Sunday Service | Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, Week 5: October 18, 2020
Brian opened up our service by reading Psalm 100, and directed us to turn to the Lord in the face of processing this past week and preparing for the upcoming week. We often forget that he brings joy to us. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it, but it is still drawing us in. He is faithful. Let’s meet with him.
April shared a testimony about her watermelon, which served as a reminder to her (and to us) of the gifts of the Lord that are still available and coming to us even in the midst of so much unpredictability and unknown of this year. We too can bear fruit and bring our good gifts via the fruits of the Spirit to other and to the unpredictability of their lives as well.
Brian also shared an announcement about an upcoming Zoom meeting that a local organization, NOAH, Nashville Organized for Action & Hope, called “The Fierce Urgency of Now.” Learn more at https://www.noahtn.org/.
This is week 5 in our series “Emotionally Healthy Spirituality,” and we are talking about Enlarging our Souls through Grief & Loss.
This is an idea that will make us confront our limits and the question is, Will we surrender to them or continue to fight to overcome them?
Pete Scazzero opens this chapter with these words:
“True spiritual life is not an escape from reality but an absolute commitment to it. Loss marks the place where self-knowledge and powerful transformation happen, if we have the courage to participate fully in the process. Loss and grief, however, cannot be separate from the issue of our limits...limits are behind all loss. We cannot do or be anything we want; God placed enormous limits around us, even the most gifted of us. Why? To keep us grounded, to keep us humble. In fact, the very meaning of the word “humility” has its root in the Latin word humas, meaning “of the earth.” Our culture routinely interprets grief and loss as alien, foreign to our lives. We numb our pain through denial, rationalization, avoidance. We search for spiritual sidetracks around our wounds; we demand others to take away our pain, yet we face many deaths within our lives...will these deaths be terminal...or, open us up to new possibilities and transformation in Christ…”
Today, we will be referencing the story of Job, perhaps the first story written in the Bible. It confronts us with limits. Is it an allegory or is it a real-time account of this man’s journey through loss? It could be argued that it is all of that, but no matter what, this book does challenge us to face the most common issues of our time: grief, loss, our limits, and the question, “Where is God?” in the midst of all the loss and turmoil of our lives.
We can go to the scriptures and search this out, because our God wants to meet us in the midst of our reality and lead us through it.
Job was an extremely wealthy man in every respect. But within a day, all his possessions and wealth was gone, including his children. Then his body began to fail, his marriage eroded with his wife telling him to curse God. He went from the highest of the highs to the lowest place. There’s no other book quite as extreme and confronting as Job.
It can be hard to relate to Job because of its severity and the robust nature of the loss. It is completely an unfair account; it is in no way related to Job’s sin or his lifestyle. It is out of nowhere. This is where it relates to us now: the story of Job is the story of us all. Most of us experience these losses more slowly, not in a day, across our lifetimes.
Here are some losses we face:
Youthfulness (we age)
Dreams (careers, adventures, marriages, hopes)
Routines and stability in transitions
Most of us will face catastrophic losses in our lives. Broken relationships, health crises, things we can’t do (limits), death of close loved ones, betrayal, views of the Church, etc.
This is exactly where Jesus meets us. Where we are confronted by limitations, Jesus stands beside us because he loves us, and in him, we belong, we are loved, and we are affirmed by him. He doesn’t take away all the pain, he meets us in the midst of it. Jesus meets us in all losses as not the end only, but as a new beginning.
Job’s story makes us question, Where is God? Job was faithful to him. The scriptures invite our honesty because they do not shy away from the hard stories and the immense losses.
How do we grieve?
Grieving differs from culture to culture, from family to family. We have to pay attention to how we are dealing or numbing.
How does our culture deal with pain? Addiction.
We turn to anything external to alleviate our pain. The result of denial and numbing our pain, we become shells of humans, unable to deal with pain. Pain & loss become our enemy; they become signs that we are not faithful or good enough.
That’s not the abundant life Jesus leads us to. Let us move out of these unhealthy ways of living and dealing with pain and meet with Jesus right here, to receive love and to offer love to others.
The heart of Christianity is that the way of life is through death. Resurrection must be preceeded by crucifixion.
Jesus doesn’t want us to avoid and numb, he wants us to stand and walk through it all.
Gerald Sitser said, “The quickest way to reach the sun in the light of day is not to run west after it, but to head east into the darkness, until you finally reach the sunset.”
The Lord is drawing us into wholeness and health. Going into our pain causes us to drop our defenses and walls. The shields we create help us endure as children, but as we seek health and maturity, we look to see if the shields serve us or prevent us from overcoming, growing, and experiencing the fullness of life Jesus offers.
Common Defenses We Use to Run from Pain:
1: Denial
We refuse to acknowledge painful aspects of reality
“I’m fine”
We don’t embrace what happened
2: Minimizing
We admit something is wrong but we downplay it heavily
3: Blaming others
Denying responsibility
4: Blaming yourself
Assuming something is your fault in order to move forward
Inwardly, you long for connection/understanding/needing healing
5: Rationalizing
Excuses, justifications, etc--inaccurate reasonings for what is going on
6: Intellectualizing
Give analysis, theories, and generalizations to avoid the real issue at hand
View how others are suffering instead of our own
7: Distracting
Engage in humor, change the subject to avoid the topic
8: Becoming hostile
Get angry/irritable when a reference is made to a certain subject
Do you identify with any of these defense mechanisms? Are they protecting or serving you?
To drop them is to move forward and find wholeness.
Job models how we are to grieve in the family of Jesus. We get amazing insight into the grief he is facing and the ways he walks forward through the pain.
5 Phases of Grieving, according to God, which offer us a path to God’s new beginnings in our losses and limits:
1: Paying attention
We have little theology for anger, sadness, grief, and depression. We give surface level interactions when faced with hard things. Job screamed out his pain. He cursed the day he was born. He told God exactly how he was feeling. He wept, doubted, questioned; he was paying attention to what he was feeling.
This is a story WITH GOD: you can be raw and real before God. The Bible is full of this. We’ve built a culture of Christianity that avoids these hard topics and raw fullness of life within grief, but scripture and Job gives us a different perspective and way forward. Read the Psalms, Lamentations, even the gospels--there is a constant expression of emotions. We’ve developed these views of negative emotions. Grieving is not possible without paying attention to our pain, our sadness, our anger and paying attention to God and to himself.
2: Wait in the confusion in-between
To be still seems irresponsible, but the Lord calls us to himself in the storms. Job’s friends struggled to walk with him through this struggle. They were convinced he had sinned and brought this all upon himself. This was not the story, though it represents much of our own culture’s theology. They tried to fix Job and defend God. They could not handle the in-between, and so they hurt Job.
Grieving gives us space in our pain to ask God where he is, what he’s doing. To be honest, real, and begin to see the bigger picture.
3: Embrace the gift of our limits
What if the greatest loss we must grieve is our limits? It can drive us to humility. Job had to embrace his limits. Here’s an overview of our limits, which are given by God:
Physical body
Family of origin, ethnicity, culture
Marital status
Intellectual capacity
Talents and gifts
Material wealth
Raw material--personality traits
Time
Work and relationship realities (never finished and never perfect)
Spiritual understanding
We must grieve our limits or we will demand from them something they cannot give us. We can embrace our whole story. To embrace our limits is like living like a baby and growing up: beginning as the center of someone’s universe, and then maturing into the reality that we are not that at all. Owning limitations can bring us great freedom. Not owning them leads to burnout. We must grow up. We hate limits, but grieving this loss humbles us like nothing else.
4: Climb the ladder of humility
Job emerged from his suffering transformed, with greater, growing intimacy with God. Job had the opportunity to enact revenge on his friends, but he instead chose to bless them.
St Benedict created a ladder in how to grow in humility. These steps include:
Fear of God, mindfulness of God
Doing God’s will, not our own
Patient to accept other’s difficulties
Radical honesty about our faults
Deep awareness of our sin
Speaking with restraint
Transformed into the love of God
Our pain can enable us to see ourselves, others, and God differently. We can hold greater capacity for love.
5: Let the old birth the new...in God’s time.
Good grieving is not just letting it go, but letting it bless you. Job did this. There is finality in loss; we can’t get it back. But Job received blessings in newness. The spiritual blessing came first, then his wealth and family and health were also restored.
The central message of Christ is that suffering and death bring transformation and death. Real death and real losses lead to real life, real resurrection. The greatest blessing is greater intimacy with Jesus. When we grieve God’s way, we are changed forever. He takes our pain, uses it, and brings connection.
We can see how not grieving with God causes more pain and isolation. May we look into our pain, feel what surrounds our pain, and then be freed to look at it with you, knowing that you love alone defines us. May we continue to say yes to you, yes to this whole, abundant life you’ve offered us.
A prayer over our pain:
Lord Jesus, when I think about my losses, it can feel that I have no skin to protect me. I feel raw, scraped to the bone. I don’t know why you have allowed such pain.
Looking at Job helps, but I must admit that I struggle to see something “new being birthed out of old.” Lord, grant me the courage to feel, to pay attention, and then to wait on you.
You know that everything in me resists limits, humility, and the cross.
So I invite you Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to make your home in me as you described in Job 14.23, to freely roam and fill every crevice of my life.
And may the prayer of Job, finally, be mine: “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.”
In Jesus’ name. Amen.