Isaiah 25: 6-9
A day is
a perfect piece of time/to live a life, /to plant a seed, /to watch the sun go
by.
A day
starts early, /work to do, /beneath a brand-new sky. / A day brings hope.
It was one of those days, a day
with lots of time to spare and nowhere to be. It was February and I found myself
meandering through a village, where I walked into an interesting shop. There
was the aroma of coffee and tea biscuits with herbs and cheese; the displays
were curated in an artsy sort of way, with themes and colour and curiousities. There
was a little of this and a little of that. There was something for every kind
of browser.
That day I was drawn to a
children’s book with a black and white and yellow cover: it was graced with Nikki
McClure’s simple and expressive drawings throughout, and a poem. Cynthia Rylant
begins her book, All in A Day, with the words I started with this
morning.
A day is a perfect piece of time/to
live a life, /to plant a seed, /to watch the sun go by.
A day starts early, /work to do, /beneath
a brand-new sky. / A day brings hope.
For whatever reason, - the colour,
the drawings, the words of the book,- drew me in and spoke to something deep inside me. I needed
the words and drawings of the book at that precise moment of time.
I often feel like that as I read
the lessons in preparation to preach each Sunday. Sometimes I am even surprised
on Sunday morning when the scriptures are read and I hear the texts in a new
way – the right words for that precise moment in time. I am even more conscious
of the texts chosen and used at funerals and gravesides.
The truth on that is that I do
think of the person who died, their family and friends, but I also think of the
words that I will need to hear at that precise moment in time. My heart breaks
too.
This has been one of those years
when grief has caught up to me. What I mean by that is that grief is cumulative;
one death lays beside another in the heart, other griefs and losses are tucked in
too; and sometimes grief accumulates faster than the heart can heal. What I
found the hardest this year is that, when my heart is full of grief, I
experience a greater grief. Compounded grief for me is the death of what I know
as perpetual optimism and never-ending creativity; two traits that are the very
mechanisms that I use to cope with grief. …
Today – this precise moment in
time- is important. We are given a gift of time and space to articulate that we
have broken hearts, raw and fresh grief, and grieves that linger on. Of all the
years in the lectionary readings, this one, talks about tears: God wiping away
tears, Jesus weeping at the death of his friend Lazarus. We have been gifted
with a moment in time when tears are okay; tears can be shed, shared, and welcomed.
We are also gifted this morning
with words -whether in hymn, scripture, or story – meant to draw us in and to
speak to the places deep inside us: relaxing the grip of grief and nurturing room
for seeds of hope.
The passage that we heard from
Isaiah draws me with its poetry and its articulation of the griefs and fears of
human beings the world over, by not mentioning the places of death and loss, -the
fuelers of grief-, but rather, boldly expressing a jubilant counter-possibility.
On this mountain the Lord of
hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich foods, a feast of well-aged
wines … God will destroy the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that
is spread over all nations … God will swallow up death forever … God will wipe
away the tears from all faces
In this jubilant counter-possibility,
the fears, griefs, and ills of our time are healed:
Hunger, food insecurity, unequitable
distribution of resources, war, conflict, refugees, displaced persons, climate
change, greed, individualism … gone; swallowed up forever.
At first when I hear the words of
Isaiah, my heart receives them to speak to what I consider personal grief, to
speak words of promise of no more tears, eternal life where all is made right –
speaking to the sadness of being without people who meant (mean) a lot to me. Hearing
these words in community, with all of you, my grief is mine, but, for the same
people and others, you too grieve – part of our grief is shared.
And in the passage of Isaiah,
directed at a community of faith, the words penetrate more deeply to sow seeds in
the dirt of cumulative grief, and grief that is beyond any one person, griefs
born and worn by peoples, nations, and creation through the hands of powers and
systems.
In this precious moment of time,
I pray that something draws you in and speaks to the grief you carry -scripture,
story, hymn- the flicker of a candle, the nod of a friend when Christ’s peace
is shared; in the breaking of bread; in the offering of prayer; in a tear shed
in the safety of this place; in knowing that you are not alone.
Your ears, listening to the
ramblings of my heart, have eased the grief I bear. Each time I am in this
space with you -praying, reading,
hearing, singing, eating, sharing- a little bit of the grief in my heart turns
to compost, and seeds of hope planted there grow; waiting for the return of
perpetual optimism and never-ending creativity…
until that time, and the time
when the fullness of Isaiah’s jubilant counter-possibility is realized, I will
live as Cynthia’s book, All in a Day, ends:
This day will soon be over/and it
won’t come back again.
So live it well, make it count, /
fill it up with you.
The day’s all yours, it’s waiting
now … / See what you can do.
No comments:
Post a Comment