Scripture: 2 Corinthians 4:15-5:4

Fellow pilgrim, follower of Christ, brother and sister in the faith, we are not built for this world. We are made for the next.

Paul invites us to GROAN over our situation. He puts us in a chapel with a soft organ playing “Abide With Me” and “I Come To The Garden Alone” in the background.

Candles flicker in the stifling air.

Grim-faced pallbearers line the front pew and fellow mourners flank us on every side.

He sets us in front of an open casket; we look inside and see…ourselves.

This life has taken its toll on us and we see the effect of it in our corpses. We mourn. Lament. Groan.

Reality hits us:

We are not made for this world.

C.S. Lewis wrote in ‘Mere Christianity’,

If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.

Paul tells us the most natural thing for us to do is GROAN.

We’re not alone, either. Romans informs us even creation feels deep pangs of anxiety and later in the same chapter, that the Holy Spirit himself groans wordless prayers in his intercessions for us.

“Jesus knows all about our struggles,
He will guide till the day is done,
There’s not a friend like the lowly Jesus,
No not one; no not one”

It might surprise us to turn around inside that funeral chapel and see who the mourners are. Trees and mountains, seas and forests, flowers and soil, stars and planets. Each weeping alongside the broken-hearted saints who long for release from the pain of this earth.

Nightbirde

A young 30-something singer/songwriter known to her fans as “Nightbirde” experienced career-ending cancer in her lungs, spine, and liver. The pain of her battle with cancer is found in these words she penned last March, nearly a year ago:

“After the doctor told me I was dying, and after the man I married said he didn’t love me anymore, I chased a miracle in California and sixteen weeks later, I got it. The cancer was gone. But when my brain caught up with it all, something broke. I later found out that all the tragedy at once had caused a physical head trauma, and my brain was sending false signals of excruciating pain and panic.

I spent three months propped against the wall. On nights that I could not sleep, I laid in the tub like an insect, staring at my reflection in the shower knob. I vomited until I was hollow. I rolled up under my robe on the tile. The bathroom floor became my place to hide, where I could scream and be ugly; where I could sob and spit and eventually doze off, happy to be asleep, even with my head on the toilet.”

Then she courageously added,

“Call me cursed, call me lost, call me scorned. But that’s not all. Call me chosen, blessed, sought-after. Call me the one who God whispers his secrets to. I am the one whose belly is filled with loaves of mercy that were hidden for me. Even on days when I’m not so sick, sometimes I go lay on the mat in the afternoon light to listen for Him. I know it sounds crazy, and I can’t really explain it, but God is in there—even now. I have heard it said that some people can’t see God because they won’t look low enough, and it’s true. If you can’t see him, look lower. God is on the bathroom floor.”

Nightbirde died last month.

Did you hear her groaning? This precious girl, blessed with singing talent and promised a future? Her candle snuffed out. Her song tragically morphed into her obituary.

Nightbirde groaned, but found in her groaning on the bathroom floor that God was there.

God groans when we hurt

Nightbirde included this paragraph in her brief ‘memoir’:

Call me bitter if you want to—that’s fair. Count me among the angry, the cynical, the offended, the hardened. But count me also among the friends of God. For I have seen Him in rare form. I have felt His exhale, laid in His shadow, squinted to read the message He wrote for me in the grout: “I’m sad too.”

—Nightbirde, ‘God is on the Bathroom Floor, March 9, 2021

Our Lord promised us in Isaiah 63:9 “when we suffer, He suffers.”

Mary and Martha groaned because their brother was gone. Jesus visited them in their sorrow… and what did he do?

He GROANED.

Before “Jesus wept,” he groaned. “He was deeply moved” (ESV) is, quite literally, “He was angered in spirit and troubled himself.” The word describes a warhorse snorting and stomping its hoof, itching to charge into the fray and face the enemy.

Sometimes our suffering, or seeing another suffer, makes us just plain mad.

Jesus knew that anger.

Our Savior doesn’t just “feel your pain.” He also hates it. He hates what it does to you. Yes he knows the long game, that every eye will be dried one day and there will be no more pain, but he also meets us in our moment with mercy and justice on the bathroom floor.

God is on your side in the groaning

The Lord is with you when your spouse leaves you for another; he’s with you in the doctor’s office when she tells you the bad news, the worst news. The Father’s with you at the bottom of a cliff. He’s with you when you’ve cried yourself to sleep over your prodigal child; and he is with you when your bleeding heart is inside a casket as it’s being lowered into the ground.

I’m spending my mornings reading from the book of Jeremiah.

Just this week I was reading where he felt “deceived” by God. He had just preached a sermon that got him slapped and put in chains and in a very raw and earnest moment he accused God of “deceiving him.”

This word is used throughout the prophecies of Jeremiah. The major “flaw in the system” in Judah was deception and lies and Jeremiah calls it out again and again.

Now, however, he applies it to God.

How could you, God?

Why?

This is unbecoming of you! How dare you! I am your prophet and you are treating me this way?

He threatens to retire. To quit. To just walk away.

But four verses later, he has a change of heart. God meets him in his anguish and gives him a vision. Jeremiah saw in the Spirit that God was with him…and not just as a friend!

Jeremiah saw God as a WARRIOR standing over him, protecting him, shielding him.

A eulogy of no regrets

Paul, the officiant, delivers a pitch-perfect eulogy. In our fog of beleaguered sorrow, he waxes pastoral as he answers each of our complaints with gospel hope.

• “Yes, you’re wasting away…but that’s just your ‘tent’; the real you is glorious!”
• “I know these troubles are all you can see; to you they seem impenetrably mountainous. I assure you, God’s love for you is an eternal mountain range and these trials are but dust in the wind.”
• “Beloved child, you can see no end to your groaning, but your Father is wise, loving, and good; BUT YOUR FATHER SEES…AND HE KNOWS; he keeps his eye on the clock and his hand on the thermostat.”

We groan, but don’t give up.

Why?

Because we know a secret.

Paul stacks hyperboles, showing how small our worst trials and troubles are here on earth (as well as our happiest moments) compared to what is being prepared for us in glory.

The day after tomorrow Sandy and I will be venturing out west with friends to see the Grand Canyon. I’ve never seen it. I cannot tell you how excited I am.

Even so,

Pastor Paul tells me I can put that glorious event on one scale — standing on the precipice of the Grand Canyon — then pile on the other side of the scale, higher than the heavens, the Day of my uncovering as I stand in the presence of Jesus.

Now, that’s something for which I really, really, really can’t wait.

I only have one message. I’ve shared it forty years in life, word — and groaning — all across the country. It’s my soulsong, my life verse, my core theology, and my eulogy:

God is God,
God is good,
God is good at being God.

And (don’t forget this),

God is good at being God in all our groaning.

Selah, beloved.