Today is All Saints’ Day – it’s the day when we remember that we are not alone here on this earth but connected to a “great cloud of witnesses”. As we say in the prayer today, we are knit together in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of Jesus Christ. That is why today we read out loud all the names of our earthly church body who have entered the grave and discovered it to be a gate into the Kingdom where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing but life everlasting.
This is one of the great privileges of given to Christians – the assurance that death is not the end, but only the beginning of real life, thanks to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for our sake and on our behalf. Nonetheless, death on this side of heaven is full of grief. And this has been a year full of loss at Christ Church; there are more than 30 names that will be read after communion today.
That is why our gospel reading for today is the beginning Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. The beatitudes assure of that the woes we experience in life right now are not the end of the story. And because we remember those who have died, I want to focus on one beatitude in this short sermon: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Life is filled with mourning of all kinds; yet is also a life teeming with the comfort of the gospel. So, if you can make it through the mourning bit of this sermon, just know that the comfort is coming.
Mourning takes many forms, but for some here today, mourning means mourning the death of someone you deeply loved, or someone you loved, but it was complicated, or someone you “should” have loved, but really didn’t, and now they are gone. There are endless ways to mourn. In Tana French’s novel, “The Faithful Place”, a father helps his 19-year-old daughter cope with a death in the family.
He says, “I don’t think there are any rules for how you are supposed to act when someone you care about dies, sweetheart. I think you just have to figure it out as you go along. Sometimes you’ll feel like crying, sometimes you won’t, sometimes you’ll be raging at him for dying on you. You just have to remember that all those are OK. So is whatever else your head comes up with.” I used that quote in my devotional book called The Almost Daily Devotional, which my friend likes to call The Almost Inspirational Devotional. (!)
Mourning is a reality for all of us, even when we aren’t dealing with the death of someone close. Parents mourn children who have grown up and flown the coop. Everyone experiences the death of relationships in one way or another – a divorce, a falling out, a fading way – the closeness you once experienced is gone. That’s sad. People mourn the brokenness in the world and failures in themselves. Opportunities lost and reality bearing no resemblance to former hopes. I have a friend who moved to what he feels is a soulless neighborhood. He says he’s gone to live where dreams go to die!
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” The word Jesus uses for mourning means much more than bereavement. It includes a kind of deep grief for any kind of fracturing. It also includes sorrow over your own sin – those things done which you should not have done, and those things left undone which you should have done. Mourning then often leads to repentance – the humble recognition of yourself as a “miserable sinner”, per the old form of our confession of sin. When mourning includes all of that, then mourning includes all of us.
The beautiful thing about mourning is that it leads to comfort. That is what Jesus says and that is what He does. The word comfort here literally means to “come along side of”. Or to call to one’s side. There is 1989 song by the band James called “Sit Down.” It opens with a scene familiar to us all – the singer is awake in the middle of the night, worrying, fretting, mourning even. He’s got “secrets that I can’t keep in the sight of day…. It’s hard to carry on when you feel alone.” Then in breaks the voice of God coming in comfort and coming to comfort. “Oh, sit down, oh sit down, sit down next to me. Those who feel the breath of sadness, sit down next to me. Those who find they’re touched by madness, sit down next to me, Oh sit down.”
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” We are doing a series of parishioner videos this year as part of our stewardship campaign. This past week, Keven Lindemann talked about the comfort of the gospel. “The week weighs me down and I come in here and an hour later I feel lighter. Every time. Every time. It’s okay to recognize that we are all flawed human beings and this is a broken world but that Someone has paid the ultimate sacrifice for us. And that recognition has given me a tremendous amount of comfort.”
The preacher of the beatitudes is ironically speaking to Himself, the one who paid the ultimate price. On the cross he cries out, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” If you feel like you are in mourning now and comfort will never come, you are not alone. So did Jesus. But comfort will come, for comfort did come. The psalmist says, “weeping may last for the night, but joy comes in the mourning. And joy did come on Easter morning, the sun rising on Jesus risen from the dead. Just as those people we will name in a few minutes will be risen from mourning to comfort, from death to life.
I’ll close with a story a man told me last week. He is in his late 30’s. He grew up in a Christian home and sometimes came to our 5pm service here when he was in college. Then he rejected it all and set out to make as much money as he could. So, for 20 years he pursued his own ends – the happiness of self-indulgence that world says will satisfy you – only to find that the was no happiness and no satisfaction, only a gnawing, existential anxiety. He was in the finance business in the middle east when war forced him to come home, back to his parent’s house. One morning after a sleepless night, he found himself alone in the house praying. He said the phrase, “a heart of contrition” came to him, a phrase foreign to him, but he prayed it. He then found himself on the floor, weeping. Weeping for 3 hours. He felt a presence – the unmistakable presence of God – sit down on the floor with him to comfort him. The peace he long sought for sought him out instead.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
Amen.