God Is A Sore Loser

Everybody Loved Matthew

The obituary written by his parents acknowledged what we all felt. “Matthew died too early. Way too early. Everybody loved Matthew … Everybody.”

They went on to name the painful truth.

The last few years of Matthew’s life were marred by the disease of alcohol addiction. He was working on getting his life back through both in-patient and out-patient treatment programs, AA, and personal counseling. The road to recovery is long and hard with many stumbles along the way.  Matthew was on that road when he had his final stumble on April 9, 2024.

Speak What We Feel

Shakespeare got it right in the closing lines in King Lear.

The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel and not what new ought to say.

Shakespeare might have been channeling the Old Testament prophets and psalmists who never hesitated to speak what they felt. Matthew had, in fact, underscored Psalm 102 in his recovery journal.

The easy thing to do in “this sad time” is fall back on peaceful platitudes. The hard thing is to tell the truth. That’s what Matthew’s pastor/friend/spiritual counsellor who had walked with him along the way did in the memorial service. Speaking to family and friends who gathered from across the country, he named the “valley of the shadow of death” in Psalm 23 while claiming the promise that God walks through the valley with us in the assurance that “goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.” He declared the truth that is deeper and stronger than any other truth. “Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ.” (Romans 8:38-39)

I believe all of that. I believe it for Matthew. I believe it for all of us. But if I speak what I feel right now, I would say we lost the game this time.

Matthew and the people who loved him did everything they could to save him. And we prayed.
We prayed to the God who loved Matthew before he was born;
the God who gave him life and who claimed him as his child at his baptism;
the God to whom Matthew committed himself in confirmation;
the God to whom Matthew prayed;
the God whose essential character revealed in his Son is Love that never lets us go.
We prayed for Matthew to win the fight with alcoholism and go on living the life for which God had created him.

But alcoholism won. Matthew lost. His sons lost. Everyone who loved him lost. It feels like God lost, too.

The Jarring Reality

I realize that saying God lost is jarring. It pushes against the grain of what we believe or want to believe. And yet, I’ve long believed that the voice deep within us that shouts, “No! This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be!” is nothing less than the Spirit of God praying within us with groans too deep for words. (Romans 8: 26-27) When death comes like this, we feel like Mary and Martha at Lazarus’ tomb, crying to Jesus, “If you had only been here my brother would not have died!” (John 11:32-37) They wept. Jesus wept. It felt like God had lost.

After his 24-year-old son, Alex, died when his car skidded off the road into Boston harbor, William Sloane Coffin memorably said, “My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.” (Eulogy for Alex is one of the classic sermons of the 20th Century.)

Here’s the way I’ve been working my way through this for myself.

If God’s desire is abundant life all his children (John 10:10)…
If death is the “last enemy” to be destroyed (1 Corinthians 15:26-28)…
If the relentless love of God is the power that will ultimately triumph over all every power of evil, sin, pain and death (Revelation 21:1-6)…
And if prayer is joining God’s Spirit groaning within us with hope for a yet-to-be-healed creation (Romans 8:18-39)…
Then… 
When, in spite of all our prayers, hopes, and hard work, the life of one of God’s children is ruthlessly taken by addiction, injustice, violence  (you can add to the list), it means that for that moment, God’s will for life has been defeated, just the way God’s love made flesh in Jesus was defeated at the cross. And for the moment, we live in the shadows of Holy Saturday in the hope of resurrection.

But!

Matthew’s parents went on in the obit to affirm the larger, deeper, hope-filled truth when they wrote:

Matthew loved God.  And God loves him.  Everybody loves Matthew – especially God. 

Because of Matthew’s love for God, and God’s unstoppable love for him, we commend him into God’s care as he begins the never-ending adventure of eternity, “in which every chapter is better than the one before, and the story never ends.”  But we miss him.  He died too early.  Way too early…

Two things are true at the same time. We live with the jarring reality of loss and with the bold assurance that the game isn’t over at the grave! God is a sore looser who defeated death by raising his Son to new life. We dare to believe that in the power of the resurrection, God won that victory for Matthew. We believe that “he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also” (Romans 8:11). We commit our loved ones to the grave in “the sure and certain hope of resurrection to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”  (Service of Committal, United Methodist Book of Worship)

Coffin concluded his eulogy for Alex with the same affirmation. I know that when Alex beat me to the grave, the finish line was not Boston Harbor in the middle of the night. If a week ago last Monday, a lamp went out, it was because, for him at least, the Dawn had come.

And so, we did what followers of Christ have always done. We gathered for worship at Grace United Methodist Church. (What a great name for a church!) The chancel window captures the way Jesus took children in his arms and said that any of us, all of us, of any age, are like those children. (Matthew 19:13-15) The good news is that the same Jesus holds Matthew in the arms of his unchanging, undying, victorious love.

Here’s the truth. We live with the painful loss of death. Matthew died too early. Alcoholism won. But we also live with the relentless hope that God is a sore loser who has already won the game!

Grace and peace,

Jim