This is the message that I shared last week for the funeral of a kind and beautiful soul. Jennifer Cain was a bright spot in the universe, and we had the joy of being her youth ministers and her friends. The message is universal for all of those who suffer loss, and it is particularly poignant for situations that involve battles with addiction and mental illness that have been lost. It’s a message of grace, kindness, and empathy.
Before I speak today, I want to acknowledge that not everyone here is a believer. I am not here to preach to you and offer cliched thoughts that only offer hope to the believers among us. This is not going to be a message like others you may have heard, and I don’t believe that it should be. This message is likely a little more raw and vulnerable than what you are used to hearing, and to me, it feels more honest. That’s what I needed right now, and I believe it may be what you need to hear as well.
I will begin by reading from the Gospel of John.
Story of the Word
John 1: 1-5 and 9-14 (Common English Version)
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.
The Word was with God in the beginning. Everything came into being through the Word, and without the Word nothing came into being.What came into being through the Word was life, and the life was the light for all people.The light shines in the darkness,and the darkness doesn’t extinguish the light.The true light that shines on all people was coming into the world.
The light was in the world, and the world came into being through the light, but the world didn’t recognize the light.
The light came to his own people, and his own people didn’t welcome him.
But those who did welcome him,those who believed in his name, he authorized to become God’s children, nor from human desire or passion, but born from God.
The Word became flesh and made his home among us. We have seen his glory, glory like that of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
Grace can be very hard to find in moments like these. Grace is generally hard to understand even when things are going well. Human nature doesn’t tend to like and accept Grace very easily. We sometimes find ourselves in life feeling as if we deserve something terrible, or at the very least, that we don’t deserve love and Grace and forgiveness. We sometimes avoid consequences, but more often, we feel that we deserve what is coming to us and struggle to accept good things that are offered.
The term grace is often misused and teamed with the idea of believing that anything and everything goes and that Jesus just gives us a pass on the harder parts of life.
This is a lie that, if we believe it, will leave us in a chronic state of disappointment.
Today, as we grieve the loss of our sister, daughter, grand-daughter, mother, and friend, Jennifer, I want to offer you all a deeper understanding of what Grace means.
While there is a kind of Grace that forgives and comforts even when we don’t deserve it, there is a different type of Grace that comes in suffering. It is the Grace that was offered to us in the form of God wrapping Himself in human flesh and making himself one of us, even taking on grief and suffering; it is this side of Jesus Christ that we need to understand in the moments when the world seems to make no sense and offer no comfort. It is this side of Jesus Christ that comes to our side and suffers alongside us.
Even Jesus needed to grieve. As he traveled to the town where his friend, Lazarus, had been ill and died, Jesus seemed to keep his composure. He even went so far as to say that he was glad that he did not come right away because now his traveling partners would be able to see the Glory of God manifested in the healing of his sleeping friend. When he arrived, his friend had been in the grave for four days.
The interesting part about Jesus’ response is that he did not experience his true grief upon finding his friend in the grave. Instead, his response came as he saw the grief and dismay of Mary and Martha in response to their tremendous loss. He saw them hurting, and he wept. He knew that he would be healing Lazarus and raising him, and yet, he still wept.
Even though he had all of the hope and faith that he would raise his friend from the dead, he still needed a very human moment to express his grief and to cry. During this time, we all must remember the hope that we have that Jennifer is now with Christ in eternity, but it is important for us to take these moments and express our response to the very real and valid tragedy that we are all experiencing. Losing someone that we love is never easy, and it was not even easy for the son of God.
The thing about Jesus that is the most important, but often the most overlooked, is that God became human and came down to live in the pain and the messiness of humanity with us. Moments like these make no sense, and trying to find meaning or some type of hope to grasp onto is exhausting and brings us to the point where we doubt or just give up. These are not wrong responses.
Anyone who is a Christian can stand here and tell you to be strong in the Lord and have faith. Those are important things, to be sure, but we need not forget that we live in an imperfect, fallen, messy world. It’s a world where the distance between what God intended for us is separated by a huge canyon of our brokenness and sinful condition. This is a world where sometimes things just don’t make sense. A world where things hurt to the bone, and we suffer and see ones that we love suffer.
I want to tell you that it is all going to work together for the Glory of God, but that is not what you all need to hear right now. We will get there, if we allow Grace to carry us there, but we are not there now. We are in the ditch. We are in the dirt and the mess and the hurt of this fallen and unfair world, but the most important meaning and Truth that we can understand as we find ourselves broken and hurting in the ditch is that we are not there alone.
One thing that is so tremendous about Jennifer’s life is the people with whom she surrounded herself. Shirley and Joe, her brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, and her son, Will, all loved and adored her. They accepted her as she was, without question, and loved her for it. Her recovery group and friends saw her as a light because she was a light and brought joy to anyone who she came across. She was like this all the way back when she was a student in the youth group that my husband, Matt, led. And she was incredibly smart, mature, talented, and kind. It always amazed me, the depth of questions she would ask about faith, and the depth of kindness she showed, even to people that did not make that easy to do.
I know for sure that as we are all here in the midst of this very human condition of suffering, this group of people gathered today are surely holding each other up. It is exactly what Jennifer would have wanted, and it is what she would have done, had it been any one of us.
But even more importantly than our support and encouragement for each other, we need to realize that Jesus Christ is here among us. He, in flesh and blood, felt all of these feelings and had these doubts. He suffered alongside us, and he shares in our suffering. What breaks our hearts also breaks his, even though he knows firsthand the hope that lies at the end of our journeys. He understands the whole thing, beginning to end, and he never leaves us, even in the darker parts.
If you are a person who does not understand this Grace and unconditional love firsthand, I would encourage you to seek out any one of the people here who does. Let us listen to you more than we speak. Let us not only pray beside you, but let us weep with you and bear your burdens, as we bear our own. We can offer this to you because the burdens that we are carrying, the gritty reality in which we find ourselves right now, are being shared with the one true light of the world. He is almighty and powerful. He was there at creation. He came from Glory, and yet he loved each of us enough to make himself small and vulnerable and live among us for these moments.
Let us pray:
Thank you for being here with us today as we remember Jennifer’s life.
Thank you for the time, even if it was too short, that we were able to have this beautiful soul with us. Thank you for allowing us to feel all the intense feelings, anger, sadness, fear, doubt, and still loving us and being by our sides as we experience them.
Thank you for your grace. Thank you for the grace that was with Jennifer during the times when she was strong, and thank you for the grace that was with her when she did not have the strength to fight her battle with addiction and sadness.
Thank you for the light that you shined through her and into the world. Thank you for the smile that she wore nonstop, even when others might have stopped. Thank you for giving the world her beautiful voice, her compassion, her humility, and her love.
As you stand by her side today, we mourn the loss from our world, and we process so many complicated emotions and responses. It hurts. It does not make sense, but most of all, we are thankful that in the midst of our sadness, you are there. You are crying with us, even though you fully understand the glorious outcome of her journey. You still grieve with us today, and we thank you for not leaving us to suffer alone.
Please make our hearts whole again and give us all peace as we heal. In the name of the Almighty Father, Creator of the Universe, and the small crying voice right beside us in our grief, Amen.
Whole Food/Soul Food 