Grief Promises Gratitude

The issue of Liturgy entitled “Liturgy and Hope,” guest-edited by Michelle Baker-Wright, an Episcopal priest in Los Angeles, offers a number of essays from scholars dealing with hope in times of difficulty––death, environmental disaster, imprisonment, when flexibility is needed, when isolation threatens community––and the role that liturgy plays in speaking truth. Here is an excerpt from David Farina Turnbloom concerning funeral sermons. –– Melinda Quivik

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I opened this essay with an oft-quoted passage from the First Epistle of Peter. However, I left off the (usually unquoted) end of the passage: “Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence.” In moments of tragedy, liturgies that defend and proclaim our Christian hope are necessary. However, these hopeful liturgies must be gentle, and they must be reverent. Deconstructing idolatrous hope cannot be done without a keen awareness of the emotional effects it will have on someone. While honestly attending to the reality of death is necessary if we are to truly integrate and transform it, this process cannot be rushed without causing serious harm. Developing this form of hope is not merely an intellectual conversion. Theological truth is not a dispassionate, propositional truth. Rather, hope, as Schleiermacher preaches it, is essentially affective and, as such, is a dynamic process that requires time to develop. Many people need idols to comfort themselves in moments of traumatic loss; they are pastorally useful coping mechanisms. Deconstructing such idols should be a gentle and reverent process, not a violent epiphany.

As pastorally dangerous as it may be to rush the deconstruction of idolatrous imagery, it is far more dangerous to combat uncertainty and pain with idols. Schleiermacher’s sermon provides us with a shining example of how to preach hope with gentleness and reverence. Gentleness patiently appreciates pain, fear, and uncertainty. It doesn’t condemn these delicate emotions, seeking to rapidly move past them into a joy that we may have been taught to see as the truest manifestation of righteousness. Gentleness acknowledges pain, fear, and uncertainty as essential to our vulnerable humanity. These emotions are opportunities to refine and focus our hope in God, the transcendent God who, while especially immanent in the love we share with one another, always remains beyond our understanding. Schleiermacher is gentle with his congregation; he corrects them with sympathy and gratitude. Above all, Schleiermacher is reverent toward God. He refuses to reduce God to an answer, to a propositional truth. He chooses instead to seek God in the emotions—the anguish, the gratitude, and the love—that he feels among his grieving community.

I conclude this essay with a quote from another great Lutheran theologian, Dietrich Bonheoffer. Written from a prison cell on Christmas Eve in 1943, this passage echoes Schleiermacher’s desire that the death of a loved one might become a blessing. Like Schleiermacher’s sermon, this passage eschews certainty about heaven, choosing instead to preach a certainty experienced in this life, in the love of community.

“There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled one remains connected to the other person through it. . . One bears what was lovely in the past not as a thorn but as a precious gift deep within, a hidden treasure of which one can always be certain.”

The rest of this essay is available in the full digital and print editions of Liturgy. All of the essays in Liturgy 37, no. 2 are available by personal subscription and through many libraries.

David Farina Turnbloom is associate professor of theology at the University of Portland, Oregon, and the author of Speaking with Aquinas: A Conversation about Grace, Virtue, and the Eucharist (Liturgical Press, 2017).

David Farina Turnbloom, “Preaching Hope: Lessons from Friedrich Schleiermacher,” Liturgy 37, no. 2 (2022): 7–13.

David Turnbloom