Getting emotional

Acts 4: 32-35; John 20: 19-31
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
April 7, 2024

Photo of a person sitting on a graffiti-painted surface, wearing black boots, black jeans, and a black jacket. They have brown skin and black hair in short tight braids.  Their knees are drawn up and their head is face down, resting on their crossed arms.

For about the past eight or nine years we have celebrated the Sunday after Easter as Bright Sunday or Holy Humor Sunday, with jokes and funny memes, silly hats and songs, and kazoos, carrying forward the joy that God has the last laugh on death, that the worst thing is not the last thing. And before the end of Eastertide, before Pentecost arrives in May, we will celebrate that laughter. If you would like to help plan that worship service, change it up a bit, speak to me after the service or send me an email.



As much as I think it’s important to lift up laughter as a resurrection experience, as a part of our life together, it’s also just as important, if not more so, to lift up our tears, and really all of our emotions, as a resurrection experience. For many of us it is so much easier to laugh in church than it is to cry in church. I’ve had more than one person tell me that they don’t go to church because they don’t want to cry in front of other people. Author and pastor Benjamin Perry in his book Cry, Baby writes that when we cry, we’re allowing it to be okay that we’re not okay. He says, “We can’t experience resurrection without acknowledging something has died.”



Maybe that’s the problem that Thomas is trying to express. Unless he feels the wounds of crucifixion, until he knows first-hand the brutal scars of Jesus’ death, he cannot allow himself to experience the emotional joy of Jesus’ resurrection. What’s strange about this resurrection story and many of the others is the absence of tears. After all, this is their rabbi and close friend who has been killed by the state, the shadow of which also threatens their lives. Tears of anxiety and grief shared with one another would help them move through that trauma. In John’s gospel, after Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved look inside the empty tomb and leave, it is Mary Magdalene who stays behind and weeps. Indeed, in all of the gospels Mary is the only one to show her grief for Jesus by crying and it is through her tears she witnesses the resurrection.



It is also in John’s gospel that we witness Jesus cry at the death of his friend, Lazarus. It is the shortest verse in the entire Bible—"Jesus wept”—which ironically has become an exclamation of surprise or disappointment, almost a joke.



What is it about crying—a normal bodily function—that makes us so uncomfortable? When we really give in to it, we call it an “ugly cry”: red puffy eyes, nose dripping with snot, wracking sobs from our chest, our mouth in an open grimace. Perhaps crying makes us uncomfortable because, as Benjamin Perry puts it, tears are disruptive. We aren’t numb when we’re crying. Our tears demand we pay attention. They connect us to the suffering of others. They reveal our deepest longings.



Which is why I included the reading from Acts. When I read “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned land or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold…distributed to each as any had need”, I get emotional because *that* is one of my deepest longings. When one rejoices, all rejoice together. When one is sorrowful, all are sorrowful together.



I believe that one of the reasons we are stuck as a nation—stuck between the past and the future, past violence and future hope—is because we don’t know how to cry with each other. We don’t know how to cry with each other in a way that acknowledges pain and wrongdoing, but also opens the possibility of healing and a new way of being. I’ve had enough of being emotional castigated as a misogynist joke. I’m tired of being unemotional used as a toxic standard to uphold. I’m furious when queer tears, transgender tears, Indigenous tears, immigrant tears, people of color tears, disabled tears go unheard and ignored or are pushed aside. I’m fed up with crocodile tears and weaponized White Christian Nationalist tears and tears shed for a past that only existed in a privileged bubble. I’m pained by Palestinian tears, Jewish tears, Ukrainian, Russian, Congolese, Yemeni tears, the tears of children, the tears of this earth.



What if we wept more for this world that is not as it should be that we might feel what we need to hope and work for the world that it could be? What if our brokenhearted tears paved the way for not only our own but someone else’s healing? “This is my body broken for you. These are my tears shed for you. This is my life disrupted for you.”

At this Table, there isn’t anything you can feel here that hasn’t been felt before. Shame, hurt, betrayal, anger, doubt, loss, grief, regret, hope, love, fear, acceptance, profound joy—it’s all here, it’s all welcome, and so are you, just as you are. If anything gives us cause for tears, it’s mercy, unconditional love, open-hearted forgiveness. Tears that make us come alive where once we felt dead, when we realize the worst thing is not the last thing. That’s Easter, my friends. That’s the resurrection. Amen.

Benediction - A Blessing for Crying by Benjamin  Perry

If you've lost your tears, may you find them again.

Know that you are never beyond redemption

and worthy of full emotional life.

May crying nourish you,

a balm for the wounds you still carry

and a salve on fresh hurt.

As droplets fall, may they water new growth.

And may our collective weeping shape a world

better than the one we inherited.

May we attune ourselves to grief

and hold the place we are broken—repairers of the breach.
May cries long silenced be heard in full,
yeast for our communal rising.
Hold each other fiercely,
not to build a future where every eye is dry
but one where we weep copiously
from the joy and tenderness of living.


Amen.