In the fall of 1991 Jerry and Lynda Sittser and their family were en route to their home in Spokane, Washington, after an evening at a powwow on an Indian reservation.  Jerry who was driving noticed a car coming toward them through the darkness at a very high rate of speed.  He slowed down, but the other car did not.  It jumped lanes and crashed head on into the Sittser’s minivan.  In the car were a man and his pregnant wife, both roaring drunk.  The woman was killed, the man survived.

            Jerry’s wife, Lynda, Jerry’s mother, and his four year old daughter, Diana Jane, were all killed.  Unfortunately, they were not killed instantaneously.  Jerry had to watch helplessly as he saw the life ebb away from all three of his loved ones.

            Jerry Sittser is a Christian, a professor of religion at Whitworth College .  But what he went through in the next months and years was as severe a test of his faith as anything he had ever encountered.  He careened back and forth from strong faith to strong unbelief.  He experienced God’s comforting presence; he also experienced God’s devastating absence.  He rode the emotional mountain railway as it traveled back and forth between those two familiar stations: elation and despair.

            His excellent book, A Grace Disguised, which tells of his successful survival of his tragedy, is one that all of us who are going through loss would profit by reading.¹  All of us have either experienced devastating loss, or we will one day.  Some of us will go to pieces, some of us will cope beautifully, some of us will do both.  God’s word to us in Scripture tells us that in the midst of our devastating losses, God is with us, sharing our pain, sharing our tears, even sharing our despair, but willing and able to stand with us until healing takes place.

            If you’ve been through a disastrous loss, you may be very familiar with the road-map of grief.  Perhaps this psalm we read this morning sounds as if it could have been written by you.

            Eager young Christians when they’re just discovering God’s word will frequently say, “It’s as if my name is written on every page of the Bible!”  And that’s so wonderful when we make this discovery!  It’s so great when you can see that this Bible is God’s word written to you and with you in mind.

            But Psalm 102 is one of those places in scripture where we might prefer not to see our names!  And yet our names are written here, too, and in many other psalms and passages of the Bible where the saints are coping with disastrous loss. 

            I’d like to share the message of Psalm 102 with you in the hope that it will be a comfort to you when disastrous loss comes upon you.

 

DISASTROUS LOSS IS NORMAL .

 

            The first message we can glean from this wonderful psalm is that disastrous loss is normal.  That is the implicit message of the psalm.  You search this psalm in vain for any expression of the idea that such loss is abnormal.  There are other places in the Bible, the book of Job, for example, where the saints are surprised and dismayed by their loss.  Job asks: “Why is this happening to me?  I’m a good guy!  I don’t deserve this!  Why me?”²

            But Psalm 102 does not use this tone.  The psalmist is not happy with his circumstances.  And he’s not entirely happy with God.  But he’s not saying, “God, why are you doing this?  Why are these bad things happening to me, a good man?”

            Disastrous loss will come to all of us.  All of us, whether we live good lives or bad ones!  All of us will die.  All of us will suffer, some more than others.  All of us will in the course of our lives lose things that are precious to us.  The gift of life is given to us on a temporary basis.  Those of you who have gone out for sports know that the beautiful new equipment you get at the beginning of the season will have to be turned in, probably quite a bit the worse for the wear, at the end of the season.

            Such is life.  We’re given new equipment as life begins.  We get more as we grow.  But mid-season injuries may put us on the bench.  And at the end of the season we turn all our equipment in.  Loss is normal.  It’s to be expected as a part of life.

 

IT’S O.K. TO FEEL BAD ABOUT DISASTROUS LOSS

 

            Disastrous loss is normal, and it’s O.K. to feel terrible about it.  That’s the second message I’d point out to you from this psalm. 

            As I’ve said in recent weeks, anyone who thinks that the Bible is a drug that was written to keep poor people from thinking about the pains of life has never read the psalms.  Check out Psalms 38 and 39.  Or Psalm 73.  Or Psalm 130.  The people who wrote these psalms knew the intensity of pain.  They felt terrible about what they were going through, and they let God know about their pain in no uncertain terms.

            The writer of Psalm 102 is obviously in deep distress.  We can only speculate as to what his loss has been.  He shows all the symptoms of a person in deep shock because of what he has lost.

            His pain is physical: he feels as if his bones are burning up. 

            His emotions are numb: his heart feels like dry grass. 

            He has no appetite for his food: it tastes like ashes.  He forgets to eat, and he loses weight.

            He’s lonely: he feels like a solitary bird hopping around on a roof. 

            He tosses and turns, unable to sleep.    

            And he’s angry with God.  For it is God, he feels, who has lifted him up only to throw him aside.  It is God who is attacking him in the prime of his life and making him miserable.

            And yet...and yet...it is God who is his only hope.  And so he cries out to the God of creation, the God of love and mercy, and asks for deliverance.

 

HEALING COMES THROUGH LETTING IT OUT

 

            Some of us, those who were raised in Lake Woebegone , believe that you shouldn’t talk about your loss or your grief.  It’s not fitting.  You should be strong.

            Garrison Keilor, writing about his fictional home town, expresses its philosophy: “Suffering was its own reward, to be preferred to pleasure. . . . We were born to suffer.  Pain was pooh-poohed.  If you broke your leg, walk home and apply ice.  Don’t complain.  Don’t baby yourself. . . . When Grandpa had his heart attack, he took one aspirin and went to bed early.”³

            But the writer of Psalm 102 didn’t share the Lake Woebegone philosophy.  He let his grief out.  He cried out to God for understanding and for healing.  It has been my experience that the more I try to keep my grief in the worse it gets.  But if I face the pain of my loss honestly and express it early, healing comes much sooner.

            In another psalm about loss, the psalmist says, “I said, ‘I will watch my ways and keep my tongue from sin; I will put a muzzle on my mouth as long as the wicked are in my presence.’” Sounds like he was raised in Lake Woebegone !  “But when I was silent and still, not even saying anything good, my anguish increased.  My heart grew hot within me, and as I meditated, the fire burned; then I spoke with my tongue: ‘Show me, O LORD, my life’s end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting is my life.’”

            Some of us with really strong boilers can contain the fire that burns in our hearts when we go through disastrous loss.  But what’s the point?  Why not tell someone what you’re going through?  Why tough it out when you don’t have to?

            If one of your friends who was suffering a terrible loss came to you and said, “I need to talk to someone about what I’m going through,” would you say, “Get out of here, you weakling!”  Would you really think the less of him or her for admitting need and seeking help?  Would you refuse to listen because you felt that person should be strong and keep his or her grief bottled up inside?

            One of my friends in the ministry, Dan Hans, the pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Gettysburg , Pennsylvania , lost a three year old daughter to cancer.  Little Laura Hans underwent nine hospitalizations and four surgeries during the last nine months of her life.  Dan and Beth, his wife, were devastated by this loss.  Laura was their firstborn child, God’s gift who came to them after years of trying unsuccessfully to conceive.  And now she had cancer.

            Two days after her death, Dan entered the pulpit to preach.  He continued in the pulpit for the next five weeks, preaching each Sunday on a different aspect of his grief.  Friends had warned him not to be in the pulpit so soon after this devastating loss.  Listen to his words:

            “A few friends questioned the wisdom of my returning to the pulpit so soon after [Laura’s] death.  I had to do it.  Preaching at this time was my opportunity to work through my own feelings and beliefs about these concluding events to Laura’s long battle. [The sermons I preached] are the fruit of my final days with my daughter.  They speak of her death; yet much more, they speak of her life.  They tell of our sorrow; yet much more, they tell of our hope.”⁴

            Those sermons preached by Dan Hans in the aftermath of his tragedy are powerful!  They were therapeutic for Dan and Beth.  But they were also vivid and unforgettable pictures of how brave Christians cope with loss that helped Dan’s people see how God works in the midst of terrible tragedy.  As you can imagine, Dan’s people rallied around him and Beth and were a tremendous support to them in their grief.  And no one, to my knowledge, told Dan that sharing his grief with the people he loved in that congregation had been a damaging thing.

            I can remember hearing the advice of well meaning professors who told us in seminary, “Don’t use the pulpit for your personal therapy.”  Yeah, O.K.  I saw their point at the time, and I see it still.  The purpose of preaching is not the healing of the preacher.  But I’m still uneasy with that advice.  Certainly in Dan Hans’ case his powerful preaching in the wake of his devastating loss was good for him and of great benefit to his people.

            Psalm 102 was therapy for the psalmist.  But it also helped his community of faith, and it helps us to this day.  The psalmist didn’t hesitate to let out his grief.  Why should we?

 

THE EXPRESSION OF GRIEF CREATES COMMUNITY

 

            One tremendous benefit of letting your grief out is the creation of community.  If we have the Lake Woebegone philosophy on grief, we’ll be strong and keep it in.  It may kill us, but we’ll keep it in.

            But asking for help does a wonderful thing.  It brings others to your side.  It hastens your healing.  In the first part of Psalm 102 the psalmist feels desolate, lonely, forsaken. “I am like a desert owl,” he says, “like an owl among the ruins.  I lie awake; I have become like a bird alone on a roof.”⁵

            But as he expresses his grief, he is aware that he is part of a community of faith. 

            “Let this be written for a future generation,” he says, “that a people not yet created may praise the LORD: ‘The LORD looked down from his sanctuary on high, from heaven he viewed the earth, to hear the groans of the prisoners and release those condemned to death.’  So the name of the LORD will be declared in Zion and his praise in Jerusalem when the peoples and the kingdoms assemble to worship the LORD.”⁶

            The psalmist in the writing of this psalm calls people to his side to share his sorrow, but also to share God’s grace.  And, as the psalmist wished, generations of us to this day have been blessed by reading this psalm.  The psalm is one more way that God has called people to be his community of faith.

            Tennessee Williams once remarked that when there are so many lonely people in the world, the great scandal is that they choose to be lonely alone.  I have met many people who were despondent after the death of a loved one and yet didn’t think they needed a grief support group.  I have yet to meet a person who plucked up his or her courage and went to a grief support group who did not benefit greatly from going.  One of my friends told me of a grief group he attended where the group leader had to say only a couple of words of introduction, and suddenly everybody started talking. 

            When we go through loss, we need to talk.  The wise person recognizes that need and seeks a community where he or she may find help.  And I’d like to commend Jerry Wilson for getting our youth together last Sunday in the wake of Eric’s accident to share their grief together and to pray.  That was great!

 

HEALING COMES EVENTUALLY

 

            Healing comes eventually to those who have suffered devastating loss.  I say frequently to people who are going through great stress, “You’re going to get through this.”

            Time, the love of friends, the ministry of God’s Holy Spirit eventually bring healing to those who have suffered loss.  We never get completely over our losses.  My sister who died back in 1997 was in a nursing home for seven years, just barely alive, a shadow of her former self.  We prayed for her death, and we were grateful when it came.  But I will miss her as long as I live.  Knowing that I can never in this life talk with her again, laugh at her outrageous sense of humor, bask in her marvelous smile, pick her astonishing brain, grieves me more than I can say.  My father died in 1961, my mother in 1974.  I still miss them.  I wish I could talk to them and share what’s going on in my life now.

            Every once in a while in my prayers I’ll say to the Lord, “Father, I know that I can’t talk to my parents and to my sister, but if you wouldn’t mind, would you please tell them that I love them, I miss them, and that I’m looking forward eagerly to a joyful reunion with them before too very long.”  I don’t know what God does with those prayers.  But I see no reason why he shouldn’t pass my messages on to my parents and my sister.

            The psalmist is full of hope as he lets God know about his grief.  He says, “You, O LORD, sit enthroned forever; your renown endures through all generations.  You will arise and have compassion on Zion , for it is time to show favor to her; the appointed time has come.”⁷

            We will bear the scars of the losses we suffer to our graves.  When a beautiful piece of furniture is broken or scarred, an expert woodworker can apply glue, plastic wood, and varnish to the spot where the break took place.  And the furniture may look as good as new.  On the surface, there is no visible trace of the scar.  But underneath the woodworker’s cosmetic, the break still remains. 

            We don’t get over our grief, not entirely.  Who would want to?  The memory of better days is so precious to us.  The memory of the voice that speaks no more, the memory of the days of vital activity before the devastating loss of health, the memory of the marriage in its best days before the divorce — all these things remain with us and are precious and good.  We wouldn’t want to erase them entirely from our memory bank just so that we could feel better.  They happened.  They hurt.  And we remember the pain still.

            But we do get over these things, by God’s grace.  Frequently, we are stronger for the experience of devastating loss.  Our character has grown.  We have become wiser through suffering.  We are able to help those who are going through similar times of loss.

            Friends, God cares!  That’s the message of this psalm and of the whole Bible.  When we’re going through devastating loss, we may not always be able to connect with God’s caring love.  But it’s there.  The One who made this beautiful world and this amazing universe has planted his Cross in it to remind us that he has suffered with us and for us, that he is with us always, that he will never leave us or forsake us, and because of this suffering love of God that we see in Jesus Christ, we have hope for restoration and healing in this life and in the life to come.