Acts 9:36-43

Revelation 21:1-4

Two days after the Virginia Tech massacre of 32 students and the hopeless, angry suicide of their killer, I was driving in a rental car toward another campus, the University of Maryland, where my daughter attends school. I already knew from talking with her that two friends there had lost a friend or family member at V Tech… I was thinking how close it felt, suddenly, and realizing that, uncharacteristically, I had avoided most of the news coverage of the shootings. NPR was playing softly in the background but when I heard the voice of a young man identifying himself as a survivor of the shootings at Columbine High School nearly a decade ago, I turned up the radio and listened. The young man was Brooks Brown, the boy who was sent home from school that day by the words of his friend, Eric Harris. Get out of here, Brooks, I like you and don’t want anything to happen to you. His words were a plea aimed at the survivors and witnesses at V Tech to pay attention to those who were not gathered up in the mercy of candlelight vigils and huddled groups of friends, or parents, holding on for dear life, but rather stand alone under a tree in the field nearby, trying not to cry. I was that young man, he said.

Brooks went on to speak about the dreadful cost of grief denied, the sheer impossibility of finding a support system brave enough to embrace an outcast whose lost friends were murderers, and the bewildering journey of himself and his classmates to find their way through sorrow back to some semblance of wholeness, or grace. He told the survivors of Virginia Tech that there are no rules to surviving and recovering from such traumatic loss; that they, like him, must trust and find their own way back. He hoped, as they did, that they might notice the solitary boy under the tree, trying to be stoic, but fighting back tears: might notice him, and this time, not pass by.

Unaccountably, the words of a pop song from my own high school years began playing in my mind: it is the evening of the day/I sit and watch the children play/smiling faces I can see/but not for me/I sit and watch as tears go by…

As tears go by. Remembering my own numbness in the face of the images from V Tech, and considering that our public preoccupation with the details feels more voyeuristic than substantive, I wonder about our capacity for compassion: I am looking for a weeping that touches the lives of the wounded as it touches our hearts. I do not wish to be counted among the numbers of those who sit and watch as tears go by.

In all walks of life, we are deeply resistant to acknowledging our vulnerability, our lack of control over the deep forces of life and death. We are worn out with the persistence of sorrow: a culture, even a church, in the grip of compassion fatigue. We do not want to weep. But still, there is weeping to be done…weeping that cannot be hidden behind a wall of indifference, a sheen of placid acceptance or the impotent invocation of platitudes about the afterlife; weeping that does not show our weakness, but rather reveals our strength, our knowledge of the way things should be, but aren’t, weeping that unleashes our hope for a better future. And we must not permit this weeping to pass unseen, or unheard.

In the story of the raising of the widow Tabitha in the book of Acts, Peter goes when he is called, but it seems that his visit to Tabitha’s grieving friends is more style than substance; a visit of condolence accomplished by rote. Peter is building a church, he is a busy man; he does not have time for the grieving women, their hands full of the things that made Tabitha real, important, a woman of flesh and blood rather than a name on a list. Impatiently, he brushes them aside, banishing them from the upper room so that, alone, he can kneel and pray. It’s the easy way out to push our way past his praying to the miracle that follows, the rising of Tabitha from death into life. But I wonder about Peter’s prayer: whether he wept, or asked for mercy because in his hurry and importance, he had run roughshod over the women who were trying to show him who Tabitha was, what her life meant to them; how deep a hole her passing would leave in the fabric of their community. It seems to me that the miracle of Tabitha’s rising was as much about how Peter’s heart came to life again with passion and pity as it was about the woman herself.

Grief and loss are powerful forces in us: too important to treat with covert haste. By taking our weeping seriously, we acknowledge the bittersweet gift of life, and we claim that both in life and death, God will give us comfort, and make us whole. God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”

The bible is full of weeping….weeping that begins in the waters of chaos that the ancients feared, and prayed that God would order and transform. Weeping that flooded Noah’s world of wickedness and depravity, destroying life, and with it, the illusion that human ingenuity could master the unpredictability of divine whimsy, or fate. Weeping that acknowledged the wrongness of a mother’s inability to protect the life of her child, weeping that sent fleeing slaves into the terror of the Reed Sea and flooded over their enemies with waters that roared and raged. The bible is full of weeping that feeds evil’s hunger for human pain, that expresses the prophets’ sorrow at justice unfulfilled, that speaks to a people’s deep yearning for comfort, for power, for peace, that cries for the dam of God’s mercy and the Spirit’s kindness to channel an ocean of human suffering into a manageable river, a river that does not destroy us, but instead nourishes our community, our people, our lives.

It’s not that we don’t need to cry: it’s that we need to cry differently.

We do not weep as those who are without hope. This is what the apostle Paul said, and I take him to mean that the weeping of people of faith should not serve to fill the ocean of hopelessness and chaos, but should instead fuel the wellspring of mercy. We do not weep as those who are without hope: so we do weep like Hagar, who cried to a god who alone could see her, and for the wrongness of the abandonment of her son. We weep for the children and families of the lost at Virginia Tech, for the death of a friend, for a bomb exploding in the midst of a busy marketplace, for Haitian refugees who braved the chaos of the sea only to die, their ship and lives foundering on unyielding rocks in the Turks and Caicos. We do weep like the prophets, for a world numb and indifferent to human suffering, for the passion to let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

It is the love of God around us and the passion of God within us that invites us to make of our weeping, something good, something strong, something powerful. When the Israelites fled Egypt and wandered in the wilderness, they came at last through their season of terror and weeping to the River Jordan. Into that River the priests and the hopeful, hapless community of Israelites waded by their own free choice, fleeing no one, walking gladly toward their promise of a future of goodness, plenty, a land of “milk and honey.” They had cried a river and fled a raging sea—and here, in the midst of Jordan, with the glory of God in the ark at last their constant companion, they entered the land of promise, centered in the presence of God, sure of a future. There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God…and when God shall wipe away every tear, the book of Revelation tells us, the sea will be no more. The oceans of useless pain and evil’s suffering will be drained once and for all, and our tears channeled into the River of the waters of Life. Our crying, our mourning, our relentless exposure to human suffering will fuel in us in us a passionate belief in the God who said, the sea will be no more. That is where our weeping must lead us: away from the sea, and on to the River. Blessed are they that mourn…said Jesus, for they shall be comforted.

Let our sorrow fuel a river full of healing intention, a nourishing, cleansing shower of justice, a rain of mercy, a fountain of love. Let us turn our mourning into dancing: not just because our tears are played out, but because our tears are the waters that slake our thirst for the presence of God in the world, and for the River of Life, our source and our future.

Like a river glorious is God’s perfect peace

Over all victorious in its bright increase

Perfect, yet it floweth fuller all the way.

Perfect, yet it groweth deeper every day.

Stayed upon Jehovah, hearts are fully blessed.

Finding, as God promised: perfect peace and rest.