Dearest Family,
Together this past weekend we have borne the sadness of Stephen’s death and the grief of his bride, Jeffanie, and both families. The sadness is accompanied by the suddenness of it all, amplified by the context of a honeymoon. It is awful beyond words, so one wonders if there are indeed any words at all that can be comforting in such apparently tragic circumstances. What to say?
At the Memorial Service for Stephen on Saturday at 2:00p.m. different voices will no doubt speak about him and for him, but we also need the voice of scripture in such times, to remind us of what life and death are about according to God. But it is so challenging. On Sunday I mentioned that when ‘Christianity Today’ did an interview with Pastor Stuart Briscoe about what it was like speaking after a tragic death, they entitled the article ‘Preaching after the Unthinkable’. I share his conviction that the only sure context in which to do it, is one of worship, as we did on Sunday, simply because, though the body returns to dust, the spirit goes to God, and it is the glory of heaven not the grave of earth that has the final word for us. But I gave you a loving pastoral word. Though this is true, that does not mean it is appropriate to slap the person who is grieving on the back with a “praise the Lord, he’s in glory!” There is a valley of the shadow of death that has to be walked through to sometimes get to that light, but the promise of His presence in that valley is as sure as His presence the other side of heaven’s door. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for thou art with me.”
This is why our continuing prayers are so necessary at such times. Prayer is simply bringing the present reality of our lives and circumstances into the presence of God, exactly as we are experiencing them, as chaotic, confusing, inchoate, unimaginable, unbelievable, unbearable as they may be: real pain, real irregular and jagged sorrow, real disbelief, real discouragement, real shock, real questionings. There are a host of emotional realities, particularly for those whose loss is familial or marital, including real loneliness and emptiness, not to mention survivor’s guilt. Yes, we battle the imaginings and the visualizings, the fragmentations and the reality of that sense of unreality. We bring the whole jumbled mess to the Lord in our prayer.
It is our pain and need that drives us to ask in the first place, and thus, to quote P.T.Forsyth, “We pray for the removal of pain, pray passionately, and then with exhaustion, sick from hope deferred and prayer’s failure.” He goes on to argue that there is a “higher prayer than that … It is a greater thing to pray for pain’s conversion than for its removal.” This is easier said than done at a place of suffering, but it is worth considering that the very fact that we are asking about what pains us, serves to take that situation out of the arena of the devil’s gladiatorial assault, and bring it into the gravitational pull of God’s grace, not to mention bringing us into closeness with Him. This sacralizing of our pain through our asking about it, robs the enemy of our souls of a means to impugn God through it, or to turn it into a weapon to beat us further into bondage to despair, doubt and unbelief.
In the face of death, Paul tells the Corinthians that “we do not lose heart” (1 Corinthians 4:1-16). He was not an optimist but a sober realist when it came to matters of suffering and death itself. September 25, 2018 He is trying to get the Corinthians, and us, to understand what life and death are really all about and he does this by setting up a series of contrasts so that they, and therefore we, can discern how two ages of time, the present and the future, not only relate but also more importantly, how they differ. Some of the contrasts that he mentioned are: the seen and the unseen, outward and inward, earthly and heavenly, momentary and eternal, temporary and permanent, heavy and light, suffering and glory, destroyed tent and newly built house, getting worse and getting better, the end and the beginning, judgment and joy. Essentially, he is showing how this life that we will leave with inevitable death, regardless of how that happens, relates to the life to come with life for evermore.
As Christians we sorrow, but we know that we do so not as those who have no hope. If a believer who has died has exchanged the temporary for the eternal, then our grief cannot be absolute but temporary. It is strange to even talk about losing someone. The truth of Paul’s message about how it is for Christian dying is the explanation of why a Christian’s spirit just gets stronger and stronger, their peace gets more palpable, their assurance more confident, and their joy more vibrant as they continue to mature in Christ. Regardless of any physical weakness, of anything that could possibly waste away, inwardly, their life that was eternal, their life that was of the age to come, is going from strength to strength, being renewed day by day, just as the text says. While things from one point of view, the present, are in fact getting slowly worse, everything from the future point of view, is getting better. It is an amazingly brilliant paradox, a mystery of God’s ingenious grace. Things are falling apart, and as a result, everything that really matters is coming together. Time is running out but timelessness is kicking in. Health is deconstructing and a new body is being constructed. As Paul puts it, the old tent is falling down and a new building emerges. The process of losing an old personality is overtaken by the creation of a new person. Every sign of wear and tear becomes the forerunner of renewal and refurbishment. Preparing for the end turns out to be a preparation for the beginning. C.S.Lewis concludes that though the accident was the end of the story for the Narnian children “it was really the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures had only been the cover and the title page. Now at last they were beginning chapter one of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
All that appears to be achieving nothing but gloom as a body fails and falls, that seems like a law of diminishing returns, happens to be God’s accruing investment in the future. As we lose, and appear to be disappearing into nothing, God is achieving a weight of glory. What we call “the end” is so for a Christian only in this sense – it is the finishing touch on a new creation. Even the groaning that goes with the pain, and the burden-bearing that goes with the pressures, are transformed and transmuted and instead, become the groaning and burden-bearing that Paul talks about, that wish and desire to be clothed with a heavenly dwelling. At the moment that we become homeless through our death, we are re-housed in the life to come. The moment we become naked in our death, we are clothed forever with His glory, resplendent as the sun, or as Lewis says, we become a creature of such brilliance and beauty that if we were to be seen someone would want to worship us. May I thus present to you Stephen Kramar in his present life, which will be yours too when you are found in His presence.
Sorrowfully but hopefully yours,
Stuart