What shall we do with our tears?
Rev 7.5-12
Psalm 56 1-8
Preached Canberra Baptist Church
13th August 2006

During the recent evacuation of Australians from Lebanon a child of 9 was interviewed at Sydney airport. This little girl spoke of her experiences, of the bombing of the building next door and then the bombing of an ambulance that came to help, killing the paramedics. She told how her uncle went out to help and came back covered in blood: she said “he had been picking up pieces of children – it was then I asked my daddy if we could go home”. I found myself in tears over the paper. In following days the stories rapidly moved into criticism of the government’s performance in the evacuation and an ‘Australian focus’ on issues of dual citizenship. I was left with my tears. What am I to do with them? Tears are used in a particular way in what passes for current affairs in our media: all manner of sobbing sufferers turned into a consumer product – tears used to manipulate an audience. Tears are routinely devalued in public life as a cheap trick. I was in a meeting this week in which a young woman broke down in tears and anger –it was difficult to handle in that ‘professional’ setting. What are we to do with our tears?

Yet there is much crying in our community and beyond. Many of us have suffered bereavements or been deeply grieved by the failures of our world to deal with violence. How to manage such grief? Do we have a ‘theology of crying’?

There are some people of course who do not cry. Soon after I was married I watched a little toddler, no more than two or three, following his father through our local strip shopping centre. The dad had a full set of motorcycle leathers on, and the little boy had a tiny little leather jacket on too. It was very cute. As I watched the child stumbled and fell, and started to cry. From 2 or 3 metres away his father turned and barked at him ”Don’t cry son: bikies don’t cry!”

It is not just the repressed and bullied who have been taught not to cry. I used to work with a Funeral Director who was unfailingly cheerful. Although always suitable restrained with the mourners he was always smiling and joking behind the scenes. He was a Christian of a particularly optimistic kind. One day when we travelling together in a hearse to a burial he was sitting beside me in the middle seat, just in front of the coffin. It was sunny day and he was whistling and cheerful watching all that was going on in the world when he suddenly turned to me in his joy and said: “Ah Jim, we had a wonderful funeral on Tuesday, a real triumph. You would have loved it. Buried my mother!”

For some Christians grief is not real – it’s moved into another world altogether.  This has been so in various communities - even some of the early Anabaptist groups – groups so sure of the other world that it completely subsumed the griefs of this one.  I don’t want to judge this – this may be the experience of some here. But this has not been my experience nor is it the experience of most of the people I meet in my ministry. Certainly Christian faith puts grief and sadness into perspective but it does not do away with it altogether!

Another response is that exemplified in the Charles Dickens character of Miss Haversham in Great Expectations. You will remember that this old lady had been jilted in youth. The disappointment and grief was carefully retained and even grimly celebrated – the wedding banquet left laid until the cobwebs of the years covered everything. Nothing ever changed, like some grim crime scene kept as eternal evidence, a perpetual reminder of a pain that will not be allowed to die.

Another response is seen in the song Cry me a river:

Now you say you say love me
Well, just to prove you do
Come on and cry me a river
Cry me a river
I cried a river over you

The song celebrates an emotional abuse that wants others to cry, that delights in the pain of some-one else. Why do I want you to suffer? Because I cried a river over you! Here the original tears have fermented into bitterness, turning the singer against the one they once loved.  This has milder forms, such as schadenfreude, the joy that smiles quietly (but oh so sweetly!) at the suffering or misfortune of someone who has wronged us!  Here we have grief as a form of poison, something that turns life sour for the griever.

Finally there is the approach that many use by default: just forget it: as time passes the grief diminishes, there are days when it isn’t too bad. Time heals all wounds, without even thinking about it grief slides inexorably into the past. This is a wonderful gift – that we are not left in pain or grief. It does have a down side: the guilty feeling as grief seems to recede: what is happening to my love for this person? Am I losing something even as life returns to normality? It can also be costly, leading to hidden grief carried in the core of being at depths we cannot know. Grief that is not engaged can lie dormant somewhere within our souls.

As people of faith we ask “what shall we do with our tears?”  If we’re not going to repress them like a bullied child, or sublimate them, like the happy, grinning Christian, nor grimly celebrate them like Ms Haversham or just forget them, allow them to be swept away by the great vacuum cleaner of time, what are we to do?

The Psalmist points to a spirituality in which tears are one of the connections we have with God. Psalm 56 suggests that our relationship with God involves a tally of tears: put thou my tears in thy bottle, are they not all in thy book? Thou hast kept a record of my turnings?  Tears are remembered by God, offered to God, trusted to God. They do not just dry up and go away. They are not forgotten but remembered. They are recorded by God, kept in a bottle, written in a book, our tossings and turnings recorded by some divine counter.  Tears have intimately to do with God. Tears are part of the traffic between us.

So it’s appropriate we give some time to a theology of crying. How do we understand tears/crying? What is happening there?  As Christians we start with Jesus in whom our true humanity is shown most clearly. Far from being some perfect human beyond confusion and suffering, Jesus, the Bible assures us, also cried. Two of the occasions are recorded in John 11, when he was told of the death of Lazarus. A second comes in Luke 19 when he first glimpsed Jerusalem on his final journey and he wept over the city and its fate.

Here we have the ontology of tears, a structure of human grief:  one the one hand there is  loss we experience personally: the death of someone close to us, someone we love as Jesus loved his friend Lazarus.  There are many others forms of loss – job, relationship, fortune, health. Grief and sorrow come primarily through personal loss.

The second form of crying is grief over a city, over a nation that didn’t know how to find peace or create justice.  This is a strange grief, sadness. When we see on the television a weeping father carrying the body of his child we know why he is crying – he has lost the one he loves and his eyes are filled with tears. But why do we weep when we see it or read about it? Is it just a sympathetic reaction? 

There is a kind of grief and sadness that is more than just human sympathy. There are tears of frustration, and rage, that these things go on, and that so few people seems to care, that the leaders of the people cannot solve the problems, cannot make peace. There are the tears that come when a people are forced to live under oppression for many years. At the heart of the people of God is great sadness over this. “O that my head  were a spring of water and my eyes a fountain of tears that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people!” (Jeremiah 9.1)

This is a slightly different structure – not built about loss. It’s linked to compassion, to the hunger for justice, to a sense that somehow we can and should be able to do better.

Something of this anger and sorrow was evident in a statement by the church leaders on the situation in Lebanon: 

We find it impossible to remain silent in the face of so much pain and suffering  in the Middle East, both in Lebanon and in Israel, but we have been particularly outraged by the news this morning of the deaths in the Lebanese village of Qana, no matter what its cause.

Where is the moral courage of our leaders? How can the leadership of the Australian Government and the Opposition not cry out for an immediate and unconditional cease-fire?

We are outraged that such unspeakable pain is being unleashed upon civilians, especially women and children, while the world remains largely silent.

Does it not occur to the Governments of Israel and the United States of America that the very possibility of a lasting, generational, peace is being made almost impossible while a new generation of youth are being accustomed to violence as a way of life.

We deplore the violence of Hezbollah and we deplore the violence of the State of Israel.  

We find it impossible to understand how the leaders of our own nation have remained so cowardly silent in the face of such brutality.

We have had enough of this so called war on terror.   When will the governments of the world come to understand that peace can only be built on justice and fairness?

Faith invites us to bring our tears into a community of crying, to weep with those who weep, rejoice with those who rejoice! The Psalmist reminds us that our sorrows are kept in God, that nothing is ever lost to God and his compassion.

It is in the Cross that human sorrow and sin is carried.  We celebrate the forensic dimensions of the cross – the way issues of human guilt and sin are dealt with in the Cross. This aspect is heavily emphasised in various branches of the church.  But we also believe that ‘surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows’ (Isaiah). It is not just our failings and our waywardness, our guilt and sinfulness that are addressed in the Cross. Our vulnerabilities and our pain are also carried and find rest.

It is in the cross where our sadness is focussed. Even here we are not just passive weepers, looking on the sorrows of Jesus. Jesus himself on the way to the Cross reminded the women “Do not weep for me, weep for yourselves and for your children, … for if they do this when the wood is green what shall they do when the wood is dry?” (Lk 23.28-31)  Around the Cross is a community of crying where the pain of God and the pain of the world and the pain of the worshipper come together. It is there that God’s great bottle is unstopped and tears and held and treasured.

Is this then just an orgy of sadness, an endless heaping up of sorrows? Is God just a cosmic Miss Haversham, endlessly keeping count of the world’s suffering in a ritual of grim remembrance?

No! The Scripture never discounts tears, never does anything but take them seriously, but the Bible also points unfailingly to a time beyond tears, an age in which all tears are wiped away and there is no more crying. Given our little ontology of tears – the tears of ‘passion’ (suffering) and compassion (hunger for justice/suffering with)  that age must be one that somehow transcends or fulfils personal loss, and one in which justice and peace are found for all peoples.

We need to keep looking for little signs of that world happening now. It happened the freeing of Nelson Mandela!  For years prayers of Christian people were offered for this man. There was work in churches and communities, political work on both sides of the struggle, Mandela’s own spiritual journey in which his own tears were bottled or counted in such a way as to issue in forgiveness and not bitterness.  It happened through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in which the appalling crimes of Apartheid were dealt with painfully but graciously: stories of torture and death were told, and terrible tears were shed, and murderers and torturers were forgiven.

And what shall we do with our tears over Lebanon – after all, these are ancient battles. Some say, “you’ll never fix this – they been at it for thousands of years – don’t cry over that for there’ll be no end to it”. We affirm that there will be an end. When I was crying and raging, Bernard was hoping and praying, and planning for peace, looking for the creative spaces the current destruction might open up, knowing that God will keep a tally of tears and out of that will come renewal, resurrection and new hope.

This doesn’t happen magically – it happens when people attend to it and believe in it, and work towards it. It happens when people trust God with their grief and look to God for courage and love and hope to move forward into newness of life.

As we come to this Table, to this ancient ceremony of communion, of connection with suffering and with hope, be prepared to trust God with your griefs and sorrows. Where you forget them and treat them lightly, allow God to bring your tears to your mind that you might offer them to God’s counting, and God’s keeping. If you have made a vintage of grief, cellared it away where you can hold it and contain its pain – let it go into the great bottle of God’s love and care and forgiveness. If you have shut out the world’s grief and refused to have anything to do with it because to is too horrible to contemplate and too entrenched to be solved, come into the community of the Cross, where we weep for Jesus’ suffering, but also for the suffering of others and ourselves and the children of the world.

Such crying does not diminish us, but opens the way to hope because we know such sorrow is not pointless and depressing, but part of God’s tender, loving, healing way with us. “Put thou my tears in thy bottle, are they not all in thy book?”