tear/fully

My name's Gregg.

I'm one of the pastors here.

I would love to have a coffee with you or a soda

or whatever your preference and talk about your life,

get to know you a little bit.

If you wanna talk about Jesus, I love to talk about Jesus.

We are in our second to last week in the series

that we've been calling Fully.

So far we have done Joyfully, Fruitfully, Prayerfully,

Forgetfully, and you will not want to miss next week

because Eric Rao will be preaching Thankfully

on the Sunday before Thanksgiving.

Really looking forward to that.

But today I'm bringing a message that is called Tearfully.

Now you may have not noticed or maybe you have

that the holidays are upon us.

Does anyone already have their Christmas tree up?

Yeah, all right, good.

Hey, good for you, man.

You're okay, all right.

So we've seen, we gotta start a club.

Go ahead and the early Christmas club is fine.

Thanksgiving is 11 days out.

Thanksgiving is 11 days out.

Anyone had pumpkin pie yet?

A month after that is Christmas, a week after that,

New Year's, I might also mention 11 days after that,

my birthday.

For so many and rightfully so, this time of year is magical.

It is, it's beautiful.

There's so many times, days, events, opportunities

to create memories and to experience the magic

and beauty of what this time of year can be.

While for others, it is their most difficult season,

emotionally, mentally, because we have memories

of what we've lost, the people that we don't see anymore,

the traumas that we've experienced

in the winters of our lives.

The truth is that for me, fall and winter

is the most difficult time of year

and is directly just related to things

that I experienced in that time of year.

But I know that I'm also not alone in that.

I'm not the only one that experiences this kind of thing

at this time of the year.

The American Psychological Association finds

that 38% of people say their stress increases

during the holidays.

The National Alliance of Mental Illness reports

that 64% of people with mental illness say

that their conditions worsen around the holidays

and as much as 66%, two out of every three people you know

experience more loneliness during the holidays.

Sadness, depression, grief, they're all part of life

and not just our lives.

When you read the Bible, you see grief and sorrow

and sadness all across the scriptures.

Sadness cuts through the entire Bible.

There's 150 Psalms, if you open up a physical Bible

right around the middle, you're gonna find the Psalms.

There's 150 of them.

There's lots of categories.

The largest category of Psalms are laments,

are songs of sadness.

And there's a reason for that because grief is universal.

Quick trivia question.

There are nearly 8,000 verses between Matthew, Mark,

Luke, and John.

How many of those verses describe Jesus laughing?

None.

There's no stories of him telling a joke.

There's no stories of him laughing.

We have TV depictions of a happy Christ

and I'm not saying that he was never happy.

Of course he was, he was human.

He experienced joy, he surely laughed.

But for some reason the scriptures did not find it

important to point that out to us.

But we have multiple stories of him weeping,

of him feeling deep compassion, being moved to grief.

And for some reason the Gospels

found it worthy of including those.

Maybe you've never heard it put this way before,

but part of what makes Jesus perfect

is the inclusion of his emotions.

Jesus did not carve sorrow out of the story.

He left his emotions on the pages of the Gospel

for the whole world to see.

So believing in Jesus, part of living fully

is the experience and acceptance of grief,

of sadness, and of sorrow.

We are more like Jesus when we acknowledge,

even honor the emotions that we feel

in the darker days that we face.

So let's open up the scriptures

and let's see what we might learn about being tearful.

We're gonna open to Isaiah 53.

Isaiah is in what's called the Hebrew scriptures

of the Old Testament.

If you see Ecclesiastes, then Song of Solomon,

then Isaiah, then Jeremiah, then Lamentations,

that's the neighborhood that you're looking for, okay?

I'll be reading from what's called the NLT,

the New Living Translation.

If you don't have a Bible,

there are blue ones there on the tables

that you can open up or download a Bible

from any of the digital app stores.

And we have a tradition of just giving the scriptures

our full attention when we read them

as a part of the sermon or the message.

One of the ways we can do that is by standing together

as we are able.

Otherwise, let's just give the scriptures our attention.

Isaiah 53, starting in verse one, Isaiah 53.

Who has believed our message?

To whom has the Lord revealed his powerful arm?

My servant grew up in the Lord's presence

like a tender green shoot, like a root in dry ground.

There was nothing beautiful or majestic about his appearance,

nothing to attract us to him.

He was despised and rejected,

a man of sorrows acquainted with deepest grief.

We turned our backs on him and looked the other way.

He was despised and we did not care.

Yet it was our weaknesses he carried.

It was our sorrows that weighed him down.

And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God,

a punishment for his own sins,

but he was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins.

He was beaten so we could be whole.

He was whipped so we could be healed.

All of us like sheep have strayed away.

We have left God's path to follow our own,

yet the Lord laid on him the sins of us all.

Let us pray.

God of every tribe, every tongue, every color,

and every nation, we thank you for the scriptures.

We thank you that they have persisted

throughout the millennia,

that we still have them to read, to consider, to learn from.

And whenever you have for us to learn today,

I ask that you help it stick,

that it would become a part of the framework of our faith,

that our faith would become stronger

as we become more like your son Jesus.

Amen.

Amen, you can have a seat.

A man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief.

The book of Isaiah was written around 700 years

before the birth of Jesus.

It is a description of what the Messiah

or messianic figure would be like,

and in Christianity, we have for thousands of years

looked at this scripture as a prophetic description

of what Jesus would be like.

And as you read it, it is undeniable

that his vulnerability is front and center.

700 years later, we see the emotions of a Messiah.

In John 11, 35, we see these emotions come out

when Jesus weeps for what I would call the inevitable.

John 11, 35 is the shortest verse in the whole Bible.

Those of you who know it, we'll just say it together,

one, two, three, Jesus wept, that's right.

Anyone who ever says, do you know any scripture,

you can say yes, right?

John 11, 35, Jesus weeps for something that is inevitable

because his good friend Lazarus had died

and was in the grave, and even though he planned

to raise him back to life, when he saw the pain

that his sisters Mary and Martha were experiencing,

the pain that they were feeling,

even though he's gonna raise him to the dead,

that he could not help but weep.

I wonder if it's because he knew that death

in this world is inevitable, that even though

he would raise Lazarus from the dead,

that Lazarus would one day die again,

and that again, Mary and Martha would be in this position

of mourning the death of their family.

It's important for us to understand

that it is healthy to cry, that it is healthy

to weep, to mourn the inevitable,

and it's important to make space for that mourning.

Two weeks ago on November 1st, it was 23 years

since my grandpa Buddy died.

I would show you a picture of him,

but all you really have to do is look at me

and imagine me old and bald, and with blue eyes.

He had piercing blue eyes, but back then,

I was a youth pastor at a church,

and it was the first full-time church job

that I'd ever had, and I'd been there for two months.

November 1st was a Thursday.

I went in on Friday and told my senior pastor,

my associate pastor, what had happened

that my grandfather had died, that the funeral

would be the next week on Monday or Tuesday,

and they said, you'll still take the kids

on the retreat this weekend, right?

I was not old enough, wise enough,

or felt like I had enough equity to say no.

This is the space that should be set aside for mourning.

I do not remember anything about that weekend,

but I remember falling asleep in the front row

of my grandfather's funeral, because I was so tired

from doing the work.

Mourning deserves its place.

Weeping, crying, diving in deserves its place.

I find no peace in saying that tragedies

and traumas are inevitable in this life,

but if we do not weep, if we will not cry,

if we do not intentionally dive into the depth of sorrow,

if we do not learn to swim through the currents of grief,

in moments when we do not see it coming,

we might feel ourselves dragged down

to the places we have never swam before.

Some of us have felt that, where we're suddenly hit

by an anchor pulling us deep and we don't know why,

and upon deeper investigation we find it's because

we never swam through those waters when we were supposed to.

So Jesus weeps in the inevitable,

and Jesus sweeps in the avoidable.

Luke 19, 41 through 44, is described what is commonly

thought of as the triumphant entry.

It's just before the Passover,

it's just before he would be handed over,

but there's a triumphant entry.

One of the gospels describes palms being laid down,

people singing Hosanna.

What happens is that Jesus gets to the edge of Jerusalem

and I could put up a photo of where they would have been

coming in and you get a good view of what Jerusalem looks

like from there and he's looking over it and it says

that he begins to weep and says,

oh that you would have known the peace

that was brought to you today.

He weeps over the city because he knows they will reject

the peace that he is bringing.

He loves them and it breaks his heart knowing that so much

of their pain is avoidable.

Some of us have lost friends, family members,

because we have set our peace.

We have tried to help them avoid something

that we believe to be avoidable.

We do not know why or sometimes we know exactly why,

but we see it coming.

And then we've watched them wander into darkness

that was avoidable.

Some loved ones that we have have watched us

do the same thing.

And we can become hardened to the feelings that we have

when someone that we love is hurt by what we saw coming.

In those moments when people that we love are hurt

by the avoidable, we have to resist the leathering

of our souls.

We have to resist the leathering of our souls.

We have to resist the I told you so's.

And listen, there's probably nothing more honest

that I can say right now than to say I know how hard

that is because I am an I told you so kind of person.

I have to intentionally choose not to be.

And I am not my best version when I am.

And when I am it is because I've let my heart get hard.

It is not feeling the compassion that it should.

And if we will not stay tender hearted,

then they will not feel welcome

when they do decide to come home.

So Jesus weeps in the inevitable.

Jesus weeps in the avoidable and then Jesus grieves

at the unavoidable.

On the night that Jesus was betrayed

and handed over to death, he was praying

in the garden of Gethsemane, asking the father

if there was any other way.

Can this cup pass from me, but if not, your will be done.

Can we avoid this?

Can this be avoided?

Is this really unavoidable?

He told Peter, James and John, the three he had asked

to come pray with him that kept falling asleep

while he prayed.

He said my soul is crushed with grief to the point of death.

And then at no fault of his own,

he was despised and rejected.

His friends turned their back on him

and looked the other way.

He carried our weakness, our sorrow,

weighed him down, he was beaten, whipped

and pierced for our rebellion.

He was crushed for our sins.

He did not grieve what he was giving us.

He was grieving how it had to be given.

Everyone of us, maybe depending on our age

or the experiences that we have,

every one of us has experienced grief or sadness or sorrow.

So how do we participate with this?

How do we consider how to practice living with grief?

First is tears.

Did you know that we are the only animal on earth,

and I'm looking at my friend over here,

that he's like, he knows things about animals.

I have no idea why he knows so many things about animals.

Like if I said, hey, Jake, you got one minute right now,

he could just go on a diatribe about like lemurs

or something like that.

But did you know that we are the only animal on earth

that cries because of emotions?

It's common for animals to have tear ducts

that produce some kind of moisture

to clear their eyes of dust or things that get in them.

We've all probably been poked in the eye

and then what happened?

Your eye started to water.

You got dust in your eye.

It started to water.

These are all evolutionary designs that God has

for our bodies to deal with what can happen to our eyes

to protect our eyesight.

And all of the animals in the world also need to see, right?

And so they have mechanisms for that.

We are the only ones that cry because of emotions.

When you get something in here, tears help get it out.

And when you get something in here,

tears help it come out.

If you have actively stymied your sorrow,

you may need to set aside some time

to let out your tears.

I have an overseer, spiritual overseer

that went through the tragedy

of watching the pastor that he led

be caught in a sexual scandal to watch him fall

and then watch as he had to take his place

as the church figured out what to do.

And years later, as the church was about to close,

and years later as we talked about it,

he told me that he still has on his schedule

time set aside to cry,

to weep for what had happened

so that they would not build up for too long.

Because tears carry more than dust and salt.

Tears are like rivers for the sorrow

that would otherwise rise to unbearable levels

and break the levees.

Because we can only hold so much sorrow

before the dam breaks.

Second, let me say that if you did not know this,

it is okay to let anger lead the way.

It is okay to let anger lead the way.

I named this week Tearfully for a reason,

instead of mournfully.

Because tear is a play on words.

Tear can be pronounced tear,

and it can be pronounced tear.

The Jewish tradition and the Middle Eastern tradition,

when they mourn, when they grieve,

they tear their clothes.

If you go to a Jewish funeral,

you may see a black ribbon over the heart of the family

and on the other side of everyone else,

and there may be a time in the funeral

where they take scissors and cut the ribbon in half.

It is their way of today still living through the tradition

of tearing or cutting their clothing.

So maybe find an old shirt,

an old frock you used to use when you were painting,

and then pull as hard as you can.

Pull with all the anger, with all the grief.

Pull until something tears, whether it be the shirt

or it be the grief from the hole that has on your heart.

And if the tears don't come while you tear,

at the very least, you will have released the penitentiary.

You will have released the pent up emotions

that you've been keeping under lock and key.

Third, grieve together.

The scriptures tell us to rejoice with those who rejoice,

to mourn with those who mourn.

So listen, y'all, hug someone.

Let someone hug you, hold someone's hand,

walk around the street arm in arm with someone

while they may not have experienced exactly

what you experienced,

might share the feelings that you feel.

We are not here together by accident.

This is not a social exercise.

We are here because God has put us together.

We're not here just to celebrate the beauty and the glory

of a baby girl being adopted into a family.

We are here to grieve with each other when we are at loss,

when we are broken, when we feel something pouring out

from a place it should not be.

We are here to hold each other together.

So have tears, tear something, grieve together,

grieve together, and last, I'll keep this one short,

go to therapy, y'all.

Go to therapy.

I have a therapist, I talk to him, I cry.

There's certain things that I'll start to say,

and I feel the tears already coming,

and he'll say, that's close to the surface, isn't it?

It's important, it's important.

Let the tears come.

If you need to let anger lead the way,

to tear something, to represent what you feel has happened,

grieve together, and if at all possible, go to therapy.

Amen?

Let us pray. Jesus, sometimes I wish that there were stories

about you laughing, but I'm so deeply grateful

that there are stories of you crying.

We have in this world so often an idea of what it is

to be a man, what it is to be strong,

and then we see you, God in man, perfect, loving,

crying, and we see you.

We see you crying, weeping, grieving, experiencing sorrow.

I pray that today that your spirit would release

so many of the men in this room that have been told

they must be strong in a certain way,

to be strong now in the way you were strong.

I pray for all the women that were told

they're too emotional, and so they have learned

to hold back their tears, that it's safe,

that grief will have its day.

And I pray that we, as a church together,

might be an example to each other, to our friends,

and neighbors in our city, of people that have

a healthy balance of emotions, that experience the myriad,

the spectrum of emotions in life,

and we do not deny or stuff them away

because they feel unpleasant,

or should only happen behind closed doors.

Thank you that you were a full human being

in the fullness of God, and thank you,

you are doing good work to make us full as well.

Amen.