Happy mourners
Matt 5: 1 – 12
Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 28 July, 2003

I’d rather have a hearty welcome than a cordial one. But did you know that, if you translate ‘cordial’ exactly from its Latin roots into English, it translates as ‘hearty’?
   After our work Christmas party last year,  received a lot of warmly cordial hugs when I said I was going. But I also received a hearty hug from someone who felt I’d been particularly supportive in a crisis at the end of the year. Six or seven hugs said, “You’re a nice bloke, Peter... have a good Christmas.” One hug said, “You've been my friend lately, Peter... thanks for everything.”

  That usually happens when you have two nearly equal words in a language. One becomes more formal then the other, or one becomes the specialist word and another becomes the everyday word.

  When I went into hospital several years ago, they stuck me on a trolley, filled me with sedatives and then asked me if I was there for a cholecystectomy. I said, "Hmmm?" Then  said, "I am here for... what do you call it? Gall bladder rem... rem... They are taking it out. My gall bladder."
  And they said, “That’s what we said.” Of course! I should have understood at once!

  Well, today, we are talking about those who mourn. Jesus says they will be comforted.
  We often talk about grief and mourning as though they meant virtually the same, just that one is a more highfaluting version of the other.
  I’d never really realised it before, but there is a subtle difference. Grief is more to do with how you feel, and mourning is more about what you do about the grief.

  For example, someone you care about dies. You experience grief. You remember the good times you spent together, and you grieve that they will never return. You feel angry that God seems to have robbed you of someone precious. You try bargaining: “I’ll be very good if you just give my friend back.” You beat yourself with all those "What if I’d done something differently?” and “If only he hadn’t gone to Singapore” kind of arguments in your head. And, in the end, you accept that it has happened, and you have to get on with life.

  If you want a quick primer on the stages of grief, watch that episode of The Simpsons where Homer faces open heart surgery, and the doctor tries to talk to him about the stages of grief. Homer acts out every stage of grief perfectly at the same time as he tries to tell the doctor that it is all nonsense and it won't happen to him.

  That’s grief, but what about mourning?
  Mourning has more to do with how you respond to grief, what you do when you are grieving.
  Many societies have traditions for mourning. People who are mourning often wear black or dark colours to indicate that they are in a sombre mood — though the Chinese tradition is to wear white. In some societies they put ashes on their faces or wear their hair in certain ways. Funerals are held, with various traditions associated with them. There might be a follow-up ceremony a month or a year after the death. Sometimes fireworks are let off, or guns fired. Special foods or drinks are associated with the season of mourning.

  Drugljub, who had been a neighbour of mine back when I was about eight, died a couple of years back. At the funeral, we all had to have a piece of special cake and a small glass of brandy, because that was part of the mourning ceremony.

  But mourning is more than ceremonies. Chris had an uncle who used to mourn people he hardly knew. He’d tell us, “Old Mrs Wobbly’s sister-in-law’s cousin died last week, so I went to the funeral. It was so sad, but it was very beautiful.”
  He just had a feeling he should tag along if someone he knew was going to a funeral, and he’d wear all the right things and do all that was required of a mourner, and buy flowers, even if he had never met the person who died, and even if the friend he was going with hardly knew the person who had died. It was just The Done Thing as far as Syd was concerned.

  I guess that you know very well that Jesus isn’t going to be a party to hypocrisy. How often did he say, “Woe to you, scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites!” He wants no play acting about our mourning. So he isn't giving any encouragement to people who do the rituals of mourning just because it’s the done thing.

  I’m not criticising Chris’ late uncle. He was a kindly old man, and I'm sure that there was an element of being supportive and caring when he went through the rituals of mourning alongside some friend or neighbour. But his mourning itself wasn’t a credit to him, only his concern for a friend was a credit to him.

  So there is a special blessedness for mourners, for people who act on the grief in their hearts.
  That would have sounded absolutely crazy to the people who listened. The attitude in those days was, “If you are mourning, things have gone wrong; if things have gone wrong, it’s more likely that you have been cursed than that you have been blessed in any way.”

  Jesus says, “If you are mourning, you are blessed, and you will receive comfort.”

  I’ll just remind you what I pointed out last week, that this whole idea of blessings for Kingdom people is that Jesus means a different quality of blessing than what we would normally assume.
  There are two Greek words for blessed. The first one, evlogitos, essentially means that someone has said good things about you; the second one, makarios, means that the blessing you need is inside you. It’s that inner blessedness that God himself has, and he offers you a share in it.
  I reminded you of the conflict between Jacob and Esau about the birthright and the blessing that goes with it, because each of them wanted his father, Isaac, to place his hand on his head and say, “Son, you make me proud! You are getting the farm, and God will take special care of you and your descendants.” Jacob and Esau both wanted to be evlogitos, or blessed by someone else.

  But I also reminded you of that tax-collector in the temple. He stood alongside a pompous, self-righteous Pharisee, who said, “I thank you, God, that I'm better than most other people, so I know you will bless me.” But the tax collector just poured his heart out to God,
Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner!
  Jesus said that it was this man, not the Pharisee, who went home justified and at peace with God. The tax collector was poor in spirit and knew how to mourn. He was becoming a Kingdom person whose life truly reflected the Sermon on the Mount.

  There is a kind of mourning which also gains very little for the mourner.

  You have probably read or seen news items about the gangland killing in Victoria recently, where gangsters shot two men dead at a kids’ football match. When the funeral comes, I’m sure there will be a lot of genuine mourning going on, but, unless there is a change of heart, it means little.
  He will have a lot of gangland acquaintances who will certainly be very genuine in their grief and their mourning.
  But I suppose it's not going to be the kind of mourning that leads to change. Gangsterism will still exist despite every evidence they will see that crime destroys lives.

  So that’s another clue: it’s the kind of mourning that leads to a change of heart and a change of attitude that Jesus means here.

  We can go back to the Pharisee and the tax collector in the temple. The tax collector’s grief over his own sinfulness led him to action as he mourned his sinfulness in the temple. And it was because of that attitude of heart that God declared that sinful man to be justified.
  As Paul writes,

Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God.

  One of the most difficult things for us to do is to truly mourn our own sinfulness and the sinfulness of our world.

  Most of us have some past deeds we are ashamed of. It may be that we have betrayed the trust of someone who depended on us. It may be that we have dropped our own moral standards, that we have done something that maybe had only a limited impact on others, but that was good luck rather than good management. Yet that action has left you ashamed of yourself. You look back and you see that your deeds have hurt God as well as ourselves.
  This is true for everyone.

  These things really need our remorse and our mourning far more than the things we usually mourn do.

  But isn't it enormously hard to face the evil in our own hearts?
  I took part in a training course some years ago to help participants learn how to care better for others. One thing I learnt in that course was how to hug better. But I also discovered that you help others when you are less controlled by your own issues.
  We had an exercise to do. We were each given an ordinary brown paper shopping bag, the kind with string handles. They are rather hard to get these days!
  We were asked to decorate them during the week and then bring them back and we would "share our bags" in the group.

  Here’s how we were to decorate them. The outside was about how we look to the world; the inside was about how we are inside.
  I found it easy to do the outside of my bag. I showed some of my achievements and some of my shortcomings, the kinds of thing that I am fairly happy for everyone to know. There were my family, my education, my work achievements. There were my interests and hobbies. There were my habits of being late, of forgetting things I have to do.

  But the inside was different. In there were some things I had been ashamed of for years. Things that made me keep clear of people in case they found out. Perhaps not the greatest misdeeds in history, but things I was very ashamed of. I put some things in my bag to represent those things.
  I felt sick the night I had to share my bag in the group. I did it, but it was the closest I have ever come to vomiting from fear. When I had finished, I didn't want to talk, I didn't want to go and join with the rest of the group. I just had to sit alone for a while to gather my composure again. Pam, one of the group leaders, came to me and saw me there on my own. She said, "Would you like a hug?" In one way, I would have, but I didn't think I could bear being touched.

  We all fear to bring our sin and shame to the surface, and we keep it submerged and hidden, but it lurks there in the depths, and it controls our lives anyway.

  I know a woman who was horrendously sexually abused as a child. She has sworn it will never happen to her own children. Yet, without ever touching them in the wrong way, she has routinely sexually abused those children throughout their lives. What is hidden and undealt with in her life continues to distort the lives of all around her.
  You see, the entire climate of her home has been controlled by her sexuality and by her determination to keep sexual matters at an arm's distance from those children. At an emotional level, the kids never escape from sexual issues. There is a vast difference between a one off event and an ongoing climate.

  We become terrified of facing what lies within us, so we refuse to grieve over our own loss of innocence. While we refuse to grieve over our own sin, we can never adequately grieve over the sin of the world. And, while we fail to acknowledge that grief, we refuse the way of mourning.
  And, while we refuse to mourn, while we refuse to take an active responsibility for our inner grief, we never experience the comfort that Christ our Lord gives to those who mourn. And, if we don't receive that comfort, then we fail to share in the blessedness which characterises God himself.

  There's an old song, My Lord, what a mourning. Someone laughed last time we sang it, because some versions say, "What a morning", like the time before the afternoon, and my words spoke of the active grief of those who face the judgment. Whoever it was thought I'd made a funny spelling mistake.

  Well, it will be a great and glorious morning when the dead in Christ rise again. It will be a morning of splendour and joy when the blood that Jesus shed for you and me on Calvary is finally shown to have worked perfectly for our redemption.
  But, for many it will be a day of mourning, when the starts begin to fall. On that day, people will weep, and cry for the rocks to fall on them and the mountains to cover them.
  On that day, they will plead for time for salvation, but there will be no more time, because time itself will have fled.
  If you haven't bowed the knee here on earth; if you haven't mourned over your own sin, there will be no comfort at all. But, if you have bowed your knee to Jesus and if your tongue has confessed, "Jesus is Lord," and if you have truly repented of your sin, then you will already know some of that comfort which will be ours, and which is even ours today.

  Before I began thinking about this simple statement, I thought it was just about the least important thing that Jesus ever said. But now I see that it is profound in a way that I had never imagined.
  It's like that tax collector again. The Pharisee was setting himself up to experience great loss and pain on the Great and Terrible Day, because he was totally unprepared to mourn a while today. The tax collector who faced himself and mourned went away comforted and experiencing the true inner blessedness of a child of God.

  Let's face what is inside our bags and bring it to the Lord for his cleansing power.

  And may great glory come to him by the Holy Spirit and through the church, through all ages,
AMEN