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Some topics are harder to talk (or write, or read) about than others. This article is about one of those topics. October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month, and while hard, it's not rare. Miscarriage and infant loss affects one in four women. According to the March of Dimes, between 10 to 15% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. (A short primer on terms: "the death of a baby before 28 weeks of pregnancy is typically referred to as a miscarriage; and the death of a baby at or after 28 weeks are known as stillbirths.") These tragedies are heartbreaking and heartbreakingly common, though we often shy away from talking about them openly.
Our holy book, however, faces issues surrounding fertility with honest frankness. We have the prayers, laments, and hopes of several important women in the Bible who reckoned with barrenness. In the Old Testament, we hear from Sarah (Genesis 11:30), Rebekah (25:21), Rachel (29:31), Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel (1 Samuel 1-2); the anonymous wife of Manoah, mother of Samson (Judges 13); and the "great woman of Shunem," an acolyte of the prophet Elisha (2 Kings 4:8-44). In the New Testament, in Luke, we have the story of Elizabeth and her husband Zechariah. The struggle to get pregnant and stay pregnant is very real and alive in Scripture.
The Bible has less to say about miscarriage directly, but the pain of infant loss still echoes through those holy pages. In the book of Jeremiah, the matriarch Rachel weeps for the children who have died:
"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" (Jeremiah 31:15).
Centuries later, the Gospel of Matthew used these verses to name the pain of women whose children were murdered by Herod in Matthew 2:18. I think that we, too, can use these ancient words to name the very present pain.
Jeremiah does more than give voice to a mother's lament. Jeremiah lets us in on God's mothering heart. One of my favorite Bible commentaries puts it this way: "In seeming contradiction to the God who punishes and destroys, the God of these poems [in the book of Jeremiah] laments and weeps with the people. God anguishes over the people's fate like a mother yearning to save her children." As we think about this mothering side of God, listen to what God cries out in Jeremiah 8:18 and 21: "My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick;" "for the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me." God is not distant from the people's suffering in these poems of weeping; God identifies with them. The people's pain is God's pain. Parents' pain is God's pain.
In this month and beyond, we pray for parents whose babies have died far too soon. We remember these children and commend them to the arms of our merciful Lord. We look with hope to the day when God will wipe away all our tears, and our joy will be complete in Him. Amen.
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Pastor Megan Hoewisch
First Lutheran Church
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