Tag Archives: J. Todd Billings

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Lament and the Open Grave

Leave a comment

 

It was a cold February at Christ of the Desert monastery, high in the mountains of northern New Mexico. Behind the chapel, author William Bryant Logan noticed an open grave, the disturbed red soil waiting in a tall mound beside it.

“Has a brother died?” he asked a monk.

“No,” he answered, “but we cannot dig in winter, so we opened this grave ahead of time, just in case.”

To many of us, an open grave is unnerving, the thought of soil disturbed and waiting entirely unwelcome. “An open grave is an open mouth,” writes Logan. “It exhales all the suggestion of the dark.”(1) In the Western world in particular, we have a complicated relationship with death, dismissing as much of it as we can manage from sight and mind and society. An open grave is a gaping wound we seem to prefer buried.

Christian theologian J. Todd Billings notes something similar about the practice of lament, a discipline—maybe even a word—that has fallen out of use in modern times, buried or hidden in Christian liturgies. “[I]n a growing trend,” writes Billings, “many funerals completely avoid the language of dying and death as well as the appearance of the dead body—turning it all into a one-sided ‘celebration’ of the life of the one who has died.”(1) While this language might be fitting for certain worldviews, where death remains an enemy that puts an end to the celebration, the biblical paradox about death attends to far more of the human experience. The Christian worldview affords the hopeful (and far more multivalent) language of celebration to be sure—Christ has indeed conquered death—but likewise, we are afforded the equally hopeful language of lament, given permission to groan as mortals who do not yet taste the fullness of the victory Christ has won, as creatures who confess with their Creator that death is an enemy of God. Where we fail to face this fuller vision of our mortality, writes Billings, “we attend to one side of the biblical paradox about death, forgetting that even the death of a very elderly person is not ‘altogether sweet and beautiful’… [At the grave of Lazarus], Jesus still wept—even for one who would be raised again. And so should we.”(2)

For Billings, the signs of death’s current reign and the dire need for the language of lament are not the mere theological abstractions of a theology professor. In a book he never fathomed he would write at the midpoint of his life, Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ, his need for the language of lament is voiced in personal terms. The book is a remarkably honest account of his own lamenting, but it is equally clear that lament itself is a gift of the church to the world.

In one section, Billings describes his own congregation, filled with an array of people and stages of life, a church that baptizes and celebrates new life in Christ and holds funerals on a regular basis. This collective, human journey struck him as he led a Sunday school class after his diagnosis, compelling an honesty that moved him. “In this room are cancer survivors who have gone through chemo; and there are others who have lost spouses and other loved ones to cancer and other disease and tragedy. The congregation is the only place in Western culture where we develop relationships, celebrate our faith and life together, and also extend those same relationships all the way through death and dying… That is a gift of the church. I would go so far as to say that a top recommended question from me for ‘church shoppers’ might be this: who would you like to bury you?”(3)

For any death-denying culture, the church sits as a striking counterpoint, empowered by the crucified Jesus to tell a vastly different story. But the whole story needs to be told. “The Psalms—with their laments, petitions, and praises—have been a staple of Christian worship for centuries. They, along with the sacraments of Christ’s dying and new life, have incorporated death into the story of Christian worship.”(4) The Christian imagination is not one that has to bury its head in the sand, taking its cues from our culture’s qualms about death. To lament is not to undermine that we are a people who live in hope. On the contrary, it is a gift of God for the people of God, who discover in the vicarious humanity of the crucified Lord both a more profound rejoicing and a more honest lament. Whereas other worldviews have no basis for the practice of lamentation (to whom would we lament?), for the Christian it is a part of the journey, a testimony to our identity in Christ. Writes Billings, “To mourn and to protest is to testify that the gifts of creation are truly wondrous, that the communion with God and others that we taste in Christ is truly the way things are supposed to be—thus alienation and death are not truly ‘natural’ but enemies of God and his kingdom.”(5)

The lections of the Christian season of Lent upon us are full of God’s care within multifaceted journeys: crossings from darkness into light, blindness to vision, the familiar to the unexpected, thirst to a place of provision. We find journeys beside still waters, through dark valleys and green pastures to a table prepared in the presence of enemies, pathways from the desert to the Sea of Galilee, a valley of dry bones and the tomb of a friend to a meal in an upper room and the crucifixion of the Lamb. There are no abstractions here. As Billings attests of the Christian story, it is mercifully not one that asks us to deny the dark and painful realities of life. Death is not pushed away in denial, but incorporated into God’s redemptive story, and held by a storyteller who knows every part of the journey, even the open grave.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) William Bryant Logan, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 48.

(2) J. Todd Billings, Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker,2015), 108.

(3) Ibid., 101.

(4) Ibid., 109.

(5) Ibid., 100.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Sharing Death, Sharing Life

Leave a comment

 

Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.

They were words that controlled us, like an electric fence to wandering minds and quaking bodies. The pastor repeated them to us frequently—at each hospital visit and in every triumphant prayer for healing within an oncology ward that seemed only to delve out the certainty of loss and the overthrow of control. His confident battle cry was so certain, so instructive: We will not fathom defeat; we will not even think about death. In the name of Jesus, we will see the evidence of healing though it is yet unseen. Despite a theology that under normal circumstances would have been bold enough to voice some very serious objections, I so badly wanted my dad to be well… So badly that we never spoke of his wishes for the funeral we would plan only weeks later.

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen. They are the words of the ancient writer of Hebrews, though the way we used them during those short weeks with an aggressive cancer never actually considered this. It was a verse we treated as if it pertained only to us, jarred loose from its story and author and community. Once loose, we used it as a tool to jar my dad from his own flesh, from his pained and embodied life as a creature in his final days. We were after a miracle that would erase life as it had become, a healing that would restore us back to life before cancer. We used the verse, distorted into an individualized half truth, to keep ourselves from considering anything more.

Sadly, the God these prayers envisioned was more like a slot machine than a sovereign, each prayer a spin that tried to muster hope against all odds, fearfully, as if dad’s life depended on the very quality of our mustering. While I don’t doubt the charitable intentions of those prayers—or the belief in a God who heals—I am saddened by the selfishness I didn’t want to see as I uttered them. The words we clung to were far more about the survivors than the dying one we loved or the abundant life we professed together in the crucified Christ—even in our own deaths. We clung to this creature-denying posture at the expense of one embodied by the vicariously human Christ himself, a posture that could have been both a sharing of my dad’s pain and a sharing of life and death with the one who holds both.

What might this shared experience in the body of Christ have actually looked like? Tragically and beautifully, it is coming into focus in the life of a friend. In October of 2012, at the age of 39, Christian theologian Todd Billings was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a rare and incurable blood cancer.(1) The sense of loss in his story is enough to send some us desperately after those confidently spoken, individualized half truths, like those we held in our own cancer story. Billings has not been a stranger to such prayers uttered on his behalf. But he wrenchingly embodies another way.

In the fog of days following his initial diagnosis, through a bone marrow transplant and quarantine to a drastically new ‘normal’ and a chemo regimen he will be on for the rest of his life, he realized he needed a language that didn’t dodge the hard theological and existential questions, a language that could bring all he is experiencing before God and to help him share it with others. He found himself sharing the language of lament with the writers of Scripture, who are honest and angry, grief-stricken and laid low by their own losses—and are yet able as creatures to bring these encounters before God in a way that does not “diminish the material, embodied nature of my life as a creature, my life as one who has been united to the resurrected Christ but is still groaning for the new creation.”(2)

For the Christian, this is the difficult, beautiful way of the cross: We die and live in and through the crucified Lord. We pray for Christ’s cross-shaped kingdom to come. We live in fellowship with a Triune God whose story of restoration incorporates brokenness, even and ultimately, his own. Alternative ways might be easier but they are not Christ’s. Writes Billings, “[C]onfidently spoken half truths can never reach beyond half truth because they are unwilling to face the biblical paradoxes inherent in orthodox Christianity. Such half truths have always been a temptation because they present a path that is less formidable than fully belonging ‘body and soul, in life and in death—to Jesus Christ.’”(3)

In dire contrast, this proclamation that “I am not my own, but I belong—body and soul, in life and death—to Jesus Christ,” is a shared confession and language that changes dramatically the space in which friends and family, students and colleagues, fellow Christians and even strangers are invited to stand as fellow creatures. Billings is honest about the loss, which gradually sets in and alters expectations of the future: the sudden sense of decades stolen, the new reality of life with an incurable illness. He is honest that the loss is not only his own: it is agonizingly a loss for his wife and their two young children. It is a loss for his friends and his community of faith. Admission of the loss itself may seem simple, but anyone who has ever experienced loss will recognize it as an invitation to break through the temptation for easy answers, to wrestle honestly with a fellow mortal in pain and the mystery of Christ crucified, who offers a truth big enough to hold us all.

Todd Billings sees his cancer story in a story bigger than his own, and in this bigger story, he has been able to invite his own communities to share more deeply the paradox of an adopted life in Christ and the reign of death around us as we wait for the fullness of that adoption. “God’s story does not annihilate my cancer story,” he writes, “but it does envelop and redefine it. Indeed, it asks for my story to be folded into the dying and rising of Christ as one who belongs to him.”(4) This is no pat-answer; it is neither a denial of the dark reality of cancer nor the God who heals. It is the hopeful way of life and death with the only one able to hold them both, the true sharing of which is perhaps more miraculous than even our most desperate prayers can imagine.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) J. Todd Billings shares his story in Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2015).

(2) Ibid., 118.

(3) Ibid., 171, quoting Heidelberg Catechism, Question and Answer 1.

(4) Ibid.