us to turn to Him always, especially in the hardest times we face.
3. But when we turn to God in those hardest of times, what do we say to God? Lament’s minor-key song gives us the words and the melody for those times.
O. So here is what I hope for us to accomplish in this short sermon series.
1. We will be looking at some lament Psalms and the book of Lamentations.
2. And borrowing the outline of Mark Vroegop’s book, I hope that we will learn how to lament, what we can learn from lament, and how to live with lament.
P. As we learn these lessons from lament, I hope we will see that these lessons can be applied to the many varied types of suffering and grief we face in our lives today.
1. Death continues to impose itself on our personal lives – whether it be death by natural causes, like old age, Alzheimer’s or cancer, or death by accidents, crime and violence, or death from the global pandemic of COVID-19 – which as of Thursday at 1 PM had claimed the lives of 713,759 people worldwide, including 161,937 in our country.
2. So, we find ourselves grieving the loss of life during this pandemic, but we are also grieving the loss of so much of everyday life as we knew it.
a. We mourning a time when we could gather without fear, hug each other, and go to ballgames and school, restaurants and the movies.
b. We mourn our job losses and economic losses.
3. We also find ourselves grieving the loss of the moral fiber of our nation as biblical ethics have gone by the wayside in our Post-Christian culture.
a. This jettison of biblical ethics and commitments has led to the breakdown of marriage and the family, leaving many to grieve and suffer through divorce, domestic abuse, abortion, suicide, and emotional and psychiatric difficulties.
4. We also find ourselves grieving the loss of civility and cooperation in our government as the major political parties in our country are so divided and so hostile toward each other.
5. And finally, and at last, we are beginning to get a proper understanding of the racial injustice that so many of our darker skinned citizens have faced and suffered under for far too long.
a. That proper understanding of racial injustice should lead us to healthy lament, and positive change so that equal justice and equal opportunity can be experienced by all.
Q. For these reasons and so many more, we need our Heavenly Father, the Lord Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and everything else.
1. Only God knows what is right and best.
2. Only God has the power to sustain and the power to heal our broken hearts and lives, and our broken country and world.
3. So to God we turn to express our grief and to find grace.
4. May God bless this journey as we discover the grace that comes from learning to lament.
5. With God’s help, it can be well with our souls, even when sorrows like sea billows roll.
Resources:
Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy by Mark Vroegop, Crossway, 2019.
