It'll All Come Round Right

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The piece today is from friend and reader, Dr. Ken Jones, a chapel sermon at Grandview University in Iowa.

Grace and peace to you, my friends, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

In a way, All Saints Day is a day to consider our deepest losses and what God promises to do about them. The game of grief and loss is a game of percentages. I think it’s a game that far too few college professors are aware of. We don’t realize how deeply our students' lives are steeped in the dark brew of grief and loss. We professors can joke with one another about how the rate of students reporting the death of a grandparent seems to go up as we near the end of the semester and more work comes due and the stakes get higher and room to breathe gets more desperate.

But the reality of grief and loss is much more serious and more prevalent than tired students using a fictional grandparent’s death and imaginary funeral as a way to get out of school work.

Kenneth Doka, whose work my students encounter in “Death and Dying,” gives us some interesting numbers. He cites research that shows that, on average, in any group of people around twenty percent are actively grieving the death of a loved one. [Pick out one in five.] In a class of 25 students, that’s five people who have some kind of sorrow they’re carrying, that they’re contending with (often invisibly and unmentioned), along with every other demand laid on them by professors, coaches, advisors, parents, bosses, and the Iowa state legislature, not to mention God.

I imagine the classroom would feel more humane and the world would feel more kind if we kept that percentage in mind.

But Doka goes on to say that grief and loss are much bigger than we initially imagine. If we consider disenfranchised grief, those losses and deaths that aren’t regarded with such respect or given such room, then it’s even more pervasive. People with disenfranchised grief experience things like a relationship breaking up, a crush that’s just not gonna be fruitful, an athletic injury and weeks of PT, a D on a test you studied all night for, the death of your childhood pet, not getting a hoped for spot in a dance team routine, the ongoing loss of your parents divorce, a learning disability or physical disability, a dunning notice from the business office, or too-frequent empty cupboards, empty gas tank, and empty bank account.

All this is real grief and loss.

At any given time and in any group of people, 80 percent of us have it bubbling that same dark brew under the surface.

The other day I was talking to a group of students about what’s going on in the world, with the terrorist attack on innocent Israelis, the inability of Congress to function, the seemingly daily reports of mass shootings, including the most recent one that left 18 dead in Maine.

I asked them if they feel hopeful about life. They all shook their heads.Not one could say they believed the future would be brighter. That’s a sign of chronic grief that comes from living in a world of seemingly unsolvable, intractable problems.This is where Jesus’ promise breaks in.

God is no god who merely observes us creatures dispassionately from afar. Jesus is God-with-us, Immanuel, who has so fully entered into human life that he knows our hopelessness, our griefs, our sorrow and pain intimately. At one point he sees Jerusalem and weeps over the city. The promise we heard from John’s gospel is aimed squarely at the painful core we know inside us, at even the most private, most shameful, most don’t-tell-anyone truth you have tucked away for self-protection.

Jesus declares, “If I’m raised up, I will raise all with me.”

He’s raised up from the water at his baptism. He’s raised to glowing form in his Transfiguration on the mountain. Those things are true, but the most important place he’s raised is on a cross in his suffering and death. That means that you are not alone in your experience of loss. It’s what he takes with him to Golgotha and to the tomb, tucked into the spear wound in his side. His wound is bigger on the inside and has room for every sorrow you carry, for all your not-good-enoughs, for every one of your questions, and, yes, even for your fictional dying grandma.

The good news is that every bit of brokenness from the foundation of the world is also right there in him when he’s raised from the dead and ascends to God in heaven.

That includes every death, loss, grief, demonic force, dire weapon, and hell itself.

He claims it all as his own so that, as the Shaker hymn puts it, it’ll all come round right.

It’s all raised.

That means that, whatever your grief and loss, it will end. Whatever relationship is broken will be mended. Whomever you have lost will be joined to you again. For the cross and resurrection have made it sure.

When Jesus promises you’ll be raised up, too, it’s not something to wait for. It’s already a done deal. You can count on it.

Wherever you land on the divide of percentages in this life, you are 100 percent lifted up in him. As we name those who’ve died in this community over the last year, we can also picture them emerging into God’s promised new eternal life of freedom and joy. We can see them turn back and beckon to us in witness, saying “It’s all good. Keep living. Keep hoping. We’ll see you soon.”

Amen.