A Sermon Based Upon Matthew 5:4; Matthew 9: 18-26
By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
7th Sunday of Epiphany, February 23, 2014
"Blessed
are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” (Mat 5:4 NRS)
Eric Metaxas’ recent Biography,
“Bonhoeffer”, retells the story of the German Lutheran pastor who opposed
Hitler, was eventually imprisoned and finally was executed in April 1945, one
day before the war was over.
In the time when Nazism was growing in
Germany, sometime in 1933, Bonhoeffer visited one of the places Hitler wanted
to close down, the Bethel Community, a community on the Northeast side of
Berlin completely dedicated to the infirmed and the disabled. It was a whole town with schools, churches,
farms, factories, shops and housing for nurses which were all build around
several hospitals and care facilities, including orphanages for the abandoned. This was the kind of place Hitler called
‘useless’ and the people it cared for as being ‘unworthy of life’ because they
were a constant drain (called ‘eaters’) on society. In contrast, Bonhoeffer saw it as a place ‘where the gospel was made visible’, and
as he later wrote his grandmother, it is a place ‘where the weak and helpless are cared for’ and these most
defenseless people reveal how ‘defenseless’
and ‘needy’ we all are, no matter how
healthy we seem to be (From Bonhoeffer, by Eric Metaxas, Thomas
Nelson, 2010, p 184.).
Adolf Hitler was unable to feel the pain
of other people. He wanted to build a
society based on ‘power’, success and the rule of the strongest with total
disregard for the weak. He also had no
time for those who showed any kind of empathy or sympathy for others. Most of those Germans who opposed Hitler,
‘mourned’ over the direction the nation was going, but unfortunately, the
majority who placed Hitler into power, lost their capacity to ‘mourn’ until it
was too late, only to be regained the hard way--through war, bloodshed, and
agonizing defeat.
“Blessed
are those who mourn…..” does not seem to be the right way to begin a
message of ‘good news’. In today’s ‘feel
good’ culture, taking time to mourn seems more like a liability, or a handicap
itself, rather than an asset or a strength we should gain or glorify. How can Jesus call those who mourn, who lose,
who suffer, who must grieve for themselves or for others---how can Jesus call those
‘who mourn’ to ‘blessed’ by God?
‘THOSE
WHO MOURN’ MEANS EVERYONE
First of all, we will never understand
Jesus’ words if we are holding out a ‘false’ belief or hopeful ‘illusion’ that
life is fair, that all’s right with the world, or that this world as it should
be. Ever since the gate of the Garden of Eden
swung shut, nothing in this world is as it should be. And if we are honest with ourselves we all
know this deep down. Life is not always
good. The way of the world is seldom
fair. Injustice is all around us. Evil grows and growls in every corner of our
world, even in the most sacred of places, including the church. I often remind people that the first place
Jesus cast out a demon was at church (or in a synagogue). The first document written in the Bible was
a letter from Paul to a church that was falling apart due to all kinds of
problems. In fact, most every document
in the New Testament was written to deal with misunderstandings, falsehoods,
and struggle in the churches to be and do rightly in the world. Never, anywhere, except in the first chapter
of Genesis or perhaps on the last page of Revelation, with its vision of Heaven
does God, nor can we, call the world ‘good’.
Even Jesus in his own human flesh said, “Don’t call me good, no one is
good but the Father in Heaven!”
The point being--that pure, unadulterated, and absolute goodness is
impossible to have or hold on to in this world that is still broken and dominated
by sin, Satan, and death.
People
who understand ‘how’ life is, really is, will mourn. Blessings
can still come to us in life, but there is no other way that ‘blessings’ can
come to us, except through this ‘veil of tears.’ We
cannot escape coming to grips with our shared human brokenness and
vulnerability. Some will try to deny or
delay facing this human reality, but it will be at their own peril. Remember
the fellow in Jesus’ parable in Luke who attempted to isolate and insulate
himself to the pain of the world by building bigger and better barns? He did this but lost his own soul. In the same way, unless we discover the
‘blessing---that comes when we mourn, and even through sharing the pain of others,
we too can lose our own souls.
As I working through this sermon back in
December of 2013, around the 1st anniversary of the tragic murder of
children in Newton, Connecticut, there was another tragic shooting at a school
in Colorado, only blocks away from Columbine High School, and not far away from
the terror at the Aurora movie theater.
If you look behind all these shootings what you will find is not just a
bunch of psychologically deranged youth, but you will also see youth, families,
and a society that, for whatever reason, are dealing with pains in life for
which they do not have the resources to bear them. Without the spiritual resources, without
learning how to ‘mourn’ in constructive ways, people will find destructive ways
to turn pain, anger, hurt and suffering back on to others. As one
Law Enforcement Officer said recently, it’s not just ‘evil’ out there but it is
a “particular” kind of evil, where children who have been too well insulated from
the realities of life, must eventually face them, but do not know how. The tragedies we are seeing today come from a
society that no longer knows how to find God’s ‘blessing’ in the midst of acknowledging
and sharing human pain. When we are
unable feel or share our pain we can’t find God’s blessing, and we soon start
to feel ‘cursed’.
BLESSED
ARE THOSE WHO MOURN?
Notice also, the most bizarre part of
this saying from Jesus which calls those who mourn “blessed’ by God. Can we
find any good in the midst of human pain and loss? We better, and we must, because we will all suffer loss and pain in this
world, but we don’t have to end up cursing the darkness.
In May of 1995, the actor and director Christopher Reeve was thrown from a
horse in a bizarre riding accident that paralyzed him from the neck down. As an accomplished sailor, pilot, and avid
outdoorsman, a respected actor, and a vibrant father, at the age of forty-two
was confined to a wheel chair and a ventilator.
Reeve faced the probability that he would never again enjoy the things
that had given his life so much richness and meaning. It was, in his words, a totally arbitrary accident,
a mere “instant of humiliation and embarrassment.” He was, in many ways a man of ‘super’ sorrow.
But with a ‘super’ spirit of courage,
his perseverance overcame his pessimism and, with the support of people who
loved him, Reeve soldiered on and began the arduous task of rebuilding his
life. With patience and good humor, he
made the adjustments his body demanded of him, coming to terms with both the
physical and psychological challenges his disability posed. He returned to work and was involved in a
number of movie and theatrical projects.
He became a tireless advocate on behalf of victims of crippling
accidents such as his, and created a foundation to advance research in the
field of spinal cord injury and push for a cure. Having endured what might embitter others,
Reeve believed his accident gave him a deeper appreciation for his family. As he once observed, before his death, his
marriage was strengthened, his time with his children became richer, and be
began noticing the little joys of life that he had long taken for granted. The task of his life was not grieve over what
he had lost, but to consider the kind of life he could have for himself, but
what kind of life could he build to be a benefit to others (As
told in “What Jesus Meant”, by Erik
Kolbell, p. 44).
Fortunately, most of us have not had a
terrible accident like Christopher Reeve, but the task of having to come to
grips with what we lose in life, is “an irreducible, irreplaceable” (Kolbell, p. 44) and
inescapable piece of human life. As a
Charlotte Pastor once said, “We are born
losers” whether we choose to be or not.
We may not lose a loved one in a great tragedy like 9/11, nor have an
accident as severe as Christopher Reeve, but we will fully lose those we love and
we finally lose our own lives. As Job mourned his own situation: "Naked I came from my mother's womb,
and naked shall I return there; the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away;
blessed be the name of the LORD" (Job 1:21 NRS).
But before we try to understand the
‘blessing’ that still can come to us, even in midst of pain and loss, we need
to more fully understand the kind ‘loss’ Jesus meant---not only the one we feel. The ‘mourning’ Jesus acknowledged here was
not merely a grieving or ‘letting go’ of the life or love people have had, but it
was a greater, more desperate ‘mourning’ over what these people never had,
because they were poor, because they were numbered among the forgotten, the
neglected, and the lowest part of their society. The people “who heard Jesus gladly” (as Scripture says in Mark 6.20, &
12.37) were never were rich in any worldly way. They hung on to Jesus words because they had
nothing else to hold on to. They were
not the people who were going to ‘lose’ everything, but they were the people
who never had anything, at least if you measured their lives by material or
political standards of the world. The
common folk Jesus addressed had nowhere to turn but to God. Most of them, like the woman with the blood
problem, or this man whose child was dying, or the lepers, the prostitutes, or
other outcasts, were already ‘mourning’ their lives because so much made their lives
miserable each and every day, leaving them with no chance of success and little
chance of survival. Dare we imagine this
kind of poverty, these kinds of illnesses, or the continual suffering and
struggle those people faced? One
wonders, “How could they ever feel blessed” without so much of what we take for
granted?
Do we have room in our own ‘blessed’ and
busy lives to mourn with people who live in and under such conditions today? While the top 20 percent of the world’s
population have more than 80 percent of the world’s total income and live in
unparalleled luxury, the bottom 20 percent of the world’s population try to
survive on less than 1.5 percent of the world’s income and are condemned to
live lives characterized by cycles of deprivation and despair. Because
most people in this world cannot access their ‘fair share’ of the world’s
income, many, in desperation, sell their labor for chickenfeed. More than 250 million children in the world work
for as little as 25 cents a day. As a last resort, many even have to sell their
bodies. More than a million children are
forced into prostitution every year.
Millions of children under the age of 15 are developing HIV and dying of
AIDS, and more than 25,000 people die unnecessarily from easily preventable
causes every day of every week of every year (As cited in Dave Andrews, Plan Be,
Authentic Media, United Kingdom,
pp 16-17, 2008). Recently, I read that New York City, right
here in America, has over 22,000 homeless children scattered in the over 460
homeless shelters across the city. The
poverty of the world is rushing in on us too, even in a wealthy country where
the rich get richer, but the poor only get poorer, where good jobs are getting
harder to find, and people are finding it more difficult to make a living wage
even working two jobs at minimum wage.
But while there is much to mourn and
grieve over, not everyone mourns or feels the pain of the current state of the
world. Not everyone knows the ‘blessing’
of understanding, feeling for, and desiring to answer the pain others feel and
experience. Most of us only acknowledge
what we feel, see, hear, and experience for ourselves, and this mostly depends
upon where we ‘stand’ in the world. Are
we with the top 20 percent who are ‘well fed’ and ‘laugh’ as Luke 6.25 says, so that we ‘rejoice with those who rejoice’ (Romans 12.15), or can we identify
with the other 80 percent of the population---those bottom 20 percent---who go
hungry, who don’t know where the next meal will come from, and who cry and
worry themselves to sleep (Luke6.25)---can we ‘weep’ and ‘mourn’ with
those who mourn? Do we see any blessing
in ‘mourning’ with those who mourn
and grieve? Can we, who are numbered
among the most ‘blessed’, find any ‘good’ reason to feel the pain and mourn
with those who suffer around us?
Perhaps the most important “blessings”
that come from mourning our own losses in life, is that we learn to feel the
pain of others and most importantly, we learn to feel the ‘pain’ of God. In mourning not only for ourselves, but for
others, we learn to mourn and weep over the sin of the world, which includes
mourning over our own sin, that in its worst form is the sin of not caring. Two
times in Scripture we see Jesus weeping, and both times he was not weeping for
himself, but for others. In one text Jesus wept over the death of his
friend Lazarus, but in another text, he wept over the entire city of Jerusalem because
it was unable to realize its own need to return to God. When we lose the ability to sorrow over sin,
especially our own sin, we lose part of our humanity. As someone has said, “Hell is not to care
anymore.” To put it another way, the unending pain of
Hell the Bible portrays, is like the state a person reaches when the only pain
they feel is their own; and now, this pain never lets up because that person has
become unable to feel the pain of God or share the pain of others. “On the
American Frontier,” J. Ellsworth Kalas writes, “(Methodists) used to have a ‘mourners bench’, which was placed in front
near the pulpit, where persons publically ‘mourned’ and expressed sorrow over their
own shortcomings,” but he adds, “that would be a hard sell in our feel-good
culture!” (From a sermon “The Happy
Mourners” by J. Ellsworth Kalas, in Beatitudes
from the Back Side, Abingdon Press, 2008, p. 28). In a society
like ours---a society that because of its great wealth becomes lost in pleasurable
feelings while it tirelessly works to insulate itself and its children from the
painful realities of life, such a society, can finally lose the sensitivity that
makes us most human: our ability to feel, to care, and to mourn over what brings
hurt and pain to ourselves and others around us. We must never take this positive side of
‘mourning’ lightly. We must never cease
to feel the pain in the heart of God.
THE
COMFORT ONLY GOD GIVES
Jesus gives one reason to seek the God’s
blessing that comes from being able to mourn.
But it’s not what you might think. There is certainly no ‘blessing’ in the
pain, loss, and mourning people experience in this life. There is also no blessing in the sin, the brokenness,
the injustice or the darkness that still curses our world. No, Jesus does not find any hidden
‘blessing’ in the terrible condition we find ourselves in, nor in the terrible
condition of the world around us. No,
the only way ‘blessing’ can come to those who mourn is because we or they ‘will be comforted’ by God. Only God
can give comfort to those who lose everything, and only God can make up for
what most people will never have of the material blessings in this life? Only God is big enough to comfort hurts like ours—and
hurts that still fill our world---because only
God can give a comfort that the comforts of this world can never give! But how does God give this kind of
comfort? How ‘will’ God bring ‘comfort’
to world that still suffers too much?
I don’t think there is any pain, hurt or
grieving in this life that is worse that a parent who loses a child. Unfortunately, many parents have had to
experience such a painful loss, but few have been able to express it like the
Christian philosopher, Nicholas Wolterstorff.
He wrote about his grief in Lament
for a Son, after his son Erick was killed in a mountain climbing
accident. Several years after the loss,
Wolterstorff noticed that the wound was no longer ‘raw’ but it hadn’t disappeared. But he is quick to add, that he doesn’t mind
the grief as much, because, he says, “If
he (Eric) was worth loving, he is worth grieving over….” Then, he makes this conclusion, “Grief is the testimony to the worth of the
one loved….Every lament is a love song.”
“How strange is this,” comments Pastor
James Howell, “that through the darkest moments of grief and pain, people can often
recount an unmistakable sense of God’s presence?” God’s loving, caring presence is seldom fully
disclosed when everything is going fine and great, but God is known most fully
when we encounter the pain and the darkness! “Through the prism of my tears, I have seen a suffering God,” Wolterstorff
expressed how he found God’s comfort in his pain (This was told in James Howell’s, The
Beatitudes for Today, 2006, p. 42). It wasn’t that God took his pain and mourning
away, but this Father came to realize that God shared His pain of loss, and
this brought him comfort. Coping,
dealing with loss comes from the life-changing experiences of eternal
love----the love a Father has for his son, and the love that God has for us.
“When
things go well, “ William Barclay
wrote, “it is possible to live for years
on the surface of things; but when sorrow comes a person is driven to the deep
things of life, and , if he or she accepts it aright, a new strength and beauty
enter into his or her soul.” (Wm.
Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew, p. 88). Out
of a sense of love, God’s love, love now, and love for eternity, we find the
source of all comfort. Isn’t this the ‘love’ Paul spoke of in his
conclusion to his second letter to the Corinthians, when he wrote: “Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and
God our Father, who loved us and through grace gave us eternal comfort and good
hope, comfort your hearts and strengthen them in every good work and word”
(2Th 2:16-17 NRS)?
Because God loves us and gives ‘eternal comfort’ to us through his ‘grace’,
we can mourn our loses and we can endure them.
And because God’s comforts and transforms us, we can mourn with and comfort
others with the comfort we have received.
We can only live out these words, “Blessed are those who mourn..”
because we know the God who is the source of all comfort. Amen.
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