When my mother died I became very aware of the truth
of Jesus saying blessing are those who mourn for they will be comforted. She
was 86 and had fallen and broken her hip and while recuperating from a hip
replacement operation had suffered a massive stroke and about twelve days after that she died. I had gone to attend the general assembly.
We’d just had the opening worship
service when I got the news that mum had died. I was standing between three
very close friends. One who, from Titirangi days, who knew my mother very well.
The other two I had come to value as friends and colleagues from my time at the
School of Ministry in Dunedin. A set of
car keys were trust into my hand and I was lent a flash 4 WD Toyota land cruiser to head from St
Kent’s to the Waitakarei hospital, to be with my Mum.
The next Sunday, the day before her funeral, we’d gone to church as a family at Massey
Presbyterian Church and it is one of the only times I have ever walked into a
Church and experienced God waiting there and speaking to me through the
sermon. The minister was away and so an
elder who just happened to be an old friend of mine was preaching. He spoke of
only two weeks before having had to speak at his father’s funeral and how he
was working through the grief and sorrow of that and preached on a psalm, that
showed David working through similar grief and coming to a stage of trust and
comfort because of the presence of God.
I was a mess, tears pouring down my face, but God meet me in a special way.
The pain was still there it didn’t miraculously go away, but I was comforted.
C
hristopher Serber says that “blessed are those who
mourn” is probably Jesus most paradoxical saying. “Even if I will be comforted”
he says, and lets be real we live in a world where not all who mourn are
comforted, “how is my mourning, in anyway blessing?” It does seem to be totally at odds it’s like
saying happy are you when you are sad.
Equally Seber says” it just may be one of the
most weighty sayings of Jesus as well.”
“Life is filled with sorrow and joy, God’s love is not
defined by how much He lavishes us with joy. God’s love is perfect because God
is perfect, not because we are always perfectly happy. “
We’re on a journey this year
looking at the Sermon on the Mount in
Matthew’s gospel… looking at Jesus first teaching to his first
disciples, because this teaching and our putting it into practice in our lives
is, I believe, of paramount importance to what it means to be the church and
follow Jesus.
As I mentioned last week Dietrich Bonheoffer said…”The restoration of
the church will surely come from a new kind of community, which will have
nothing in common with the old but a life of uncompromising adherence to the Sermon
on the Mount in imitation of Christ. I believe the time has come to rally
people together for this.”
We are starting our look at the Sermon on the Mount ,
by looking at what are called the beatitudes. A series of statements Jesus makes about who in
the kingdom of heaven are Blessed. The
kingdom of Heaven has often been called God’s upside down kingdom, because it
goes counter to the world we live in where we consider the rich and those
who have an easy life, those who have
all they need, who receive public acclaim; the beautiful, rich and famous as
blessed, they have it all made. But just maybe, Jesus simply tells of the world
the right way up and we’ve been used to standing on our head so long we don’t
see. In fact says Jesus it’s great news that it’s not if you try hard or work
at it, but rather if you already like this, poor of spirit, mourning, hungering
and thirsting for righteousness, because you’ve almost there, you’re in the
right place to encounter God’s goodness.
I love cricket so this week
while I was preparing for today I had the radio on in the back ground to listen
to the test match from Hamilton. And let’s face it Blessed are those who mourn’ is a great motto
for black caps fans. Right! On Thursday afternoon it started raining on and off
and the players went off the field. It was only light rain and Talk back host
Darcy Watergraves, went off. He suggested that the cricketers should get out
there and play, not because it was an important game between two nations, a
fierce combat, but rather that the cricketers were professionals and they were
paid to entertain and amuse us and they’d better get out there on the pitch and
amuse us. It exemplified for me the way in which the western world seeks to entertain
and amuse ourselves. To the point of distraction. to Avoid pain and sorrow.
It’s a multibillion dollar industry. With the advent of reality TV, even the
real life personal struggles and woes of others has become little more than
fodder for our amusement and material to plug the gaps between adds offering us
stuff that will make us happy and instantaneously solve all our problems. Even
Christianity has been portrayed in some quarters as a fix all… come to Jesus
and it will be all right. Christopher
Seber says
“The social and
religious Schizophrenia of our age astounds me. On the one hand we run at a
near fevered pace in our constant pursuit of present entertainment and
happiness, on the other hand we ignore the reality of the brokenness of life. Is
it really surprising that so many people are filled with anxiety and depression
when they are bombarded by the incessant lie that they are supposed to be
always happy? There are things in this life which bring us to our knees. There
are thing pains in this life that crush us to the core of our being. Outward
happiness often masks broken hearts which have never been allowed to grieve.”
If we are prepared to mourn
it means that we are willing to face sadness and sorrow and pain and wrong and
be open to the possibility, in Christ, of comfort and a way through.
If we are prepared to mourn
and grieve over the wrongs in our lives, our sins, and turn to God knowing our
spiritual poverty, we open ourselves up to knowing the forgiveness of God. Of
being reconciled with God through Christ’s death on the cross, we open
ourselves to the possibility of reconciliation with one another as we face and
seek to set right what we have done wrong in the past. I remember Andrew Dunn,
a Presbyterian Minister who was central to the establishing of Spirit Growth
Ministries in New Zealand saying ‘he was finding it hard to have his sin
forgiven lately’, he was refereeing of course to the lack of prayers of
confession in public worship, that there was a trend to forget this as part of
our churches liturgy. Maybe we were not
taking the problem of sin seriously, we wanted to sweep it under the carpet. And
as I often tell people, all that happens when you sweep things under the carpet
is that there ends up being a big lump that you’ll trip over eventually. Or
maybe we just didn’t want people to feel bad. But notice he said having your
sins forgiven… because along with our confession and mourning over what we had
done wrong is the great affirmation, that I always use in public prayers, the
great comfort from John 1:9 “if we say we are without sin we call God a liar,
but if we confess our sins God is faithful and just and will forgive us our
sins and cleanse us of all unrighteous”. Our comfort as we confront the
falleness and brokenness of our lives comes from knowing the very character of
God. God is faithful, God is just and will forgive us our sins.
It does not mean that we don’t have to deal with the
consequences and damage those things have done to us and others, but we know
God has forgiven us and is with us as we work through restoration and renewal.
I mentioned the first steps in the twelve step programme for dealing with
addictions was acknowledging powerlessness in the face of our addiction and our
need for a higher power, for God to free us… The next steps deal with taking an
honest and often painful look at where we are at. What we have done to harm
others and ourselves, to grieve over them, seek forgiveness and make amends. It’s
the same as we deal with our sin addiction, It’s the process of repentance,
sorrow over the wrong direction we have gone and are still going and with God’s
forgiveness and grace, turning round to live in a new and different way…
following Jesus.
Being willing to mourn also
means that we are willing to face the pain and suffering in this world and
allow it to affect us, allow ourselves to face it and respond. Sadly we’ve have
become afflicted by what writer Susan Moeller calls Compassion Fatigue, the way
the news and media works we are confronted with a diet of disaster after
disaster after human tragedy by the media… the pain and suffering of the world
makes great TV pictures. We are bombarded with images of despair and death,
devastation and depravation, all of which are designed to trigger an emotional
reaction within us, but leave us with no real avenue to respond, or if we do we
find ourselves worn out by the next one, the next night, the next news cycle
and it wears down our ability to mourn and to seek comfort.
But to mourn for injustice
and the suffering of others in the kingdom of Heaven says Jesus, is to find
comfort. To know God’s presence with us… to enable us to be lead by our
comforter the Holy Spirit to react and act.
The genocide in Rwanda in 1994 was and is an open saw on the soul of
that nation and on the world. Many were locked down and captive to an unhealthy
sorrow, a sorrow that could easily have lead to more hatred more violence more
death. World Vision was involved in the after math of the killing fields and
ran seminars to help people deal with the pain and suffering they were going
through, to process their grief in a healthy way. Forgiveness and
reconciliation was the only way forward. One women who attended there seminar had
had 50 of her close family members killed, beaten to death by mobs of people
who had been her neighbours. Her next door neighbour who had participated in the killings was in
prison for them. She wrote to him to say that she forgave him and then prepared
a meal for the man’s father. The meal was full of good food and many tears. But
for this woman, whose story I have only seen in a world vision video, she found
comfort in putting into action the words of Jesus. It also shows I think that
fact that we too as followers of Jesuc can become part of God’s comfort for
those who mourn. It’s our calling as people of the kingdom, as Paul says in
Romans 12 “rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.”
I want to
deal with a specific kind of mourning, that I think is relevant for the church
today. Specifically many mainline, or as some have taken to calling us lameline
churches. There is a lot of sorrow and mourning round as people look back and
remember, the way it used to be. We all have an idealised past… be it when the
church was full and everyone came in their Sunday best and sang those wonderful
old hymns with great gusto, and ministers even dressed right… right. The kids
would all sit still and be quite. By the way can I say I love to have kids at
worship, and if they make some noise well it’s a sign of life. Maybe the
charismatic movement in the 1980’s… there are people who sing one line of
Majesty and it’s like an acid flashback. Maybe it was the way it was back home
in the Islands, I’ve read a book that says if you want to know what church was
like in Samoa in the 1950’s don’t go the islands go to Auckland. Now people see
things changing and growing smaller and where have our children gone. They
mourn. It’s not like it was back then, its not like it was in those faded
photos on the Sunday school hall.
This is the situation that the Old Testament passage
this morning was from. The Jews had come back from captivity in Babylon, Haggai
the prophet had encouraged them to not just focus on their own economic
prosperity but to rebuild the temple as a symbol of God and their faith being
at the central to their lives. They’d cleared off the rubble and rebuilt the
altar and now at the dedication as they re to give a festive shout, many were
crying instead… how could it be like it used to be. How could this temple being
built, by a rag tag group of returnees be anything like the temple built at the
height of Israel’s power as an empire. Haggai’s words come as comfort for that
mourning. Not to always look back but to take courage and to work to rebuild
and restore. He says to the leaders and the people to take courage. Why because
God is with them. God is for them. God is with us so we should take courage and
build… I’m not proposing a new building program, but we work with Christ to
bring living stones, using the metaphor the book of Peter uses for those called
in Christ, together to build the dwelling place of God.
Blessed are those who mourn
for they will be comforted. In Jesus Kingdom if we have surrendered ourselves
to Jesus and know our need for God as we face the grief and sorrow of life we
have Jesus word that there will be comfort. That comfort does not come like
some sort of get out of jail free card. It comes from the promise that God is
with, even in the midst of the pain and suffering of life. That God is for us, that
comfort comes from his direct presence and in John’s gospel the Holy Spirit is
called a word which has been translated into English as our comforter, and also
present in the love and care of fellows Christians who are willing to laugh
with those who laugh and weep with those who weep. Blessed are you
when you mourn, for you will be comforted.
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