Sermon

On Christian Sadness

Scripture Text:

Luke 23:33-43

Sermon:

Adam and I were in Texas last weekend for a wedding, and that Sunday, we joined my cousin and her husband for church. They attend a large Southern Baptist church, and a lot was very different from how we’re used to worshiping. But people worship in different ways, and that’s just part of how God made us to be.

But what Adam and I were very struck by the music leader, who led the songs with a microphone in his hand: he constantly had a smile on his face as bright as a light bulb.
He and the choir were singing a song about how Jesus died at Calvary. I was trying wanted to be open-minded and appreciate the music, because it was different from what I was used to. But I was distracted by the fact that the music minister and the choir were all smiling intently as they sang about the crucifixion!

Now, to be fair, the song was also about salvation, so maybe the smiles were meant to point to a feeling of joy in the resurrection. I will give them that. But there was an intensity about their smiles and the smile of the music director that got me thinking about the wider meaning of a happy face in our society and in what it means to be Christian.

I’d recently read an article about smiling on a blog called Faith and Theology. The writer says that we’ve become so obsessed with health, happiness, and positive thinking that smiling has become a sort of requirement. A successful life is a happy life; a good and admirable person is someone with a big smile. Sadness is something we should chase away – with medication, distractions, a positive attitude, or maybe even with the love of Jesus. A happy face shows the world that we are healthy and well.

But when I think of Jesus, and when I think of the people I meet in scripture, I don’t exactly think of happy, smiling faces or even people who are all that healthy and well.

In the bible, we meet complex people: people like King David or Cain, who carry the weight of their mistakes with them; people like the prophets, who notice the suffering of other people and even the suffering of God, who suffers when he sees his people suffering; people like Mary, who ponders everything in her heart; people like Peter who can never quite figure out what he should be doing, but whose heart is earnest and drawn without reservation to Jesus; people like Paul who brags, complains, scolds, and yet is so full of the love of Christ that he can’t stop traveling and talking to people about it.

And in the bible, of course, we meet Jesus Christ himself. Although there are wonderful pictures of Jesus laughing and smiling, he wasn’t the “Buddy Christ” of the movie “Dogma,” thumbs up and with a captivating grin on his face. Actually, over time, the church came to identify Jesus as the one Isaiah called “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (see Myers blog piece). Today is the Christian New Year’s Eve, the last Sunday of the church year before Advent comes again, when we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King. And how do we know Jesus as a King? We hear Zechariah sing about a king who will come to set us free and save us from our enemies. Jeremiah speaks of a king who is also a shepherd. And we read the description of the crucifixion, where a sign over Jesus’ head describes him as King of the Jews, and a dying thief asks to be remembered in his kingdom.

In Christ’s kingdom, the king reigns from a cross as well as in the glory of the resurrection. Pain, suffering, and despair are part of his kingship. There is a power in the brokenness of Jesus’ body that speaks to the brokenness of all human bodies and the brokenness of Creation. We don’t have to erase our own brokenness to be part of the kingdom – God blesses it and transforms it through Christ. Remember: even after Jesus is resurrected, the holes and scars are still on his body; they don’t go away. He’s transformed, but the marks of his wounds are still part of who he is.

So, I want to fight the holiday media demons. Thanksgiving is this week, and I don’t want you to think that being happy is the only sign of God’s blessing. Or that being happy and having a smile on your face is God’s idea of normal. Happiness is wonderful, a smile can transform our whole day, but sadness is part of a holy life, too. Grief, loss, and regret are blessed by God, too. These are signs that we are human, that we have feelings, that we’ve loved and lost people, that we loved and hurt people, that we’re only human and we’ve not done everything perfectly.

Feeling unhappy or sad is not always a problem we have to solve. Sometimes it’s part of of how God acts in our lives, and how God acts through us to reach others. Sadness helps us have compassion. Unhappiness points out to us that something is wrong or unjust. Anger, if we can use it in a healthy way, helps us stand up, be honest, and make change happen.

I usually think of anger as the most powerful emotion of change, but I’m not sure that’s true. I think of the Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina, who for decades came to the center of Buenos Aires wearing white headscarves embroidered with the names of their disappeared children. They wouldn’t protest, they were just present, witnessing to their great sadness that their children were gone and unaccounted for.

I think of the same feeling when I think of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery. The remains of three soldiers, one each from World War I, World War II, and the Korean War, are there (the remains of the Vietnam solider were identified and removed in 1998), and there is always a soldier there, keeping constant watch. There is a power of sadness there, that reminds the wages of war are high, and that not all families who have lost a soldier have the comfort of receiving their bodies home for burial.

People tend to apologize for their sadness, especially when our tears flow in public. For some reason, we have been taught to believe that we are an inconvenience or embarrassment to other people when we cry in front of them. And yet, it can be incredibly powerful when someone cries in the presence of other people. It is a kind of witness, a kind of blessing. I feel grateful when people feel they can cry in church – I certainly have. It’s a powerful expression of emotion, which is a gift God has given us to communicate with one another.

When I think of the powerful witness of sadness, I always think of a friend of mine in seminary, who I will call Elizabeth. Elizabeth discovered in her late twenties that she was a lesbian. She struggled deeply with this discovery, because she knew it wouldn’t be easy for her family. And she was right; her parents weren’t able to accept it. Her brother wouldn’t speak with her about her sexuality because he was angry that she had upset their parents so much. Elizabeth would go home for the holidays and although she found she couldn’t get angry with her parents, she told us that she would just find tears rolling down her face. And a friend of ours said something I’ve never forgotten. He said, “Elizabeth, you know, there’s actually a great power in sadness. I think your tears are actually the most powerful witness you could give to your family. Don’t think that they’re helpless or pathetic. They’re powerful.”

I wonder if you have an example in your own life of the powerful witness of sadness, either your own or that of a family member or a friend. So often, we feel nervous and try to make sadness go away – whether it’s ours or someone else’s. What is it like just to allow someone to be sad, to recognize that sadness and just to be present with them in it? That’s love. That’s compassion. Not trying to chase sadness away, but to acknowledge it. When I was six, I cut my right hand open and needed stitches. I remember how painful it was to receive the local anesthesia in my hand and I fought back tears. I’ll never forget how the nurse said to me, in such a tender way, “It’s ok to cry.” And I just cried and cried, so relieved that I was allowed to be sad!

Here’s one more sentence about the power of sadness from the blog I mentioned earlier: “The face that always smiles is the face of a stranger. Love is written on the face of sadness.”

When I think of Jesus Christ, our King, this is the kind of power I think of: the man who went willingly to the cross, the God who emptied himself and entered into a human body. Why did he do that? To teach us about love, and how powerful it can be. The man of sorrows seems so powerless on the cross, but he is powerful beyond our imagining because of God’s love in him and the tremendous power of his love for us – a God who would die on the cross just to try to reach across time and eternity to get close to us.

Sadness is not a sign that something is wrong with us, it’s not something to be embarrassed about. It’s a sign of our humanity, it’s a powerful witness, it’s a way for us to get to know Jesus Christ, and it’s a way for God to work in us for others. It’s a part of the way to salvation. This Thanksgiving, be thankful not only for the ways God has blessed you with happiness, but with the blessings of sadness, as well.

Amen.

Uploaded on November 21, 2010 in by RevHeidi

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