My sermon when I returned to preach at Westwood Christian Church eight weeks after the death of my wife, Christine.
Let me begin today by thanking you for your graciousness and prayers since Christine died. There are not words to adequately express my thanks. From the time I met with the elders on Tuesday evening, December 10 after Christine died early that morning, they did not flinch from giving me time away from Westwood. Thank you. The elders and many of you have taken on additional responsibilities without thinking twice about it during these last weeks. Thank you.
This has been a difficult time for you as well as for my family and I. I will not try to hide my grief from you. It is deep, as it should be. As I deal with my grief, though, I will be a better pastor to all of you and perhaps to many others. That said, however, I cannot let this moment pass without laying before you what all this means for my faith and for yours. I have not bypassed difficult issues in my ministry before and I cannot do so now – even though this one is personal. My faith will only be deepened by this experience, and I hope yours will be too.
When I was in seminary, I came across the preaching of Arthur John Gossip, a Scottish preacher from the early years of the 1900’s. I read some of his sermons and some of his lectures on preaching. One of his sermons had by that time become a classic. I first read that sermon back in seminary, and returned to reread it a few weeks ago.
That sermon was a classic, not because of its content, although its content is very good and very powerful. It is a classic primarily because of the events that caused A.J. Gossip to write it. It was 1927 and Gossip was 54 years old when he wrote and preached that sermon at Beechgrove Church in Aberdeen, Scotland. It was the first sermon that he preached when he returned to his pulpit after his wife’s dramatically sudden death. You understand why I reread his sermon multiple times over the last two months.
Gossip titled his sermon “But When Life Tumbles In, What Then”? Today I would like to ask you Gossip’s question: But when life tumbles in, what then?
Some of you will recall that on November 20, just under three weeks prior to Christine’s death, I preached the funeral of one of our neighbors who had died unexpectedly at age 49. The text I used for that funeral was from James 4 where James asks, “What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.” I understand that verse far better today that when I had Paul’s funeral.
On the night that Christine died, we waited until the last family member who was coming had arrived. We visited for a while and then, as I had agreed to do earlier in the day, I asked the medical staff to remove her life support equipment. After they had done so and we returned to her room, I stood around her bed along with Nancy and Dave, Christine’s sister, Susan, Christine’s brother, Bud, and his wife, Lorilee, and our dear friends, Carl and Deb Ferguson. As Christine breathed on her own for a few minutes, we prayed and sang hymns together, including “It Is Well With My Soul,” the song she sang at so many funerals and other occasions. Then she took a couple of halting breaths, one more breath, and she was gone. What is your life? It is a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. So when life tumbles in, what then?
It does not have to be the death of a spouse. A week and a half before preaching this sermon, I had already written the first part of it. I was driving by myself and thinking through this part of the sermon when I began to listen to a discussion of the murder of a 21 year old student at Purdue University in January 2014. The student was from West Bend, WI and had attended the University of Marquette High School. His parents were well-liked in the community and he was well-like in high school. He was set to graduate from Purdue in the spring. Yet a man walked into the Engineering Building at Purdue and shot and stabbed him. What is your life? It is a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes? So when life tumbles in, what then?
Buried deep in the Old Testament is a passage where the prophet Jeremiah complains to God. There is no one in all of scripture who places more complaints before God and that is not surprising because he experienced a great deal of suffering. So in Jeremiah 12, the prophet muses about the bewildering matters of life that come before us when he bursts into the presence of God. He is hot and angry and stunned by how God seems to bless the wicked and bring hard times on the righteous. He cries out to God that it is all so unfair.
Then God speaks to Jeremiah and asks him, what is it that you have to complain about? Nothing that everybody does not share. Only the usual issues of life that come to everyone, no more. God says to him, if you have raced with men on foot, and they have wearied you, how will you compete with horses? And if you have a hard time splashing through the shallow waters of a summer brook, what will you do when the Jordan bursts its banks, and rushes, far as the eye can see, one huge, wild swirl of angry waters, and, your feet are caught away, half choked, you are tossed nearer and nearer to the roaring of the falls, and over it? So when life tumbles in, what then?
If the normal affairs of life or what you read in the news or when you have perceived the world to be unfair to you or others, if these things weary you, what will you do when some great tragedy comes bursting into your life and leaves an emptiness where there had been a home, an emptiness you could not imagine even in your worst dreams, a tumbled ruin to a previously ordered way of life, a heart so sore you wonder how it holds together? When life tumbles in, what then?
On the morning of Christine’s accident, I had preached the second and last of what was to be a four sermon series leading up to Christmas that I called “Joy to the World.” The message that morning was about Zechariah’s song upon the birth of his son, John the Baptist. His song describes how God was going to visit the world with the birth of his own son. How would you feel if you had preached that sermon in the morning and in the evening your wife was in the hospital from an auto accident and the next day you discovered she had no possibility of surviving?
This was not only my experience, it was Ezekiel’s experience. In Ezekiel 24:15-18, the word of the Lord came to him and told him God was going to take away the delight of Ezekiel’s eyes at a single stroke. Then Ezekiel said, “So I spoke to the people in the morning, and at evening my wife died.” When life tumbles in what then?
And what about Jesus Christ himself? It became clear that his life on earth would be that of any other man. A tremendous sacrifice was to be asked of him. If it were you, could you face it with even a tiny bit of the courage with which Jesus faced it? There is no question about these things, though. It is a certainty that to you too, in your turn, some day, these things will come.
Yes, unbelievably life’s waves wash across us too. We live our happy lives for years and years and listen to the news of terrors from across the world: a hurricane in Louisiana, a typhoon halfway around the world, a tornado in Oklahoma, a shooting at a university. They all seem so far away that it seems they have nothing to do with us, but then it happens to us too. And when it does, we have no right to complain that we are the only ones ever to have faced this.
So when your heart breaks, what then? When life tumbles in, what then? It is a bit late in the day to be talking about insurance when your house is burning down and somewhat tardy to be searching for something to bring you through when the test is upon you. How are you and I, who get so caught up in the minor worries of life, to handle waters when they flood into our lives and your breath is taken away and you lose your footing? When life tumbles in, what then?
Many people’s faith is a fair weather affair. A little rain, and it washes away. A touch of difficulty, and it snaps like a broken twig. Gossip was a chaplain in World War I. He tells how they would often lay out at the front and watch an airplane high up in the sky on a blue, sunlit day when a shot came out of a cloud and the plane crashed to the earth, a twisted, broken mass of metal. Many people’s faith is like that. So long as everything is fine and we seem to be in the center of God’s will, we follow him without question. But at the moment things become difficult, at the moment we do not understand something, we let go of our faith right when we need it the most.
Do you remember the story Jesus told of the two men who built houses very similar to each other? Perhaps they lived in the same village, went to the same synagogue, sat in the same pew, listened to the same sermons. Perhaps they lived next door to each other. Then one day, a gale blew into their lives, a terrible storm. One man’s house collapsed, totally destroyed. He had built on a foundation of sand. The other man’s house stood firm, but he emerged from the storm stronger and closer to God because he had built his house on a rock; he had put a foundation under his home. So what of us? We have marched with the infantry, but how will we keep up with the horseman? We have walked through the shallow waters, but what will we do when the water rushes over us? When life tumbles in, what then?
This has often been the difficulty of preaching and of living the Christian life. My college basketball coach, one of my mentors at that stage of my life and a friend since, told me about an alumnus of my alma mater who graduated a year or two before I started college. He called Lynn after his wife died and lamented the fact that he had preached all those funerals over the years and had taken people’s grief lightly. He said the right words, but wondered why people did not just get over it. Losing his wife changed his perspective. I never took grief that lightly, but I too have had a happy life, a relatively easy life, a life filled with people of faith around me. Sometimes the Gospel seems like an easy way to respond to anybody who goes through the tragedies of life. They might well say, with irritation, if I stood in the sunshine where you are, no doubt I too could talk like that. But if the cold wind blows clear through you, are you absolutely sure about your faith? When life tumbles in, what then?
Let me tell you now. I have always thought much of the Christian faith. I was raised in the faith. The Christian faith now extends across at least five generations in my family. Today, though, I think far more of the Christian faith than I ever have. So what is it about our faith that can ring far more true when life tumbles in? It is this: the Christian faith has a certain loyalty about it that we can trust God without reservation even in the dark and that still trusts God even when the worst happens, even when things go terribly wrong.
Isn’t that exactly what Christ did? He faced the greatest terror of all – that of the only sinless person, who died without cause and then had God turn away from him. Why? He did so because, even knowing the terror that was before him, it was the only way for the people who God created and loves to be redeemed. So all through his ministry he set his course for that one awful day in Jerusalem where he died the most horrible death of all. And when Jesus died, God grieved. He grieved far more deeply than what I grieve today and far more deeply than any of us will ever have to grieve. More than that, he grieves with me today, and he will grieve with you no matter how great the tragedy when life tumbles in.
What I do not understand today is how people in trouble and loss and bereavement can so easily and lightly fling away the Christian faith. And, for what? Have we not lost enough without losing the faith as well? If Christ is right – if, as he says, there is something grand and glorious beyond this life with all of its darkness, then we can see our way through times of darkness when life tumbles in. But if Christ was wrong and our hope is in vain; if God brought this tragedy down on my life and family with no thought for the grief we would bear, then I have a right to be angry at him. If, however, Christ is right, if the promises to which we hold are true, if we are always only a breath away from eternity, we can manage to trust him even through the worst, even when life tumbles in. As Gossip said, “You people in the sunshine may believe the faith, but we in the shadow must believe it. We have nothing else.”
So what have I learned through all this? What does the Gospel teach us in the midst of this grief? It teaches us much, for we often learn more in the darkness than in the daylight. It is in the darkness, not the daylight, that you can see the immensity of the universe as you gaze out at star after star. In the darkness, faith often develops the most. So, in my own darkness, some things have already become very clear to me.
First the faith works, and its most audacious promises are absolutely true. The glorious assertions of the Scriptures are not mere suppositions and guesses. There is no perhaps or possibly or probably about them. You will recall how the three young men from Israel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, were thrown by the Babylonian king into the fiery furnace that was heated seven times hotter than it had ever been. When the king peered into the furnace, he saw four men instead of three, and one looked to him like a son of God. I have felt during the last weeks at times as if I were cast into such a furnace, but have also had the sense that one who is the Son of God is standing alongside me. What a blessing that is. I have never been more certain of it. When our feet slip as the waters cascade over us, when the worse thing you could ever imagine happens, when our world tumbles in, a hand leaps out and catches us and steadies us. Jesus said, “I will not leave you comfortless.” It is true. There is a Presence with us, a Comforter, a Fortifier who strengthens us, holds us up, brings us through somehow from hour to hour and day to day. One sage once wrote, that when his wife died, he felt “as if the rushing waters were up to my chin; but underneath the chin there is a hand, supporting it.”
The apostle Paul put it this way about this faith of ours: What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:31-39).
Here is another thing that has become clear to me: the faith needs to be lived every day.
Christine lived out her faith for a long time before I even knew her. One of her bridesmaids at our wedding was here for her funeral. She said to me that she would not be a Christian today if it were not for Christine. I heard the story many times over the years of how Christine led her to Christ when they were in high school. Just before Christmas, Christine’s sister and I went to visit a family, one of whose sons was home from California for Christmas. Christine and he had played in numerous piano recitals and performances through high school. She got him attending church, and soon his entire family was in the church. Fred has gone on to be a successful university music professor, although he has left the faith. His father and two of his brothers, however, have served as elders in the church, and the rest of the immediate family faithfully serves Christ. I could tell you countless stories since of people she influenced for Christ, because she lived out her faith every day.
That is one part of living out your faith, but there is more. If you had asked me three months ago, how I would react if something like this would happen to me, I could not have told you. I may have made some response, but I would not have really known. Now I know, and I have some observations to make:
When my family and I stood around Christine’s hospital bed, when we visited with people during her visitation, when we gathered around her casket as it was closed, and when, nearly two weeks later, I lowered her remains into the earth, we were not putting on a show. We were simply responding out of lifetimes of faith, lifetimes of holding dear the truths of the Gospel and the promises of God I have referred to. Indeed for most of us we were responding out of multiple generations of faith within our extended family and families. We have watched our grandparents and parents respond to the issues that came into their lives, and we responded in the only way we knew – as followers of the One who died and rose again to give us eternal life.
One of the things I am still amazed at, but not really surprised at, is that during the tense days of mourning Christine’s death, coordinating travel arrangements for various family members, making funeral and burial arrangements in two different places, we did not have one family argument or disagreement that threatened to erupt and get out of hand. Why? Because we responded in the ways of Christ that we had been nurtured in and in which we had nurtured our children. While living lives of faith puts a certain amount of pressure on when everything tumbles in, we felt no pressure, because we responded out of who we are.
While I have received many compliments about how our family reacted during that time – from personnel at the hospital in Green Bay, from the funeral home staff, from some of you, and from others -- let me tell you that does not mean this has been easy. I know that people who work in critical care in the hospital or in servicing people’s needs at a funeral home or just being part of a family at a time of death, do not always see such grace acted out at a time of death. So all of this has been exceedingly difficult and continues to be, and, as a friend has faithfully reminded me all during this time, it needs to be so. I have felt the difficulty in my own heart, and I have heard it in the voices and seen it in the eyes of my daughter and her husband, of our family, and of friends.
But I also know this: If you will faithfully serve Christ and walk by faith all of your life, Christ will prepare you for when faith needs to take you through some difficulty as life tumbles in. You will feel his presence like you have never felt it, just as I felt it from the time I received the first phone call from the hospital about five hours after Christine’s accident and as my world tumbled in during the next 24 hours. I have also believed from my reading of Scripture that God reveals himself to us in unique and special ways at critical moments in our lives, and now I have experienced it firsthand, and you will too if you always walk with him.
This also has become clear to me: The church is important and those who walk with Christ can and will help sustain us when life tumbles in. I will talk more about this in our adult class later, but let me make some observations now.
Christine and I have been in the church all of our lives. Through our adult years and nearly forty years of marriage, we have seen more good in the church than most, but we have also seen more bad in the church than most. The first church split I witnessed was in my home church when I was middle school age. Yet we determined never to walk away because we have seen the church rise up over and over again when people’s worlds tumbled in.
When Nancy was almost four years old, we had a terrible problem erupt in the church we had gone to Oklahoma to serve. That was just the first really bad situation that she saw develop in the church. We never hid these things from her over the years; she did not know everything, but she always knew enough. Yet today, having watched that and things far worse, she has stayed in the church because we also helped her see the good in the church. About three years ago, Nancy was called by the leadership in their church to help them work their way through an issue in their church. It was the kind of thing you never even want to think might erupt in your church. But today she and Dave are still in the church, because like Christine and I and members of our family over the years, they too have seen the good that happens when the church rises up in times of difficulty.
During the course of forty years, Christine and I have developed friendships that literally extend across the county and in various places around the world. During the hours that Christine was in the hospital and in the hours after her death, word about her accident and death began to spread far and wide. People from church after church, some of them we knew and some we did not, began sending us messages that they were praying for us and asked people in their own network to pray for us. That alerted more churches and more believers, and we began to hear from them and it just kept cascading. I never even had time to begin counting how many churches we had heard from.
Now those people can do only so much in the days, weeks, and months ahead, but you can continue to stand beside me – and I want to ask you to do just that. Invite me to breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Ask me to spend an evening with your family. Call me; email me. If I call and need to get away from my home or office for a couple of hours spend some time with me.
Most of you know that my family and Christine’s are spread across the country. The closest family members that I have are a four hour drive from Madison. You are the family that I have here. I have had some wonderful time with family as I have traveled to see some of them in the past month, but I cannot get in the car and drive across town or an hour away and have a meal with family or spend an afternoon or evening or an overnight with them. You can help fill that gap.
One other matter has become clear to me: Belief in eternal life is no longer in doubt. You think that you believe in eternal life, but wait until you have lowered your dearest into an open grave, and you will know what believing it means. I have always been moved by Paul’s scornful, almost mocking ridicule of death. It is as if he stares down into an open grave and then bursts out with his challenge, “O death, where is your sting? O grave, where is your victory?” But now, I would offer the challenge with him. True, I can tell you today where death’s sting lies. It is the constant missing of a person who used to always be here. It is going through every day with no phone calls, no texts, no emails from the one you love. It is never again hearing the door to the house open as the one you have long been accustomed to returns home, and it is never again walking into the house to hear a word of greeting.
I have always believed the Bible’s promises about eternal life, but any doubts at all were set aside standing around a hospital bed at St. Vincent Hospital in Green Bay. I can say without equivocation more firmly than ever that “I believe in the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.”
It is all summed up in Paul’s great argument in 1 Corinthians 15 that the Gospel is summed up in the fact that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and was raised on the third day. Then he asks, “Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ as been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.”
If Christ has been raised from the dead, there is no longer any question about eternal life, and death is only a passage from this life to a greater, grander life – eternal life – for those who believe in Christ. It is only when the trumpet sounds and Christ bursts through the clouds that the final victory over death will be accomplished: “O death, where is your sting? O grave, where is your victory?”
So, for me, even as I grieve Christine’s passing from this life, I choose to rejoice that in that moment when she took her last breath, she completed a very brief journey into the presence of the Lord. The days, weeks, months, years until I follow her on that journey may be long, but I would not deny her one moment of her time in the presence of the Lord. That is, after all, exactly what we live for, what she lived for. Why would I want to deny her the greatest longing of her heart?
You see the truth is, death is only a passage from this life to eternity. Donald Grey Barnhouse illustrated this to his children when his first wife passed away. Barnhouse was one of America’s great preachers. His first wife died from cancer when she was in her thirties, leaving three children under the age of twelve. On his way to the funeral service, he was driving with his little family when a large truck passed them in the highway, casting a shadow over their car. Barnhouse turned to his oldest daughter who was staring disconsolately out the window, and asked, "Tell me, sweetheart, would you rather be run over by that truck or its shadow?" The little girl looked curiously at her father and said, "By the shadow, I guess. It can't hurt you." Dr. Barnhouse said quietly to the three children, "Your mother has not been overrun by death, but by the shadow of death. That is nothing to fear." “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.”
So this life is but a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. What do you do, then, when life tumbles in? The apostle Paul gives us the last word on that. He closes his defense of the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 with this: “Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.
