Westwood Presbyterian Church

April 13th, 2008

197 Browning  Boulevard, Winnipeg, Manitoba  R3K 0L1

REV. PETER BUSH's SERMONS

Matthew 5: 4

 

Blessed are they who mourn 

     I admit it, I really don’t like the song – “Don’t worry, be happy.” And I have been accused of being a pessimist, looking on the down side of life. And so I like this beatitude, it justifies my worldview. But there is more going on in this statement from Jesus than an affirmation that the pessimists have it right. So what is going on here?

 

     To mourn is to feel. To mourn means that we feel something deeply, if we didn’t feel then we would no mourn.

     This might be a useful place to bring in the fact that Jesus is thinking about mourning in much larger terms than my grieving the death of a loved one. Certainly the grief we experience when a loved one dies is included in the mourning Jesus is talking about – but he is also thinking about other mourning. Mourning over the state of our world – where young people are lured into gangs; where men, women, and children die from drinking contaminated water; where we are forced to witness violence and oppression. Also included is the mourning we experience over our own inability to change – the grief we know because when we try to do the right thing, it blows up in our face and when we try so hard to not do the wrong thing we still end up doing it.

     There is much that is wrong in our world – things that break our hearts – and Jesus says we are blessed when we feel that brokenness. Jesus says that Christians are people who feel, we are not immune to what is going on – we are not inoculated against the angst of our world. It is not as thought our faith comes down and yanks out of all the bad things – all the things that make us hurt inside – so that we get a free ride above the realities of life.

     That can not possibly be the case for Jesus, who is our example and also our way to salvation, did not get yanked out of the pain of life. Jesus wept, mourned, when taken to the tomb of Lazarus. Jesus wept over the city of Jerusalem and the callous ways people in that city treated each other. Jesus felt pity for those who were hungry physically and spiritually. Jesus, our example, mourned, felt the pain of our world. Walked through the pain of our world. And we as Jesus followers can expect to experience nothing less than what Jesus experienced.

 

     So, “Okay,” you are saying, “I get the point the world is a broken place, but do we have to focus only on the down side, aren’t we allowed to be happy, to rejoice?”

     And here is the surprising part, we can’t feel joy, until we stop running away from the mourning. If we inoculate ourselves against the pain, we will also inoculate ourselves against the joy. If we decide that we are not going to feel any pain, we won’t feel real joy.

     A number of years ago a young man with a bipolar condition (we used call it manic-depression) came to my study. He just wanted to talk to a minister. As we talked he said to me, “I know that when I am on my medication I don’t get as depressed when I am on the low part of my cycle; but the medication also means that the high is not as high, and I feel cheated because I don’t feel as joyful and excited when I am on my medication.”

     I am not advocating that people with bipolar conditions not take their medication – for them the medication is life balancing and life-saving. What I am saying is that when we seek to reduce the mourning in our lives, when we seek to find ways to stop feeling the pain, we also are preventing ourselves from feeling the joy. As human beings we are built to both experience grief and joy – and if we lose the one we will also lose the other.

     Raw emotion terrifies us as middle class North Americans – we keep our emotions under control, and the emotion that we see displayed in other countries of the world makes us feel very uncomfortable. I am not advocating grand displays of public emotion, but I do believe that if we were more prepared to let some of our mourning be seen, then the joys of our lives would be more profound as well.

 

     The psalms of lament in the Bible scare us. Scare us because some how the anger and hurt seem to be inappropriate when it comes to thinking about – talking to God. The raw emotion, the “in you face” quality of the words, they aren’t the way we think we should talk to God. But in the psalms we find the full range of emotions expressed to God – anger and joy, demand and thanksgiving. The full range of human emotions can and should be expressed to God. There is nothing wrong with screaming at God, it is not a statement that we don’t trust God. Rather screaming at God is a statement that we still believe he matters. When we stop talking to God that is when we are saying that God is irrelevant, has no role to play.

     Blessed are those who lament for they discover that God can take it. Blessed are those who lament for they discover that their faith is robust enough to take it.     

 

     Quite often I am asked, “When I visit someone who is in grief, I don’t know what to say. What should I say?” As Christians we are taught that we are to care for others, and part of that caring is that we show love and compassion to those who grieve. Now often our first response to those who mourn is to try to cheer them up; to find ways to reduce, to minimize their mourning and grief.

     But that is not what Romans 12 suggests is the way to respond to other people’s grief. Romans says, “Mourn with those who mourn.” In other words, we are invited not to pull them off the path of grief, but instead we are invited to join them in walking that path. And if we think about it in our own lives, the people who have been the greatest comfort to us when we have been in grief have been those people who quietly walked with us. These were the ones who joined us on the journey. And in my experience at least, those people who tried to cheer me up I often felt were minimizing my grief, were telling me that my sorrow, my mourning did not matter.

     So what do we say when we are with people who are mourning? “I am sorry for your loss.” “It is very painful when a loved one dies.” And that is about all we need to say. In fact, one of the best things we can do is be with the person in silence, and let them take the lead in what they want to talk about. The other thing is that we need to walk with people through grief and loss over a long haul. This is not something that is over quickly – it takes time to mourn. We need to make a point of touching base with people frequently over the period of a number of months even up to a year. 

     Now to be clear, the passage from Romans 12 also invites us to Rejoice with those who rejoice. This is not a call to always be in the dumps, rather it is a call to walk both the roads of joy and mourning with people.

 

     A quick reminder – we are talking about mourning on a larger scale than just the death of loved ones.

 

     Jesus said, “Blessed are they that mourn, for they will be comforted.”

     We mourn not as people who have no hope, we mourn because we know that the world can and should be a better place. We mourn believing that that better world will come. We mourn asking “How long” – how long must things be this way – how long must violence occur, how long must people grieve, how long must society function in this destructive way?

     To mourn is in fact to hope – to believe that there could be a different way. To mourn is not be a fatalist – to mourn is to affirm there are other things that could happen. To mourn is live in expectation of the joy to come – for we mourn not as people who have no hope – we mourn as those who know – who believe – there is another way – the kingdom of the Triune God which will be revealed.

 

     We are Christians – that means that we believe there is something beyond the world we can see and touch and taste. We believe that there is a set of powers in the world which are greater than sin and death and hell. We believe that there is comfort – not just the comfort of a hand on a shoulder (although that is important) – but a robust world changing – mind blowing – life transforming comfort that comes as the Holy Spirit acts in our midst – acts in our world. A comfort that comes from knowing that the hope we have in a better world is not in vain. A comfort that comes from knowing that there is a life beyond the grave – that knows that God is in the business of transforming the world the world by his grace and love – that knows that the world is being remade by the God of love into his kingdom.  

 

     I met Elizabeth Moore when I was a summer student minister in Bayfield, Ontario. Elizabeth had a cottage in the community and spent her summers there. Elizabeth’s husband had died suddenly when he was in his 30’s leaving her to raise three children. Elizabeth was also thrust into the role of being the bread winner. There was so much that Elizabeth could have become bitter about – facing the challenges of raising teenagers alone, facing the challenges of making ends meet, and so on. But instead of becoming bitter, Elizabeth lived in hope, trusting that God would make a way where there seemed to be no way.

     Don’t get me wrong, Elizabeth had her questions, at times she got angry at God, but she had discovered that God was a God of comfort who turned despair into hope, who turned mourning into dancing. Elizabeth knew only too well the pain of loss, but she also knew the comfort that God brings. And in that comfort she lived – even when she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

     Elizabeth had traveled to Africa and had seen the poverty and despair there, her certainty that God was bringing about a new world was not a naïve hope – rather it was a hope that knew that there was much in the world to mourn, much in the world that was not right, but lived in the hope that God was in the business of changing the world.

     In her gentle way Elizabeth lived her life in the comfort that comes to those who mourn. A comfort that comes only to those who are willing to walk the pain of mourning, so that they can experience the joy of God’s comfort.