Don't Look Away

Suffering, death, burial, and God's purpose through it all

This is the introduction and conclusion from our sermon today, "He Was Buried." They were a little more personal than usual, but I thought it might help to apply a text about suffering, death, burial, and God's purpose through it all.

The introduction...

"I would say I am happiest, in terms of activities, when I'm writing. I've always been a storyteller and a communicator. But while I was doing my undergrad at Northern Kentucky University, I fell in love with writing and just started writing more and more. And I've written hundreds of thousands of words and published papers and books and all that sort of thing. And I have a lot of that stored in a Google Drive, along with a lot of unpublished stuff.

And I loaded all that up into an LLM, a large language model, about a year and a half ago, and asked it to do various things, including identifying thematic trends, stylistic trends, stuff like that, and then deliver it over to me in a three-page PDF. And what came back was pretty insightful. And there was a line in there that really stuck out to me. Something like, there is a somberness in my writing attached to unprocessed grief.

It made me laugh out loud. Because I know it's true. My life has certainly been marked by a series of unexpected and often strange, tragic deaths. Whether it was my cousin dying at 16 from some sort of strange heart defect that no one knew was that serious, in his sleep, which shocked everyone, or a very close friend and ministry partner passing away in a fire with two of his children. Or my mother being the victim of medical malpractice. And many other strange deaths.

I've done a funeral for two friends, Mark and Nicole McClure. In the last year, I did their wedding. Nicole bled to death through a tragic accident last year. Mark drank himself to death through grief just a couple months ago. Live long enough and all of us store up stories like this. So many of you can relate. And eventually, all of you will.
I remember after my daughter died, someone told me, "I just can't imagine what you're going through." And I told them, "Well, just give it time." As hard as we may work to hide death, death is coming. It's coming for us all. And we try to look the other direction, cover our eyes, or call it something that it's not. It is the last enemy, and it is ever-present.

Back to that unprocessed grief. When my grandma died, I was 17. I'd just become a Christian. And she had sold the farm I grew up on and moved to live closer to my uncle in Salina, Kansas. And from our perspective, he rushed the funeral, and I wasn't able to go there. So I wasn't at my grandmother's funeral, and she was like a second mother to me.

My uncle Roberto, he died when he was about 31. His wife Sarah, in my perspective again, rushed the funeral, and I wasn't able to make it. I wasn't able to be there for Greg's funeral, my cousin who died in his sleep. And then I was there for my niece's funeral. But in my grief, I decided, and persuaded my wife to go along with it, that we would have her in a closed casket. There was nothing wrong with her. She was beautiful. Her and Gala looked identical as newborns. It was just so hard to look at her, to see what almost was.

We didn't get to see Wayne's body, my brother who died two years ago from a drug overdose over in a Covington homeless shelter. Claiming the body took a long time, and it was at a point where an open casket wasn't possible. Mark and Nicole both were cremated. No open casket. At my dad's dad's funeral, no open casket. It wasn't even a funeral. It was no body. It was a celebration of life.

I've been to lots of celebrations of life, and at all of them there's all these pictures of someone alive and happy, all the good memories. But there's no body. And if there is a body, it's been burned down to dust and put into a little urn. So when you go to a grave, if there is even a grave, under all that soil, there's not a casket with bones. There's usually an empty casket, if any at all, and perhaps some ashes in it.

It's hard enough to process death when it comes to you over and over again. It's even harder to process death when we will not look at it, when we won't look at it for what it is, when we won't look at that body without that animating life in it and be horrified.

I told my children in preparation for their grandmother's funeral that her body will not look real. It will look like a wax sort of figure. But that body is her. It's just not all of her. And I want you to look at it, and I want you to take it in, and remember, we have a soul. And I want you to remember that death is an enemy.

I want to linger on the importance of Jesus' death and burial. I want to linger here today because, as a society in denial, as a society with unprocessed grief, I think this is something we need to talk about. And I'll tell you why it matters to the gospel. So just give me a few minutes..."

And the conclusion...

"The creed doesn't skip this, and neither can we: crucified, dead, and buried. Our catechism says his humiliation went all the way down to "being buried, and continuing under the power of death for a time." Which brings me back to caskets, and grief, and a funeral I once walked into late...

I became a Christian at a charismatic church and belonged to their youth group for about a year and a half. And it was led by a couple. The wife, technically, was our youth pastor, but she really was just more like a mother. They were either in their late 40s or early 50s. And though they had some screwed-up theology, they really did love me and try to encourage me in my walk with Christ.

I left that church when I was 18, but kept up with a lot of people in the youth group. And the husband ended up in the hospital with this weird mold that had gotten into his body. And it became so severe he was in critical care, and things weren't looking good. And everyone was praying for a miracle.

And that church had a little bit of that health and wealth gospel going on, which essentially teaches that if you are a faithful believer, your life will be filled with financial prosperity and enduring health. So they all were praying for a miracle. And it seemed like one had kind of come. He started to recover from this mold. Things were looking up. And then, just a couple days before he was to be released, it turned out it had weakened his heart. And as I understand it, he died of a heart attack. A very young man by normal standards.

Anyhow, I determined that I would go to the funeral at my old church. I actually got there a tiny bit late, and they had already started the funeral. And it did not feel like a normal funeral. Most of the people were dressed for a funeral, but this is southern Indiana. So, you know, the way they dress up is they tuck their best polo shirt into their jeans.

His wife was dressed all in black. And many of you are too young for this, but she looked a lot like Jackie Onassis at the funeral of her husband, JFK. When I walked into the sanctuary, they were playing this explosively happy, triumphant praise music about victory over death and how the devil can't stop them and things like this. And there was this man's wife up there, dressed all in black, dancing and praising God. Everyone was.

I found it very odd. I hadn't been at a church like that for a while, so it was a bit stunning for that reason alone. But as that sort of worship component started to quiet down, there was a moment. It was one of the more tragic things I'd seen.

Someone from the youth group had told me that the wife believed that God was going to do a mighty miracle. He was going to raise this man from the dead right there in the sanctuary. So she nearly climbed up on the open coffin, on her husband's dead body, and kept kind of bowing over him multiple times and praying and crying out to God. It was disturbing.

I don't remember how long that went on, but eventually some of the people up at the front guided her away from the casket. He did not climb out. And she burst into tears and cried tears of grief.

I would say at that very moment, the funeral started, when she started to grieve, when she started to face the reality of death. Her husband was no longer here. He was absent from his body, and his spirit was present with the Lord. The service, to a great degree, was a lie. All the victory, all the triumph, it got deflated when there wasn't an immediate relief from the pain, the suffering, the grief.

She did, in time, come to terms with reality and remarried, and last I heard was doing fine. Dramatic as the story may be, she is us and we are her. She had unprocessed grief. I struggle to process my grief. And that struggle is most intense when you expect relief now, when you think you can escape suffering quickly.

No, God often makes us wait so we will have faith in Him and not have these superficial shows of faith that really are an act that we play out, that quickly falls away if we don't get what we want when we want it.

I think it's significant that Christ suffered on the cross. I think it's significant that Christ's body had no life in it. It was prepared for burial. It was laid in a grave. And it lay there all day long on the long Saturday. He just didn't die and immediately resurrect. They had to wait.

One last thing connected to this...

I'm increasingly thinking about the topic of trauma, as the more I talk to people, the more therapeutic I discover the mindset to be. And let me just tell you, the therapeutic mindset is a self-focused, whiny mindset that's both stuck in the present, whose thoughts ruminate on themselves, particularly their suffering, and fail to look forward in faith toward the blessed hope, the resurrection of the dead.

I know that many of you have suffered and are suffering. You're single and you want to be married. You're married and don't have children. You're married with children, but the excitement and romance of the marriage isn't there, and you find yourself at odds with your spouse, sometimes thinking you made the wrong decision. You once were strong, but some injury robbed you of your youthful vitality, or you're just getting old.

Maybe you were abused, molested, raped, beat. Maybe you feel alone. Maybe your mom, your brother, everyone you grew up with, everyone you love, for some reason, died before you did. And you want relief, and you want it now. But you don't have the guts. You don't have the will to look at sin and to look at death as it really is.
You're an enigma wrapped up in a riddle. Quick to think about all your trauma, if not talk about it, and yet at the same time unwilling to face the bad news of life, that you will suffer, you will die, and you will be buried, and so will everyone else you love. And because you won't face it, you go deep down inside yourself and become consumed with self-pity, self-loathing.

But if you look at it, if you look at death, if you see the body in the casket, if you stand on the grave, if you see it for the horror it is, and realize that Jesus Christ faced it. He didn't take the sour wine. He didn't blunt any of the suffering. He committed himself to it, all the way to the shameful death on the cross, all the way to the very grave where his body lay.

And then he overcame death, and he overcame the devil, and he overcame all the disease and pain, overcame every sort of evil there ever was and ever will be, and he rose to heaven, and he was the firstfruits of this mighty work of redemption, showing what we can be. And you get giddy, and you get excited.

Yes, you weep. You weep tears. But you believe that just as his body did not see corruption, yours will not remain in the grave, that you have a future of joy, of hope, and love. As you come to terms with the bad, bad news, you start to understand just how great the good news is.

Instead of being that self-focused, whiny, therapeutic, I-am-my-trauma, frozen forever on yourself, you melt and come alive with sober joy that says, to live is Christ, to die is gain. My King went before me, and he's preparing a place for me. He was buried so that he could be raised from the grave, and so he will raise us at the end of the age."

Painting: Tim Oliver