Joseph Scriven was born in Ireland in 1819. He studied at Trinity College in Dublin, preparing for a career in the army, he hoped. Except his health was so poor, he had to take a new direction. He had been engaged, but his fiancée drowned on the eve of their wedding in 1844. Grief visited upon grief, right? That year he immigrated to Ontario, Canada, where he became a teacher. He later was engaged again, only to have his second fiancée die following a short illness.
His life was difficult, and he struggled to earn a regular income, often relying on the kindness of others for a place to stay. He was part of a religious community that sought to follow the Sermon on the Mount as literally as possible, which meant he was constantly sharing all he had with others and serving the poor and physically disabled.
Scriven also was a poet. During one of his many illnesses, a neighbor came to be with him. It was during that visit that the neighbor found a poem Scriven had written for his mother to comfort her during a time of special sorrow, never intending anyone else to lay eyes on it.
It’s title? “What a friend we have in Jesus.”
What a friend we have in Jesus, Scriven wrote.
all our sins and griefs to bear!
What a privilege it is to carry everything to God in prayer!
O what peace we often forfeit; O what needless pain we bear,
all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.
All our sins and griefs to bear. Scriven was a man well-acquainted with grief. Career plan thwarted. Bad health. Death of two fiancées. Poverty. Depression. Separated from family. He even died tragically in 1886 by drowning, with no one sure if it was accidental or not. Through all of this, he could still claim that Jesus’ friendship with us helps us in our grief.
Jesus himself was well-acquainted with grief. Our passage today began with these words, “Now when Jesus heard this.” What was it he heard? Well, his cousin, John the Baptist, the moral thorn in the side of Herod and his family, was dead. Herod had him beheaded at the prompting of Herodias. This is terrible. It is not the way things are supposed to be. It grieves.
The first pastor I served with liked to say that “violence is the clearest expression of sin there is,” and I’m inclined to agree with that. God’s kingdom is peaceable. It’s where the lion and lamb lay down together. It’s where the child plays with the snake without fear. After Adam and Eve have to leave the Garden of Eden because they broke trust with God, the very next story is about how their son Cain grew jealous and murdered his brother Abel. Violence. It’s what’s wrong with the world, and healing the world of the scourge of violence is at the very heart of church to this day.
So, Jesus hears of John’s violent death, and he goes into the wilderness to be by himself. He is there to grieve. Grief wants to be alone. Even in a room full of people, grief can pull a person so inward they feel like they aren’t there. But what happens to him? Crowds will not let him be. They follow him to the wilderness, and it is there that he leans into who he is (which is also who God is, since Jesus and the Father are one). He has compassion on them and spends the day healing their sicknesses and pain. What a friend we have in Jesus, indeed!
At the end of the day, those pragmatic disciples of his try to tell Jesus what he should do. (Isn’t that just like all of us — thinking we know better than Jesus about our circumstances and telling him what he should do?) What follows is the miraculous feeding of the 5000. (It’s actually more because there were also women and children there.) This story loudly echoes how God is a provider down through the ages. This is manna in the wilderness, where God’s people had to rely on God for what they needed.
This also echoes the Passover meal. Like he does here and later at the Last Supper, Jesus looks to heaven, blesses the food, breaks the bread, and then distributes it. It’s the meal where Jesus still meets us today, a meal we will share together momentarily. It’s the meal where we bring all our sins and griefs and trust them to Jesus, our friend and Savior. Perhaps these were the same crowds there when Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, where he urged them, “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink….but strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”
But I’m not so focused on God’s provision of food today as I am on the rock solid trustworthiness of God, even in the storms of life. Our community has suffered an unspeakable tragedy, so horrific that it has received national coverage. Eight dead, not including pets. A father who killed his wife and children. A man who took his own life. These are hard words to even write or say, and to know that this happened so close to here makes the grief almost unbearable because it directly impacts family, neighbors, classmates, friends, friends of friends, and so many more.
I’ll circle back to this shortly because it’s too important not to address, but I need to return to our texts first to give us solid ground to stand on. Psalm 145 is a beautiful description of the very character of God. The Bible I use most frequently says this is a psalm about the greatness and the goodness of God. This week I came across a prayer with this line: “God, you are the only story about the world where truth and love make any sense. Remind me again.” In a world where evil seems to keep winning, in a world where horrific violence breaks through the quiet of a local neighborhood, it’s necessary to get back to the core of who God is. That’s what this psalm does.
What does it say about God? At its center, this psalm reminds us of something that God’s people have been saying down through the ages: “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The Lord is good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made.” This is a prayer that goes all the way back to the Hebrew people in the wilderness after leaving Egypt. Despite their special relationship with God (who had only just given them the Ten Commandments), they immediately behaved in ways that went against God’s good intention for them. Rather than outright rejecting them, God’s patient and gracious character reigned. God corrected them and then declared, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” God not only forgives but also provides all that is needed for the people to live fully and freely.
The psalm goes on to assert so many things that are true about God. The Lord upholds those who fall and raises up those who are bowed down. The Lord is just and kind. The Lord is near to all who call. Just like Jesus did in feeding the multitudes, so God gives what is needed to all who look to him. But notice this: the psalm acknowledges that life is not smooth sailing, even when we trust in God. If you haven’t fallen down, you don’t need pulled up. If you don’t sense God’s absence, you don’t need reminded that God is near. If you aren’t in need, there’s no point in turning to God for provision, right?
Ours is a community flattened by grief over this unspeakable tragedy. Ours is a community questioning how a good God could allow something so horrific to happen, particularly to children. Like a rock tossed into a once-calm pond, the ripple effects of this have spread wide. I think of the first responders — firefighters, police, EMTs — called to a house fire and then encountering things they cannot unsee. I’m grateful for people like them who step into hard places and try to bring order, and I pray for them — that they might encounter God’s peace that passes understanding.
I think of the families and staff of the Grand Haven Schools, particularly those at Peach Plains. The absence of a friend, a coworker, and premier sub, is acute and real. The friends and classmates of the children are going to keep feeling the ache of absence in time to come. The support staff like social workers and counselors are both grieving and trying to console children and coworkers. This is real. This is hard.
Of course, the ripple effects go further to family and neighbors and friends. The attention this grabbed nationally will soon fade — it always does — but we will still be here trying to put the pieces back together.
I’m not here trying to offer a moral to the story or to give any good sense of why this happened. It happened. It’s terrible. It’s clear evidence of how broken and inhuman we humans can be. It’s why sin is such a problem and why God battles against sin and will in the full course of time defeat it because of Jesus’ death and resurrection.
But we live here and now. And today we grieve. We ask why. We turn to the words of Psalm 145 both as a question and as comfort. God, if you’re so good and kind, why didn’t you stop this? Yet, still we hold fast to who God is because our reality ceases to make sense and becomes hopeless if we cannot rely on God’s goodness and promises in the midst of our grief.
In other words, we pray,“God, you are the only story about the world where truth and love make any sense. Remind [us] again.”
So, I’m going to close with a prayer written by Kate Bowler and Jessica Ritchie years ago. It’s in the chapter called “Bless this Grief-Stricken Life,” and it’s called, “for when the unthinkable happens.”
God, we are heartbroken in the face of
so much evil, so much grief.
Comfort us in our sorrow.
Blessed are we who allow ourselves to feel it—
the impossibility
of what was possible a second ago—
the light decision, the casual stroll,
the easy exchange and ordinary duty,
a decent choice or a banal one,
the sweep of hours on a day that was like any other,
until it wasn’t.
This is the place where nothing makes sense.
This is the place where tears flow in earnest now.
Blessed are we who allow our hearts to break,
for it will take some time
for the brittle unreality to release us from its grip,
for the long and slow dissolve
until we fully see
what never should have been.
Blessed are we who ask you, God,
that grief find its way to move among us
and be felt together, that comfort may flow
in bonds of affection
unbroken by this fresh tragedy.
Though grief and tragedy and pain
try to convince us otherwise,
remind us that we are not alone.
God, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.
Spirit, have mercy.
Amen.