Scripture: John 20:1-14
And it was at that moment when I realized that my mother was going to punch the biggest of those guys right in the nose.
It’s a pretty good way to start a sermon, don’t you think? Doesn’t it grab your attention? Doesn’t it make you want to hear me to say more—the rarest of sensations among those who are listening to someone preach? Okay, I’ll give you the backstory.
I was six or so years old, my family had fallen on hard times, and my mother and sisters and I were living with my grandparents in St. Louis. It was late October and I had spent the evening carving a Jack-o’-lantern of which I was excessively proud. In honor of my artistic genius, my mother ceremoniously placed it on the front steps of the house for the general public to see and admire.
As we watched from the window, a group of teenage boys who were passing by spotted the sacred object, paused, and whispered conspiratorially. Then the biggest of them, moved by those randomly destructive impulses that infuse so much of what teenage boys do, dashed up to the steps, grabbed the pumpkin, and smashed it to smithereens in the street. It all happened in an instant.
My mother, without a hint of hesitation, dashed out the front door like some sort of undersized but overpowered mixed martial artist. She got herself in front of the culprit and started to berate him, drawing on all the intimidating presence her five-foot frame could manufacture. Her hands inched upward. And it was at that moment when I realized that my mother was going to punch the biggest of those guys right in the nose.
But … she didn’t. The young man raised his hands defensively and began frantically bleating every apologetic word and phrase he could conjure. His feckless companions joined in, making similarly contrite and penitent noises. After a minute or so, my mother’s hot Scottish temper cooled, she pierced them with one last withering look, and she marched grumpily back to the house. I was sorry to lose the pumpkin, but relieved for the young man’s safety.
That story flitted briefly through my mind a couple of weekends ago, when Lisa and I were visiting a special exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It is the first comprehensive exhibition in United States history of the works of the great Italian Renaissance artist Raphael, a contemporary of Michelangelo and of DaVinci—or, as I call him, the otherLeonardo. The show brings together 170 of Raphael’s greatest masterpieces and is staggering in its breadth and depth and beauty.
A large part of the exhibition is dedicated to Raphael’s paintings of Mary and the baby Jesus. In preceding centuries, artists had mostly portrayed these figures as supernaturally holy. But Raphael chose instead to depict a mother and son who are thoroughly human and who are clearly bound by a tender, affectionate, and even playful relationship. Art historians call it the tradition of “the compassionate Virgin.” Depending on your personal hardwiring, these paintings will make you smile, or weep, or both.
In the midst of my reverie, it occurred to me that these images, while gorgeous and touching, did not remind me very much of my own mother. Don’t get me wrong: I loved my mother and she had abundant virtues as a parent: she was strong, supportive, a good listener, and—as my story suggests—protective of those she loved. In the mom department, I have zero complaints. But, well, my mom didn’t really do “tenderness.”
On Mother’s Day, we often celebrate the kind of mother that Raphael depicted in his masterpieces; indeed, I’m sure that reproductions of some of those paintings appear on the covers of greeting cards. We can call those images idealized, I suppose, but that’s not quite right, either. After all, in these paintings Raphael shows us just one kindof compassionate mother. There might be other kinds, like, for example, the kind who runs out into the street to fight for the honor of your pumpkin.
But that’s only the beginning of the complexity that Mother’s Day can bring to us. This can be a hard day for women who want to become mothers but, for one reason or another, cannot. It can be a hard day for women who became mothers but lost their child to illness or disease or accident or addiction or suicide or violence. It can be hard day for women whose children have rejected them or from whom they have become estranged.
It can be a hard day for people who never knew their mothers, or who had absent mothers, or who lost their mothers, or who had abusive mothers. It can be a hard day for those who feel abandoned by their mothers. And it can be just as hard a day for those who feel smothered by them.
At this point, you may be thinking to yourself: “Wow, this got dark fast. Can we please go back to the part where your mother was bravely sticking up for you?” Again, don’t get me wrong: motherhood can be glorious, joyful, intimate beyond measure—just as Raphael depicts it. But if it is an honest faith that we bring into this building, and I’m sure we all agree that it should be, then we need to have honest conversations about how motherhood can also sometimes be hard and complicated.
In that spirit of honesty, permit me to take this occasion to invite you into a broader conversation. A conversation about how all sorts of things can turn out to be the sources of our struggles. A conversation about where we go next when those struggles ensnare and encumber us. A conversation about lamenting … and about living … and about the connection between those two experiences.
A Scottish theologian named John Swinton has written quite brilliantly about the intersections of faith and mental health. In his book Finding Jesus in the Storm, he argues that an authentic faith is a faith that knows how to lament, individually and collectively. He writes:
“Lament … does not insist that happiness and a lack of anxiety are the hallmarks of the presence of God. Lament puts the lie to those who insist that ‘praying harder’ will bring blessing, with blessing defined as a release from our present sufferings. Jesus’s lament from the cross … drew neither release nor answer. Lament allows honesty and mystery … But lament does not belong only to those who are suffering. Lament is a practice that the body of Christ must learn together in times of happiness and tragedy so that it can deal faithfully with times of sadness, brokenness, and disappointment. There are plenty of things in the world to lament. The door to lamentation is wide open … [And] we need to lament for and with our brothers and sisters in Jesus so that, when it’s our turn to suffer, we (all of us together) know how to embody the language of lament. Lament is something we do together. So also, and perhaps oddly, is joy.”
Swinton suggests that the language of lament doesn’t offer sugary platitudes to the suffering. It doesn’t promise quick relief to the struggling. It doesn’t patronizingly pat us on the head and tell us to cheer up and not to fret.
Swinton writes that, instead, the language of lament sounds something like this: “I desperately want to help you hold on to the possibility that God exists, and the possibility that God loves you, and the possibility that joy might be closer than you think. I know that’s not how you feel, but it remains a possibility, and I want to hold that for you. I want to sit with you in this darkness (as best I can), and I want to say to you that I love you, and that God loves you, and that we can wait together. The storm will pass.”
A gifted preacher friend of mine, the late Dr. Donald Strobe, used to say that ours is a faith of hope. It therefore follows, Don said, that in all things God gives us sources of light and reasons for praise. Don argued that, as a result, we are always in a position to proclaim: “Yes, this is hard. But hallelujah, anyway.” I love that idea, and sometimes my journey out of darkness has started just there, by hearing a still small voice say deep in my heart: “Well, hallelujah, anyway.”
But for ours to be a faith that engages with the full complexity of life, we must also have the language of lament. Sure, we need to be able to say: “Hallelujah, anyway.” But we also need to be able to say: “Yes, God is great and God is good and God loves me. But I am suffering, anyway.”
I think this is what Swinton is getting at. I think he wants us to acknowledge honestly that even in the midst of the amazing grace and abundant blessings that our faith bring into this life, real pain happens anyway. And he wants us to talk about it: candidly, openly, and compassionately.
Now, you may be thinking to yourself: “Wow, just when things were looking up this went dark again.” But Swinton makes a critical point here. He argues that it is through lamentation that we come to joy. It works this way both individually and as a community of faith. We sit and wait and watch; and, when we can, we sit and wait and watch together. And, finally, the light comes.
Permit me to localize the point about community by inviting you to think about some of the language we use in this very building. Every Sunday, we proclaim from this pulpit that you are welcome here—and so you are. But let’s also be completely clear about one of the many things that this means. It means that your pain is welcome here, too.
Whatever it is. Whatever it’s about. Wherever it came from. Wherever it’s going. Bring it on in. Introduce it around. Help us get to know it.
We will welcome it here. And we will sit together with you in that dark. And we will celebrate together with you in the morning.
In a series of recent sermons, Robin has been exploring how the post-resurrection stories of the gospels often echo the pre-resurrection stories. We might argue that lamentation works a bit differently. Pre-resurrection, we find lots of lamenting—by everyone around Jesus, by the disciples, even by Jesus himself, right down to his final words. In contrast, post-resurrection we find little if any of it. The language shifts to that of victory, redemption, and a new creation.
But there is a text that I think operates as a transition from the one language to the other. It is the passage that we heard this morning about the grieving of Mary Magdalene. I want to revisit it, even though we ordinarily hear it at Easter.
At Easter, we focus on the back end of the story, when the angels greet Mary and reveal to her the astonishing miracle of the risen Christ. But I want to focus us on the front end of that story, in which Mary weeps inconsolably for the savior whom she fears she may forever have lost. And I invite you to think about that passage as a three-part fugue on the theme of lamentation. For, what does Mary do here? She weeps. And she waits. And then, finally, she wonders.
Mary gets to that place of wonder only by staying for a while in her unspeakable, inarticulable, incomprehensible grief and pain and suffering. She has to spend some time there before she can go anywhere else. She has to wander into the valley of the shadow, and take a seat, and dwell in that darkness before the journey can proceed.
That’s how it works when you do it alone. That’s how it works when we do it together. The promise that we make to each other is that we will stick around while it gets done.
Just this past weekend, Lisa and I attended a fundraiser for Sebastian Smith at the Old Art Building. Maybe some of you did the same. I’m sure that most or all of you know his story and know the Smith family, beloved members of our community. Sebastian’s grandmother was a member of this church and her memorial service was held here not that long ago.
Sebastian, who is in his thirties, has lived an active and athletic life. But a terrible snowboarding accident this winter has, at least for now, left him without the use of his hands and much of his lower body, including his legs. He’s undergoing treatment at Craig Hospital, a famous neurorehabilitation center in Denver, Colorado, and will soon be returning to join all of us who love him here on the Leelanau Peninsula.
On last Sunday afternoon, more than one-hundred people flowed in and out of the Old Art Building, bid on auction items, donated money, hugged each other, cried, and laughed. We watched video messages from Sebastian and a video showing his own journey so far through his own valley.
If you do not think that the language of lamentation can be the same language as the language of celebration, well, then you should’ve been there. Maybe you’ll get the chance yet. There are more fundraisers planned and you can still donate online.
The gospels tell us that when two or more are gathered in his name, He is there. Well, when dozens of your friends have gathered to sit with you until the light comes, He isn’t just there. He’s pulled up a chair. He’s made himself comfortable. And He’s going to stay for the duration.
Our trip to New York included a stop in Boston along the way. While we were there, we took time to visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It’s a wonderful, odd, and wonderfully odd museum with the personality of its wealthy founder, Isabella Stewart Gardner, imprinted throughout.
One of my favorite pieces in the museum is housed in a simple black frame and is hung in a loggia—a kind of covered exterior porch. When we were there, the streaming sunlight illuminated the piece from behind. It almost glowed.
This particular piece of art has quite a story. During World War I, the town of Reims became a front line of the battle between the Germans and the French. Its famous cathedral, which had stood for a millennium before the war, became an easy target. The Germans heavily bombed the cathedral, resulting in massive damage. At one point, the roof caught on fire and the heat was so extreme that molten lead poured out through the mouths of the cathedral’s stone gargoyles. The architectural casualties of the bombardment included some of the cathedral’s gorgeous stained-glass windows.
In 1919, an American ambulance driver found fragments of those windows at the site, gathered them up, and gave them to an interior designer named Henry Davis Sleeper. Sleeper—a man with a gifted eye for color and form—placed the fragments into a frame and gave it to Isabella Stewart Gardner, apparently in thanks for her donations to the ambulance service. Out of the shards and fragments of glass he made a new creation. And it remains in her museum to this day.
Unlike lots of museums, the Gardner doesn’t have many written labels or signs next to its works of art. But this one is an exception. A textual guide posted here tells the story of this piece. And it concludes with these lines: “It proves something both [Henry Davis] Sleeper and Isabella [Stewart Gardner] believed: One can create beauty in the wake of tragedy.” Beauty. In the wake of tragedy.
It is what we are called to believe, too. It is the message of lamentation. It is the message of resurrection. It is the message of Easter.
It is the message of the cross. It is the message of the compassionate one who waits with us in the dark until the light comes … and we find, in the wreckage and rubble of life, the raw material for a new creation.
Praise God that it is so. And the people said: Amen.