Readings for the Day:
Sermon:
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Hollywood, the world around us really, often depicts funerals in a very specific way. Everyone gathered together is crying, often bawling their eyes out. It lends to this image, this idea, that if you’re at a funeral, you’re supposed to be crying, wailing, generally inconsolable.
If this depiction is not how you mourn, then it can be anxiety producing. It can make you feel like you’re not doing the right thing. It can make you feel like something is wrong with you.
That’s exactly how I felt as I started to deal with death more at the start of college. The first was the death of one of my dad’s running buddies, which was sudden and unexpected.
Now this was someone I knew, though certainly not anything like my dad did. But I didn’t feel this deep sense of mourning as his funeral came and went. That I didn’t feel a certain way gave me a great deal of anxiety. It impacted some of my class work. It impacted how I looked at myself. It made me worried that I was unemotional and unfeeling.
A couple of years later, my grandfather died. This was less sudden and not entirely unexpected. I found myself reacting in a similar way. I wasn’t wailing and inconsolable. Though this time, dealing with the death of someone obviously much closer to me, I was able to get a better sense of why I was reacting this way.
I realized that I wasn’t inconsolably sad because I have hope. I have hope in the Resurrection. I have hope that this is not the end and that I will see my loved ones again on the other side of the Resurrection. That hope got me through grief. Recognizing that hope got me through my anxiety of not reacting to death in the “Hollywood way”.
I share this story because it hits on two themes in our readings today: Death and Anxiety. Our readings are forging a path of hope through those two themes.
Nowhere do we see the holy response to anxiety in our readings today than in Psalm 4. From the beginning, we see David, the writer of this Psalm, having hope even in difficult times. David lived through many difficult times. He started as a shepherd who would have had to protect his flock from wild beasts, which is why he had the ability to take on Goliath. He was on the run from King Saul even after the Prophet Samuel had anointed David as the next king to come. David even faced strife and an uprising from one of his own sons later in life.
Psalm 4 also tells us the reaction of the world. The reaction of the world is fear and anxiety. The complaint is that things might be better. Perhaps “better” for some means more a desire for things as they used to be.
David doesn’t have this same anxiety though. Yes, he spent many years of his life in caves and on the run. Yet he still lies “down in peace”, immediately falling asleep at night. Even when times are bad, he trusts in the Lord.
It is often the case that nothing makes us feel more anxious than change. We see this in Acts with the miraculous healing Peter provides to a longtime Temple beggar, changing his status for those who got used to seeing him, leaving them “amazed” as we hear and maybe, based on Peter’s response, a bit confused as well. We see it too with Jesus’ own Resurrection, which Luke tells us terrified and startled the Disciples, just as we saw at the end of Mark on the Easter Vigil.
The greatest, and most anxiety producing, change comes in the form of death. It is Jesus’ death we hear Peter speak of. It is the same death that 1 John mentions as well. It is the same death even that Jesus appears to the Disciples resurrected from.
That Resurrection is important, because it is the path for us out of this anxiety. Through it, we don’t have to fear, for we have been saved from our sins, as 1 John tells us. We don’t have to fear because God has forgiven us, even those who nailed Him on the Cross as Peter reminds us in Acts. We don’t have to be “startled and terrified” like the Disciples initially were because Jesus has shown us directly that there is new life on the other side of death.
The point today is that we don’t need to have anxiety. We can replace that anxiety with hope. Even in the bad times, God is there. God has shown us this by walking in the midst with us in the form of Jesus. That is a reminder to us that God is with us even in the worst of what is happening, for Jesus faced one of the worst and most horrifying ways to die that is possible. We don’t have to fear the unknown on the other side because Jesus has given us a glimpse, ever so briefly, of what that we can find on that other shore.
Our readings are trying to give us hope, so let the Word of God do that for you. Take a moment to breath out that anxiety. Breathe in the hope of the Resurrection. Know that even in the worst of it, and there is so much bad out there in the world, God is there with us and will see us through til we make it to the other side.