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Posted on Mon Jun 22 2009
Mel Williams
BLESSED ARE THEY WHO MOURN
Matthew 5:1-4
A sermon by
June 21, 2009 (2nd in series on the Beatitudes)
Why have you come to church today? Let me risk answering the question. We come here to give thanks for God’s grace in our lives. And we’ve come here to bring our pain and sorrows to God. Over the past week and a half, four members of this congregation have had parents to die, and one member had a spouse to die. That’s a lot of grief. If you’ve been here in this church very long, you’ve likely heard from this pulpit: If you can’t weep in church, what’s a church for? Church is the place where we come to weep.
This statement is merely a re-stating of Jesus’ words, “Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” Luke’s version says “Blessed are they who weep.”
That reminded me of past years when we have listened to John Cheek give the history of this church. John has a terrific way of telling the story of the church by focusing on the various pastors of this church. I heard him describe one of the pastors in the 1940’s who often wept in this pulpit. He would become so emotional as he preached that he wept and wept—so much so that the people became concerned about him. Blessed is the preacher who weeps in the pulpit, for he/she shall be comforted.
I don’t plan to weep today; but we know that weeping can come at unexpected moments. Many of us, especially us men, grow up with negative messages, “Don’t cry now. It’s all right. Shake if off. Keep a stiff upper lip.” The danger, of course, is that we will repress our feelings, stuff them down, which can result in depression or other health concerns. An occasional cry is cleansing; it’s necessary to clear out the pain before it becomes toxic. Weeping is beneficial for our emotional and spiritual health.
Weeping is a spiritual matter, and we learned that from Jesus. He wept at the death of his friend Lazarus; and he wept over
The Beatitudes are guides to the spiritual life. They are steps, stair steps, into the Kingdom, the Beloved Community of love, forgiveness, and restored life. Jesus first addressed the Beatitudes to a crowd of peasants; the majority of the people were poor. So, the first Beatitude, the first blessing, is tossed out to those who are poor—materially poor and poor in spirit, meaning completely dependent on God.
Then the second blessing is tossed out on those who mourn. This second stair step is offered to those who have something to grieve. They have something to mourn about; that is, they are sensitive to their own pain, the pain of the neighbor, and sensitive to the pain of the world.
Jesus offers a blessing to those who orient their lives to God’s Kingdom, the Beloved Community, where love is the central value. So, the Kingdom is made real to us as we invest our love energies. When we are willing to reach out in love, to give some of our heart, then we experience both the delight and the pain that comes with loving.
“But I don’t want to hurt,” you might say. Hurt is a part of loving. When Jesus said, “I’ve come that you might have abundant life,” he meant the abundance that comes with the full range of human emotions—from intense love to pain and grief. Our job is to feel whatever we’re feeling, to welcome whatever happens, knowing that God is with us to carry us through the difficult times.
The major reason we weep is love. We weep because we love. If we didn’t love, we would never weep. Blessed are they who weep, who mourn.
The opposite of mourning is numbness, repression, denial, forgetting. (from Evelyn Mattern, Blessed are You: The Beatitudes and Our Survival). In other words, when we do not mourn, we can end up with a defensive posture toward life. We are braced; we block ourselves from feelings—experiencing our own suffering or the suffering of others. That’s why Paul writes in Romans 12: “Weep with those who weep.” This sentence may be one of the most challenging in the entire Bible. Why? When someone else is weeping, we may secretly be thinking, “Thank God, it’s not me going through that grief.”
How can we give ourselves permission to weep—and to weep with those who weep? It might help to think about the progression of the Beatitudes. Let’s think of them as stair steps into the Kingdom. The first stair step is poverty of spirit—dependence on God; the next step is mourning. If we are truly dependent on God, we gradually become like God—more compassionate, more loving. We are then more likely to become sensitive to the pain and losses of people around us. (from
In Durham for the past 15 years we have been holding vigils at the sight of every violent death. Often a small group of people will gather, holding a candle, as we listen to various family members of the deceased speak their love and their pain. We are there to stand in solidarity with the grieving family. We are acknowledging that when one person is killed by violence, we all suffer. For if we truly believe the Lord’s Prayer, when we pray “Our Father/Mother, we are all saying that God is our parent, and that means we are all brothers and sisters, members of God’s family, God’s household.
We gather then on street corners of Durham to acknowledge the loss of a brother or sister, to stand in solidarity with the family, to engage in the “public processing of pain.” The only way out of grief is through it, and we need to be together in times of grief. Without grieving, we cannot find the energy to move forward. By expressing our pain, we make newness possible. No grief, no new beginning
Blessed are they who grieve, for they shall be comforted
Some years ago I was invited to speak to a class at
Life is filled with grief, and Jesus is encouraging us to find the blessing that is embedded in our grief. That means expressing our pain, shedding our tears, doing our “grief work.” When we suffer the loss of a loved one, we lose a part of ourselves. Someone said, “It’s like losing a leg or an arm.” We are diminished. And we leave, like Jacob, limping but blessed.
So when we face our losses, where do we find the strength to go on? Strength comes in knowing that God is grieving with us. When Bill Coffin’s 24-year old son died as his car careened into Boston Harbor, he wrote, “When the waves closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.” (Bill Coffin, “Alex’s Death,” The Collected Sermons of William Sloane Coffin)
God grieves with us. That means that God blesses our grief. And our broken heart, by God’s grace, finds a way to mend. Hemingway wrote, “The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” (from A Farewell to Arms) The healing happens as we find comfort from God’s presence and God’s people who are willing to stay with us in our pain, to weep with us as we weep. And in the process, we know the blessing of God’s comfort.
Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted. We find our comfort in the love that never dies.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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