Reverand Gia

Reverand Gia Hayes-Martin.

““Let the little children come to me,” Jesus said. But not like this. Not like this. It is not right that a little girl dies when she is only six years old. It is not fair that a family should lose two children. These things are not supposed to happen. We are all shocked by Laine’s death. We may be angry that she is not with us any more. We might be scared, scared of life without Laine, or scared because we’re starting to see that someday, we hope a very long time from now, we will die too. And we are so very, very sad. It’s a different kind of sadness than we may be used to feeling, because our hearts are broken. We lost so much when Laine died.

Laine loved Phillips Brooks School. She loved her teachers, she loved her friends, she loved going to school with her big brother Mathew. So Laine’s mom Anna was surprised when she noticed Laine standing in the hallway outside of Mrs Tully’s room, waiting for her classmates to get there before she went inside. Anna asked Laine about it, and she said, “I can’t open the door. It’s too heavy.” (Laine could be a bit of a drama queen.) Anna was very wise. She said, “You know, Laine, you are small for your age, and you probably always will be small. You can’t let your size be a reason for other people to do things for you that you can learn to do for yourself.” So Anna and Laine went up to school at a time no one else was around, and they practiced opening that door, how to turn the knob and pull with all of Laine’s weight at just the right time, until Laine could open the door by herself. And Laine learned, with her mom’s help, that her size did not stop her from doing what she wanted to do.

That was Laine for you. She had more personality per unit of weight than anyone I’ve ever known. Every Sunday morning after our church service ended, Laine and Mathew and their dad Mathai stopped to shake my hand. Laine was very grown up about it. I would crouch down to her level, and she’d reach up and say, with a serious voice and a serious face, “Good morning, Reverend Gia.” I could always tell she was waiting for me to say, “Good morning, Laine. How are you today?” so she could start bouncing again. She couldn’t hold it in. It always made me laugh. That was Laine for you. She was an exceptionally loving little girl; when someone new joined her class at school, Laine made friends with them right away. She went up to total strangers in Starbucks and the supermarket and left them laughing and smiling. Laine had always been like that, even when she was a tiny baby and she used to sleep cuddled up to her sister Mia. Even as a tiny baby, even when she was asleep, Laine couldn’t help loving people.

Laine had so much love to share because all of us loved her so well. She had loving, wise, patient parents in Mathai and Anna. She had an extraordinary big brother in Mathew. A couple of weeks ago, he spent an entire day teaching Laine to ski. He got frustrated only once; he skied down to the bottom of the hill, said, “I’m tired of this,” tried to make a snow angel––and then went right back up to teach Laine again. She had grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins who loved her in all kinds of ways, some from far away and some close to home. She had friends at St Bede’s who loved her, friends and teachers at Phillips Brooks who loved her, her nanny Vijay who loved her. Laine received so much love that she couldn’t help sharing it with everyone she met.

And in that way, Laine showed us what God is like. The reading we just heard, the one that Mathew did for us, tells us that God has given us love, because God is love. God loves because that is what and who God is. Laine couldn’t help loving, and God can’t help loving. God loves each one of us, just because God made us. And God calls each one of us God’s own beloved child.

Christians also understand that God does not love us from far away. God loves us so much that God became a human being like us: Jesus, who lived on earth and had friends and laughed and played and stubbed his toe and lived a life just like our lives. God became one of us in Jesus so that God could experience everything we do in this life, our greatest joys and happiness and our suffering, even our death. And that means that God is feeling what we are feeling. God is hurting. God is scared. God is angry. God is so very, very sad. And when Laine died, God’s heart was the first one of all our hearts to break.

The story of God becoming one of us does not end with Jesus hurting and dying on the cross. Because when Jesus’ friends went to visit his grave on Easter morning, they found that he was not there. He had risen. Even though he was dead, God gave him new life. It was a different kind of life, because he wasn’t here on earth any more; it was a life very close to God. And God’s promise in Jesus is that someday, Laine and Mia and all of us will have new life, just like Jesus did. We won’t be here on earth any more; we will be very close to God. We will see Laine there, and Mia, and all the people we love who have died. And that lets us be hopeful, even though our hearts are broken. Laine is living a new life very close to God, and she is safe and happy and loved.”

The following day at Sunday morning service.

There is a custom in some churches of burying the Alleluia during Lent. In the season of repentance and solemnity that starts on Ash Wednesday, we do not say or sing “Alleluia.” That word of praise to God has a particular association with Easter, so as we prepare for that joyful day of resurrection, we fast from using that word, creating a sense of anticipation so that our “Alleluias” may have even greater joy when we say them again at the Easter Vigil. The custom of burying the Alleluia often involves a banner with the word “Alleluia” drawn on it. On Shrove Tuesday, the last day before Lent, the banner is placed in a box and then hidden somewhere in the church. The buried Alleluia is then opened at the Easter Vigil, a kind of symbolic bursting of the tomb that signifies Jesus Christ’s triumph over death.

I wish we were observing that custom of burying the Alleluia this year, because then we might know what to do with our broken hearts. We could put them in a box with the Alleluia and give them time and space to heal before we try to be joyful again. Laine’s death last Monday is an unbelievable loss. That a vivacious, energetic, cheerful, funny six-year-old should die so young and so suddenly is heartbreaking. That it comes so soon after her sister Mia’s death is crushing. That this happens to genuinely good, loving, faithful people like Mathai and Anna and Mathew, a family that has already borne more than their share of pain in this life, is even more devastating. It is wrong. It is unfair. For many of us, this week has passed in a haze of sadness, tears, and restless nights. We may have raised our fists and shouted our anger at the universe for allowing this to happen. I admit that I have directed a number of four-letter words at God this week; I can’t remember an occasion where being angry with God was more justified than this.

The question of where God is in events like these is a difficult one to answer. It takes us right to the nature of God, of who God is and what God is like. We see some of God’s nature in that moment on the mountaintop in today’s gospel. Jesus encounters God in God’s glory, God’s majesty, and the splendor of God’s radiance. God’s light transforms everything it touches, clothes, grass, people. And God seems distant, utterly other, even from Jesus. The son of God has to climb a mountain to come near to his Father. It all seems very far removed from the messy lives of ordinary human beings.

Yet God is not only like that. We know that the story of Jesus does not end on the mountain. Jesus leaves this transcendent experience with his disciples and starts walking towards Jerusalem, towards his arrest, suffering, and death on the cross. And this, too, is what God is like. God is a human person, walking, breathing, celebrating at a wedding, weeping at the death of his friend. God took on our flesh and blood to share all the possibilities and limitations of our existence. In Jesus, God comes as close to us as it is possible to be. God is one of us; God is with us.

One of our Lent book groups is reading Pastrix, a memoir by the Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber. She is foul-mouthed and funny and oh, so real about life and faith and God. She has a chapter about her internship as a hospital chaplain during seminary, in which her role was to be aware of God’s presence in the room while other people did their jobs. On Tuesday in Holy Week, Nadia was paged to the ER, where a thirty-one-year-old woman was dead on arrival. She had been killed when she stepped out of her minivan on the freeway, as her two young children were strapped safely in their car seats. Nadia was asked to care for the kids until family members could get there. She writes, “as I scooted a red fire engine back and forth over the cheerful linoleum, I was aware that for the rest of these boys’ lives, this would be the day their mom died… This would be the day that their mom was taken from them before they could really even know who she was and before she could love them into adulthood.”(1) Nadia had two small children of her own, and she felt this loss keenly, as a parent and as a person of faith. She was aware of God’s presence as she played with these newly motherless children, but she also wanted to slap God good and hard.

I’ll let Nadia speak for herself about sitting in church that Good Friday, three days after the boys’ mother died. She writes, “When the reading of the passion began—the account in John’s Gospel of the betrayal, suffering, and death of Jesus—I listened with changed ears. I listened with the ears of someone who didn’t just admire and want to imitate Jesus, but had felt him present in the room where two motherless boys played on the floor.

“I was stunned that Good Friday by this familiar but foreign story of Jesus’ last hours, and I realized that in Jesus, God had come to dwell with us and share our human story. Even the parts of our human story that are the most painful. God was not sitting in heaven looking down at Jesus’ life and death and cruelly allowing his son to suffer. God was not looking down on the cross. God was hanging from the cross. God had entered our pain and loss and death so deeply and took all of it into God’s own self so that we might know who God really is…

“The passion reading ended, and suddenly I was aware that God isn’t feeling smug about the whole thing. God is not distant at the cross and God is not distant in the grief of the newly motherless at the hospital; but instead, God is there in the messy mascara-streaked middle of it, feeling as [terrible] as the rest of us. There simply is no knowable answer to the question of why there is suffering. But there is meaning. And for me that meaning ended up being related to Jesus—Emmanuel—which means ‘God with us.’ We want to go to God for answers, but sometimes what we get is God’s presence.”(2)

The day after Laine died, I pulled out Nadia’s book and reread this chapter, because she said what I needed to hear, perhaps what we all need to hear right now. God is not watching this from a distant heaven, waiting for us to climb the mountain before God will speak to us. God was hanging on the cross that day on Calvary. God was with Laine in those final moments of her life. God is with Mathai and Anna and Mathew, grieving with them as they absorb this devastating loss. God is here with us, suffering alongside us. And when Laine died, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.(3)

There is one exception to the practice of not saying Alleluia during Lent. That is during a funeral service, when we say it no matter what season it is. As our prayer book goes, “Even at the grave we make our song, Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” We grieve knowing that the Christian story does not end with Jesus hanging on the cross. The Christian story continues to the empty tomb, to God’s victory over the power of death, to resurrection. Every Good Friday always leads to Easter morning. Death always leads to new life. We say Alleluia to remind ourselves of that hope, that promise. Today we will shout “Alleluia” with all the strength our broken hearts can muster. And however weak and feeble our voices may sound, we can hold on to the assurance that God always, always triumphs over death.

May we say and hear that joyful word with confidence. May our broken hearts know some comfort. And may we know the presence of Emmanuel, God with us.