A Sure and Certain Hope

There’s a phrase – five small words – that people utter when they’re trying to empathise with you. People say it with the best of intentions, trying to bridge a gap of grief or loss, attempting to reach out and find some common ground. It’s a phrase that tries to be kind; that tries to be helpful.

…I think it’s the most annoying phrase in the English language: “I know how you feel”.

I’m sure I’ve uttered it before, and I’m thankful I wasn’t met with a swift slap in the face, to be honest. It’s certainly what I’ve felt like doing when people have said it to me.

Because, the thing is, standing here in this pulpit tonight, I don’t know how you feel. I’ve not lost a partner or a mother or a father, or a daughter or a son. I’ve not lost a brother or a sister. I have lost other relatives, and my life is unequivocally emptier without good friends I have known who have died in years gone by. I also carry with me the grief of nearly ten years of my wife and I being unable to conceive children, and, although our situation has happily changed within the past five years, it does not wipe that decade, or that grief, away.

But, even if I had lost all those people, even if I had lost everyone I had ever loved, I still would not know how you feel. No-one would.

We're all different people, and though, on the surface, we may be going through a similar loss to someone else here tonight; maybe even down to mourning the same person; our relationships with those we've lost are complex and, in a lot of cases, complicated. Our feelings are too. 

There's no one right way of 'feeling' the loss of someone. There's only our way, our own way, that no-one else ever really knows.

And that is hard. That's what makes people want to empathise, and claim to have some understanding of what we're going through. That's why people sometimes cannot help but claim to know how we feel. Because, otherwise, as we all know, people can feel very alone in their grief.

But, you're not alone. None of us are. Because, as odd as it may sound, our job, here, as the Church, is not to understand your grief. No; our job is to be with you in it. Our job is to be a people with whom you can just sit, and feel whatever it is you're feeling. That's what tonight is about; this is a space and a time to simply be, where no-one will tell you what you should be doing, or thinking, or feeling. It's one of the very things one of the founding fathers of the Church specifically asked us to do – to mourn with those who mourn. So tonight, even though we do not know how you feel, we mourn with you.

Bur we also have hope to bring you. A double-helping of hope, if you like. And the first hope is this; though we do not know how you feel, we believe that Christ does. And what's more, we believe he deeply, deeply cares. And the fact that God, the creator and sustainer of everything that is, or ever was, or ever will be, really understands our feelings, means those feelings – and all the people involved in those feelings – have a real worth. They matter. 

Out of everything that is, or ever was, or ever will be, this matters. The love of God for you, and those you love, and have loved, means those feelings matter and you matter and your loved ones matter. And nothing, as we heard in our reading from the letter to the Romans tonight, nothing can separate us from that love.

Now maybe that all sounds a bit too good to be true to you. Maybe it's something you'd like to believe, but can't quite stretch to reach that level of faith. That's ok too. Because, honestly, if nothing can separate us from the love of God, then our own lack of faith makes no difference to how much we matter to the creator of the universe. Our own lack of faith makes no difference to how much we are loved. And to my mind, our own lack of faith makes no difference to how whole-heartedly we are accepted and welcomed when we do die and we finally meet God face-to-face.

And that is the second helping of hope. The Church refers to it as a 'sure and certain hope'. That is the hope of the resurrection; a hope that is sure that death is not final, that it is not the end; a hope that is certain that one day, we will meet our loved ones again, and death – even death itself – cannot separate us from the love of God.

And so, although I cannot claim to know how you feel, I can tell you this: you are not alone. Nothing can separate you, or your loved ones from God. And I can leave you with another, truer phrase than me claiming to know your feelings: and that is that there is always hope.

Amen