Pentecost 6B, 30 June 2024 – Sermon

Howard Wallace

Our readings today have one thing in common: they each involve grief of one sort or
another. David grieves the deaths of Saul and Jonathan. And in the gospel reading, we hear
of a father’s plea for a dying child and a woman’s plea for relief from a life-long condition.
Whenever we hear about someone ill or afflicted in the gospels, our minds have been
trained to anticipate the act of Jesus healing the person which usually follows as though he
is some sort of magician. We forget the experience of others in the story like the synagogue
leader who mourns the death of a daughter or the woman who, through many years of
affliction, has endured hardship, loneliness and social isolation. And yet we can understand
their grief for probably all of us have experienced grief sometime in our lives. Such grief can
be a complex emotion and we know it must be allowed to run its course which is not always
at our control.
But grief is not just a personal thing. A community or a whole nation can grieve at the loss of
someone or something of significance. In 2001when the twin towers were destroyed I was
on a train in England on my way to Heathrow airport to catch a plane to Philadelphia. Of
course, flights to and from the US were immediately grounded. I got to Princeton where I
was headed a week later. I went to church on the Sunday after. Princeton is not far from New
York and many people who lived there worked in the city. The prayers of the people were
moving. When it got to the section on people needing help there was a list of 20 or so people
from the congregation and local area who had perished in the attack and another equal
number who were still unaccounted for. How does a congregation, admittedly even a largish
one, carry such a loss and for how long?
We remember the lives lost in the many wars fought last century and at the start of this one.
We grieve for the thousands of Palestinians who have died in Gaza and for those Israelis
savagely killed or kidnapped last October. We despair at the loss of life in Ukraine, Yemen,
Sudan, Papua New Guinea and many other places through war or natural disaster.
Our own country has had its share of grief too through death and destruction by fire and
flood. In such events there is a sense of national grief. There is also the accumulated grief
over two centuries of indigenous Australians – grief over land taken from them, over the
destruction of sacred places, over the loss of culture and language, over the taking of
children from their families. There is grief even today over those who have no homes to
shelter in, and those caught in brutal family relationships. There is grief over the way we are
affecting the planet through our desire for more of its resources and we wonder if there will
be grief for the millions of lives which will be affected as a result.
How do we deal with this grief? Much of it, however, is undealt with as the nightly news
moves on to the next issue or our screens are filled with trivial talent shows or home
renovation programmes.
The reading from 2 Samuel today is an expression of national grief. Saul, the first king of
Israel, along with Jonathan his son, have been killed fighting the Philistines. We do not hear
much of Saul’s story. The focus of the text has been on David. Saul’s story has been marked
by tragedy both personal in terms of instability of character and personality, and in relation to
the war against the Philistines, a major task Saul had to deal with when he was made king.
Now Saul and Jonathan have been killed and David expresses deep lament over the
nation’s loss. He calls the nation to weep for the two men.

David is portrayed in a very positive light in this passage. He is presented as being
magnanimous in his assessment of the two men. We might remember that David had to flee
from Saul several times as the king wanted to kill him. Of course, there is, however, a certain
amount of political motivation behind David’s lament. He will supersede Saul as king, and he
has no little concern for wanting to appear to be a nation builder honouring his predecessor.
Nevertheless, scripture presents a positive view of David here. It promotes David’s lament
as heart felt and genuine. That is how we are meant to read it. The writer, regardless of how
sceptical we might be of David’s motives, wants us to know that grief should not be divorced
from kindness or compassion, either toward the ones grieved or, in other circumstances,
toward those we encounter who are grieving.
But what has this story of national grief to do with us? Just this. Neither our personal grief
nor our community grief goes unnoticed in the love and being of God.
Each month, next week in fact, we will come to the table to celebrate communion.
Something I read a while ago asked the question ‘did you ever wonder why the central act of
Christian worship is the breaking of bread and not the baking of bread or restoring
something else that had been broken’? At the communion table we reenact symbolically the
truth that is at the heart of the gospel – the experience of brokenness, loss and the deepest
of grief. Our celebration is not an empty memorial of a death long ago. Rather, in it we
symbolically present God’s becoming one with humans in their brokenness and grief, a
supreme act of compassion whereby God turns things around so that we can become one
with God. In Jesus’s death, God entered profoundly into the deepest human experience of a
wounded, grief-stricken world. All that grief and anguish is absorbed into the heart of God in
compassion. Every death, every extinction, every broken home, every stolen child, every
violent attack, is taken into the heart of God; not to destroy that brokenness, nor to cover it
over in some way and forget it, but rather to bring it near to the source of creation, to life
itself so that it might be ultimately transformed in act of healing.
This is the point of the two stories in Mark’s Gospel. They do not say that if we pray hard
enough or believe sufficiently or do the right thing, the bad things in life will vanish. We know
from all sorts of experiences that does not happen. Rather what they say is that God in
Jesus comes near to human grief and loss; that God is affected by such and is moved to
compassion and healing in God’s own way and time. And as we come near to God, we too
are affected by a desire for life, for compassion and for healing.
As we share in the experiences of grief and brokenness in the world, either directly on
occasion or indirectly, we enter into the deep mystery of God, of communion with God in
Jesus Christ. Christ at this table offers himself to us in his brokenness, embracing our
wounds and grief and he takes our human brokenness into his wholeness.
In this we can return to the world knowing ourselves embraced by God’s love, ready to serve
the world in God’s healing love, aware of how all the hurts of the world – those of indigenous
and non-indigenous Australians, as well as the hurts of those far off caught up in the horrors
of conflict or other disaster, as well as individuals grieving a personal loss; we know that all
of that is embraced by the healing love of God in Christ.