It would be safe to assume that at some time or another during the past week a number of us, for whatever reason, had tears in our eyes. You'd never know it by our Sunday morning faces, but unless we are an uncommon collection of stoics – and we're not – there's been some recent private weeping among us. There always is. A memory rises of someone we lost and it starts welling up again. Or stinging words get spoken and tears leap to the eyes. A maddening frustration can do it, or certain kinds of feeling afraid. A sense of failure and shame will do it, or just feeling deep-down lonesome. Sometimes we see the plight of others and weep for them. More often, it's about something in ourselves. It can happen without even knowing fully why. So many losses and stresses have accrued and commingled, who can say how many troubles may flow into a single tear?
Our weeping is done mostly in private. You don't see much of mine and I don't see much of yours. But there are places where tears are shed in the presence of others, and I'm grateful to say that church is such a place. Not just at funerals and weddings either, but in Sunday morning worship, for whatever reason, people cry here. This is as it should be. In worship we expose our hearts. Parts of ourselves that we often keep shielded are opened here in prayers and in music and in probing words and in shared silences before the most sacred. We are vulnerable here, vulnerable to the secrets of our own lives, vulnerable to the pain of others and to the anguish of the world, vulnerable also to God – to the tenderness and pain of God, to God's unbearable beauty and longing.
Maybe tears are especially fitting in worship because our capacity to weep is one measure of our being in the image of God. Aren't we unique among creatures in how we do our crying? Other animals express sorrow with sounds, postures, losses of energy and appetite. Humans do the same – and this other thing. How strange, really, that in our species sadness and other feelings send fluid pouring from our eyes. The fluid and the little duct it flows from already have the purpose of keeping the eye lubricated and clean. Why this other thing? It's as if we and only we would need an overflow valve for what we feel. The human capacity for sorrow is so utter that nothing available to other creatures can handle it. Not even our special gifts of language can handle it. Nothing remotely rational handles it – so it streams down the face, convulses the torso, chokes the voice. When what we feel is too acute to be said or too massive to be said but still must be expressed, then out it comes in weeping. Or, at times, in music. In this, music and weeping are alike, though neither replaces the other. So we humans, gifted with speech but knowing more and feeling more and wanting more than words or gestures can say, we have uniquely specialized in music and in tears.
This marks our kinship with God. Classical theological talk typically starts with the omniscience of God or the omnipotence of God or the omnipresence of God, but reading the Bible, what you get much more of is a sense of the pathos of God. God is grieved by the ruin of creation, God is in anguish over the evils humans do, God mourns the loss of communion among us, and where there is suffering, God suffers. If you prefer your deities aloof, serene, supremely rational, you do not want the biblical God, who mourns and rages and yearns and suffers, who feels hurtfully all this waste and ruin and wrong. If the Divine Being is, as portrayed in the Bible and in Jesus, a God of vulnerability and pathos, who can say how sacred some of our weeping may be? Our grief is a participation in the vast grief of God. God weeps through the eyes of those who suffer and who faithfully mourn.
But not forever. The Bible is adamant that the number of tears to be shed is finite; weeping has an end. Music does not. Whatever heaven may be, scripture can't speak of it without reporting the sounds of distant singing. But more than once scripture describes quite a different future for weeping.
One example is the book of Revelation. Whatever you happen to think about the book of Revelation – and I can guess that some of you don't think too much of it – you would admit if you read it that it is an unusually visual book. It talks in pictures, lots of them, and the pictures are vivid and dense with detail and very rich in symbolism. So in Revelation we get detailed visual images of a white-haired Jesus with a sword coming out of his mouth, and visual images of four strange creatures in heaven, and of a beast and a dragon and angels and apocalyptic horses and on and on. But as graphic as all this is, Revelation paints no picture of God. God is not described. God never even speaks until the very end of the book. All we are shown of God in this book is a throne. We're told that at the center of it all is a throne.
At one point fairly early in the book John the Seer describes a scene around that throne. Around the throne are gathered a multitude of people that no one can number from every nation and every tribe of the earth. They are all singing. There are angels too and elders and the four creatures, all singing around the throne. And before this scene is over, God is given a verb that involves use of the hand. From the throne now emerges a hand. How would you imagine the hand of God extending from the throne? Do you see it as an elderly hand, a hand ruined with holding the world, a hand as young as a child? What color would it be? Most of all, what is it stretching out there to do? Does it rise to bless, does it open to welcome, does it point as if to speak? None of this, says John. The hand extends from the throne to touch the faces of all the mortals gathered there, all the brown faces and black faces and every shade of human face, God touches. These are the words written of it: "And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes."
It means that all of our separations will at last be overcome. This is what all of our sad weeping is about – some kind of separation. We are cut and we cry. We are cut off from a loved one or we are cut off from a dream or cut off from ourselves or from God. That's where tears come from. Something that belongs together pulls apart, and out of this painful gap of separation comes pouring the stream of tears. The world is so full of sadness because the world is heaving from so many separations. Death separates us from those we love. Failure separates us from our dream. Sin separates us from each other and from God. Parents and their children are separate. Husbands and wives are too separate. The races are separate. Rich and the poor are separate. Here is a definition of injustice: people kept separate from what rightly is theirs. No wonder, no wonder, the earth runs deep in tears.
So when scripture starts to sing of a day when God will wipe away every tear, it's pointing us to hope in the One who means to reconcile all that is now painfully separated. Listen again to the promise and hold to it for life: "Death will be no more. Grieving and crying and pain will be no more" – every tear wiped away by the hand of God.
To know that this is God's dream is to know that our calling till that day comes is to heal all the separations that we can. Every reconciliation we can make we must make. Between rich and poor, old and young, women and men, neighbor and neighbor, between all of us who in some way have left each other, between ourselves and the God we have fled – every reconciliation we can make we must make. For this is the whole purpose of God in Christ, to move us toward the healing of all separations.
And this is why it is proper, till that day comes, that we do some weeping for all that is still so far from being healed. God can't wipe away our tears yet, for God's own tears are still falling. As Gustavo Gutierrez said, "Woe to those whom the Lord finds dry-eyed because they did not bring themselves to solidarity with the poor and suffering of this world." So we put our present sadness and our present rage to a purpose, joining our longing with God's longing, joining our passion with God's passion, condensing tears into prayers and deeds and signs of hope that hasten the day.
In Montgomery, Alabama, outside the Southern Poverty Law Center, is a Civil Rights Memorial. It was designed by Maya Lin, the same architect who designed the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. The Civil Rights Memorial is a huge circular table of black granite. Into the upper surface of the stone are carved the dates, places, and events that define the civil rights struggle, and the names of many who were killed. On the wall above the stone is the biblical mandate from Amos often quoted by Martin Luther King, Jr., with just the first word altered, "Until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness liked a mighty stream." The surface of the stone table with all these names and dates on it has a sheet of constantly moving water flowing over it. You can touch the water as it slowly washes over the names on the stone. You can hear it always flowing. On the day the monument opened one of those who came was the mother of Emmett Till, the fourteen year old boy from Chicago brutally murdered in Mississippi. As she touched her son's name on the stone beneath that sheet of water, she began to weep. Maya Lin was there and was moved to see a grieving mother's tears falling into the waters, mingling with the moving stream across the stone.
So also with God's dream for the world. It moves like waters across the hard stone of history; it will change the shape of things, as waters alter stone. And that mighty stream carries our tears mingled with the tears of God – the love stronger than stone, stronger than death, washing all our separations till they are healed at last.
A Jewish legend says that a certain angel is holding a huge vessel in which are kept all the tears of the righteous. They say when it's finally full the Messiah will come.
So God be in our tears and in our longing and our labors for the day that is to come. And when it comes, the sacrament of tears being completed at last, Christ will lift high the full cup and give it back to us, changed into wine. Then we will sing all the more our love for the One who has dried our eyes and made us whole.
1 Gustavo Gutierrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell (Maryknoll, NT: Orbis Books, 1987), 103
