Emotional Rescue

From the tyranny of spiritual punchlines

Golden hour rain in Craftsbury, VT

I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan;

greatly beloved were you to me;

your love to me was wonderful,

passing the love of women.

How the mighty have fallen,

and the weapons of war perished!

2 Samuel 1:26-27

The following is something that some church folks don’t need to hear, and I suspect it’s something that some can’t hear enough.

As we continue Saul, Samuel, and David’s story into the Book of 2 Samuel, the Biblical authors do what you had to do with VCRs and switch out the tapes to continue the same movie (I vividly remember Titanic and Saving Private Ryan this way). Last week, we were just seeing young David killing Goliath for Saul. Now our readings suddenly have him lamenting the death of Saul and his best friend Jonathan, missing a whole epic and emotional saga in between. Sadly, we have to skip so much of the story of 1 Samuel 18-31, but it’s too good and important not to recap briefly. Here’s the fast-forward version of the 1 Samuel’s cassette:

After Goliath, David rises in prowess, causing Saul to get jealous and try to kill him. Jonathan helps David to flee to safety. As David grows in political and military power, he’s also growing spiritually; while on the run, David has the opportunity to kill Saul, but chooses not to out of respect for God and Saul. Meanwhile, Saul continues to spiritually devolve. Despite knowing David has spared his life, Saul half-heartedly repents again, then “repents” on his repentance and goes back to pursuing him. At Saul’s spiritual low point, he seeks out a probably-a-charlatan-witch's help for divination and conjuring spirits, putting faith in charlatans for the answers he should be turning to God for. To the witch’s surprise, her conjuring spell actually seems to work (perhaps with a little help from God), and the spirit of the long-dead prophet Samuel reappears one more time to give Saul the bad news: your king days are over, you and your son Jonathan will die tomorrow. And they do.

This brings us to 2 Samuel 1, with David’s lament for not only his best friend but the king who wanted him dead. Rather than dwelling on all of Saul’s many failures, “How the mighty have fallen,” he cries. Like the prayer that will end 2 Samuel and the prayer at the start of 1 Samuel by Hannah, this song is another poetic interlude in a story suffused with holy emotions.

When feeling into what was speaking to me about this passage this week, I couldn’t help but dwell on emotional lessons taught and re-taught (most recently by Inside Out again) but which we still forget; many of us still feel uncomfortable with grief. Many of us still struggle with trusting that dwelling within sadness can bring us closer to joy, much less God.

My old street in Los Angeles, CA

The Tyranny of Punchlines

For several years in my early twenties, I was doing standup comedy in Los Angeles in the worst places imaginable: dive bars, cafes where you couldn’t hear jokes over blenders, and coffee shops where twenty comedians at a time would foist five minutes of poorly written vulgar jokes upon unsuspecting screenwriters trying to work on their TV pilot script.

While I remember many things fondly about these years, there was an interesting paradox. There was a whole lot of depression among comedians, and yet pure, vulnerable sadness could never work on-stage. It always had to be undermined with irony, dryly disassociated from, or completely remixed until you were trying to conjure laughs out of the worst times of your life (even worse was when your joke bombed and the depression just had to hang in the air like body odor).

I was often jealous of professional musicians. If your favorite musician goes on-stage and sings a ballad that stirs us, we all eat it up. “Thank you for moving me to tears!” But nothing makes people more angry than a comedian failing to make you laugh and instead bums you out. Rare is the art form where the audience regularly rebels against performers to their faces for sharing the wrong feelings.

There were many lessons there (open mic standup is the worst form of free therapy, but thousands do so across the country every day). There are also lessons about how we think about expectations that carry over to the church. What are our expectations of each other for emotional acceptability? While many churches are good at inviting people to bring whatever emotions they want to church, others (hint hint, many liturgical denominations) have it as an unspoken social faux-pas if you show up a bit too authentic.

Emotional stunting was one of many reasons comedy wasn’t the career path for me (more talent would have helped, too). When I pivoted to other art forms, I discovered that there was a full emotional range I had warping (again, cue Inside Out).

While there are some notable exceptions, unadorned sadness is verboten in the art of stand-up because everything has to be a punchline. And there’s always a danger that we in the church do this, too, and it’s sometimes called “spiritual bypassing,” Instead of sitting with and really processing our grief, we want to hurry up and get to the “punchline” of Christ defeating death. What would it mean in our sometimes-stoic pews to allow more and more expectations of full emotional welcome? What would it mean that—if each Sunday has joyful Easter vibes—if we also walked through each other’s Passion every week?

Craftsbury, VT

David, Jairus, and the Women

For all of rural Vermont’s wonderful qualities, I don’t know that emotional vulnerability is among our chief exports. For all our uniqueness, that’s something we have in common with many other regions in the US. Sometimes, we are so uncomfortable with lament we don’t make room for it even when death is at hand. From funerals to Facebook posts, we often feel much more comfortable with “celebrations of life” and optimism than, for example, a good old-fashioned sobbing. There’s nothing wrong with pointing us back to joy in death, but we don’t want to miss out on the gifts that God offers us in grief. If we forget that sometimes it is grief that brings people closer to his holy ground.

David’s poetic lament is the obvious big grief story today, but I don’t want us to gloss over this week’s gospel reading from Mark 5:21-43, where two people come to Christ not in spite of their grief, but because of it. First, a leader named Jairus:

When Jesus had crossed again in the boat[a] to the other side, a great crowd gathered around him, and he was by the sea. Then one of the leaders of the synagogue, named Jairus, came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet and pleaded with him repeatedly, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well and live.”

Mark 5:21-22

Maybe it didn’t have to happen that way. Maybe if Jairus had thought that instead of going to Jesus to beg for help, he tried to first get himself together, file the right form, maybe write a letter to the disciples politely, or raise his hand at Jesus’ next teaching. Who knows, maybe it would have got him closer to Jesus all prim and proper. But we know that this is what happened: Jairus, in grief over his child, begged. He was not too proud to beg Christ in front of the world. I want all of us to feel comfortable doing that in church.

We also hear of a woman who had been hemorrhaging for twelve years:

A large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. Now there was a woman who had been suffering from a flow of blood for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians and had spent all that she had, and she was no better but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, “If I but touch his cloak, I will be made well.” Immediately her flow of blood stopped, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my cloak?” And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’ ” He looked all around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

Mark 5:24-34

Maybe it didn’t have to happen that way. Maybe if she had better healthcare in ancient Judea, all the physicians she tried to see could have helped her. Maybe if she had email or Zoom chats, her prayer would have been heard without anyone seeing. But what happened was she found herself after twelve long years crawling through this crowd to just touch Christ’s cloak. Twelve years of ritual impurity, too unclean for her religious community, too messy to touch. Twelve years of pain that maybe she was taught and told explicitly and implicitly was publicly unacceptable.

When Jesus came to town, had something changed in her theology? Had she received some new teaching? No. She just felt it, a stirring within at the presence of the Holy One. Her pain had finally boiled over until she was bursting with prayer, a desperate and even fearful prayer. And what does Jesus say? Not an accusation, but a pursuing, “Who touched me?” His disciples were thinking, “What the heck do you mean? Everyone’s trying to touch you.” And Jesus says, “No, I mean who touched me with their soul? Who had nowhere and nobody to reach out to until they found me?”

Jesus is not an audience member for our perfect emotional performance. He’s not telling us to keep it light and upbeat. He doesn’t need us to have punchlines, he doesn’t need us to tie things in a bow, he doesn’t need to have cleanliness of body, heart, or mind, he just needs us to reach out to him in our soul. 

This is what David’s doing in his lament, too, showing that God’s favorite king, the great warrior of Israel after his own heart, could pour that heart out in front of everyone. As Walter Brueggemann said (courtesy of Meg Jenista), “The prospect of public grief is a scarce practice in our society, where we are so engaged in self-deception, pretending that everything is ‘all right.’ Underneath that propaganda, however, we are a deeply troubled community with a great deal of unprocessed public hurt. We have no easy way to process hurt, but [David’s] poem is a model…When Israel witnesses David in his grief, it sees David in his fullest, most faithful, most powerful  form…[because] there is a moratorium on power for the full honoring of grief.”

Grief is also how the first book of Samuel begins. Not from a king. but from Hannah, one of many holy barren women in Israel’s history. Hannah’s weeping prayer was so passionate that the priest thought she had staggered in drunk into the temple. But she said, “No, I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord.” (1 Sam 1:15). And it was not long after her grief had been cherished as holy before her tears turned to joy.

Repenting Cries

A few weeks ago in a Bible study on Isaiah, we wondered whether a cry for help is always repentance, or vice versa. Is this a “every square is a rectangle but not every rectangle is a square” thing? Repenting our sin seems to always have a cry for help within it, for within repentance is the admission that we can no longer do things on our own (which is maybe why repenting is so hard for us),. But is a cry for help always repeentence?

Maybe sometimes a cry for help can just be a cry for help. The bleeding woman, Jairus, David, and Hannah grieve without an obvious sin they’re repenting. But maybe for us in our cries, we are repenting: repenting of our culture’s discomfort with naked grief. Repenting of our pride, of our fear of embarrassment. Repenting of our doubt that God will transform it.

My theological ancestor John Calvin is not beyond reproach, but his criticisms of the excesses of Stoicism hold up, as Sarah White writes. “If all tears are condemned,” Calvin tells us, “what will we make of our very own Lord, from whose body trickled tears of blood? […] If all sadness should be dismissed, how will we accept that His soul was sorrowful even unto death?” That Christ’s experience of grief and sorrow was to transform it, not shut it out; if we do not show up with our grief, what is there for Christ to transform? And so in bearing our crosses, our souls “expand with spiritual joy…by embracing suffering as real, we enjoy communion with Christ.”

What to do? I’m not saying anything most of us haven’t heard a million times. Let me just say it the million-and-oneth time: we can grieve the things that we need to grieve, and we can help anyone in our community know that there is always room for grief. Rather than insiting the Hannahs of our community put on the right face and keep it to the prayerful punchlines we like, we can be like Hannah sometimes, praying so hard that our neighbors think we’re drunk. We can be like David, laying down our armor and grieving friends and enemies alike.

And you can know that whenever you reach out on your hands and knees to scrape your fingers on a bare thread of Christ’s cloak, Christ will pursue you in the crowd.

Craftsbury, VT