Thanksgiving comes late this year, and as soon as we return from these holidays, we’ll be thick in the middle of Advent. Even now, we’re all probably thinking about Christmas and hearing Christmas carols playing on the radio and in stores. I was reading and thinking about how strangely real some of those carols are, like, “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem,” which says,
Yet, in the dark streets shineth
The everlasting light
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in Thee tonight.
Is it really possible for hope and fear to be met in one place? What about sadness and joy? Or, as we’re seeing this week, thanksgiving and death? Can we really think about being grateful and joyful and hopeful when we lose a child, a son, a classmate, a student, a friend, a brother? To lose a child is one of the most terrible things there is, a gross perversion of the way things are supposed to be. How can we feel hope, or joy? How can we give thanks at a time like this?
A reality of this life, as told by the one great and true story by which we order our lives and everything else, is that we now live in the “now, not yet” of history. We’re in the time when Jesus has already come to pay the penalty for sin, to eradicate death, and to inaugurate his Kingdom. He has broken death’s back, pushing back evil every day. Even though it doesn’t feel like it sometimes, more people who know Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior are alive and on earth than have ever been on earth before. More excellent worldwide health and prosperity exist, and fewer people are starving than ever. Things like human trafficking, racism, and other forms of oppression are so offensive to us now because we’ve exposed as evil what for so long were just “the way things were.” These areas of progress are all facts; you can look them up. They are true. God is moving mightily, and he is using people like the people gathered here today, his church, his hands and feet, to do these things. He is doing them in the Tyler area, Texas, and the world. These things would not be happening if Jesus Christ had not risen from the dead. This is the “now.”
And, “not yet.” Because we buried a student this week, and a mom and beloved teacher died a few weeks ago, sooner than we think they should have. There are wars in the Ukraine, where many of our brothers and sisters live, and there is war in Israel, in the midst of the people to whom Jesus was born roughly 2024 years ago. As many of us saw earlier this month in the International Day of Prayer for the Church, our brothers and sisters are persecuted and imprisoned around the world. We still fight each other, still hurt each other, and still struggle with sin. We are still in so very much pain. To follow Jesus in the “not yet” is to love and serve sincerely despite suffering. That is what’s real. And although we know there will come a day in which we place our hope and trust, a day when all of this will be a distant memory, it still hurts us deeply now.
Living in a place where hope and fear are met in God, where we feel joy and grief, and where we feel thanksgiving amid death is not a false dichotomy. These are not “either/or” things. Through Christ, they are “both/and.” In times like this, we laugh and cry.
You’ve heard me use this quote before. I’ll use it again and again because it’s profound: the late Tim Keller said that one of the great paradoxes of Christianity is that we are free to feel the total weight of our grief, but with that grief activating the hope and joy we have within us, rather than bitterness—to feel the fullness of grief and the fullness of joy simultaneously. To be free of bitterness, that would be precisely how we should feel if it all ended here, if death had the last word, if it was a “period” rather than simply a “comma” at the virtual beginning of our story.
It’s why James, Jesus’ brother, who knew a thing or two about grief, can tell us in Chapter 1 of his letter to persecuted Christians to consider it all joy when we encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And, let endurance yield its perfect result—that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. In Christ, walking through sadness, grief, and death paradoxically makes us better than we once were: richer, fuller, deeper, more profound human beings, despite the pain. Or because of it.
Mourning well is a time for laughter and tears. And joy. As I talked to our lost student’s mom on her front porch last Thursday night, she told me story after story of how her son was burdened for the hearts and souls of others, and wanted people to be reconciled to God and to each other. As Luke’s mom told me these stories, what radiated from her face and heart was joy. Sure, there was sadness, but there was deep, abiding joy.
The fact that joy exists in the depths of the worst pain anyone can feel is perhaps the greatest testimony I know that a God in heaven exists who loves and provides for his children. The only reason joy exists in the depths of this pain, the only reason, is that we know there is more to this story, that Luke’s life and our lives are just beginning.
So we give thanks for the fact that we can celebrate living and loving together. We give thanks that in a world where so very many people are alone, none of us gathered here are alone. Sure, we may feel lonely sometimes, but we are never alone. Because we are a part of something beautiful, something deeply special that is a gracious gift from the hand of Jesus: a community of love that gets to be on mission for the gospel of Jesus Christ, loving each other and this area around us every day.
Our high school principal and I often ask, “If Grace didn’t exist, would it matter in this community?” I don’t think there’s any question but that the answer is a resounding yes, and it’s times like these, when we’re suffering and coming together around the people we love, those who are hurting and need us, that we see Christ in ourselves and each other most clearly. It’s now we are most fully not selfish, most fully the people God calls us to be, the people we always dreamed and hoped we would be, people of being, substance, faith, hope, and love. People of Jesus. We can rejoice, find hope, and give thanks for that.
We also grieve. Grieve as we contemplate this broken, distorted, fallen, often really ugly world we live in. A world where despair is so absolute and visceral that even sons and daughters of the living God either die early from natural causes or through those daily, self-destructive choices that slowly whittle them down, a little at a time. A world where our families, those we love the most, have to suffer dearly in the wake of these sudden tragedies or for our mistakes. A world where we have to ask why and where we have to remind ourselves over and over again that God is good, and sometimes feel guilt and remorse for things we think we could have or should have said or done, all of which we know deep down is pointless and futile, but nonetheless feels painfully honest.
We grieve in a world where things like death and mourning are as real and common as oxygen and fall like rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. We are less than human if we’re not weeping and lamenting over a world like that, over this broken planet we have made with our own broken, fallen choices.
But, finally, we gather again, whether here or around our tables next week, to give thanks and feel joy. Joy in the midst of that pain and grief intermingled and mixed and surpassing and transcending. Joy I have seen and felt these past few weeks in watching Christ’s Body, His church that He bled and died for, united and pouring out love on these suffering families. Joy manifests itself in working through all that guilt and remorse toward a resolve to fight back the inclination to isolate ourselves in grief and just be present in each others’ lives, to look out for one another and love each other better, as I have watched students and families and teachers and administrators and community groups and churches love each other better this past week and month.
And, joy that our student, together with the young mom and our beloved teacher and all those many others, are free from this often really ugly world and rest in the arms of Jesus, and wait for mom and dad and brother and sister and family and all of us, joy as our world-weary hearts long for the new Jerusalem, where we will work, and play, live and love and worship together in a place where sons and daughters of the King don’t despair, don’t leave mamas and daddies and brothers and sisters, always remember who they are and whose they are, and who love and are loved perfectly and well.
Joy, hope, and thanksgiving are made possible by God’s love that pinned Jesus to the cross and Jesus’ own love that willingly held himself there. When we feel grief, we don’t shy away from Thanksgiving; we step deeply into it. We express and allow ourselves to feel gratitude for the giver of all good things who makes joy and hope possible.
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