Have you ever taken a picture in to be framed? You lay the picture on the large counter and then place corner piece of different framing material next to the picture to see how it will look. It is amazing how a slight color change or the width of the frame or the material can give your picture a very different feel. I usually stand back and look for the frames I like up on the wall, try them and see I have no skill whatsoever for choosing frames and then let the sales person make a few choices and choose from those. Frames need to go with the room where the picture is to be hung, and with the picture itself. No easy task.
We frame things in our lives as well. We tell stories about how things happen. We interpret events and give them meaning. We create celebrations and rituals that help to mark transitions in our lives. Two things happened this week that got me thinking about this topic. First, I celebrated my birthday. I had a lovely day! Parker and I had dinner together. My sister-in-law Julie and I went down to Refuge to get a massage and relax in their saunas and hot and cold pools. We did this together in December to celebrate her birthday and now she shared mine with me. I am hoping it becomes a new tradition. After the steam and shock of hot and cold water awakened my body, I enjoyed a deep tissue massage. Clearing my mind and being present in the moment, I was surprised twice. As Jerry released the muscles in my right leg, when he massaged my foot, God came into focus. I prayed for a moment and went back to being present. Then the left leg and soon foot and once again God felt present with me. I let my mind consider how God and my feet may be connected. But then at the end of my massage Jerry lightly touched both feet and nothing. Over lunch I was telling this story to Julie and I thought how God is with us on our journey’s and how we use our feet to take that journey, one step at a time. One foot is always grounded and the other can be moving towards God. We use our feet and our hearts to follow Christ; and somehow that felt right.
The three verses from the Joshua are the culmination of the Israelites using their feet to follow God. Their 40 years of wandering is over, they are ready to cross over to the promised land. In preparation they renew their covenant with God by having all the men be circumcised. During their wandering they did not circumcise their boys. That was the disgrace that has been rolled away, so now they are in right relationship with God. In this moment their dependence changes. For decades they had manna from God to meet their physical needs.
God gave them food, manna, to eat.
Now God is giving them the land which bears grain and fruit and they eat that.
But how they frame that change is important.
Do they see the land God offers, as God providing for them as clearly as the daily gift of manna? Sustenance falling to the ground is surely a gift from God, God’s provision.
But land that is bounteous, they will work, toil and they will have a hand in what they eat.
But who gave them the land? Who is providing? The book of Joshua is a brutal account of God clearing the land of its inhabitants to give it to the Jews. A few verses later a warrior appears and offers to fight with them, another provision of God.
Do you frame all that you have as coming from God? Do you see God’s provision in everything? That is a task of Lent, to examine how we frame our understandings and look at how God is providing. For the Jews it was a time of ritual, of Passover, and they were reminded of God’s provision. Even when life changes: manna to grain, it is still God who is doing the providing! Even when our lives change: working to retirement, married to widowed or divorced, before kids and after kids, God still provides!
The second thing that happened this week, I had an end of life conversation with my sister Beth. She had mentioned the doctor wanted to give her morphine and I asked her if she understood that often meant the beginning of the end? I asked if she needed to do or say anything to be ready to die? We reminisced about our trip up the coast with our mother before she died, how Mom spent time with each of us. Beth’s youngest daughter is coming out to see her next week. We talked about what she wanted to happen with her remains and I am looking into some options. Speaking with the cemetery where most of my family is buried stirred up many emotions. Soon I will be saying goodbye to my 65-year-old sister!
That got me thinking. It feels like more people are not wanting to have memorial services. Not wanting to frame their loved one’s life within the relationship of faith, within the cycle of life and death and life after death. But after the heartwarming celebration of Chuck’s life on Saturday we all realized what is at stake. We often refer to the memorial as a time of closure and it is. It allows family and friends to say goodbye, to express their faith, and mark the end of a chapter in their lives. But it is also a time of reconciliation.
Reconciliation means to restore, to settle. Another meaning is to accept something unpleasant. It takes time to accept the death of a loved one, but our relationship with the deceased begins to be reconciled through this ritual of closure. Until that moment we often have lingering unsettled feelings, because as a community, and especially for those closest to the person, we are not reconciled to the death. Grieving takes time and is one of the most difficult emotional tasks we face. But we are not meant to do it alone. God is with us in our grief, God is reconciling us.
Paul wrote about reconciliation. The chapter starts with the earthly tents we live in and how they are destroyed. But Paul then promises “a house made without hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Cor. 5:1). He is talking about life beyond our body of flesh and blood. That we are new creations in Christ so that we regard no one from a human point of view, according to the flesh. Scripture declares, “Anyone in Christ is a new creation; the old has passed away and everything has become new” (v.17). I have always thought of this in terms of sin. I am a new creation in Christ and the old sinful me is no longer a burden because of Christ’s death. And that is true. Paul states, God made Christ sin, who had no sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God (v. 21). But we are also a new creation when it comes to grief and reconciliation.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t know how to become the righteousness of God.
The beauty is God knows.
God is the one who reconciles us.
God is the one who makes you a new creation.
God is the one who reconciles your grief. God is the one.
When my father died when I was thirteen, I put my grief in a box. I had no skills to face that challenge. 10 years later I started that work. Therapy, tears and lots of emotions finally helped me start that process. I had not learned that grief is really a partnership with God. That God wants to help us reconcile our pain and loss.
God wants to help us learn to accept the devastation death causes.
God wants to reframe our lives in terms of God’s love and Christ’s ability to make us new creations. But God is respectful of you and will only enter when invited to do so.
If we frame grief as only a personal journey and not a spiritual one, we have missed out on the great Advocate who walks with us on the path. The one who guides our steps and holds our grief.
How do you frame life? Are Celebrations celebrated?
Do you mark life transitions with rituals? Do you depend on God, relying on God’s provision; rather than depend on yourself? How do you frame life and death?
In every circumstance God is providing.
In life and in death God is reconciling you to Godself in Christ. Let us pray
