Where is God in our Grief?

I have a sermon that is now my default message when I visit a church as a guest preacher. (This happens when you graduate from seminary.) I first preached it earlier this year at our partner church, Community of Reconciliation, a wonderful congregation in Pittsburgh that prays for Harbor and is helping me in my ordination process. I shared the sermon again this past Sunday at a local church; it was hilarious from my perspective, since I was leading the worship service and it was my first time ever attending a Presbyterian church in person.

Anyway, the sermon is about grief. And I suspect that—after a global pandemic and 600,000 Americans dead and a violent insurrection at our Capitol and racialized voter suppression laws and re-watching George Floyd’s murder dozens of times at his killer’s trial and more police violence against unarmed Black people and more mass shootings and political arguments and job losses and on and on—we’re all still moving through lament, grief, and pain.

It helps that so many are vaccinated, and we’re able to get out into the world and spend time together. But we can’t rush forward and paper over our mourning. If we are going to heal, we’ll need to feel our feelings and learn what we can from them.

What Caused My Grief

I went through my most difficult personal grief when the best doctors in the country told Ashley (now my wife and then my girlfriend) that her cancer had returned and was aggressively spreading. They said she had about 2 months to live, and they maintained that grim prognosis for 1 month. So for a month, I was trying to make sense of senseless tragedy. I was trying to figure out how to say goodbye to the woman I was falling in love with.

At the time, I worked in full-time (conservative evangelical) college ministry and was a leader at my (conservative evangelical) church. As I was tossed around by waves of sorrow, rage, and despair, I thought that—of course—it would be my faith that would get me through.

In the end, it did. But it wasn’t easy, because in order for my faith to actually help me, it needed to go through some painful changes. This might not have been the official beginning of my “deconstruction” process, but it marked some seismic shifts in my understanding of God and what it means to be a person of faith.

What Didn’t Help My Grief

Like any good evangelical, I looked to the Bible for guidance. But like a bad evangelical who was losing his mooring, I looked to the Bible with some defiance. I turned to Romans 8, because there stood the verse so often thrown at people buckling under hardship:

We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love God and who have been called according to the divine purpose. (8:28)

People are no doubt well-intentioned when they try to comfort others with these words. But please stop doing this. It’s toxic positivity, it’s gaslighting, and it’s probably many more things—but it’s not helping. When I am facing down a loved one’s untimely death, I don’t need you trying to convince me it’s “good.”

I flipped ahead to the poetic end of the chapter. There we find these beautiful words:

I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (8:38-39)

The problem is that, when I feel very much separated from God’s love, it doesn’t help much to be told that I can never be separated from it. Oh yeah? Then why do I feel alone with nothing but pain to keep my company?

Earlier in the chapter, another argument ventured to ease (or perhaps talk me out of) my tribulation:

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. (v. 18)

I do think this sort of “eternal perspective” has helped some people in the midst of hardship. “Things may be terrible now, but after we die there will be so much glory and joy that this will all have been worth it.” But the idea that heaven was waiting off in the future simply wasn’t able to help me deal with Ashley’s impending death—which would be happening here and now.

One-liners, even powerful one-liners that come straight from the Bible, are simply not what a grieving person needs. And yet, perhaps, on rare occasion, if we reflect on the one right line at the one right moment, it can cause us to reflect. And that reflection just might cause us to change.

What I Have Learned

In my case, the one line at the one moment was a little phrase in the middle of this chapter in Romans:

God did not spare God’s own Son, but gave him up for all of us—will God not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? (8:32)

I reflected on this verse as I cried my way through a box of tissues and scribbled furiously in my journal. I reflected for hours, crying and scribbling and crying and scribbling. Why didn’t God spare God’s own Son? Why would God give up God’s Son for all of us? What was this like for God and for God’s Son?

At the end of the cryfest, I think I had learned more about myself than anything else. One of the reasons this whole grieving experience was so difficult for me was that it chafed against my own sense of Evangelical Discipline Glory Entitlement (EDGE), a term I just made up and will never use again. The point is that I felt like God was violating some contractual agreement we had—I would perform as a good, obedient Christian, and in turn, God would provide me with a happy and fulfilling life, or (at the very least) protect me from calamity and heartbreak.

This is of course completely misguided, and it’s the kind of error that takes root so easily in my own social location. As a straight white American man from a financially comfortable family, I had so many layers of privilege buffering me that I could come to believe that my easy life was a reward from God! When we live godly and faithful lives, voila!, we are blessed with abundance and favor.

But now faced with a terrible situation that my own privilege could not overcome, I saw that this whole view of faith was an illusion. And it was my sustained reflection on Romans 8:32 that helped me see this. God’s own Son, a person full of wisdom, love, and faith—a person to whom I looked to figure out what those words even mean—was not shielded from calamity! He experienced horrors. He felt pain. He wept.

And so it must be that heartbreak and grief are actually part of human life. They are inescapable.

And there’s more: God is not absent from this stuff. God is intimately acquainted with trauma and loss. Feeling anguish is not a sign that God is far from us; if we accept the gift of God’s presence, our anguish is actually a sign that God is drawing ever nearer.

I do not know exactly what you are grieving today. And I do not pretend that these ramblings will fix any of your problems. But I hope and pray that as you cry, you can sense that God—who did not spare God’s own Son, but gave him up for all of us—cries with you.

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