“Holding The Faith For Each Other” with Kim Wagner

Show Notes:

Grief lies to you. Grief will tell you that you are alone in your suffering. This conversation will remind you, over and over, that you aren’t. If you’re grieving right now, you might be tempted to skip this episode, but we encourage you to listen anyway. Send it to someone you know who is hurting, and maybe save it to come back to at a later date.

Kimberly Wagner has been on The Weight before to discuss collective trauma, but this conversation is a little more personal. As Christian churches approach All Saints, a day in which we remember and name those loved ones who have passed before us, we need the reminder that grief is holy and sacred, and that Jesus weeps with us even as he walks with us. We need the reminder that our communities of faith hold in trust the reality of hope and comfort, even when we don’t feel them.

Kimberly is assistant professor of preaching at Princeton Theological Seminary and the author of Fractured Ground: Preaching in the Wake of Mass Trauma. Her doctoral dissertation centered around preaching and trauma, and she has seen first hand how disorienting mass trauma to a community and to individuals. 

Resources: 

Learn more about Kimberly at her website, preachingandtrauma.com.

Buy Fractured Ground.

Read William Sloane Coffin’s sermon, Eulogy for Alex

Transcript:

Chris McAlilly 00:00

Hi. I'm Eddie Rester. I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight. Today we're talking to Kim Wagner, who is Assistant Professor Preaching at Princeton Theological Seminary. She's a repeat guest on The Weight, and today we're talking to her about an upcoming moment in the life of the church, All Saints. And we're talking about grief and death, and how to talk about those realities and to live into them as as a faith community.

Eddie Rester 00:29

One of my favorite days in the life of the church is always All Saints. And that's strange and odd, because it's a day wherein churches that celebrate All Saints, you name the people from the life of the church who have passed away in the last year, and you give people a moment and an opportunity to name loss and grief, and you acknowledge it as the body of Christ. And for me as a pastor, it's always been a special moment. Sometimes it's off putting to people. Some churches don't celebrate it. We talk about that in the episode as well. But for me, I think it's a significant moment as our guest today, Kim says, where we bring grief into and name grief in the body of Christ.

Chris McAlilly 01:15

I am increasingly drawn to Kim as just a trusted teacher of preaching, and someone who's just a faithful practitioner who is also kind of helping to guide the next generation into the work of ministry, and just really profoundly grateful for her perspective. We're not just talking about the church and preaching and leading. We're also talking about the reality, the human reality of grief and loss and Eddie and Kim and I all share ways in which that's impacted us personally, and that's a big part of the conversation. So if you're struggling, or if you know somebody that needs language, a faithful language around how to process and to move forward, both with the reality but also the hope of death and resurrection, this is a good conversation to share.

Eddie Rester 02:21

Absolutely. If you know, like Chris said, if you know somebody that's really in the moment right now, this may be a conversation that would be helpful for them or helpful for you, as you walk the walk with them. We're so thankful that you're in the journey with us every single week. We're thankful for the ways that you occasionally encourage us, but also send us guests and share the episodes, so we are thankful for you and where you are in the journey with us.

Chris McAlilly 02:52
[INTRO] The truth is the world is growing more angry, more bitter, and more cynical. People don't trust one another and we feel disconnected.

Eddie Rester 03:03

The way forward is not more tribalism. It's more curiosity that challenges what we believe, how we live, and how we treat one another. It's more conversation that inspires wisdom, healing, and hope.

Chris McAlilly 03:15

So we launched The Weight podcast as a space to cultivate sacred conversations with a wide range of voices at the intersection of culture and theology, art and technology, science and mental health, and we want you to be a part of it.

Eddie Rester 03:30
Join us each week for the next conversation on The Weight. [END INTRO]

Chris McAlilly 03:38
We are here today with Kim Wagner. Kim is a repeat guest on the podcast, and we're so grateful that you're here. Thanks so much for coming back and accepting our phone calls.

Kimberly Wagner 03:49
Absolutely. So glad to be with you all again. This is fun.

Eddie Rester 03:52
Yeah, I'm not sure everybody accepts our phone calls after being on The Weight. So we're just thankful that you...

Kimberly Wagner 03:58
Listen. Listen. Caller ID sometimes fails me too. No, it was so fun, so I'm glad to be back with y'all.

Eddie Rester 04:08
So we were talking before, before we hit the record button, just a little bit about your work and what you do. So remind everybody a little bit about kind of what your work, what your area is.

Kimberly Wagner 04:23

Absolutely. Well, I have the privilege and joy of serving as Assistant Professor of Preaching at Princeton Theological Seminary, and so I teach all kinds of the preaching classes, but the majority of my research and work is in preaching amid trauma. And so thinking about trauma and grief and suffering. I like to say no one brings down a party like Kim Wagner. You know,"Wwhat do you do for work?" "Oh, buckle in." You know.

Eddie Rester 04:49
That's right. Have you got an hour? Let's process some things.

Kimberly Wagner 04:52

Yeah, yeah. Well, and usually it either shuts things down or brings up so much that, like, the party just shifts, right. But no, so my book that's out is on preaching in the wake of mass trauma, and that's what we talked about last time I was with you all. But I also do work around what does it mean to be a wounded preacher? What does it mean to think about preaching authority in the midst of these things? And then the book I'm working on now, the work I'm doing now is on eco trauma and eco anxiety, and thinking about, how do we think about grieving the loss, ecological degradation, and thinking about the ways that we address that trauma so that we can address ecological degradation and climate change.

Eddie Rester 05:39

One of the things that we wanted to talk with you about today is All Saints. We're approaching All Saints. This will come out a couple of weeks before the Christian celebration of All Saints. And I say the Christian celebration of All Saints, but the reality is not all Christians celebrate All Saints, and even the ones who do show up in churches where All Saints is being celebrated around November 1. November 1 is All Saints. They may feel like they were dropped into something from outer space. So help us, Kim. Talk, to us a little bit about what's All Saints? What is this celebration? I call it a celebration. It's one of the high points for me of the year. So I'll lay that out there, but...

Kimberly Wagner 06:22 Absolutely.

Eddie Rester 06:22 Yeah.

Kimberly Wagner 06:23

Well, yeah, so jump in at any point here. But for I mean, technically, All Saints, right, is the celebration of the saints that have come before us. And in the Protestant tradition, we believe that those who have died and are with God now are all saints, right? That it is not just a high holy feast of Catholic saints, right? And so it falls always November 1, which after All Hallows Eve, or what we traditionally call Halloween. And so the two have a relationship, right? We think about All Hallows Eve as, which has been now obviously commercialized into Halloween. But All Saints Day being the celebration of the saints who have come before, but also a celebration of holding together grief and resurrection, right? Part of what makes All Saints holy is this celebration of the faithful who have come before us, of the faithful who have sought to keep the faith in the midst of the struggles of the world and a kind of celebration of the promise of the resurrection for them and for us. And so it is, I agree. I love All Saints. It is one of those feast days, one of those celebrations in the Christian church that does that hard and holy work of holding together grief and hope, loss and resurrection. And so it's a day that kind of sits in the middle of this kind of odd moment in the Christian calendar that can hold those things and help us hold those things.

Eddie Rester 07:58
Why do you think some churches, or even full denominations, they just it's not their thing. What would they gain, though, if they were willing to preach or to celebrate All Saints?

Kimberly Wagner 08:16

Yeah, I think there's multiple reasons, right? One is just, there are traditions and churches that that see it on the calendar and think I don't even know what that means. And there's an allergy to the language of saints in the Protestant historical tradition, right? One of the dividing things about the Protestant Reformation from the Catholics, is this idea of that there are not these distinguishable saints, but that we are all, as a priesthood of all believers, we are all saints. And so I think the language of All Saints Day is already hard for folks who are not familiar. But I also think that there is a natural allergy that we have as preachers, as churches, as denominations, to naming grief and to struggling with what it means to take loss seriously. We do not have... We have lost, maybe is the way to say it, such a robust understanding and theology of death. And so I think one of the struggles of All Saints is that it asks us to come face to face with death and to articulate a rich and faithful theology of death. And so I think a lot of churches resist that, and preachers resist that because it's hard to talk about death, right? We don't want to face our own mortality, either as individuals or collectively, right? I mentioned my work in eco trauma, and one of the things I'm really reading a lot of and exploring is, what would it mean for us to be honest about living in the end of the Anthropocene, right, living in the end of humans being the primary markers of Earth. And I don't know how close or how far we are from that, but to decenter ourselves and name and grieve loss is important, but hard. And I think it is a theological language and pattern that we've kind of lost, that All Saints actually might be one of the ways to help us reclaim and be able to talk about faithfully and well.

Chris McAlilly 10:29

One of the things that I feel like preachers do, this preacher, you know, maybe at the top of the list is we will jump forward to resurrection. We'll jump forward to hope without spending adequate time dealing with pain, grief, death, loss. Our previous conversation, we were talking about this in terms of mass trauma, and out of that conversation, shortly after that conversation, one of my best friends lost his father after having lost his mother, you know, within the previous 12 months. And so we've had, you know, this year has been a year where in just my sphere, family and friends, where we've been grieving and, you know, just kind of navigating that. I know that that's also a part of your last 12 to 18 months. I wonder if you, you know, I feel like there may be an opportunity here, if you're willing, to maybe take the conversation in a more personal direction. Would you be willing to maybe share a little bit about kind of your own journey with your mom?

Kimberly Wagner 11:41

Absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. So my mom passed away after a very, relatively brief illness on October 7 of 2023 in the early morning of October 7. And it was what I would call a fairly traumatic death and loss. Twelve weeks before she died, we were as a family in Hawaii celebrating my dad's 70th birthday. I was snorkeling with her. I wouldn't say she was 100% healthy, but it was like having a sinus infection, right? And then on the way back from Hawaii, she fell ill, was hospitalized briefly, misdiagnosed, sent home, and then at the end of August, dad couldn't wake her up from a nap. And so she ended up going into the ICU and never coming out. So she was in the ICU for eight weeks, almost eight weeks, seven and a half weeks. And by the end of the first week, we received her diagnosis of a very rare, very aggressive lymphoma, and we fought hard with and for her, always asking, though, as a family, this really important question that I wish we would do better, theologically thinking about, which is, what is life giving and what is merely preserving? And so every medical decision we made with my mom, because, also, I should tell you, she was not fully conscious. So I never talked to her again after she went into the ICU. She never fully woke up. There were days she could nod. Really good days she could do thumbs up and thumbs down, but her capacity for language was gone. And so we had to make medical decisions, kind of with but on her behalf. And we kept asking questions about, what does it mean to merely preserve biological existence versus support life? And so that those were questions we wrestled with as a family during her care. And then, you know, we got two rounds of chemo in her, and by the second round, it was too much for her body, and so she passed away, like I said, early morning of October 7. And it has been a really challenging grief journey, but a beautiful one. I've recognized so much of my work coming out in the way I have processed and my family has processed, and I'm very proud of my family, my father and my sister. We have really come together as a family to support and care for one another and realize the challenges each of us face are different, right? That that my relationship with my mother is, was and is, very different than my sister, who herself is a young mother, and so losing her mom as she's trying to mother. You know, my niece was two when my mom died. And my mom loved being a grandmother. Oh my gosh, she was, you know... And so I've taken up the mantle a little bit of over spoiling that child. And I do so proudly and unapologetically. And so to recognize the needs that each of us had, but that yet the shared collective grief has been a real gift. And as I think about, you know, to get back to the topic at hand, and I, you know, feel free to edit any of this out, by the way. ButAll Saints, I think, allows us, even if you are not the family grieving that year or that era, it allows us to practice that capacity to hold with one another our individual and collective griefs. Because one of the gifts and challenges I think of grieving with my family this year has been holding my own grief while also wanting to care for my sister and my father and my aunt and all the other people who loved mom. And like the outpourings that come when folks are, "Oh my gosh, I miss her so much," and I'm like, "So do I." And how do I honor my own missing her with honoring the care I want to provide and the ways I want to be in community. Not just like shutting down my own grief, but like, how can I put my grief and love in community with others' grief and love? And both the gift and challenge of that. You know, and then, my dad's own journey. He and my mom had been together since he was 17 and my mom was 16. They were high school sweethearts and went to college together, got married, were married for 48 years, and so, you know, so this is a loss of a life partner. And I kind of jokingly say, and I've said it to my dad so I can say it on a podcast. My dad doesn't know how to... Didn't know, I shouldn't say "doesn't" at this point, but didn't know how to adult without my mom, right? They grew up together. They've navigated adult life together.

Chris McAlilly 16:56

Yeah, so I thank you so much for sharing, and I resonate so much with some of what you shared. What I have in my mind are just the loss of both of my grandmothers, kind of in the wake of, during the COVID era, and just kind of that it's when you're sharing this story, some of my own grief, it just comes to the surface. And I'm sure that's the case for others, and I think in a beautiful way, because I see my family coming around one another in the wake of those losses. And you know, there are a couple things that you said that I just want to lift up. One is the opportunity that All Saints presents to unite your grief with the community, the grief of the community. But why is that important, and what can be gained from that?

Kimberly Wagner 17:52

Yeah, I think it's so important, because first of all, grief is a human experience, right? Grief is a sign of love, right? If we don't love, we don't grieve. Grief is also, I think, an expression of gratitude. But grief is a shared human experience, and I don't think we were ever designed to grieve alone. I think part of the how we were created is to be able to hold these things in community, but we have so privatized death and loss and grief, right. And I think one of the gifts our Jewish siblings offer us is the sitting together, right, and the ways that you sit Shiva after a death for, I believe it's 12 days. I don't want to misquote it. 12 days, yes. That the family is never alone, that they are never, that there's always someone there, even if it's not in the room, but in the house or in the space, sitting and praying with them, for the family, even if there's no conversation happening, right? And I think that one of the gifts All Saints allows us is to not only exercise that, but practice it, what does it mean... I remember as a child, I attended a rather large Presbyterian Church, and always for All Saints, the youth would get together, or the children and youth, and we would make felt banners for each person who had died in the church that previous year.

Eddie Rester 19:35 Wow.

Kimberly Wagner 19:36

And the families would give a little write up about the person. And so we would try to put, we'd put their name on it, and then we'd put like symbols of things they enjoyed, or hobbies or things like that. And then what would happen is, on All Saints Day or Sunday, each child would process in with the banner that they helped make as that name was read. And would stand surrounding, while we sang "For All the Saints," and would stand surrounding the congregation holding these banners. And I remember as a child, I loved making the banner right, but I couldn't understand why it was important and why we did it every blinking year, right? And now I realize what it did was it allowed us not just to honor those who had died in the community. It allowed us to see one another's grief and to recognize our own. And I remember my mom would cry every year. She was a crier, so to be fair, like a good Kleenex commercial would get her going, but I remember watching her cry every year and thinking like, do we know these people? Right? And some years we did, some years we did, and some years we didn't. It was a big church, right? But I started to realize that part of the gift of All Saints and the gift of that practice, whether or not you do that practice in your church, right? The reading of names or the recognizing of those who have come before or those who died within the last year, is inviting us to honor our own grief, right? Chris, you named what bubbled up for you in me sharing my story of my mom. When we share grief stories others' grief is honored, but also we have the opportunity to cry with. I mean, and this is something Jesus modeled, right we think about Jesus in the Lazarus story, and one of the first thing Jesus does is he wept with them. He knew he was going to bring Lazarus out of that tomb, but yet he stopped to weep with. And I think there is holy work that happens when we weep with one another and we honor one another's grief, and it's a way of building the body of Christ.

Eddie Rester 21:52

In those last words that you said, "the body of Christ" have been just echoing through my head, particularly with the story of the kids making the banners. This is one of the few times in my mind, and maybe part of the reason that I love it so much is that we get to grieve, to honor, to celebrate, to name resurrection in a very practical way as the body of Christ. In our world, we are so individualized and atomized and spread out. And churches aren't neighborhood churches anymore. Churches are people drive 30, 40, minutes to come to church and you know, or they don't see each other during the week like they used to when the world was a little slower and more community centered. And so it's this amazing moment where the body of Christ gets to really be the body of Christ, and you name people that you may or may not know. And depending on what your church does, in terms of candles or naming or banners, whatever they do, it's a moment where we get to pause and say, "We're all in this together." This life, death, resurrection thing, it's all of us. And one of the other things I've been thinking of, Kim, is that last year your mom died on October 7, and so All Saints was less than a month later for you. So it was early on in the grief process. All Saints is coming up again in just a few weeks. And so as you approach it this year, I mean, this is not a year where your mom would be named as she was last year in a service, probably, so kind of, what's your mindset now, as you approach All Saints?

Kimberly Wagner 23:39

Such a good question. I think for me, part of what I'm... I will always connect All Saints with the loss of my mom, because it was so close. And actually, I believe we celebrated All Saints Sunday, like three days after her service. So because we waited, we had to wait a few weeks for her service due to family and scheduling and all those things, you know, just the practicalities, and we did not want to hold her service on my sister's birthday. That became a really... I said, we do not want to connect those two. I put my foot down on that. So we waited a little longer. So mom's service actually was the 28th of October. So, you know, All Saints came right on its heels. And so I think I always connect it with with her. In a way, All Saints has always been, you know, holding that tension between death and resurrection. And in a way, last year it was very much the death was we honored her death at the service. And All Saints became very resurrection oriented for me. And I think this year, two things, two mindsets. One is, I think All Saints now can hold both a little more for me this year, can hold that honoring of how do we talk faithfully about death without rushing to resurrection, but trusting in resurrection? And I think part of the reason we can talk faithfully about death is because we have resurrection. It's the same reason we can go to God in confession, because we trust in grace and forgiveness, right? We wouldn't be able to do that if we didn't have that other piece. And so I think for me, I'll be able to hold those two closer this year, being that it is not within weeks of my mom passing. The other thing, I think, is I now see I'm paying attention to All Saints and who is where I was last year, who lost somebody in the last 12 months, for whom this is their first All Saints. And how do I welcome them into, to use, a to borrow a phrase from William Sloane Coffin who said, welcome them into the world's army of the bereaved. Right. He uses this great line in his sermon on his own son's death, Alex's death, and he talks about what it means to be the newest recruit in the world's army of the bereaved. And I think that there is a beautiful and hard reality that comes when you lose a close loved one, whether that's a grandparent or a parent or a sibling or a child, and that you get brought into this community. And I think one of the things is having entered that community in a new way last year, and that's not to say I had--I'd lost all my grandparents, you know, before my mom died--but like that was the first death that felt out of order, almost. You know, not completely out of order, but felt... All my grandparents died in their 90s. They lived full, long lives. My mom was 69 right? Like, not terribly old. But to say, like, what does it mean for me this All Saints to be attentive to caring for and welcoming members into this community of the bereaved, recognizing that it is a holy space. It is not a community of folks who have to hide their grief, or somehow pretend to be okay.

Chris McAlilly 27:26
I want to press into the preaching dimension and then come back to this kind of more personal connection for a person who's going to be coming into this All Saints having lost someone. I want to... Maybe we can come back to that. But for a moment, let's stick with preaching. You mentioned William Sloane Coffin's sermon. This is a classic sermon, if you're not aware of it, and you have to offer words for a loved one at a memorial service or a funeral, or if you're a preacher, particularly in the wake of a traumatic experience, I think it's a really important, classic example of the best version of preaching in the wake of death. Maybe give voice to that. And then I want to come back to our, both of our preacher of teaching, our teacher of preaching, that is Tom Long, I'm going to come back to him after we talk about William Sloane Coffin.

Kimberly Wagner 28:32

yeah. Well, that sermon, I use it quite a bit. I use it in my book. I teach it as well, because it's what... So, to give a little context, it was preached in 1983, January of 1983 so it's an older sermon. And William Sloane Coffin preached it, I believe it was 10 days after his son Alex died in a car accident in the Boston, he drove off the edge of the road and drowned in his car in the Boston Harbor. And William Sloane Coffin comes back and was preaching at the time at Riverside Church in New York City. And it's a unique sermon for Coffin because he was very much a social justice oriented preacher, preached against the Vietnam war, against disarmament, or preached for disarmament, against nuclear war, nuclear weapons. And so for this, to preach this, it's such a personal sermon. I tell my students I love this sermon, and I would not recommend you preach this soon after the loss of a loved one on this. I think it's a... He does it well. But I think most preachers cannot speak in this kind of way about loss without, you know, sharing their wounds with their congregation in ways that might be problematic. That being said, one of the things I love about the sermon, there's so much I love about the sermon. First of all, Coffin's just a great preacher, and incredibly poetic in the way he talks about things. But what I love in the sermon that I hold up for my students is that he wrestles in the sermon. One of my favorite lines. There's two favorite lines in the sermon. The first is he says--and now you're going to make me remember the quote, because I don't have it in front of me. But he says, some of the best and reasonably the worst letters came from fellow reverends who proved they knew their Bible better than the human condition. They said... And then he goes on to say, "and I know all the right words, for goodness sake, including 'blessed are those who mourn.' And my faith is no house of cards. But here's the thing. While I know these words to be true, grief renders them unreal." It's such a fabulous discussion of, like, what does it mean? Right? I'm like, it blows my mind. I probably heard this sermon, what, hundreds of times, and it blows my mind every time. But then he closes the sermon with literally an entire paragraph recitation of texts of comfort, and he starts that recitation saying, "and while the wound is still deep, these words are beginning to feel true again." And so within the course of the sermon, and it's not death, resurrection, right. He is still wrestling, but within the course of it, he names the way that words can be rendered untrue by grief or feel unreal by grief, and then yet still recites them. It's stunning.

Eddie Rester 31:42

I love how honest that is, because I think sometimes what he's wrestling with is that, in our best intentions as followers of Jesus, to give comfort, we give more honor to the words of scripture--and that's going to sound odd--than honor to the moment the person is in. And again, I go back to our Jewish brothers and sisters who sit with, and it's a sitting with, not a speaking to, and sometimes we need to be with until the words of hope and comfort can really begin to speak again to people in a new and different way. It means something different, I found, after you're able to be in grief for a while.

Kimberly Wagner 32:35

Absolutely, and it's not linear either, right? Like there are seasons those words... Like, even with my own grief journey, there are seasons some of those words feel comforting and true, and there are seasons and moments where I'm just like, No. Those are hard to believe. And I think even just giving language for the challenge of believing it can be so powerful. Those words are held in trust for us, right?

Chris McAlilly 33:02

Yes, I was just about to say that. I was about to say that phrase because I learned that phrase, I learned that story and that phrase from the person that I assume you learned that story and that phrase from, Tom Long. So Tom Long taught preaching at Candler School of Theology and Princeton, before Kim, and he has written extensively. First off, he's, I've never heard a better preacher. I've never been around someone who can teach preaching as well as this guy. And specifically on the topic of death. He wrote a book called "Preaching About Death," and he talks a lot about the language that... Or the book is called "Accompany Them with Singing." The class that I took was called Preaching About Death. And he talks about this reality that sometimes the words of the faith can sound untrue or unreal in a moment, but that the language of the faith, and I think, we can add the rituals or the liturgies of the church, including All Saints, to the set of things that the church has in its storehouse. They can be brought out. They're held in trust for us for moments when we need them, and then also in times where they're rendered unreal for us. They're still there for us. And so by gathering together with the faithful, there's a way in which others can believe them for us, until our grief, which is obscuring our hope, maybe kind of lifts a bit, and we can again kind of enter into the language once more. It's as if the community of faith holds our hope for us through the language of scripture, the singing of the church, the rituals, and the liturgies.

Eddie Rester 33:52

And that's why I go, why the body of Christ, I think, when I think of All Saints, and being the body of Christ in a very real way around that, because on that day, that's exactly what we're doing. We're holding in trust for others. When early in my ministry, the church I served did a divorce recovery class. And one of the things we would talk about the very first night, when people didn't want to be there, they were grieving deeply, a loss, a pain, a brokenness that they could not understand. Most of them couldn't even fathom. They didn't want to be there in any way, shape, or form. They were just drawn there for a reason they didn't understand. And we said we're going to hold hope and joy and trust for you until you can understand it and know it again. And usually 10, 12, weeks when the class was over, there was laughter again. But I think sometimes we undervalue our own impact on holding things in trust for others, and when we're in grief, sometimes undervalue what others are doing for us, even sometimes when they speak the words that maybe don't ring true for us in that moment.

Kimberly Wagner 36:05

Absolutely. And I think that's some of the work of preaching, particularly on All Saints. To bring it back to kind of a practical moment here is I think one of the gifts that All Saints offers a preacher and a community is to start practicing those words. Some, because there are going to be some folks in that room that need it right then, and there are going to be some folks in that room who will need it next year or the year after, or the year after that, right. How do we practice holding things together, holding the faith for each other? And guaranteeing folks that it will be there for them when they are ready again, when they can receive it again. And so I think a lot of our preaching... Earlier in our conversation, Chris, you mentioned, how do we not rush to resurrection? Our inclination, or named our inclination, to rush to resurrection. And I think one of the things is that our faith and All Saints invites us to hold space for loss and hurt and grief and brokenness and disruption and struggle, by saying we do this because we trust in the resurrection, but we're also holding this together. Right? It's allowing us to do this work collectively, as opposed to individually and chronologically, even, right? I think some of the best All Saints sermons I've ever heard start with resurrection and then say, but the reason why this matters is...

Chris McAlilly 37:41
Yeah. So let's maybe get a little bit more technical.

Kimberly Wagner 37:48 Yeah.

Chris McAlilly 37:49

So I think if someone is, you know, maybe new to the task of preaching, or, you know, looks at these moments of a funeral, or doesn't know what to say at Easter, doesn't know what to say at All Saints, what are some of the ways of kind of navigating? You've already mentioned this text of Jesus, coming, waiting, being called by Mary and Martha, waiting to come, coming to their house to raise Lazarus, weeping with them. Like that's one of the frames for preaching about death. It names the humanity of Jesus, and kind of Jesus accompanying us on this way of grief. What are some other frameworks or kind of models that you think might be helpful if someone tries to navigate how to preach on a Sunday like All Saints?

Kimberly Wagner 38:54

Yeah, I think another great model that I often lean upon is lament psalms, psalms that are able to hold together questions to God, crying out in lament alongside recitations of faithfulness, right, recitations of," I know I was taught that you are a God who is great in mercy and abounding in steadfast love. But where are you right now?" Right? And these lament psalms, again and again, are able to hold together the crying out to God, the hard questions, and this kind of repetition of what we know to be true about who God is, even if it doesn't feel true in the moment. And so to me, in our preaching, what would it mean for us to offer together lament for the losses, questions--about particularly losses in the world. I mean, we're coming up on, I mean, ironically, not ironically, but my mom died the morning of the beginning of the Israel-Palestine conflict. And, you know, we're over a year on that. We have the war in Russia and Ukraine. We have all these ongoing just, just horrendous issue of gun violence in this country, right, and losses due to natural disasters and hurricanes and flooding and what would it mean for us to like hold that grief with the individual grief, and be able to say to each other, "And yet God is with us. And yet God is merciful and abounding in steadfast love. And it may not feel true right now, but it is true, and we're going to keep repeating it to each other until we we can recognize its truthfulness." And so obviously the model of Jesus, with coming to Mary and Martha and weeping with them and being able to receive their questions of "Lord, if you had been here..." Or not, questions, accusations, right?

Eddie Rester 41:03 Accusations, yeah.

Kimberly Wagner 41:03

"Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." And Jesus doesn't start arguing with them. He receives it, right? He's like, Yeah, I can take this. And the same with lament psalms, the holding together of pain and trust. And I think that that is another way that we can even model the form of our sermon after ,to look and study a lament psalm and see like, how does that psalmist jump from one thing to the next? And even thinking about, how do we talk about that in both our individual and our corporate griefs?

Eddie Rester 41:38

One of my favorite lament psalms, if somebody's listening, they're like, "I don't... What's? I don't know where the lament psalms are." One of maybe the best examples is Psalm 13. "How long God?" How long will this go on? How long will I have to sit in this brokenness and pain and loss? And really lays it out there, point blank, the questions that I think that when we sit in a moment of intense grief and we can't figure out, is it going to end? Is it ever going to end? And yet, at the end of that psalm, just a few verses later, it's only six verses long, "but I trust in your unfailing love. My heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing the Lord's praise, for he has been good to me." And so like you're saying, it's holding in tension, the reality of life and the joyful truth that even though I'm stuck here right now, God is with me and will be with me going forward in ways I can't see yet.

Kimberly Wagner 42:51 Yeah. And I...

Chris McAlilly 42:51
Yeah. If one of the... Oh, sorry to interrupt you.

Kimberly Wagner 42:54 No, jump in. Chris.

Chris McAlilly 42:56

So if one of the frameworks, that's really helpful, and it may be kind of the paradigmatic frame for Christian preaching is to Easter, it's death, resurrection. In the Old Testament, you also have this framework that I learned from Walter Brueggemann, the great Old Testament scholar, particularly in his work on the psalms of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation. And so psalms of lament are classic psalms of disorientation. I" don't know what the hell is happening to me right now. I used to know. We used to know." Like, everything was great, and now it shattered. And part of it is naming the disorientation, but also kind of holding out the possibility for a reorientation. You know, I've kept my feet underneath me again. I'm still alive. You know that this is not... You know, we're shattered by grief, but we're still going. We're still walking the pilgrim journey, and God is still with us as we kind of wander through the wilderness towards the promised land. That framework, you know, I think, is helpful. And All Saints is unique, because it's not in the, usually, not in the immediate aftermath of a loss. It's, you know, your your mother's lost notwithstanding, but you're, in some ways, intentionally, the church is raising up in us grief that oftentimes our culture, we want to keep down.

Eddie Rester 44:27
That's what I was going to say.

Chris McAlilly 44:29

In order to let it, I mean, in some ways, come into the light and into the community, rather than be this thing that keeps us isolated that we don't know how to navigate, and also brings it into the presence of God, whose character we know is steadfast, faithful. From generation to generation, God is going to keep us, hold us, and lead us into something other than just this crappy moment that we're in, you know.

Kimberly Wagner 45:08

And I think that one of the gifts of doing this corporate work of naming grief and death is that it blesses it as holy. For too long, I think that we have felt like we have to keep it in the shadows, because that when we feel bad or when we feel hurt, that somehow that is a sign of either a lack of faithfulness or a lack of holiness or lack of God's presence. And yet our scripture is filled with people, maybe with our ancestors and the saints that have come before us, naming as holy, grief, pain, loss, wrestling, right? And I think one of the things that we, one of the most powerful and counter-cultural messages that All Saints can offer us is the chance to say this, too, is holy. That God is not divorced from these moments. That God actually engages with us in these moments. Jesus wept over Jerusalem, right? There's just language of weeping all throughout the psalms and Lamentations in the Old Testament and the prophets, right? And just to say that that this weeping is throughout our biblical text. And yet, for some reason, particularly in Western Christianity, we have decided that anything that feels negative is not welcome or is not holy, or is somehow beyond God, right?

Chris McAlilly 46:43 That's right!

Kimberly Wagner 46:43

And so what would it mean for All Saints to be one of the ways we re-establish a rhythm that recognizes, in a theology and a communal way, that recognizes hard feelings, bad feelings, negative feelings, as also holy?

Chris McAlilly 46:58
Yeah, it's not happy clappy Protestantism here. We trying to go a little bit deeper.

Kimberly Wagner 47:04 That's right!

Eddie Rester 47:04 That's right.

Chris McAlilly 47:06

Yeah, one of the things that's interesting about this to me is that one... So we at our church, we have a traditional expression of worship with robes and an organ and acolytes, and what you would think of as kind of traditional worship, and then we have a more modern expression, more contemporary music with a band. And one of the things I find fascinating is on All Saints Sunday, in this environment that's associated with praise and worship and more kind of upbeat music and feelings, that's the service where, when you bring All Saints into it, that's where the magic happens. It is so powerful to see that room change, the emotional tenor of the room change where we bring grief into the room and allow folks to light candles, the movement around the room. It is a holy, holy moment as we're engaging in these ancient practices. It feels so amazing. And I mean, it's one of my favorite moments of the year. Why is that? Why is it that something like All Saints in that kind of environment has that kind of power?

Kimberly Wagner 48:22

I mean, I think that it has power in that kind of what we were talking about a little earlier, which is that it acknowledges that grief is part of the worshiping and communal life. And often in spaces and services that focus on praise, it is also grief that is couched in praise, right? That it is acknowledging communal grief amid a space that normally is surrounded by praise music or by more happy, not happy clappy in a bad way, right? But more joyful worship to pause and say, "This, too, is worship. This, too, is part of what it means to be the body of Christ, the faithful community." And when we have those moments, I think that feel both disruptive but welcome, holy things happen, right? That kind of disruptive moment of, "Wait a second. God is here, too."

Eddie Rester 49:21

And I think sometimes we undersell as pastors, let me speak to pastors. Sometimes we undersell what the congregation needs. We underestimate their capacity and desire to step into the hard places. And so, you know, I've heard pastors say, "I just don't want another day where we remember funerals." I had a pastor tell me that one time. And it's not that. It's opening the doors to the full expression of life in worship. And I think for some of those, because I've been with Chris, where I've been in other churches, where the moment you do that in modern worship, it really becomes transformative because it introduces something unexpected. Maybe it feels a little jarringly out of place, but in a glorious way. And I would say, if you're listening today, and your church doesn't do All Saints. This isn't a time to quit your church, get mad, whatever, but maybe it's time to go have a conversation with the pastor, some of the church leaders, and say, "Hey, next year, in 2025 can we begin to think about bringing this into the life of the Body of Christ, so that we can name something that the rest of the world doesn't want to name or talk about as an experience of what we do across life?"

Chris McAlilly 50:47

I wonder. I wonder as we kind of wrap up and bring the conversation to a close, I wonder if we could come back to just an individual who may have had a hard year, someone who may have lost someone, who is really struggling or grieving, you know, maybe doesn't want to go be a part of a big service or whatever, but maybe is just just kind of stuck in grief. I wonder if you have any words of encouragement that you might offer to someone who's in that kind of a place.

Kimberly Wagner 51:21

Yeah, well, you know, I said earlier, I think sometimes we think grief is a sign of brokenness, or somehow we're failing atdoing this well, and instead, I think recognizing that grief is a sign of love, and grief is a sign... Grief... We only grieve that which we love and those whom we love. And so grief is actually a very healthy thing. The other thing is, is particularly intense grief, acute grief, traumatic grief likes to whisper a lie to us that says that we are isolated and we are beyond help and support and accompaniment. And I just want to offer that encouragement that says that is not. That is a lie that grief is whispering in your ear and that you are not alone. And that means being willing to share with those around you, to your friends or your family or your community or your community of faith. In times where you don't have that kind of support, to find communities, grief communities, who can journey with you. I will say one of the interesting conversations that I had, actually with my father, and I feel comfortable sharing this, because I think he would be good with it. I will ask his permission before we air, but. He really at some point, about six months after mom had died, he said, "I'm having a hard time because I want to talk about her, but I feel like I shouldn't." And I was like, "why is that?" And he goes, I feel like everybody... I don't want everybody be like, 'I don't want to hang out with him, because all he's doing is talking about his dead wife.'" Right? And I said, "Dad, does it not occur to you that people, first of all, are more than delighted to journey with you, but second of all, that when you open up that conversation, they get to talk about her too?" Rght? Because the people he's talking to are largely people who knew her, and who had dinners with her, where my mom was the queen of hospitality, were hosted by her. And, you know, that didn't occur to him, and I think it was a conversation we've had multiple times, of like, let others accompany you, because that is not only a gift for them to be with you, but it allows them to remember her. Right? When I talk about my mom, I find that folks will say, "Oh my gosh, I remember this one time..." And then they're eager to tell these stories about her. And so just to fight that little voice that says you have to do this alone. You don't have to do this alone. Not only do you have the presence of God and the Spirit with you, but you have community. And if not, I would encourage you to find community, because the hardest thing I think about grief is that it is isolating.

Eddie Rester 54:30

Kimberly, that's the perfect place to land. Thank you so much for the conversation today. Thank you for your willingness to share your grief and loss, but also the hope that we have as the body of Christ in All Saints. So thank you for that.

Kimberly Wagner 54:45 Thank you. This is such a joy.

Chris McAlilly 54:48 Thanks so much, Kim.

Eddie Rester 54:50
[OUTRO] Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed the podcast, the best way to help us is to like, subscribe, or leave a review.

Chris McAlilly 54:58

If you would like to support this work financially, or if you have an idea for a future guest, you can go to theweight podcast.com. [END OUTRO]