Sermon Cloud

“Well” he said, “I have some bad news.”

“Oh, what is it?”

“This afternoon while mom was on her way to the library, she was broadsided by a truck at an intersection, and she was ... she died.”

I had lost grandparents before, but nothing shook me like this phone call. Everyone knows: when your mother dies, a big hole is cut out of you. Whether you have lost your parents, or you are a widow, or worse yet, you have lost a child; you know the great pain and emptiness of losing a loved one.

For some people this loss is a cause for turning against God. For some it is a time to lean most heavily upon God. For all of us, it is a time of sorrow, confusion, disorientation, and adjustment. For all of us, it is a time that we dread, and we struggle to survive it when it comes.

The worst part, perhaps, is that it takes so long to find a new equilibrium. In some ways we never fully recover. We still think of our loved ones, and miss them. We still wish we had them near to talk to, to advise us, to hold just once more.

If you’ve read any newspapers, or watched any TV news in the past six months, you know that we are deep within one of the most difficult periods for our economy that we have seen since the Great Depression. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has just come through its worst year since 1931. Lots of things that we have come to simply assume were a normal part of life have all been turned upside down.

If you add to this time of economic uncertainty the disruptions of a death in the family, the loss of a job, the undoing of one’s financial security, and possibly even the end of a relationship or the loss of trust in that relationship; then you may feel like your life is in a tornadic whirlwind like the draining of tub full of water. Everything is spinning around and around, and going down the tubes.

So how can the church, how can our faith help us in these difficult times? That’s the question behind my doing these four sermons as we start the new year. We have no idea what this year will bring, but we can know who holds us. So when all else seems to be falling apart, we still belong to God, and God is still here with us. Whether we will have a good year in 2009 or a terrible year in 2009, none of us can tell right now. But our hope and our security do not come from things or other people. Our hope can only come from the one who is consistent and faithful; the One who is the same – yesterday, today, and

tomorrow.

The sisters sent word to Jesus about the grave illness of their brother, Lazarus. The word finally reached Jesus, perhaps several days later. Jesus knew the outcome. There was no need to rush. He continued to minister where he was for a few more days. Then he turned to his disciples and said, our friend, Lazarus, has died. Let us go to his family and be there for them

.

Our passage, picks up at the moment that Jesus is coming to Bethany. Word comes to Martha, and she rushes out to greet Jesus. “O Lord,” she said, “if only you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”

Isn’t that the same reaction we have when we fall on our knees in desperation and grief. Oh Lord, if only you had been here, I would not have lost my husband, my mother, my child. But God was here. God was with you. God does not prevent every terrible thing from happening. God doesn’t reach out his hand from the sky and prevent the worst from happening.

We all have free will and life is fragile. The very fine balance that sustains us day to day is all but miraculous. We cannot know all the factors at work in our lives. Is our cholesterol or our blood pressure to high? Do we smoke or drink too much? Do we

drive too carelessly, too recklessly? Is our diet too heavy and our exercising too light? Are we a worrier type? Are we Type As? Do we live in a bad neighborhood or live next to someone unbalanced?

There are so many factors in life that could end what we know: for ourselves or one of our loved ones. Therefore we should treasure each other, and give thanks to God for our lives, with every single breath we take.

When we go through tough times, two things happen. One, we discover that God is far more faithful than we thought or knew, and two, we discover that we are far stronger internally than we thought or knew.

Robert H. Schuller has written a very helpful book entitled, “Tough Times Never Last, But Tough People Do.” One of his reviewers on Amazon.com wrote concerning this book, “The challenge is how we deal with those times and how each one of us can take these difficult situations and turn them around into something miraculous.”

So there are two things that all of us must know when we face difficult times, no matter what the matter is; one, God is always with us. In this time of difficulty, we learn that we are not alone, we learn that God’s love and grace is sufficient to sustain us, and we learn that we can lean on God for help and strength. Two, we learn that we are stronger than we thought, more resilient than we thought, more capable than we thought, and we learn things about ourselves, about situations and about the people around us, so that we find ourselves strengthened and encouraged.

This is one of the reasons having a church family is so important. We cannot always weather the storms of life alone. And no matter how close we may feel to God, we also need God’s people to hold us, support us, be there for us, and remind us that our lives are not over, just because we lost the love of our lives, or someone who is everything to us.

The church family surrounds us with such tender love and care, such concern and compassion, such friendship and help that we will be buoyed up by their love and care. God has placed in the church hundreds of people whose very gift is the gift of  ompassion, the gift of mercy, and the gift of helps. When you have a church family, God moves through those you already know to show his great love and care.

It is important that we all, also understand that there is life after a death. Our own lives don’t end when a loved one dies. The reason we are still here, and the way to look at life after we have lost a loved one is to realize, that God has work for us to do. God has things for us to accomplish on this earth, and that the reason we don’t curl up and shrivel is because there is still much to do, much to accomplish, and much with which God wants to bless us. This way we will look forward, and not spend the rest of our days looking backward and being sad.

We have one more assurance. We have the promise that if we have faith and our loved ones had faith, we will all be rejoined when we go to heaven. That will be a glad reunion indeed. When we cross over to the other side of life, to life eternal, we will be greeted on the shores of heaven by the multitude of our loved ones who preceded us. It will be the happiest of all joyous reunions. This is a promise we have from God for those who place their faith and trust in him in this life.

I don’t believe I have ever heard of three people in a community dying on the same day. Yet on January first we lost Mary McDonald, Irene Davis and Buddy Rice all within a few hours. A lot of us are hurting right now. A lot of us have been touched by death just in the past year. My wife, Dawn, lost her father last December. We all have lost someone.

We all have felt the sense that someone was taken away from us. But we don’t have to feel defeated or undone. Life does go on. God is with us. Tough times don’t last, but with God we will all be more than survivors, we will emerge stronger in personhood and stronger in faith. Let us pray ...