Hope Beyond the Sorrow

[This was shared earlier this evening during a funeral in honor of Clem, a member of Living Water Lutheran Church, a World War Two veteran and Pearl Harbor survivor.]

Last night, I was told, “You know, it’s quite an honor for you to be able to do Clem’s funeral.” It is. The members of the greatest generation are quickly leaving us. This is the third funeral for a veteran of World War Two over which I’ve presided in the past year. There have been others through the years.

In spite of the unique attributes of a generation to whom we owe so much, people who weathered the Great Depression and endured the greatest war in human history, every member of that generation is unique, each with their own special life stories, their own achievements beyond the horrors of the war, loved ones and friends who, after they have passed, miss them for who they were after the war was over.

Although Clem was in worship every Sunday, I never got to know him very well in the two-plus years I’ve been his pastor. (I do cherish the particular Sunday when he, moving beyond the usual good morning greetings, thumped me on the back and said, “You’re doing a great job!”) Clem’s age and circumstances by the time I arrived though, made really getting to know him difficult. But from other people who knew and loved Clem, I got to know some things about him. When Carol and I met on Tuesday, I learned even more.

To me, one of the most remarkable things I’ve gleaned from Clem’s life and from that of his wife, Joanne, is just how resilient they were. Even beyond World War Two, they both had tough lives. And yet, by all accounts, they emerged in adulthood as productive, caring, loving people who raised their family, started a successful business, enjoyed the company of friends, worshiped God, and, in the case of Clem, avidly golfed and fished.

There are people who don’t understand what it’s like to grieve the loss of a father, grandfather, and friend who’s lived 94 years. They think that somehow there’s less grief or sadness. They don't understand that while loved ones and friends may be grateful that someone like Clem lived a long life and was blessed with a peaceful passing, there is still sadness and grief at the loss of one who loved and was loved well, who was such a presence in the life of his family and circle of friends. Let no one make you feel guilty because you grieve at Clem’s passing. It would be strange for you not to grieve.

But there is hope!

And that hope which comes from Jesus Christ, the Lord in whom Clem believed, means that even in the midst of grief, you can have hope and joy. The apostle Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14 in the New Testament: “Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.”

There is a different quality to the grieving of those who grieve for one who has trusted in Jesus Christ.

Clem is today, at this moment, experiencing life with God. He’s fully alive and in the presence of God, along with all the saints who have gone before us, including Joanne. He’s no longer afflicted by the ravages of time nor of dementia. He is restored fully in an eternity in which Christ, the Lord Who has died as the perfect sacrifice for our sins and risen so that all who turn from sin and surrender their lives to Him have life with God, “will wipe every tear from their eyes. [And with whom] There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

Clem is experiencing Christ’s new creation in its fullness.

But this hope isn’t just for those who have died. The Bible teaches that “...if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old has gone, the new is here!”

The new life of Christ, a life filled with God’s guidance, wisdom, and the power to live this life with love, resilience, compassion, and toughness, lives in all who turn from sin and believe in Christ.

We don’t have to earn eternal life, only receive Christ and let Him reign as God and King over our lives.

We don’t have to be good enough, only trust in Christ Who has been more than good enough and will share His goodness with us.

I wish that I had known Clem well and I’m a bit jealous of all of you who did know him.

But I know this: God wants to give all of us an eternity to get to know special people like Clem, to live and love, work and worship side by side with them, as God fills us with His ever new and ever-renewing life.

Today, you grieve your loss.

But in the midst of your grief, I also commend to you the only One Who can give you life, hope, salvation, and joy in the midst of grief and beyond, Jesus Christ. Amen

Hope for the Living

[This was shared during the funeral for Dale, a member of the congregation I serve as pastor, earlier today.]

Psalm 23
Romans 8:31-39
John 11:17-27

Over the past three-and-a-half years, as his pastor, I’ve gotten to know Dale a bit. Because Dale, who was never a talkative man from what I have gleaned, was increasingly silenced by illness in this period, some of what I’ve learned about him has come from others.

One day, for example, while visiting Dee at her house, she showed me a beautiful piece of furniture that Dale made for her dining room. He was a tremendous carpenter!

But his talents weren’t confined to carpentry, of course. Luke used to tell me about how knowledgeable Dale was when it came to anything mechanical or, as Luke would put it, “handy.” (High praise from Luke!)

From everyone—from Dale himself—I also learned how much Dale loved the outdoors. He loved to boat and hike. Were it up to him, I think, Dale really would have kept a “home, home on the range.” (A song he loved to sing.)

In later years, unable to hike or travel, he enjoyed, when the weather allowed, sitting on the deck amid the trees and the chatter of the birds. (I know he appreciated the gift of the “birdie cam” he recently received.)

Dale’s love of nature was also reflected in the home he built on that hill near Lake Logan back in the 1970s. This dwelling did not always meet with Elaine’s approval. As some of you will remember, the first time I visited Dale and Elaine, she commented on their house, “Dale says it’s secluded; I say it’s isolated.”

From that, I learned something else about Dale (and Elaine): whatever differences in their personalities, these two who grew up as classmates in a rural Michigan one-room schoolhouse, were a team. Dale smiled when Elaine said things like that to me. It was the smile of recognition of a “discussion” they had rehearsed countless times before.

Sometimes, Dale’s smiles would turn into laughter that I loved to hear: the breathy, hearty laugh of someone truly tickled.

I came to know Dale also as a man of great intelligence.

And I also experienced Dale as a caring person. When someone was in the hospital, he wanted to know how she or he was doing. He relished telling me how things were going with Sandy’s and Perry’s lives and work and with his grandchildren. He enjoyed it when neighbor Butch brought his own granddaughter Isabelle, a young ball of energy, along for visits. After I had a heart attack last summer, I mentioned that the church council was after me to take it easier; Dale fixed me with a stare and asked bluntly, “Are you doing it?”

On top of all this, Dale was a man of quiet faith. He was always anxious to receive Holy Communion during our visits. Even when it had become a struggle for him to move his hand to his lips, he determinedly ate the bread and drank the wine that are Christ’s body and blood. And no one ever more sincerely thanked me for bringing the Sacrament to him.

Dale was truly grateful for the grace and love of God, whether he saw it in the meticulously engineered beauty of the created world or in the gift of Jesus on a cross, Whose death and resurrection brings eternal life to all who turn from sin and believe in Him.

And it is to this I want to point all of you who grieve Dale’s passing today. At one level, Dale’s death brings a story to a close. With that, there will be, understandably, some sense of relief. Dale had suffered from multiple maladies over an extended period of time. His suffering is ended. But his death is a sad ending for all of you, too: A father, a grandfather, a friend, a strong presence, is gone.

But you can take heart. You can have hope. Dale’s passing is also a beginning. The Gospel lesson from John which I read a few moments ago tells the story of what happened one day when Jesus went to Bethany, the hometown of friends: two sisters and a brother named Martha, Mary, and Lazarus.

The sisters and the whole town are grieving when Jesus arrives. Lazarus was dead. At first, Martha seems to lash out at Jesus. "Lord,” she says, “if You had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.”

But to Martha in her grief and her confusion, Jesus says, “Your brother will rise again” and “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in Me, even though they die, will live and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die.” He then asks Martha to trust those assertions. Jesus asks her to believe them, to believe in Him.

Jesus asks the same thing of you this morning. You see, if the promise that Jesus makes to share His Easter victory over sin and death isn’t true today, it isn’t true. It is precisely for moments like these that Jesus makes His promise to be the resurrection and the life!

And our faith in Jesus’ resurrection promise isn’t just a hope whispered against the grim realities of life. After telling Martha that all who believe in Him will live with God forever, Jesus gave a sign of His capacity to make good on His promises. He stood at the place where Lazarus' body had been placed some four days before and commanded his friend’s dead bones to come back to life on this side of eternity. The voice of Jesus, God in the flesh, spoke with the same voice as the One Who called the heavens and the earth to life in the first place. In response to the command from that voice, Lazarus stepped out of his tomb, back into the embrace of his family.

Of course, Jesus would, shortly after the events at Bethany, give an even more emphatic sign of His authority over life and death and sin. After bearing the weight of all the sin of human history—including your sin and my sin—on the cross, though Himself sinlessness, Jesus rose to life again. The Bible says of the crucified and risen Jesus: “God raised Him up, having freed Him from death, because it was impossible for Him to be held in its power.”

Fortunately, God recognizes how hard it is for us to believe such good news, especially on days like these. That’s why He sends the Holy Spirit to any of us who want to believe. If we will pray to the God the Father in the Name of Jesus, the Holy Spirit will help us to believe in the same Lord so welcomed by Dale every time he gratefully received the Lord’s Supper and listened to God's Word...the same Lord he so reverenced every time he joined the Saint Matthew family for worship over the radio on Sunday mornings.

In the days and years ahead, you will miss Dale, just as you have missed Elaine. Grief is natural and understandable when the love runs deep and the memories are piled high.

But those who follow the risen Jesus don’t grieve like others do. We have hope. We belong to a Savior Who rose on Easter.

Because of Jesus, Dale will rise too. So will all who believe in Jesus.

May God fill you with this hope and the peace that comes from it in the days ahead…and through all the days of your lives. Amen

In Christ, We Can Always Be Thankful!

[This was shared during worship with the people and guests of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]

2 Timothy 2:8-15
This past week, my wife, Ann learned, that a good friend of hers passed away suddenly. Cindy and Ann were part of a group of five women who worked together at an elementary school in our former community. Even after one friend, Nancy, retired, Cindy moved, and later, Ann moved, the five still got together regularly for dinner, conversation, and lots of laughter.

We went to the funeral visitation on Friday. Ann and another member of the group, Janie, approached Cindy’s family—her mother, her sons and her son's wives, her in-laws, and finally, Cindy’s husband. They all knew about the group of five which was symbolized by a flower arrangement at the funeral home: four red roses and a single white one in the middle. Cindy’s husband, Tom, grabbed hold of Ann and Janie, and they wept together. Tom acknowledged that he’d wished he could have had Cindy with him longer here. But then he said, “She’s with Jesus now and she has no more pain.” Then he asked Janie and Ann individually, “You do know that, don’t you?”

Christians grieve. But they also understand something that the apostle Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14. You can find the passage on page 684 of the pew Bibles. Please read it along with me silently:

But I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep [Paul is talking about those Christians who have died], lest you sorrow as others who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus.

For the person with faith in Jesus Christ, it’s possible to honestly mourn, yet still be grateful to God for all of God’s blessings, especially for the hope of life beyond death. That’s why Paul says this just a few verses later, in 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18:

Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

When our trust is in Jesus Christ, we always have reason to be thankful.

With that in mind, please pull out the Celebrate inserts for today and look at our second lesson, 2 Timothy 2:8-14.

As we pointed out last Sunday, the book from which the lesson comes is a letter written by the apostle Paul, who was imprisoned, to a young pastor named Timothy. Paul was imprisoned for confessing that Jesus is the King of kings and the only God of the universe. Paul starts out with these words:

Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David—that is my gospel, for which I suffer hardship, even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But the word of God is not chained. Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, so that they may also obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory.

We may be chained by many things in life—scorned for trusting in Jesus Christ above all things, tortured by disease, spurned or bullied by classmates, hounded by debt, hurt as a consequence of past decisions we’ve made, subjected to economic reversals, dogged by feelings of inferiority, encumbered by the reality of our own sins.

But no matter what we’re dealing with, God’s Word—the Word that reveals God’s will for human beings and the Word about Jesus, the Word made flesh, Who died and rose so that all who trust in Him will live with God forever—that Word of God has never been chained!

In Isaiah 55, God tells the people of Israel (and us):

…as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth…so shall My Word that goes forth from My mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. 

God’s Word is perfect and powerful and cannot be constrained, held down, or limited by anybody or anything.

One of my favorite incidents in the Bible happens when the Israelites, God’s people, are in the wilderness between Egypt and the land God promised them. The people are whining about not having any meat to eat. Moses goes to God and asks for meat. God says that He’ll give this whiny bunch so much meat that they’ll get sick of the stuff. But Moses is skeptical. God angrily asks Moses, “Is the Lord’s power limited? Now you shall see whether my word will come true for you or not.” We can be thankful that God’s Word is unchained, bringing us blessings even when our faith is weak.

Our second lesson continues with a series of sayings that were apparently well known to, maybe even sung by, the early Church. Let’s quickly look at each phrase, starting at verse 11.

“If we have died with him, we will also live with him.” The Word of God calls for all of us to die—that is, to allow the life of sin into which we are born to no longer be in control of us. We let that old life die so that Christ can give us new lives that begin in this world and will be perfected in eternity. This is an ongoing process that begins when we are baptized. Each day, the Christian is called to submit the old self living inside of us to God in daily repentance and renewal, so that each day the new self—the person Jesus died and rose to make us—can rise to a life made ever new by God’s love and power. This is another reason to thank God every day.

The first part of verse 12 says, “If we endure, we will also reign with him…” Jesus has promised that His followers will reign with Him over eternity. But only if we endure: only if we keep trusting when the world has turned away from Christ; only if we keep repenting when we fall into sin; only if we keep trusting that Jesus’ death on the cross was even for us. Eternity belongs to those who keep fighting the good fight of faith, who keep trusting in Jesus. This is another reason to thank God.

The second part of verse 12 says, “If we deny him, he will also deny us.” Since Jesus is God, He could easily force us to trust in Him and follow Him, making us little machines that have no choice in the matter. But as the only of God’s creatures made in God’s image, we are the only beings in creation who have the right to tell God, “No, we would rather be our own gods, thank you very much.” God gives us this freedom because it’s only when we have the freedom to say no to His love that our saying the yes of faith has any meaning. But Jesus has issued a solemn warning, “I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before others, the Son of Man also will acknowledge before the angels of God and whoever denies me before others will be denied before the angels of God.” We can also thank God that, in spite of our sins and imperfections, Jesus gives us access to the blessings God wants to give to everyone, but forces on no one.

In verse 13, Paul says, “If we are faithless, he remains faithful— for he cannot deny himself.” To me, this is the thing for which you and I can be most thankful. Faith—trust—in the God we cannot see does not come naturally to us. Our old selves don’t die without a fight. Even people who believe in Jesus deeply sometimes find themselves believing in other things more than they believe in Jesus—whether it’s in their common sense, their impulse to go along to get along, their desire for security, the push of their emotions, the pull of their biology, the influence of friends and culture. God understands. God is faithful even when we are faithless. God is faithful even when our doubts are shouts and our faith in Christ is a mere whisper in our hearts.

When faith becomes too hard, some people give up. Behind one of the 6000+ doors on which I knocked back when we were getting my former church started, was a man who had stopped attending worship anywhere, although he had grown up in a church. I asked him why that was. “I love the Lord,” he told me. “But right now, other things are more important to me.” This man was consciously extinguishing his own weakened faith by cutting himself off from the only fellowship created by Jesus Christ to foster and sustain a relationship with Him.

A better model for us is the man who asked Jesus to heal his demon-possessed boy. Jesus told him that all things can be done for the one who believes. “I believe,” the desperate father replied, “help my unbelief.” Jesus answered the man’s prayers because God is faithful even when our faith is running on empty. We can thank God for that, too!

Years ago, I read the story of a missionary couple who had retired. They headed home to the States from Africa on a big passenger liner. Also onboard was a famous military hero. Through the whole trip, the missionary husband felt a little sorry for himself. As they boarded the ship, the military hero received accolades, while the missionary couple was ignored. That continued through the whole trip. Every night, there were banquets and toasts for the military hero; but the missionary couple who had given most of their lives in service to Christ and to the people of a small African village were ignored. The missionary husband consoled himself with the thought that when they arrived home, they would be appreciated for their faithfulness to Christ.

But when they docked in New York Harbor, there were a boisterous welcome and a key to the city for the military hero. No one even met the missionary couple. The man was discouraged. But his wife, knowing what was going on in her husband’s mind, looked at him and reminded him, “It’s okay, sweetheart; we’re not home yet.”

Life can be tough. It can be even tougher for those with faith in Christ. The devil and much of the world target the faithful for temptations, tests, and unkindness. The tragedies of life can seem to put everything we believe about the goodness and power of God under suspicion. But, we’re not home yet; heaven is our real home.

Until we reach that place, we who follow Christ can be thankful for so many things:

• forgiven sin, 
• the promise of eternity, 
• the rewards God gives to enduring faith, 
• the willingness of Christ to claim us in spite of our imperfections, and 
• the character of God Who will always be faithful to us, even when we are faithless. 

We can be thankful that God’s Word which announces and creates these blessings can never be chained. God is good and whether we live or we die, we can always be thankful for that!