I was raised to believe that emotions were dangerous, and I live in a culture that encourages me, as a man, to bury my sorrows, frustrations, and pain. Listen to the wisdom we pass on to each other:

• Only the strong survive
• Keep a stiff upper lip
• Pull yourself together
• A rock feels no pain; an island never cries.
• Never let them see you sweat
• Grit your teeth and bear it
• Laughing on the outside, crying on the inside.
• Tough it out

Little boys learn on school playgrounds there is nothing worse than a crybaby. Rocklike men who “tough it out” possess the qualities that made this nation great. Even little girls, who are given more emotional leeway than boys, learn that if they cannot control their tears, they will never climb the ladder of success. Crying is a sign of weakness, a sign that you have lost control, a sign that you are not objective and reliable, a sign that you are a wimp.

Neil Simon’s play Lost in Yonkers orbits around tough old Grandma Kurnitz and her difficult life and family. When her son Eddie brings his two sons, Arty and Jay, to stay with Grandma Kurnitz and his sister Bella after his wife died, she balks. She thinks Eddie is a crybaby, and she passes on her view of life to her two grandsons:

Und now he comes to me for help?…He cried in my bedroom. Not like a man, like a child he cried. He vas always dot vay….

I buried a husband and two children und I didn’t cry.  I didn’t haff time.  Bella vas born vit scarlet fever and she didn’t talk until she vas five years old, und I didn’t cry…Your father’s sister, Gertrude, can’t talk vitout choking und I didn’t cry…Und maybe one day, they’ll find Louie dead in da street und I von’t cry….

Dot’s how I vas raised. To be strong. Ven dey beat us vit sticks in Germany ven ve vere children, I didn’t cry…. You don’t survive in dis vorld vitout being like steel. 

It’s no coincidence that Superman—the first superhero—created in 1938 as the world edged towards war, was called the “Man of Steel.”

Only the strong survive. A rock feels no pain; an island never cries. Is it true, all this wisdom we pass on to each other? Are the Grandma Kurnitzs of our world right? Her words come back to haunt her later in the story when Bella, her special needs daughter, falls in love with a special needs usher at the local movie theater. Bella dreams of marriage and having children. She seeks her mother approval, and when she does not get it, she lets out all her anger and frustration:

You think I can’t have healthy babies, Momma? Well, I can…. I’m as strong as an ox. I’ve worked in that store and taken care of you by myself since I’m twelve years old, that’s how strong I am…. Like steel, Momma. Isn’t that how we’re supposed to be?

But my babies won’t die because I’ll love them and take care of them….And they won’t get sick like me or Gert or be weak like Eddie and Louie…. My babies will be happier than we were because I’ll teach them to be happy…not to grow up and run away or never visit when they’re older or not be able to breathe because they are so frightened…and never, ever to make them spend their lives rubbing my back and my legs because you never had anyone around who loved you enough to want to touch you because you made it so clear you never wanted to be touched with love.

Do you know what it’s like to touch steel, Momma? It’s hard and it’s cold and I want to be warm and soft with my children….Let me have my babies, Momma. Because I have to love somebody. I have to love someone who’ll love me back before I die.

I was born on the other side of World War II, and raised to believe that real men buried their emotions. By implication, God did the same. I did not view God as being like steel, but I did view God as powerful and aloof, dispassionately controlling the world. God was immutable and not only did not change, could not change. The scriptural accounts of God changing God’s mind were just an accommodation to the limits of human understanding. Since God had already foreordained the events in our lives, and all was unfolding according to God’s fixed plan, God was not inclined to respond to human prayers and pleadings.

Throughout my junior high, high school, and college years, I worked at Hendricks Supply Company, a sheet metal shop on the corner of Market and Wealthy in Grand Rapids. To keep costs down, Herman Hendricks, the owner and founder of the company, tended to hire old men and young boys. There I met a cast of characters more colorful than the ones I had met in my local church or school and heard language more colorful than what I heard in our sanctuary or my classroom.  

But not all the older men were profane. One summer, I worked next to a gray-haired retiree named George. George seldom talked to anyone and always ate lunch by himself. He carried himself with an air of confidence, if not superiority. Over time I was able to coax a few words out of George and eventually a conversation. I found out he considered himself a true Calvinist. He believed in the sovereignty of God over every sphere of life. Everything was foreordained, he told me as we fed thirty-gauge metal to a machine that shaped it into the proper form for use in home heating systems.

According to George, it did not make any difference what a person did since God would follow his plan regardless. God had elected some for salvation and others for perdition. When he told me his church did not bother to send out missionaries, I reacted with surprise. I had been raised to think that sending and supporting missionaries was the supreme Christian act. No, sending missionaries was a waste of time and energy, George explained, for God had already chosen the elect and nothing humans did would influence God’s choice. Toward the end of the summer, George passed a few books and pamphlets to me detailing his beliefs. He apparently had a little missionary zeal after all.

Recalling our conversation so many years later, I find it ironic that George expressed his views while we were feeding metal to a machine. His worldview was mechanical; he assumed that God shaped us in the same way a machine shaped metal. I realize that George’s views and those of his faith community are extreme, but I wonder whether there is a little bit of George in every Calvinist.

Steel is cold and hard. There is no life in it. The God of the scriptures does not have a heart of steel; God has a heart of flesh, a bleeding heart, and God has eyes that weep. The love of God opens the heart of God to the world, and binds God to the beloved world and its creatures. God’s heart is uplifted when God’s people offer their thanksgiving and praise (Psalm 22:3), and God’s heart is downcast when they oppress the poor and vulnerable and despoil the created order. God keeps their tears in a bottle (Psalm 56:8). The cries of the oppressed pierce God’s heart and rouse God to action.

The Kingdom of Judah was destroyed by the Babylonians. Thousands fled to Egypt, thousands were deported into forced labor camps, and thousands were slain, their bodies unburied and rotting in the fields. Rachel, whom Jeremiah personifies as the mother of all Israel, cries out: 

A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping; Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more.

And God hears her voice and is deeply moved: 

Thus says the Lord: Keep your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears; for there is a reward for your work, says the Lord: they shall come back from the land of the enemy; there is hope for your future, your children shall come back to their own country (Jeremiah 31: 15- 20).

The story of Lazarus in the Gospel of John contains the shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept.” That was the kind of information that used to win points for us in games of Bible trivia. But the shortest verse in the Bible is hardly short on meaning. It suggests something about the nature of God that many find confusing, if not disturbing. Jesus, the very son of God, fully God and fully human, weeping and deeply moved by the death of his friend Lazarus! Can God lose it, break down, be overcome by emotion? This hardly fits our idea of the all-wise, all-powerful creator of the universe. I have heard many people, whom I suspect connect weeping with weakness, split Jesus in half and say that his human nature is showing through here, not his divine nature.

But whether or not it fits our idea of an all-powerful God, the scriptures present a God who feels pain, who is sorrowful, and weeps. Jesus is deeply moved by what happened to his friends. But his weeping is not emotional indulgence, not a sign of weakness, not a loss of control, not a flight from reality. Jesus’ weeping is the power that keeps Lazarus’ name alive, an act of protest before the power of death, a demand for new birth. His tears are the first trickle of the river of life about to burst upon the world. In the story of Lazarus, John makes a clear connection between tears and new life. First Jesus weeps, then he resurrects.

Jesus lives out what Israel sang in Psalm 126:

May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy.

Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing,

shall come home with shouts of joy, carry their sheaves (5-6).

In a world where “only the strong survive,” how do we express our sorrow?  How do we make clear to people the connection between tears and life and, of course, the opposite, the connection between emotional distance and death?

Let me try to answer these questions by sharing the reflections of someone close to me who was disturbed by seeing images of starving children:

Of all the images passing so fleetingly before my eyes, certain ones engrave themselves in my memory. Images of the children of the world; innocents with distended bellies and brains so malnourished that they could not respond to the gospel of Jesus Christ were they to hear it.

These images haunt my consciousness and disrupt my life. They materialize inconveniently when I sleep, when I eat, or when I am checking my investment portfolio. Like shirttail relatives, they invade my world and place demands on me. And just what are my responsibilities to them? A donation now and then will not ultimately better their lot; they are impoverished by forces beyond my control. I am so frustrated.

To be perfectly honest, I now seriously contemplate how I can exorcize these images from my consciousness and how I can train myself not to care, so I can forget the children of the world and get on with my life.

Can we train ourselves not to care? Can we remain dry-eyed? Can we forget the children of the world? Can we ignore those starving in refugee camps and those gathering at our borders who are displaced by poverty, war, and climate change? If we can, the kingdom of God is at risk, for if we do not grieve, the oppressed in our world will not live.

And so, one week after a series of executive orders were signed by the incoming President of the United States that, as a whole, lack compassion, care, and humanity, I grieve. Grieving is an act of protest, a call to action. Our tears are springs of living water. Our tears flow together to become a river of life for all who are caught in unjust systems and dying of hunger and oppression.

 May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy.
Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing,
shall come home with shouts of joy, carry their sheaves.