All Saints Sunday
2 November 2025
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
Gregory Pope
THE GOLDEN STITCHES OF OUR GRIEF
Psalm 116. John 11.17-27
Last Sunday would have been my mother’s 81st birthday and my parents’ 63rd anniversary. However in August of 2020 my mother was diagnosed with an aggressive form of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Because the chemotherapy would have been so hard on her small frame already so very weak my parents made what I believe to have been a wise decision to forego treatment. For the next six weeks my family shared some warm and beautiful moments together and my mother knew very little pain. She is greatly missed. I wish you could have known her. Still beautiful at 75.
Eighteen months later in the Spring of 2022, my father would check into Piedmont Atlanta hospital with a headache that would not go away, caused we would later learn by an aneurysm. After an unsuccessful eight hour procedure that was supposed to take an hour, he never regained consciousness. Three weeks and two strokes later, after realizing he would not improve, we removed all death-delaying medicines and machines and allowed him to die in peace.
The best parents and grandparents the world has ever known. (My apologies to those of you who thought yours was the best!) In between their deaths, my wife’s father died after a brief illness. Grief upon grief upon grief.
The grief we feel at the death of someone we love, no matter how old they are when they die, rips holes in our hearts and lives. When Mary and Martha experienced the death of their brother Lazarus they were distraught. They were angry at Jesus for not getting there sooner, for not doing more to save their brother’s life. They knew about life after death. But they were living their lives before death, as we all do, and they wanted their brother Lazarus with them. They continued in the words of the psalmist to walk before the Lord in the land of the living.
As I continue to walk in the land of the living on the other side of my parent’s passing, for the first time in my life I live in a house my parents will never see and I serve a church they will never enter. What I have learned in my own grief and in walking with others through their grief is the importance of how we talk about grief. I have found that grief lasts as long as love lasts. You don’t “get over” your grief. You don’t “move on” from your loss. You learn to “walk with” your grief and “live with” your loss. And every person has their own unique journey through grief and loss.
Marabai Starr experienced the sudden death of her 14 year-old daughter Jenny. This is what she learned about grief. She writes: When someone you love very much dies, the sky falls. And so you walk around under a fallen sky. There is no map for the landscape of loss, no established itinerary, no cosmic checklist where each item ticked off gets you closer to success. You cannot succeed in mourning your loved ones. Nor can you fail. Grief is not a malady, like the flu. You will not “get over” it. You will only come to integrate your loss. . . . The death of a loved one is an amputation. You find a new center of gravity, but the limb does not grow back.1
The popular five “stages” of grief help us understand that all the numbness, shock, denial, and depression we experience in loss is normal. But our journey through those emotions toward acceptance more closely resemble a “spinning wheel” than step-by-step stages. Death cannot be processed well through quick answers, religious platitudes, a stiff upper lip, or checking off stages of emotions. Grief is not a process that can be rushed but must be allowed to travel its course over time and in its own time.
Jamie Anderson is the author of the Doctor Who novels. He has this to say about grief: “Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give but cannot. All of that unspent love gathers in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, in the hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”2 Yes, we can remember our loved ones. Yes, we can take flowers to the cemetery. But ultimately, grief feels like love with no place to go.
And grief with no place to go threatens to tear us apart. We cry out with the psalmist: The snares of death encompassed me. I suffered distress and anguish. I called on the name of the Lord: “O Lord, I pray, save my life!”
Pop recording artist Shawn Mendes sings as a jilted lover (which is its own very real grief) but his words ring true of almost any grief: I thought that I’ve been hurt before, but no one’s ever left me quite this sore. Your words – (or you can name your own grief here) – Your words cut deeper than a knife. Now I need someone to breathe me back to life. Got a feeling that I’m going under, but I know that I’ll make it out alive . . . And now that I’m without your kisses, I’ll be needing stitches.3 We all need stitches, do we not, when grief rips our hearts open? You will always be able to tell where the tear took place. Healing comes but the grief leaves scars.
The psalmist testifies that there are gifts along the way that over time can serve as golden stitches in our mending: The Lord heard my voice. God inclined his ear to me, therefore I will call on the Lord as long as I live. Gracious is the Lord. Our God is merciful. When I was brought low, God saved me. The Lord has dealt bountifully with me. The Lord delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling.
Hannah Coulter is a Wendell Berry novel every woman needs to read before she dies. It wouldn’t hurt for every man to read it too. Hannah has experienced much grief: the death of a young husband in World War II, the departure of a daughter from the farm and home place to life in the city, and the estrangement of a son lost without his father. Hannah speaks like Mary and Martha and the psalmist of “living in the absence of the dead.” And she asks: What is the thread that holds (us) altogether? Grief, I thought for a while. And grief is there sure enough, just about all the way through. . . . But grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery. . . . Love is a great room with a lot of doors, where we are invited to knock and come in. . . . The room of love is the love that holds us all. I am there with all the others, she says, most of them gone but some who are still here, who gave me love and called forth love from me.4
Though grief may feel like love with no place to go, there is a love that doesn’t need a place to go. There is a love that abides deep within. The love our loved ones pour into us that remains with us all the days of our lives. The love they have given is, in large part, the love of God. And the gifts of love they have given are numerous. Hannah Coulter says: “When I number them over, I am surprised how many there are. And so I have to say that another of the golden threads (in addition to love) is gratitude.” . . . Sometimes I was grateful because I knew I ought to be, sometimes because I wanted to be, and sometimes a sweet thankfulness came to me on its own, like a singing from somewhere out in the dark. I was grateful because I knew, even in my fear and grief, that my life had been filled with gifts.”5
For the six weeks leading up to my mother’s death, clouds of grief certainly hovered over my heart. But what surprised me in those few weeks was that more than grief my heart sat perched on the mountain of overwhelming gratitude. Gratitude that for 53 years my life was held in her great love, a love that continues to surround me even as I live into her physical absence from my life. As I looked at her in those last few days lying in bed or sitting outside on the porch in her favorite spot (on a swing that now sits on my deck) I could not stop thinking about all the times throughout my life her tender face had brought assurance, and her faithful feet had traveled to see me in the various places I have lived, and her kind hands had brought comfort, made or repaired clothes, and prepared meals – without vegetables – that made my soul sing.
My father tried his very best to teach me how to take care of a house, change the oil in a car, and make needed repairs. My brother listened very well and is now a useful husband to his wife. I, on the other hand, did not learn. The family tool box is in my wife’s name. But I am grateful for what my father tried to teach me, and for the unconditional love both my parents showered upon us.
Three and a half years now without parents, I find that in my grief I can pray with the psalmist: What shall I return to the Lord for all his bounty to me? I will offer to you a thanksgiving sacrifice and call on the name of the Lord.
I know that I will never be thankful FOR the absence of my parents. But perhaps as difficult as it may be I can do as Paul suggests and be thankful IN my parent’s absence for the gifts that are still mine because of their lives and because of the loved ones that still surround me. I don’t know about you but I have found that the life and love of those who have passed can remain with us and somehow even sustain us in their physical absence. And for that I can be thankful. And I can say with the psalmist: Even when I said, “I am greatly afflicted,” I kept my faith. Along with love and gratitude the golden stitches of faith call us back into life.
Hannah Coulter said after the death of her young husband: “There have been times . . . when I thought I would cry forever. . . . (But) the living can’t quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are (gone). They can’t because they don’t. The light that shines in darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room (of love). It calls them into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other little ones. Little Margaret (her living daughter) was calling me into life.”6
Such is the power of faith. There remains life to be lived work to be done people to be loved joy yet to be known. The golden stitches of joy.
When my mother passed away my daughter Jennifer was set to graduate two months later from Kennesaw State University. My mother expressed her sadness knowing she would miss it. It turned out that because of COVID there was no university graduation ceremony after all. So six days before my mother died, while she was still lucid, we held a graduation ceremony for Jennifer in my parent’s living room. Jennifer dressed in her graduation cap and gown, processed in to the traditional graduation music, thanks to Spotify. And I gave a make-shift one-minute graduation speech spouting forth every corny cliche I could think of about reaching for the stars, making a difference, following your dreams, beginning a new chapter. I called out her name and in the place of a rolled-up diploma we presented her with a roll of paper towels “with all the rights and privileges granted hitherunto by the university board of trustees.” And a proud grandmom led in the cheers! My mother went to bed the very next day and never got up again.
But one day she will! And so will Manley and Dean and Pat and Jim and all who have gone before us. I am the resurrection and the life, Jesus said. Anyone who believes in me even though they die, yet shall they live.
These are the golden stitches that help us heal while living with our loss – stitches of love that dwell deep within, gratitude for God’s bountiful gifts, faith that calls us back to life, joy in moments past and moments yet to come, and the living hope of resurrection.
I want to close this morning by sharing a powerfully sacred and holy moment that occurred in the final hours of the life of a woman in a former church of mine, a woman named Betty Jean, related to me by her daughter Lisa. It’s what Celtic Christians call “a thin place,” a place where heaven and earth seem to touch.
Many of you know the exhausting days of sitting with a dying loved one. Lisa was spending the night in her mother’s room. She slept through the alarm set to wake her in order to give her mother medicine. Betty Jean’s sister, Ollie, woke Lisa from a dream Lisa was having of her father Alvie who had died twelve years ago. In her dream Lisa saw her dad walk into her mother’s room go straight to her bed, and tell her mother, his wife: “It’s time to go.” When Betty Jean woke up she said to Lisa: “Death is calling, I’ve got to go.” And just a few hours later she crossed on over to the Other Side.
Perhaps it was a beautiful moment like that which led the psalmist to say: Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful ones. Loved ones who’ve gone before us await us on Another Shore. And when its time they will lead us through to the other side and welcome us home. Until that day of glad reunion as members of the Communion of Saints, that Great Cloud of Witnesses who join with us each time we worship – they continually call us and inspire us to live faithfully and love fully, to do God’s good work in the world and to love those we’ve been given to love.
Turns out the love within our grief has a place to go after all. And when our time comes we will greet our loved ones on Heaven’s Beautiful Shore in the sweet by and by. Thanks be to God!
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- Mirabai Starr, Caravan of No Despair: A Memoir of Loss and Transformation, Sounds True, 2015, 227, 223–224
- Jamie Anderson, source unknown.
- “Stitches.” Written by Danny Parker, Teddy Geiger, and Daniel Kyriakides. Performed by Shawn Mendes, Handwritten album. 2015
- Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter, Shoemaker and Hoard, 2004, 51-52, 158
- Berry 52
- Berry 57