The sermon below was offered by Smith Broadwell at the Service for the Weary & Wounded on December 21, 2024 at Eastport United Methodist Church. Smith is a graduate of Washington College and completed both their Master of Divinity and Master of Social Work at Boston University. They currently work as a mental health therapist in private practice.
Sermon for the Weary & Wounded
Crows collect trinkets and they offer them to each other and even humans as a form of connection and bonding. Like a crow, I collect quotes and ideas and images and just spread them around the bed I sit in. I find a new one and arrange it in the semi circle atop my bedding, hanging them on the interior walls of my heart so that when I hold my breath between inhales and exhales, I remember what I am learning to know.
As I sat to write for this evening, I didn’t have a clear idea of what to share. I just had all of these quotes from my favorite artists and thinkers and feelers. I thought, ugh I wish I could just read these quotes that are propped up on all of the surfaces in my spiritual cave like knick knacks. And then I thought, wait a minute, that’s pretty cute. And what else is writing if not a collection of trinkets collected from elsewhere arranged to be in conversation with one another. So here’s a little collection of trinkets arranged with some added commentary especially for you tonight because what our weary world needs is connection and bonding.
Hear this poem by Andrea Gibson: “This year everyone I know had a broken heart, everyone I know cried in private on their way home from a party, and not everyone I know woke up the next morning, and not everyone I know wanted to even though they did. And this year I stood inside of a redwood tree and thought, “This is the sweetest day of my whole life,” and two months later I was sobbing in a parking lot, thinking, “This is the worst day of my whole life,” and a few months later I was dancing in my living room, saying, “This is the best day of my whole…” Have you ever seen the seed of a redwood tree? So tiny. And all of that everything inside of it. All of this everything inside of us.”
All of this everything inside of us… In our full human experience, we come with so many feelings that don’t fit neatly with the stories we tell in our current take on the Christmas season. What is tricky is that these stories should fit together inside of us but in our current moment, we have been so impacted by the gospel of capitalism, genocidal collecting of power, that we are fed the idea that joy and pain cannot exist together in the same pursuits. That in order to accept and live with pain, we must be redeemed from it. The idea that pain and suffering must somehow be squashed or ignored or turned around in order to experience joy. But our bodies know even if we don’t have words for it that that kind of joy isn’t evoked through connection. It comes in the unwrapping of the gift we’ve been convinced we need in order to experience our value, which is actually shame given a misleading name tag.
Of course we have come to need an entire service set apart from the rest of the advent activities to honor grief and pain. We have been steadily escorted into a simulation of existence that estranges our multiplicities of humanness from one another. Our bodies know deeply that something is off, something is wrong with the dominating philosophic truth of our moment in history. We’ve been left to cope by compartmentalizing our experiences as what we’re supposed to be feeling and what we’re not supposed to be feeling at this time of year. This dissonance just becomes louder and louder and louder. We’re anxiously exhausted and screaming ‘how can I celebrate at a time like this?’ and lamenting, ‘I don’t have time to grieve’ and questioning ‘I don’t understand how anyone can feel insert literally any emotion here right now.’`
Joy and grief become antagonists of one another in the simulation when in actuality, they are inextricably linked. The poet Rumi writes, “Your grief for what you've lost holds a mirror up to where you're bravely working. Expecting the worst, you look and instead, Here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see. Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, You would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding The two as beautifully balanced and coordinated As bird wings.”
Theologian Willie James Jennings wrote, “I look at joy as an act of resistance against despair and it’s forces.”
Poet and activist, Andrea Gibson, writes, “I have never felt awe and shame at the same time.”
Artist and activist, ALOK, writes, “repressed grief is the most fertile ground for hatred to bloom…and that’s what’s happening across the world right now, repressed grief that becomes militarized.”
Joy pulls grief toward her, not to silence grief but to give it a microphone.
Awe shines the light on expansiveness when shame’s constriction twists the truth that grief is trying to tell.
Joy and awe form a beloved community to bow in reverence when oppression wishes to muffle grief’s vibrations.
It is vital that we learn to feel the vibrations of joy and grief and where they are located. We must ask ourselves if it’s painfully easy to find where they are or are not? Are they a hum or a whisper? A blaze? A roar? A rumble?
What do joy and grief say about one another?
At times, the truth of our grief changes something for us. It shows us something we no longer believe or that we can no longer hold. It can illuminate what we need more of or what we have valued beyond measure. Sometimes the grief shows up or shows us parts of ourselves we want but don’t how to comfortably fit into quite yet.
Our awe and joy can show us something we’ve always known but haven’t quite figured out how to show others, something that was always there but wasn’t obvious until now, not obvious yet but we want it to be. We want to grow it, cultivate it. What do we no longer want to hold space for? What do we no longer need? How do we say thank you for what those things meant to us at the time so we can continue to move?
So, we listen to the rumble of our grief, the rhythm of our awe, and the echoes of our joy. Let’s notice the spaces where these emotions reside within us. Considering what they reveal about ourselves, our needs, and our desires. With these insights we get to cultivate a life that adores the full spectrum of human experience, an advent where joy and grief not only coexist but open us up to a fuller experience of one another. Maybe we get to go from here, thinking about how we can bring one another trinkets of our truth, knick knacks that show our pain, our love, our regret, our delight, what we yearn for.
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