No one is coming to save me

A sermon on grief, leadership + some incredibly good news

When a longtime colleague and friend becomes a bishop and invites you to preach at annual conference, you offer a whole-hearted yes! For my friends not familiar with the inner workings of the United Methodist Church (the other world I move in), different parts of the US gather annually to connect and vision for the next year.

I don’t typically share the full texts of sermons in this space but it feels like the next right thing to share with each of you!

This message was shared at the Desert Southwest Annual Conference’s Memorial Service a couple weeks ago in Mesa, Arizona. You can read it below. Or you can watch or listen here. It starts at 16:30.

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No one is coming to save me. 

Tears slid down my warm cheeks as this reality hit at two critical moments in my life. The first happened after my anxiety got so bad that I started having panic attacks while preaching. I realized hiding my anxiety so well had massive consequences. People really did not know I was not okay. Apparently, no one was coming to save me. 

The second happened in the fall of 2021 as I finally came face to face with how bad my burnout was and that I had to step away from serving the local church. As long as I smiled through my phone camera to a faith community I hadn’t met in person yet, they really could not know I was not okay. No one was coming to save me. 

I share that, not as a way to win most depressing opening of a sermon ever, but to say this: Many of us are quite skilled at being a non-anxious presence, the gold standard in church leadership. But what about the grief and complexity we carry? Might we be in danger of appearing so well put together that even we don’t know, truly know, the pain we carry? 

A month or two ago, I stood on mud flats while the waters of the Puget Sound gently came in. It was one of those places where the land juts out far enough that multiple bodies of water all try to enter a new space together. 

There were two distinctly different ways to describe that moment. Either the waves were fighting for their new land, trying to get there first, to claim what was theirs. Wrestling with each other for control. 

Or they were gently dancing with each other. Allowing one to lead and then the other. In no hurry to get to their next destination. Welcoming the other. 

Wrestling or welcoming

Let’s talk about wrestling, welcome, grief, honesty, and some incredibly good news tonight. 

As I watched the braided streams of water, I thought of the streams of grief moving in your story this past season. The grief we collectively hold together. The pandemic. Denominational upheaval. Racial reckoning. Harm to our queer communities. Immigration. Gun violence. The personal losses people don’t see. 

I don’t know about you, but if someone suggests I welcome all that grief, my body doesn’t naturally roll out the red carpet. My body wants to wrestle. To fight. To refuse to accept all these horrific stories. 

Now sure, it’s one thing to fight for a better story. To lament, protest, advocate, fiercely love. Yes. 

But my curiosity, as I’ve spent the last several years deep in the world of grief, is how easy it is to sidestep around our grief -- to cross by on the other side of the road -- so we can help everyone else with theirs, while we slowly die inside with unexpressed pain. 

I am learning this truth: We wrestle the very thing that longs to heal us. 

Are there seasons you’ve wrestled grief? You willed it to disappear. Denied its presence. Hoped your lack of attention would cause it to shrivel up and dissolve. I’ve found that it works for a bit...until it doesn’t. Our grief simply takes up residence in the corners of our lives, throwing tantrums like a toddler, until we’re forced to pay attention.

Our text this evening centers us on Isaiah’s words to a people in exile. Into places of restlessness, pain, fear, grief, and despair, the words of God echo through the ages: “I will make the desert into ponds and dry lands into cascades of water.” Eugene Petersen writes, “I’ll turn the baked-clay badlands into a cool pond, the waterless waste into splashing creeks.”

Now, I imagine residents of the Desert Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church have a different relationship to water than I, a member of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Methodist Church. I’ve lived in the Seattle area for the past 8 years and I’m quite familiar with a gray, cloudy, rainy day. In fact, these are some of my favorite days. It’s cozy and soothing. 

As Jesus people, we are created by, loved, and invited to follow a God who loves to look upon the dry parched lands of our lives and call forth cascades of water. I need this kind of God. This kind of expansive, generative, ridiculous gracious kind of Love. Because I look at the depleted and dusty parts of my life and all I can usually muster is a small watering can half-filled with stale warm water. 

But God? Source? Creator? Knower of our most painful stories? Architect of Beloved Community? The same Love who knows every corner of our aching stories of grief?

That God delights in not just randomly flooding us with abundance (like a freak flash thunderstorm that causes more harm than good), but in nourishing us daily with exactly the love and care we need in each season. But for us to get to the point where we’re ready to receive that kind of love, we’re invited to journey from wrestle to welcome. 

And this starts with honesty. 

Why is it so hard to be honest about our grief?

You’ll have your own answers. Here’s a few of mine.

Grief hurts. Our world trains most of us to avoid pain at all costs. I didn’t get the classes that my kids are now getting on emotional intelligence and how it’s perfectly normal and healthy to feel challenging emotions. 

It’s hard to be honest about our grief when there’s something riding on us not seeing it. And until we’re honest about that, we can’t even get to the grief. It might be our paycheck or our family structure or our full calendar or our job title or a belief or shame.

Maybe we’re restless and angry but don’t yet see the grief underneath. Or maybe we know something feels heavy, but we’ve been trained to power through, never quite realizing we’re allowed to set it down and feel the heaviness.

It’s like we wrestle with this tight, tense, fuzzy energy inside us. Hoping this or that will finally numb it into submission. We overwork, burn out, or try to control what refuses to be controlled. We’re winning the kudos from our external structures we’ve set up. We’re doing great! But inside? No. We’re not okay. 

The good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that every single one of us is carrying grief. No one has magically figured out how to escape it. We’re all in this journey together through dry and desolate paths, trying to find the sprinklers and slip n slides and puddles that remind us Love is really still here, right in the middle of the worst of it.

Which brings me to this question I offer you tonight: What could God do if we are honest about our grief? What space might Love have to move if we are honest about our inside world?

Might we have the courage to say…

• The pandemic really screwed up life for so many of us and the places we serve. And we don’t have magical game plans for where to go from here. 

• The veil is being pulled back on racism and misogyny and ableism and Christian nationalism and transphobia and it’s so painful to look in the mirror as a country. 

• The denominational home many have known their entire lifetime is coming apart at the seams. The ripping hurts.

• We’re serving in hurting churches while our bodies carry the weight of our own grief. We’re not sure who’s going to break first.

Beloveds, unexpressed grief has a way of slowly killing the life in our bodies. In our individual body and in our collective body.

Can we heal what we’re unwilling to be honest about? 

Into that space, comes another piece of fantastically wonderful gospel good news.

Looking directly at the thing that hurts always shifts something

I posted this image below in mid-February of 2022. I was almost three weeks into my personal leave. I felt stirrings of life again as I made space for solitude, healing, and lots of therapy. I didn’t yet know this would be the last social media post my younger brother would see from me before he unexpectedly passed away in Anchorage, Alaska. In fact, Bishop Carlo met my parents in that ICU room as they watched the unimaginable unfold. We’re so thankful for his love and care.

I don’t quite know how to express the complex grief of dealing with burnout and church trauma mixed with the middle of the night call that my brother was dying. A few days later, my therapist reminded me that I could set one part of my grief on a shelf and pick it up later. It wasn’t going anywhere. That’s not fair! I thought. One grief should cancel out the other. But no, I returned to it later and it was alive and well, patiently waiting for my compassion and care.

I turned my attention to being a grieving sister. I started tapping out poems on my phone on the plane, at his bedside, while snuggling with his dog, while picking my kids up from school. When I felt numb, I tapped out a poem and tears flowed. When anger coursed through my body, it found its way into words on the page. When I glanced at his ashes above our fireplace, the emotions turned into image and story.

I asked a friend during this season why poems about grief were rushing out of me in a way I couldn’t stop if I tried. She pointed out that, in the church, I’d been in a very private season of grief that I couldn’t talk about publicly. But then a socially acceptable form of grief, like a brother’s death, opened the floodgates. I couldn’t wrestle or argue or deny this grief. I was too tired from wrestling it in earlier seasons. I gave myself over to it, like a leaf floating downstream with the current.

Last fall, I realized there were hundreds of poems about grief. This was a book. So I published Still Here: A Poetry Memoir of Grief & Love this past February on the one-year anniversary of Jeremy’s death. It’s been one way I’ve brought meaning to one of my most treasured relationships. I am floored that pastors are sharing it with their people as a helpful resource in those early months of raw grief. Being Jeremy’s big sister will always be one of my most favorite titles.

Looking directly at the thing that hurts always shifts something. 

When we decide to be honest about the grief we carry, we start the shift from wrestling our grief to welcoming our grief.

Have you ever tried to punch water?

It’s like trying to fight something that refuses to battle with you. It’s futile. Which is so irritating. Sometimes, I want to fight something that will fight me back. Because fighting something makes me feel like I’m dealing with it. And that keeps me from the far harder work: feeling it. 

We wrestle the water when we deny our grief. When we refuse to look right at it and name it what it is. Our holy texts show us, over and over, that God invites us to welcome the water. To open our hands in radical acceptance to what is, so then we can welcome what could be. 

Water isn’t concerned with the story of who we think we should be. Or how we think this chapter of life is supposed to go. Water simply flows to and around and over and under what is most true. Softening the hard edges. Water carries us home to ourselves. 

Water loves to nourish, satisfy, create, flow, revive, dance, soothe. And we can’t get to that until we stop wrestling the water. Until we welcome our grief. Until we become friends with the truths that haunt us a bit. 

We can learn to befriend the hopelessness that meanders in our soul. We don’t have to spiritually bypass it with a well-intended platitude about positivity. Being ridiculously honest about what hurts is the way to stop wrestling the water. It’s how we love ourselves where it aches. It’s how we offer anything of substance to a deeply hurting world. In fact, maybe a leader who wrestles and learns to welcome the most complex things in here becomes a leader who can help us do that out here.

It’s been said a leader cannot take people where they haven’t first gone themselves. We sense this in people, can’t we? I feel it in my spiritual directors and therapists and favorite authors and poets. They showed up to their lives in such a way that when I would prefer to wrestle the water, they gently take my fearful tight hands and remind me I can open them with curiosity and trust. I can learn to welcome the complexity and duality and pain of this life. They know this because they’re learning it too. They’ve made friends with their painful stories and it shows. They didn’t settle for tiny puddles or a small watering can half-filled with stale warm water. They know the cascades of cool nourishing water that come when we welcome the love of our Creator. 

The gift & ache

Friends, together, we get to imagine, practice, and embody a world where we are each befriending our grief in such a way that we now have space, creativity, and capacity to be the body of Christ because our grief is integrating into new chapters of our story. We no longer cross the road to get around our grief -- it comes with us as the gift and ache that it is. And maybe, it even becomes a beautiful way that Spirit connects us all to each other. 

In fact, the very last poem in Still Here is this: 

the best news
someone told me
i never have
to get over this

May it be so. Amen.

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