—1 Thessalonians 4:13

I belong to a group of people who, for the past six weeks or so, have been having an ongoing discussion of how hope appears from a variety of different perspectives. We have become familiar with one another as we have shared our ideas and had our ideas expanded by our conversations with one another.

It is a good thing to think about hope - to understand that it has been, for our people, a concept far more complex than just getting one’s way or having one’s wishes come true. Hope does involve positive outcomes, but often it is born of pain or grief and involves hard work and enduring difficult experiences.

this week I have been pondering the relationship between hope and grief. As a pastor, I have been privileged to be invited into the homes of grieving people and into the places where they are working out the meaning of life in the face of devastating loss. I have officiated at between 10 and 25 funerals per year for the past 37 years. That adds up to a lot of tears and a lot of different and unique situations. You might think that this experience might lead me to become an expert on grief, but I don’t know if that is true. I have learned not to fear grief. I have learned that one does not get over grief, but rather gets through it. Grief changes those who have experienced it and the change is permanent.

I also know that each journey through grief is unique and different.

So people grieve in different ways.

The writer of the Letter to the Thessalonians states that grief is different for those who have hope than for those who do not. It makes sense that this might be true.

Perhaps I have never been in a situation of grief with no hope. I have never been in a situation of active warfare where the devastation rains from the sky and the deaths are so frequent that one has no expectation that one will survive. I have never been a member of a group singled out for genocide where the expectation of some is the annihilation of others. I have not yet been in a place of immediate expectation of my own immanent death.

The people with whom I have been privileged have been in situations where hope is revealed fairly early in the grieving process. I remember bringing the news of the death of a son to a mother who has immediately so devastated that she collapsed onto the floor in tears and there was no consoling her for some time. She didn’t want to talk to me and she didn’t want me offer her comfort in any what that I knew. Another time I stood by helplessly as an elder brother literally collapsed over the body of his younger brother who had died. I wondered how we would separate the living one from the one who had died. In both cases the grief was intense, overwhelming, undeniable, and, for a while unquenchable.

But those moments of awful devastation did not last forever. They were not the end of the story. Those individuals do not feel the same today as they did on that day. In both cases the change came in the form of the arrival of another caring person, a family member, a friend, who at first simply shared the space with the one overwhelmed. I was able to offer a bit of comfort, perhaps only in the form of an offered tissue or information about where we could find a place to sit and talk. Then, little by little, a tiny sense of normalcy returned. A cup of water was offered, a memory was shared, a small decision was reached. Life went on.

I don’t know if I have ever experienced grief with no hope.

I think of the words of the letter often. I read them at nearly ever funeral where i am asked to speak.

As I have walked through seasons of grief in my own life, I have wondered about hope. Even in the midst of intense grief when multiple losses pile up one upon another, I don’t think I have journeyed to the depths of despair that I have witnessed in others. I can’t speak to their experiences, because I do not know them from the inside. But I think that I have always had he luxury, or privilege, or serendipity of having some small amount of hope in my life.

One of my favorite passages of scripture is the great recitation of the faith of our ancestors in the 11th chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews. It tells of the many generations of faith in which our people took risks, endured hardships, gave of themselves, worked hard, set forth on incredible journeys and adventures, lived and died. It describes a legacy of faithful people who have been willing to act on their faith. The recitation is so meaningful to those of us who are familiar with the scriptures because it is a summary of stories that appear elsewhere in scripture. These are stories that we have known and with which we have wrestled for meaning. And here they are, almost in a list, recalling the generations of faith and the stories upon which our faith and our stories are based. The writer of Hebrews calls this the “great cloud of witnesses.”

The introduction to this great recitation says, “No faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1) In a simple sentence faith and hope are linked together and we are reminded that there is more to this great universe than that which is directly observable.

Perhaps that is what I discover when I am with those who grieve. I am always aware that there is more going on than what I can observe with my eyes. There is more to the story than the moment I am witnessing. Occasionally I am able to share that simple fact with those who are grieving: “This isn’t the end.” “Love never dies.” Sometimes those words can be the seeds of hope so that we do not grieve as those who have no hope.

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