I spent 10 of my 21 years as a pastor in one congregation. In those 10 years I became a divorcee and a widow, both losses that changed who I was as a person. Both losses also changed the way I preached, and not always in ways that were helpful to the congregation.
We preachers know how easy it is to get tunnel vision about Scripture, preaching to the same people in the same situations week after week. We read the same commentaries, mostly from the same set of authors, and we are always walking that fine line between meaningful exegesis and the points of eisegesis that bring the Scriptures home to our hearts. That balance becomes infinitely more difficult to hold when we are undergoing personal crises, especially grief.
Grief changes everything: our sleep, our pain tolerance, our ability to think clearly, our emotional stability, and more. Naturally, grief will change our preaching. In my experience, that can be a beautiful deepening of relationship with congregation members who are also grieving, but it can also become an inability to see anything outside of our own grief. While completely understandable, that inability is a signal to a preacher to take care and ask for help.
To stay responsible in our preaching while experiencing our own deep grief, we might ask ourselves some questions:
- If I share (insert whatever piece of your grief you are considering sharing as part of a sermon), will it deepen my proclamation of the good news about Jesus, or will it propel the congregation into taking care of me? (There’s nothing wrong with the congregation caring for us in our grief, but the pulpit is just not the best place to have that happen.)
- Is there another way to make this point using someone else’s story rather than my own?
- To paraphrase Nadia Bolz-Weber: Am I preaching from my open wounds or from healed-over scars?
There will be days in your grief when you cannot even answer these questions because you are so deeply hurting. This is the time to call on your colleagues as a sounding board, to dig in your files for sermons that can be reused, or to take advantage of that retired pastor in your congregation and take a week off of preaching.
But enough about the dangers inherent in preaching when we are grieving a personal loss!
What about the possibilities our own deep grief offers for a deeper connection to God and God’s people? In my own experience, grief has made me more authentic as a preacher, more willing to ask the hard questions of faith out loud and let them stay unanswered. And to my amazement, people in the pews have appreciated this less-certain style of preaching, saying that they feel less alone in their wrestling and have more permission to reject the unhelpful platitudes they’ve heard.
This feedback is what led me to write The Grief Lectionary, a six-week study for using Scripture to engage your grief. In it, individuals and small groups are asked to consider familiar Scripture stories through the eyes of their grief and to find new insights.
Our own deep grief, ironically, can become the vehicle for the Good News:
- Our refusal to be comforted brings the voice of Rachel crying for her children (Jeremiah 31:15) into the present day, echoing the many laments in the Psalms and prophets that never appear in our lectionary texts.
- Our willingness to engage our grief publicly gives opportunity to point to all the places in Scripture where God grieves (Genesis 6; John 11; Ephesians 4:30), allowing our congregations to know God as a companion in grief.
- Our witness to the community of believers holding us with their faith when our own is lacking reminds us all that the gospel is always a communal word.
Do not be afraid, dear working preachers, when you are in the midst of your own deep grief: There is good news to be found in grief as well. Your wrestling and tears are holy, shared by the God who loves us and the Christ who saves us. When you feel up to it, preaching your own grief can be a powerful act of testimony, connecting you and your congregation more deeply to each other and to our God.
