The Often Overlooked Benefits of Sadness

Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32

Genesis 45:1-15

You are no doubt skeptical of our theme this morning.  “Great,” you’re thinking, “I performed the miracle of just getting here today, hoping for some inspiration.  And now we’re going to praise sadness??  I could have done that by staying in bed, eating pop tarts, and watching a sad movie!”  Ok, Ok.  But trust me.  There are some real benefits to owning the periods of sadness in your life.  We’ll get to all that in a few minutes.

Today’s reading is a gripping scene filled with tension and emotion as Joseph is reunited with his brothers after many years.  But let me set the stage first.

 

Joseph’s brothers hated him.  They were jealous because they knew Joseph was their father’s favorite.  And they were bitter because Joseph shared his dreams that they would one day bow down to him.  They planned to murder him.  But they decided instead to just sell him as a slave to merchants who were headed south towards Egypt.  Once in Egypt, he was sold on the auction block to Potiphar, who was captain of Pharaoh’s military guard.

Betrayed by his brothers and now a lowly slave in a foreign place, the story gets even worse.  He’s falsely accused of seducing his master’s wife, and gets thrown in prison.  That’s where Joseph hits bottom.

But from the bottom, his fortunes begin to change.  He rises slowly but surely to a position of prominence.  He is eventually elevated to the position of the Prince of Egypt.  In that role he proved himself an excellent and wise administrator.  He stored up grain in every city and prepared Egypt for a period of severe drought and famine.  This famine hit Canaan too, and so Joseph’s brothers made their way down to Egypt and presented themselves to their brother by bowing down before him and requesting to purchase grain.  But they didn’t recognize him.

READING

I’d like to focus on Joseph’s powerful grief.  His weeping.  And I want to use this story today to help us reflect on the easily overlooked benefits of sadness. We sometimes live as if avoiding pain and heartache is our primary life strategy.  But just keeping ourselves safe from harm isn’t really a plan that gets us where we want to go.  You can’t play it safe all the time.  You can’t live in fear of experiencing pain and loss.  Joseph’s story reminds us that the price of being alive is the willingness to experience both joy and sadness.

The problem for many of us is that we’re tempted to make a high-light reel of our lives and only include the good stuff.  Like curators at a museum, we only want to bring out certain items from the storeroom for presentation to the public.  We fear what would happen if we granted others access to the full, messy, complicated scope of who we are, what’s happened to us, and what we’re feeling.

Some of us do this in Facebook posts.  If we learned to be a little more honest and vulnerable in the ways we communicate with others, things would sound very different.

It’s common to see posts that read, “I just lost six pounds and two inches from my waist!”  We rarely read a post that says: “Just gained another four pounds.  It’s getting hard to button my jeans.”

We often see a picture posted of someone on a beach from just the right angle.  Seldom do people post pictures of themselves with the flu, wearing sweats, and on the floor in the background we can see underwear and socks, and an old pizza box.

Some of us do this in our annual Christmas card update letter to family and friends.  Friends have come to expect a Christmas Letter full of your family’s triumphs and travels from the year.  They’d be shocked to receive this kind of letter in early February:

“Sorry I didn’t get this out sooner.  I’ve been crazy depressed.  Probably because I hate my job.  But I guess it could be my mediocre marriage.  Well, our underperforming children didn’t exactly help either.  We had plans for a Caribbean Cruise but our credit cards were already maxed.   So instead we spent a miserable weekend at a State Fair.  Please come visit us when you can.  Please, seriously, please, anyone, come visit us.  But anyway, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.”

The reunion of Joseph with his brothers is so moving that no strangers were allowed to remain in the room.  He sent his attendants out.  In that room there was only Joseph and his brothers, face to face.  The only people who get to stay in this room, and witness this scene, are people who are in touch with the powerful sadness that has touched each of them.  Of course as readers of the story, we too are invited into the room, but only if we make some attempt to connect with our own experience of sadness.

I promised you that there are some benefits to our sadness.  What are they?

The first benefit is that you get access to more of who you are.  

You get to stop trying to fit your life into a little mold where everything is ok.  You get to be you, fully yourself.  You get to claim the wide range of experiences you’ve had in life without editing parts of it out.  Over time you’ll learn to pretend less, fake less, lie less.  And that’s a pretty good thing. The pressure to appear healthy, or successful, or together, or ok is a really terrible burden, isn’t it?  It forces us to squeeze out much of who we are so that we can fit into a pretty narrow and constricting container. 

The second benefit is connected to the first one:  your sadness can make you a much more compassionate person.  It can connect you to the people around you in ways that will be life-giving to them. 

·   If you’ve ever lost a job and have let yourself felt the sting of that, you’ll be a good friend when someone else loses theirs. 

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    If you’ve struggled with your weight, with the frustration of a body that doesn’t look like you want it to, you’ll be a good friend to others who have that same struggle. 

·      

    If you’ve been through tough times as a parent, or had a business fail, or been through a divorce, if you’ve experienced periods of loneliness or depression, or if there was a time when your faith gave way to doubts about God’s love, you will be in a place to pay attention to other people when they experience these same kinds of pain.

We had good friends who lost a baby who was just a few days old.  We attended the funeral, along with lots of other people.  I guess the whole reason you attend funerals is just to be there with people you love and care about on during a time of loss.  That funeral was particularly hard for me.  Because I have children.  And when you go to the funeral of good friends – people my age – who lost a child, you cannot help but wonder, “Would I survive if I lost one of my children?”  Of course the answer that comes back is “No, I couldn’t survive that.” 

After the funeral we filtered out of the sanctuary into the foyer of the church.  And I noticed three women embracing one another.  I found out later that each of these women had lost a baby many years ago.  So what I witnessed was a tender moment between three women who could identify with one another’s pain.  Of course it’s not that no one else could sympathize with their loss.  But the particular loss that each of them had experienced wove them together into that embrace.

I woke up early one morning this summer and turned on ESPN.  It was in the middle of a story about a young boy around ten years old who had one eye removed due to cancer when he was about five.  Then they found cancer in his remaining eye.  And then came the devastating news that his remaining eye would need to be removed.  The story focused on his final day of sight before his surgery.  He spent the day looking as intently as he could at the faces of his parents and siblings so he could remember what they looked like.  Here it was, 6:15am, I haven’t even had my first cup of coffee, and I’m sobbing uncontrollably in my living room.

That was good journalism.  It was a well told documentary story that took me into the life of another person.  That’s what great music does.  And great novels.  And great paintings.  The artist creates something with the power to usher us out past the boundaries of ourselves into an experience in the life-story of another person.  In a way that experience of being brought into communion with another person is a picture of what faith does at its best.  It propels and launches us out past ourselves into the wider world of pain and joy, of heartache and celebration.

That’s what can happen if we open ourselves to the work of God’s Spirit as we listen to Scripture with full attention.  At a different point in my life I very well may have changed the channel at the first sign that this might be a sad story.  Just like everyone else, I’m tempted to avoid the hard parts of my journey.  But I’ve also tasted how good it is to be able to feel my sadness.  I’ve become aware of the difficult parts of others’ lives in ways that I totally missed in the past.  And strangely enough, because I’ve gotten a little better at sadness, I’ve gotten a lot better at joy and gladness too.

I don’t believe that God sends us pain.  But I do believe that God uses the pain we experience to connect us to other people.

When God calls you and me into a life of solidarity with the pain of others, God isn’t asking us to do anything God hasn’t already done. God visits us in the life of Jesus in order to share our plight.  Jesus comes to be with us right in the middle of our lives.  He isn’t afraid of the mess.  He isn’t scared by our foolish rebelliousness.  He wants, more than anything else, to abide with us so that we experience our lives as places filled with light.  This solidarity that Jesus practices with us does not aim at fixing everything that’s wrong with us.  God won’t fix you.  But God will dwell with you and will never abandon you.

When Joseph meets his brothers, weeps with them over their betrayal of him, and still extends to them his forgiveness and his blessing, this story is pointing us to the way Jesus deals with us.  When he was crucified, Jesus looked on those responsible and prayed, “Father, forgive them.”  When he was raised from the dead and met his closest friends who had betrayed him, he pronounced a blessing on them, “Peace be with you.”  There is no anger, no punishment meted out. 

Once you experience yourself as a person loved by God all the way through, you begin to enjoy a new kind of freedom to explore and experience all the difficult or painful places of your life as places being filled with light.  You need no longer avoid the dark or confusing places in your life out of fear that they will overwhelm you in their power.  Every form of sadness you’ve ever experienced is a place of God’s healing presence in your life. 

One of the wonderful and unique ministries of congregations like ours is that we give one another permission to feel deeply.  We give one another permission to slow down, to take Sabbath rest.  We remind one another of our tendency to hurry, rush, stay busy, and in all that flurry of activity, to avoid the kind of slowed down silence in which we can ask what we’re feeling.  We remind each other that it’s not ok to rush from work to errands to social events to committee meetings and back around the circuit again tomorrow.  We remind each other that there are wonderful things happening in the center of our lives.  God’s grace is at work in us to connect us with one another.  My prayer for you this week is that Joseph’s story will connect you in a healing way to your own sadness.  And that you will be more aware of and more connected to the pain of others.

Thanks be to God for visiting us in Jesus Christ, for touching the wounded and tender places in our lives, and for making us people able to share the pain of others.  Amen.