It's Alright to Cry

“It’s Alright to Cry

October 5, 2025 Cobleskill United Methodist Church, Pastor Anna Blinn Cole

Psalm 137:1-5; John 11:28-36

Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost 

 Psalm 137

¹ By the rivers of Babylon—    there we sat down, and there we wept    when we remembered Zion.² On the willows^[a] there    we hung up our harps.³ For there our captors    asked us for songs,and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,    “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

⁴ How could we sing the Lord’s song    in a foreign land?⁵ If I forget you, O Jerusalem,    let my right hand wither!

John 11:28-36

Jesus Weeps

²⁸ When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary and told her privately, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” ²⁹ And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. ³⁰ Now Jesus had not yet come to the village but was still at the place where Martha had met him. ³¹ The Jews who were with her in the house consoling her saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. ³² When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” ³³ When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. ³⁴ He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” ³⁵ Jesus wept. ³⁶ So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!”

Do you know this man?  

This is Rosey Grier.

Rosey became famous as a football player, both at Penn State and as a defensive tackle for the New York Giants from 1955 to 1962.  It was during these years that his team won the NFL Championship. He went on to be one part of the “Fearsome Foursome” for the LA Rams, considered one of the best defensive lines in football history.  

But that’s not all.  After he left his football career, Grier served as a bodyguard for a friend, US Senator and Presidential Candidate, Robert F. Kennedy.  Grier was moved by Kennedy’s commitment to racial equality and his attempt to unite a divided nation.  He was inspired by RFK’s appeal to nonviolence, especially in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination.  Three months later, in June of 1968, Grier was acting as body guard for Ethel Kennedy, RFK’s wife (pregnant at the time), on the night when he heard the gun shots in another part of the building.  Gun shots that would ultimately end Bobby Kennedy’s life. Grier ran toward the shots and jumped into the fight and it was Grier that ultimately subdued and disarmed the gunman.  He wasn’t able to prevent the violence that night but he was the one who took control of the gun and ended any further violence, physically protecting the assailant from others who wanted to cause him harm.

Years later, Grier told biographer Michael Weinreb that in the months and years after Kennedy’s death, he cried nearly every night.  He wondered what might have been different in this world had Bobby Kennedy and so many others lived. But mostly, his biographer reports, “Rosey Grier cried because he had believed in something, and that something was gone, and he wasn’t sure how to get it back.”

For a man who had made a name for himself as a strong defender in a world that valued size and strength; a man willing to run toward danger in order to prevent further violence; a man who had witnessed enormous tragedy first-hand, Rosey Grier might strike you as a tough man.  And no doubt, Rosey was a tough man.  But Rosey also understood what it meant to be honest about the pain one feels.  He had witnessed the worst of human kind and instead of putting on a strong face and hiding his emotion, he became comfortable with the fact that he cried so much.

In 1974 when Marlo Thomas was casting her production of “Free To Be…You And Me” she called on Rosey Grier to sing the song, “It’s Alright to Cry.”  Rosey said yes, I have to imagine, in part, because he knew the truth of the song.  Not only is it okay to feel the sadness that our life and the pain around us brings, but feeling sadness can help to make us feel better.

Has anything made you cry lately?  

Our scripture readings today reflect two points of tears in the Bible.  The first are the tears shed by people forcibly removed from their homeland, held against their will in a neighboring country.  

“By the waters, the waters of Babylon.  We lay down and wept, and wept, for thee,Zion.  We remember.  We remember.  We remember, thee Zion.”

A song of remembrance for the tragedy and the pain that has brought them to this moment.  A song of remembrance for what could have been and possibly, what might still become a better future.  A psalm like this belongs in the Bible because it’s a song  of God’s people crying in a way that is honest and true.  A pain that can’t be glossed over and forgotten.  

And then in the shortest verse of the Bible, we find Jesus standing at the grave of a friend, Lazarus, overcome by grief. John 11:35: “Jesus wept,” it says.  He might have tried to see the hope of days to come but in this moment, all he could feel was grief for what was lost: a friend.  We know the story goes on to tell us that Jesus raised his dead friend from the grave.  But maybe it was his grief that had to come first before new life could be summoned.  

Has anything made you cry lately?

Warsan Shire, a Somali British writer and poet born in Nairobi and raised in London, wrote in a poem in 2011 named “What They Did Yesterday Afternoon,” that talks about painful experiences the poet has known during her life.  The poem ends in these words: 

“i held an atlas in my lapran my fingers across the whole worldand whisperedwhere does it hurt?it answeredeverywhereeverywhereeverywhere.”

We live in a society right now that is hyper-focused on who doesn’t belong.  Suspicion and anger and fear all hover around like fog.  Violence and hatred for the “other” are menacing epidemics infecting the soul of our land.  

“But in a candle lit roompeople gather at a tablefrom different tribes and parties,rich and poor, and all are welcomed, all are fed.Clear eyes. Warm smiles. Open hands.It is a direct affront to the Emperors,who can't imagine this, butthe table transgresses their realm,extends through the cities,across the nation, around the world, forever.Children on far off islands hold handswith elders on the tundra,one meal, one prayer, one body.”

Salient words from a poem this week by Steve Garnaas-Holmes: 

This table is about one thing: That Jesus asked us to remember him on the night that he died. (it’s written right on the front: “DO THIS IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME.”  In the eating of a meal around a table, Jesus asked us to remember.  Remember what?  The pain, yes. The loss, yes.  The ache of a world driven by fear and power, yes.  But also, to remember that our shared task in coming to this table is to carry our tears back out into a world that needs people who can still feel things.  Jesus asked us to never forget what it feels like to feel loss.  To not grow numb.  To not glaze over.  To not become apathetic or stoic in the face of tragedy, but to be changed by it in here.  Filled with Jesus’ life-giving bread and cup so that we have the energy we need to be vulnerable witnesses to the world’s cry for help. 

This isn’t an empty ritual.  This is an invitation to bring your full vulnerable self and let yourself be changed by your remembrance of pain.  To let yourself be better because of it.  To hear Jesus say, it’s alright to cry and know he means it. 

Rosey Grier is still alive today and I still turn to this song when I need to feel all the feelings. He’s made a name for himself over the decades in speaking to groups about the way he carries his pain.  You could even say his grief brought about a new narrative.  That he could talk about his pain in ways that helped other people.  His feeling helped others to feel, too.  It is okay to cry, it might make you feel better.  It’s alright to feel things; though the feelings may be strange.  Feelings are real things and they change and change and change.  

Rosey Grier became a modern-day pioneer for feeling things when the stereotype was to just be strong.  It’s probably not a coincidence that he was a pioneer in other ways.

  Here he is on the cover of his 1970s book “Rosey Grier’s Needlepoint for Men” a long-time hobby of his that he felt comfortable sharing with the world.  He was a man comfortable in his own skin.  Whether it was needlepoint or showing emotion, Rosey followed in the tradition of the Psalms and of Jesus himself.  Being who God created you to be means bringing your full self.  

Has anything made you cry lately?  This isn’t a sermon about making it better, God doesn’t do that.  This is about affirming your tears as part of the process of being human.  When we’re sad, it’s proof that we care.  And when we know our own hurts, we are more likely to see the hurts of others around us. Out of our remembrance of grief, something else, something new, something almost hopeful becomes possible.  

Let us pray.

Benediction: 

A woman who gave her life to the study of survival died this week.  Late in her life, Jane Goodall shifted her focus from chimpanzees and other animals to human beings.  Of humans  she said having hope in the face of adversity was one of their most prominent survival traits.  She became a big believer in the concept of hope to bring us through the difficult times in which we live.  So I’ll leave you today with her own words: “Hope does not deny all the difficulty and all the danger that exists, but it is not stopped by them. There is a lot of darkness, but our actions create the light.”  Go now to be bearers of the light of God.  Humans on a vulnerable journey that will inevitably include pain.  Humans, though, who let the pain bear witness to the light that lies ahead.