Life Lessons: Loss
Luke 15:1-7
March 16, 2014
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross tells this story:
A man in his thirties told me that his wife had left him unexpectedly. He felt absolutely devastated. He spoke about the anguish he was going through, then looked up at me and asked,
“Is this what loss feels like? Lots of my friends have lost people to breakups and divorces, and even death. They were sad and they told me they were hurting, but I had no concept that it felt like this. Now that I know what it’s really like, I want to go back to all those people and say, ‘I’m sorry, I had no idea what you were going through.’
“I’ve grown and become much more compassionate. In the future, when a friend is dealing with a loss, I will be a completely different person, much more helpful to them. I will be there for them in ways I would never have thought of before, and understand the pain they are going through in a way I could never have imagined.”
That’s one of the ways experiencing a loss changes us, transforms us for the better. It unites us with other people. It helps us deepen our understanding of each other. Like that callow young man, when we first experience a significant loss – the death of a beloved family member, the ache of a once-promising relationship gone sour, an accident or injury or disease that makes us less than whole and less than able – when we experience something like that, we have the reality of the human condition engraved on our hearts. It hurts, and because we experience that hurt, it helps us to realize that other people hurt, too, hurt terribly. As different as we may be from any other person on the planet, we have that in common with everyone on the planet.
We’re continuing with our Lenten series of messages called Life Lessons, drawing on
Kübler-Ross’ book by that name and exploring some of the wisdom shared by those who are coming to the end of their life.
Today we’ll consider the lessons of loss. One of the privileges of being a pastor is that people share their stories with you, and so I know some of the losses that people in this sanctuary have lived through. In some ways I may not be saying anything today that you don’t already know through hard experience. But it’s worth reminding ourselves that, as the old Jewish saying goes, if you dance at a lot of weddings, you’ll cry at a lot of funerals. If you’re present for many beginnings, you’ll also be there for many endings. If life is a school, loss is a major part of the curriculum.
Not to belabor the point, but learning about loss is a lifelong endeavor. We come into the world yelling our little lungs out, because we have lost the perfect little world of our mother’s womb. As infants we are held, but then we’re put down, and we aren’t always sure if we’ll ever get picked up again. We get older and we lose friends when they move away or when we do; we lose our favorite toys when they get broken or lost; we lose the big playoff game. We have our first loves, and almost always lose them. Year after year we lose teachers, we lose friends, we experience the death of our childhood dreams. As we settle into adulthood we lose a lot of illusions about how our life can be. We lose money when we make stupid purchases. We lose jobs sometimes. We lose that sense that a 20-year-old has that anything is possible. We lose grandparents and parents and spouses and sometimes even children. And at the very end of life, all that we’ve worked for in material things is lost to us, because of course you can’t take it with you.

Now, don’t jump out the window just yet. Certainly those losses are interspersed with a life’s worth of joy and the million blessings that God pours into our lives. It’s a rare life that sees loss piled on loss without letup.
But to see these losses as opportunities for growth, and to make peace with the reality that loss is simply part of how life is – that is a mark of spiritual maturity.
Surely Jesus knew the experience of loss. One of the events he experiences during his public ministry is the death of his lifelong friend John the Baptist, killed by Herod. Matthew 14 says, “When Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself.”
We can only imagine his pain and his grief – both for his friend, and because Jesus knows he too is headed for a fatal showdown with Herod. “A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief,” the prophet Isaiah says in foretelling Jesus’ life, and that prophecy is borne out.
But Jesus also is able to use that sense of loss to point to God’s care for us. He tells a hostile crowd the Parable of the Lost Sheep, in which a shepherd loses one of his hundred sheep, and drops everything to find the lost sheep and bring it back to the safety of the flock. And there is rejoicing when what’s lost has been found. Jesus understands that the pain of loss sometimes trumps even abundant good things in our lives – the ninety-nine remaining sheep – and that our need for wholeness and healing after a loss can drive us to all sorts of strange behavior. And he uses this parable to point to God’s love for us and the pain that God feels when we separate ourselves from God through sin. God feels that loss acutely, and God reaches out to try to bring us back into the fold.
When you’re grieving a loss, whatever you feel is exactly what you’re supposed to be feeling. You might feel empty, helpless, paralyzed, angry, sad, fearful; you might not sleep or you might sleep all the time; you might eat nothing or everything. And there’s no time frame for grief; indeed, when you lose someone you love, you will always and forever have that loss as part of you. W.S. Merwin, in his poem “Separation,” says it like this: “Your absence has gone through me / like thread through a needle. / Everything I do is stitched with its color.” Life is forever different; life goes on.
I promised you that in these Lenten messages I would suggest some concrete ways we can claim each week’s Life Lessons wisdom for ourselves. And so, for your consideration this week, here are three ways to accept the reality of losses in our lives and maybe even find something holy in them:
First, it might help to remember the Buddhist idea that suffering comes from attachment.
Which is not to say that we shouldn’t form attachments; our love for other people is one way we experience and practice the love of God. But we can also recognize that the pain of loss is partly the pain of our own sense of connection and security being ripped away. There may be ways to meet those needs again.
The second idea is a corollary to that. In many ways we live our lives as a story, with ourselves at the center. Pretty much everyone on their wedding day thinks they’re entering a story that ends, like a fairy tale, with “And they lived happily ever after.” Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. But even in the happiest story, those losses will come. And so one of the keys to rolling with those punches is being able to craft a new narrative, a new story, for your life. To look loss square in the face and acknowledge that the old story has taken a dramatic plot twist, and to try to imagine where that plot might be taking you, and to claim that new story as your own.
Finally, acknowledge that some losses will always be with us in a dull ache of grief. Time heals, but there’s not enough time in the world to heal completely the sharpest grief. And when

you feel that continuing pain, recognize it as a connection to what you’ve lost. That person is always with you, and you know it because that ache is there. The heart is a muscle, and you’ll feel your beloved in muscle memory forever. In that, perhaps, is a small measure of comfort.
May God’s sustaining love be with us all in life and loss. Amen.