Emmanuel in our pain: “Lord if you had been here...” (John 11: 1-57)

This is the text of a message from 1/17 at the UGA BCM:

Karen and I went on our internship in campus ministry after our second year of marriage and second year of seminary. We moved to Mobile, Alabama where I worked as the campus ministry intern at the University of South Alabama. Karen worked at a church daycare with various ages of children. Her favorite group was the babies - especially one little boy named Micheal. For some reason Micheal and Karen bonded. She would awaken at night imagining she was rocking him in her sleep. Yep, you guessed it, we decided that it was time for her to go off birth control pills and see what might happen. However, after three moves and two years nothing had happened. She had talked with her doctor about her concerns and she even went to a specialist and had surgery. Another move, more doctors, more surgery, and still no babies. After 8 years we began to grow desperate. We borrowed money and did a mini-in vitro procedure where they take the needed, um, materials from the man and woman, do some magic in a petri dish and come up with a embryo which is then placed in the woman's womb. A month later we received a call that she was not pregnant. Our world crashed. We had already had doubts and many tearful nights. For Karen her body gave her a month to month reminder that it was broken; that she could not get pregnant. She blamed herself. She blamed God. She blamed me. She blamed the houses we lived in. She blamed God. She blamed the water. She blamed her parents. She blamed God; it always came back to God. Imagine holding your wife, who is rocked with grief, knowing there is nothing you can do to ally her pain or her fears, there is no hope you can offer, no comfort you can give other than your love and your embrace. It is heart breaking.

Martha, Mary and Lazarus were perhaps Jesus closest friends. Throughout the Gospels Jesus retreated to their home just before or after key events in his ministry.

According to Herschel Hobbs, Martha's "response was the greatest confession of faith in Jesus as the Messiah which is recorded in the gospels...." because "she made hers from the pit of despair. She had sent for Jesus in her hour of great need. Insofar as she could tell, He had failed her. Yet she still believed in Him. Hear her confession. 'Yea, Lord: I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world.' (v. 27)"

Like Mary and Martha, we should not avoid the pain that comes with grief and disappointment - even when that disappointment is with God! Read the Psalms. The writers are often not only disappointed with God, but are frustrated and often angry! We need to be honest with God and with each other when we are hurting!

Psalm 22

¹ My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? ² My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest.

Lamentations 3 the writer tells of his pain, feeling that God has abandoned him and his people:

¹ I am the man who has seen affliction
by the rod of the LORD’s wrath.
² He has driven me away and made me walk
in darkness rather than light;
³ indeed, he has turned his hand against me
again and again, all day long.

⁴ He has made my skin and my flesh grow old
and has broken my bones.
⁵ He has besieged me and surrounded me
with bitterness and hardship.
⁶ He has made me dwell in darkness
like those long dead.

⁷ He has walled me in so I cannot escape;
he has weighed me down with chains.
⁸ Even when I call out or cry for help,
he shuts out my prayer.
⁹ He has barred my way with blocks of stone;
he has made my paths crooked.

He ends in chapter 5:20 with a question that we all tend to ask in the midst of pain and suffering:

"Why have your forgotten us completely? Why have for forsaken us these many days?"

It is almost impossible to avoid asking the very real question, "Why?" However, there is no acceptable answer to that question! Just like a three year old asking his parents why, when we get an answer, we only ask again, "but why?" and it goes on and on and on and on.

Look at Jesus' response to the grief surrounding the death of his friend Lazarus in John, chapter 11. Jesus was not initially moved emotionally when talking with his disciples about Lazarus because he knew he would later raise him. He patiently told his disciples that Lazarus would not die, but was only sleeping. Of course they misunderstood him. Jesus explained that Lazarus was dead, but that they were going to Bethany so that Jesus could raise him. However, after encountering his close friends Martha and Mary and seeing their grief, Jesus too is deeply affected. Both Mary and Martha express their frustration and disappointment, each coming to Jesus saying, “Lord if you had been here...” If only....They were accusingly asking, "Jesus why weren't you here!?!"

Here we encounter the shortest verse in the bible, but perhaps one that contains the most comforting message in all of Christendom. "Jesus wept." Herschel Hobbs pointed out that this is too simplistic of a translation - this is one case where we have minimized the emotional side of Jesus. A better, more literal translation of Jesus crying here is, "Jesus sobbed."

Picture this if you will. Here, the God of the universe is so moved with compassion for his friends that he cries with them. Jesus cried with Mary and Martha because of THEIR pain. In seminary one of our required texts was a book called "The crucified God." In it the author delves deeply into the idea that God cries with us in our grief. Folks, this is a game changer. I don't know if you can truly catch the depth of this truth unless you have been racked with grief or torn in two with pain. Jesus wept because of their pain. God weeps with us because of our pain.

When Jesus was leaving his disciples he told them that he was sending along the Holy Spirit - the Greek word is Paraclete - the advocate or helper or comforter. I want to challenge you, the next time you are stricken with pain or grief, picture Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, crying with you. It is the role of the Holy Spirit to be advocate and comforter. God is on your side!

Intercession: A few years ago someone told me that when he prays for others often he does not know how he should pray. So, he began to visualize his prayers. This is what he did, he began to picture himself carrying the person who asked for prayer all the way to the throne of Jesus. Then he placed that person into God's lap and watched as God held and cried with the person. I began practicing that myself. It is incredibly comforting for me to see and know that I have placed those whom I love into the arms of God. Sometimes I listen in to the words the Jesus whispers to my friend as he cradles them in his arms, "I love you. I've got you. You are safe in my arms."

Helen Parks wrote of intercession as "holding the ropes". Her allusion was to those on the boat who throw out life-buoys to those in the rough seas. A beautiful opportunity and responsibility for those of us in the family of God is to hold the ropes for others whose faith has been shaken. Like a family, we are to be there in love and support for others while they are immobilized in their grief and pain. We need to be a safe place.

From Why to What now: As the shock of our grief subsides, we need move from asking "Why" to asking, "What now?" We need to develop an attitude of expectancy, like that of Martha - putting our faith not in the situation, but in God. "God is up to something!" Our hope needs to be in Jesus, not in a fantasy of what-could-have-been or what-could-be. We need to put our faith and hope in God and in the future that God holds. Very often that future is very different from what we could have ever asked or imagined, as Paul prays in Ephesians 3:20 & 21. St our wedding my bride surprised me with an inscription in my ring. She had Eph. 3:4-21inscribed inside the band she gave to me. Paul writes, "Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen."

Let's bring this home: There are lots of hurting people all around us. Most of them hide behind a facade of make-up and a wide grin. Many hide behind anger or drugs or working too much or.....you know the excesses meant to dull pain. Instead of ignoring the pain around us, or enjoying our ignorance about other's pain, we need to begin asking God to give us his eyes to see the hurts around us. This past weekend Chad Norris challenged us to be open and attentive to the voice of the Holy Spirit, to pray for God to be so close to you that God speaks to us of other's needs. Or, as i like to say, for God to give us his eyes so that we can begin to see what God sees. To see the hurts, to see the needs in others. We need to begin to pray for God's healing spirit to come into the lives of those around us. You never know what kind of instrument of life-change you can be by allowing God to use you as a comforter to your peers.

I'm under no illusion that everything is hunky dory in the lives of everyone in this room. Many of you are in pain too. Many of you are angry at God. Many of you feel like the writer of lamentations....that God is out to get you! I want to challenge you to be honest about your pain. Be honest with yourself. Be honest with God. Be honest with each other. Often healing cannot come until we are willing to admit we can't do it on our own.

After 10 years of struggling with infertility Karen and I hit bottom. One Wednesday evening the minister of music passed out a new piece of music for our choir to sing. It was an arrangement of Psalm 86. As we started this haunting melody began to fill the sanctuary. We began to sing, "Here my voice O Lord when I cry, Here my prayer when I cry to you from the holy place...." (Here is a choir singing the piece: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXY3v7GUC44) And my wife, seated a few rows below me, began to cry. This was not your polite, lady-like weeping, but loud, audible, body shaking sobs. It was rather disruptive to the moving strains of music. Somehow we finished that verse and put the piece away. The music minister was rather taken aback, he was new at the church and did not know our story. He didn't know my wife and probably thought this was going to be a common occurrence. My wife NEVER cries. For her there is no such thing as a "good cry". I don't think we sang that piece again for almost 6 months. That Psalm became one of Karen and my favorites. Especially the last verse:

Psalm 86

⁶ Hear my prayer, LORD; listen to my cry for mercy. ⁷ When I am in distress, I call to you,

because you answer me

¹¹ Teach me your way, LORD,
that I may rely on your faithfulness;
give me an undivided heart,
that I may fear your name.
¹² I will praise you, Lord my God, with all my heart;
I will glorify your name forever.
¹³ For great is your love toward me;
you have delivered me from the depths,
from the realm of the dead.

The next few chapters: A few months later we met a couple on a cruise we had taken to get our minds off of the stresses of life. We hung out with them the entire cruse - they were lots of fun. On the last night we were watching the sunset as we left Key West, they were talking about how excited they were to get back home to their 5 children. The mom asked Karen, "I've not heard you talk about children...." Karen admitted, "I don't think we will ever have any of our own." The girl asked her, "Have you thought about adoption?" To my surprise Karen said, "We'll yes, I think that's the only way we will ever have a family." She said, "Oh my gosh, I have a niece..."

A few months later, in June, we flew to Omaha, Nebraska to pick up our baby whom we had named Blake. The next morning when we called the birth-mom she told us she had changed her mind. We were back into the pit of despair, deeper than ever this time. The plane ride home was the longest in the history of the world. I will never forget the embrace shared by Karen and her father when we reached the airport in Atlanta. They held each other and sobbed for a full five minutes. Everyone who passed by in the concourse stopped to stare.

It took us two months to return to church when we got home we were so hurt and confused. And mad. In August we pulled ourselves together, believing that God had led us down the road towards adoption months before. We thought we might as well follow through with it. We wrote a letter introducing ourselves as potential adoptive parents. I sent that letter to 100 people all over the US. We contacted a national Adoption agency in Atlanta. The next spring break, exactly one year after the cruise, Karen and I had two meetings with women who wanted to place their to-be-born children for adoption. A month later we welcomed Natalie Joy into our family. Six months later we welcomed Nicholas Aaron. Two children. We were blessed beyond what we could ask or imagine.

And the final act of God's grace was the birth of Karlie Nicole, born to us in our 20th year of marriage! Now we are speechless and exhausted! God's grace and provision is profound. He has turn our mourning into dancing.

Since then we have had countless opportunities to minister to others who are going through similar experiences. Our pain has become Gods glory and our joy, a joy we could never had imagined while we were in the throws of despair.

In the story in Chapter 11 Jesus raises Lazarus. Like ours, this story has a happy ending. Mary and Martha got what they wanted - they got their brother back, their grief was cut short. But such happy endings don't always occur in our lives. Lazarus later died again. The grief was still raw the second time around. In our lives, sometimes the boyfriend comes back, but sometimes he marries your best friend. Sometimes we get another job quickly, but sometimes we stay unemployed for months or years. Sometimes our friend is healed, but sometimes she dies. Sometimes we ace the class, but sometimes we flunk and have to change our major, abandoning our childhood dreams of becoming a doctor.

But even in the midst of our pain, if we keep our eyes on God we will gain new intimacy with God, and new insights into ourselves and our faith. We will better understand Paul's crazy talk when he said that when "he was weak he was strong." As a result of the difficult days, the Dark Nights of the Soul, as early Christians called them, we will find deeper faith, deeper comfort, and deeper peace. When we begin to emerge on the other side of our pain and grief we will discover, upon looking back, that God had been with us the whole time. The same Emmanuel, God with us, whom we sang about a month ago, is still with us in our times of grief and pain, crying with us, mingling his tears with our own.