Isaiah 50: 4-9a

March 19, 2005

Elizabeth Macaulay

I was with a group of women yesterday.

One of the women in the circle told of a time when she was working with a group of at-risk youth. These were youth who had encountered much grief in their lives: the grief of families being disrupted, the grief of being buffeted by chemical abuse, the grief of being a youth in this culture which is so often too busy to stop long enough to pay heed to the youth in our midst.

The leaders of these youth got involved in a discussion. They knew of a powerful story that they thought might be helpful to the grieving youth. Some of the adults, though, worried that the story was too strong, too pain filled for the youth to hear.

The story went like this:

A long time ago, in a village, there lived a man, a woman, and their greatly beloved son. The time in which they lived was not an easy time. Many knew the way of hunger. The men of the village sought to keep hunger at bay by hunting, and so it was that hunting was a skill both admired and necessary.

In the way of boys, the time came when the young son became insistent that he learn the ways of hunting. This was difficult for the man and the woman. They knew the way of pride in their son’s growing into manhood. And, they knew the dangers of the hunt.

Finally the day came when they could put him off no longer. He went with his father to find food for their table. Knowing the danger, the father told the boy to climb a tree. From his vantage point, he could watch the ways of the men and be safe.

The boy did so, and the father went off in search of food for his family.

As the boy was in the shelter of the tree, a serpent bit him. The boy fell to the ground, where his father found him when he returned. He was dead.

The man wrapped his beloved up in his cloak and brought him home, wondering all the way how it was he would share the unimaginable news with his wife.

When he came close to his home, his wife threw open the door, so relieved at the bundle she saw in his arms. She believed it to have been a very successful hunt, and there in the bundle in the arms of her husband was the end to the pain of hunger.

“Oh” she said, I have no pot large enough to cook what you have brought home. What will I do?

Her husband told her this:

Go to the neighbors. Ask them if you can borrow a pot. But. You may only borrow a pot from a home where there has never been grief present.

The woman ran to her neighbor’s house to ask to borrow a pot. She knocked on the door and asked if she could borrow their largest pot, and she explained that she could only use a pot where grief had not been stirred.

Her neighbor told her that she had no such pot. Truly, she had a pot large enough, but she had experienced the death of her husband years before and so grief had been stirred into every pot in her home.

The woman ran to the next home, and the next, and was told that grief had been stirred into the pots in all of the homes she visited: the death of family, the losses of old age, the death of dreams, the woundings of hearts, all of these things had been stirred into the pots of the people in her village.

She returned home to tell her husband that she had not found any home in which grief was not.

And it was only then that her husband was able to unwrap the precious bundle that held the body of their son.

… Is there any home in which grief is not? Is there any life in which grief is not?

Those youth in the program knew the ways of grief. We know the ways of grief – the entire village of this world community we share knows the way of grief. And to pretend that we do not is to deny the deaths and losses and heart hurts and glories of our lives.

With the coming of the Christ into the world, God had grief stirred into God’s very self. God sent into our midst the hope and essence of all that is Holy – and that child found death on a tree.

Like the well-meaning group of adults who wondered if speaking of pain in front of the youth made it only worse, we too want to dodge. We want to dodge the telling of betrayal and pain that were experienced by Jesus during this week we call Holy. We want to silence our awareness that there was such pain and we want to silence our knowing that crucifixions continue yet in our midst.

But to perpetuate that silence is to perpetuate brokenness. When will we ever learn, if we do not share the story?

So let us not be silent. But let us also say this, we who are willing to allow pain to be spoken and heard and shared:

There is no place where God is not. In the grief, in the betrayal, in the death and in the joy. There is no place where God is not.

Amen