Sunday, March 17, 2019
Matthew 5:4
‘Blessed are Those Who Mourn, for They Shall be Comforted’
The Rev. Martha M. Shiverick
During these Sundays of Lent, as we prepare for Easter with what we refer to as our Lenten disciplines, we will be journeying through the part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount found in the Gospel of Matthew that we refer to as the Beatitudes.
Last Sunday we started the series with the first Beatitude, Blessed are the Poor in Spirit, and found that it is only when we recognize that we are not in control of our life can we realize that we are not alone. We feel God with us when we feel weak cradling us and holding us up and that the job of the Christian community, of our Riviera family, is to be God’s love on earth, caring for each other and offering love and support to those that need it. Blessed are the poor in spirit, because they know God’s presence in their lives.
This morning we will focus on the second beatitude: Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted… for they will find consolation. Like the first one, Jesus has again made a statement that presents emotions and feelings that are contrary to what we expect. It should be blessed are the joyful and jubilant right? Not those who are mourning! But, Jesus again turns things around.
In Bradley Cobb’s book on the Beatitudes he discusses that everything in the Sermon on the Mount ultimately goes back to inward attitudes and thought. Unlike Moses presenting the 10 Commandments of God, Jesus’ theology is not so much about following laws that will be pleasing to God but in our attitudes that reflect our Spiritual theology.
In this second Beatitude, Jesus discusses a human condition we usually think is negative and shows the gift it can be. Mourning… it is a painful condition of living. Mourning is a condition that is multi-dimensional. Initially we think about the grieving we do when a loved one dies, but there are other times in our lives when we are in deep grief. Think of King David’s personal mourning over his personal sin. He grieved deeply over his behavior with Bathsheba and the change in relationship it put him in with God. The Bible also talks about mourning over the sins of others. Jesus looked at Jerusalem and wept over their actions. And I know a few of you here grieve over things in the news. I read Chuck’s editorials to the Miami Herald and think of Jesus in the 19th chapter of Luke as he wept for the city and their inability to recognize what was needed to obtain shalom. I believe that God wants us to grieve over the immigrant children held in the detention center in Homestead, the lack of laws controlling guns in our country, and even over moral lapses that are becoming common place in our society such as the haves in society buying their children acceptance into universities and the president of our country using language in a speech that my children would have tasted soap in their mouths had they used those words in front of me. Yes, we should grieve over these things, but we should grieve so that it moves us to actions as moral people. We need to feel personally about them so that change can occur. And in acting to change what grieves us, will bring comfort to us. So blessed are those who mourn social ills of our day as our grief will turn to action and change will occur.
But we know that grief is larger than that. Because anyone who has loved another, knows that deep grief and mourning are the products of loving someone who dies. This mourning is deeply personal and it is much more than a sadness. Mourning over someone you love who dies begins at the heart. People talk of heart ache and, yes, that is a good description, but mourning for a loved one can take possession of the whole person. Mourning is the word we use for a very deep personal loss or sadness. This type of mourning is an outward manifestation of something too deep to conceal. I remember the first deep loss I experienced was my senior year of college when my grandfather died. I flew home from Orlando where I was in college and remember entering my house where my family had gathered and feeling the grief that permeated the very air we breathed. My grandmother’s and mother’s sorrow was so deep that there was no consoling them. We just had to be in it until we learned how to live within it.
When I was in graduate school, I attended Riverside Church where William Sloan Coffin was the preacher. Coffin, for those of you who are too young to know him, was the second most influential minister in the civil rights movement in the last century after Martin Luther King Jr. He fought for peace, equality of all people, and the disarmament of nuclear weapons and was a general pain to the establishment. Although I found all his sermons inspiring, several stood out. One was the sermon he preached two weeks after his son Alex died in an awful vehicular accident. He was honest about his grief, it was so acute you could taste it. He expressed his anger at people who looked for the will of God in the situation, and those who had simple platitudes to explain why the accident occurred. He talked about the thing that was needed was for people to just be with him as he grieved. It was not the people who tried to make sense of his son’s death that helped, it was the people who came with meals and just were there with him. In the end it was his belief that God was there in those people who were there for him that got him through it. He ended his sermon with, ‘So I shall – so let us all – seek consolation in that love which never dies, and find peace in the dazzling grace that always is.’
‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall find comfort.’ What does comfort mean? How blessed can someone feel in their sorrow when they are in the midst of the crushing reality of great loss? Can there be consolation? It is something much more than saying ‘it will be alright’ and we know that comforting someone does not mean that the pain will be taken away. It literally means, ‘to call to one’s side.’ It means that in our grief, we have an advocate. We will not be alone in our bereavement, but will be God at our side.
In my last church I ran a bereavement group annually after the Christmas and New Year holidays. Because of the age and size of the membership, there were people each year to invite to the group that covenanted to meet weekly for 8 weeks. We used a book called living through personal crisis by a psychologist named Stearns as our jumping off point in discussions. One week, after a chapter on Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s stages of grieving, one member of the group said that he identified with the anger phase. After his wife had died, he tore up the beautiful garden she had cared for and nurtured for years. He said, it made him realize this destructive thing he had done was a way of coping with his deep grief. He had felt awful about it and now knew that God was with him comforting him in his sorrow as he dug up all the plants.
Blessed are the sorrowful, for they will find consolation. It is not our place to make someone who is grieving feel better. It is not our place to assign a timeline to grief and say, it has been a year now, you need to move on and not be sad. When someone we love dies, we lose them. It is like losing an arm or a leg. It is not going to come back. We just need to learn how to live without them. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in the book Letters and Papers from Prison,
Nothing can make up for the absence of someone we love, and it would be wrong to find a substitute… That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation, for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bond between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; God doesn’t fill it, but on the contrary, God keeps it empty and so helps us keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain.
The dearer and richer our memories, the more difficult the separation. But gratitude changes the pangs of memory into a tranquil joy… We must take care not to wallow in our memories or hand ourselves over to them, just as we do not gaze all the time at a valuable present, but at only special times, and apart from these keep it simply as a valuable present that is ours for certain.
The twenty third psalm is normally read at memorial services. It, like this quote from Bonhoeffer centers on a theology that is honest. It speaks not to a reality where everything will be just fine, and life will be in a perfect harmony, but a reality that in the bad things in life, we are not alone. God walks with us. We are God’s. God does not abandon us in our mourning, but sits with us and holds us as we grieve.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
In Rabbi Harold Kushner’s famous book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People he says that Yes, God gives us comfort, but God also gives us direction. God says that life has to be lived for something. This provides the life-line we need to go on living. It is exactly this which propelled the families of those killed by assault weapons to seek strict gun laws and families of those who overdosed on opiates to ask for more control on prescription drugs.
Edgar Jackson, author of You and Your Grief, rewrites the words to this beatitude to say, ‘Blessed are those who use their sorrow creatively for they shall find a security that is not shaken by circumstance, but rather, produces the fruits of enriched sympathy, heightened understanding, and deepened faith.’ Blessed are the sorrowful, for they will be comforted and eventually you will be able to be a great comfort to others. Amen.