We begin the New Year by ending our series in the Beatitudes, and the blessing we’re looking at today is one that really caught my imagination earlier in the week when I sat down to think about it.
Jesus said: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Now we’ll get to the question of purity in a minute, but before then there’s a tangent I want us to follow, because it leads us into some really important truth.
Listen to that beatitude again.
Blessed are the pure in heart, says Jesus, for they will see God.
There’s something here so obvious that we’d easily miss it, but it’s so significant that we daren’t miss it. What he’s highlighting is that there’s a profound link between what goes on in our heart, and what goes on with our eyes.
And when I realised that, it was like someone took the cork out of the bottle. All these insights and images came fizzing up from nowhere.
I remembered a scene from the Silence of the Lambs where Dr Hannibal Lecter is helping an FBI agent called Clarice Starling catch a serial killer.
“He covets, Clarice, That is his nature. And how do we begin to covet? Do we seek out things to covet? No, we begin by coveting what we see every day.” – The eyes influencing the heart.
I remembered King David, hanging around listlessly on the roof of his palace when he should have been leading his troops in battle, and catching a glimpse of his neighbour’s wife as she undressed for her evening bath. The seed of an idea took root, and he let it grow. The eyes influencing the heart.
I remember a certain 4 year old I live with, who will remain nameless, who until fairly recently didn’t know how to work the remote control on the telly and was therefore limited to whatever channel we chose for her. And we always chose CBeeBees, for two reasons – 1) it’s educational and 2) there are no commercials.
Now the self-same 4 year old has worked out how to use the remote control, and even though we police things quite carefully, she’s coming under the irresistible influence of the advertising agencies who want to sell her things and seem desperate to get her parents to consolidate all their debts into one manageable monthly repayment. They are getting to her little heart through her little eyes.
And on a more serious note, I remembered a piece I read recently about how both teenage boys and girls are being affected by the ready availability of pornography over the internet. The average age at which boys have their first exposure to online pornography is 11, and there’s growing raft of evidence that teenage boys’ treatment and evaluation of girls is becoming conditioned by what they’ve been watching online.
Girls are affected too, because they’re feeling more pressure than ever to look like these pneumatic models the boys are lusting after, and, worse still, to be as sexually accommodating as them. Another example of the profound connection between the eyes and the heart.
“The eyes” says Jesus “are like a lamp for the body. If your eyes are sound, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are no good, your body will be in darkness”.
What we feed our eyes on, we feed our hearts on. What we behold, develops a hold over us, for good or for ill.
But that isn’t the whole story in the eyes/heart relationship. Because the lines of action aren’t one way. How we are in our hearts also determines what we choose to see; maybe even what we’re able to see.
18 days after the Civil Rights March on Washington in 1963, white supremacists planted a bomb in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama, and four children were killed.
Connie Lynch, a member of the local Ku Klux Klan was interviewed after the bombing and she was given a hard time because innocent children had been killed. Her response was staggering. “They weren’t children. Children are little people. Little human beings, and that means white people…. They’re just niggers…. and if there’s four less niggers tonight, then I say “good for whoever planted the bomb”
Contrast that with Mother Teresa, who was once asked how she could minister with such kindness among folk whose bodies were rotting away with illness. “Each one of them is Jesus in disguise” she said.
One woman couldn't even recognise the humanity in another human being. The other was able to see the image of God in even the most deformed human being. The condition of our hearts determines what we’re able to see.
And we can bring that idea much closer to home. We all know that there are folk we find it hard to think badly of because we love them, and others we find it hard to see any good in because we dislike them. And the thing is, those judgments, however strongly felt, may not be sound. Our heart is dictating what we’re able to see and others might see the same people in a very different light.
So instead of a one way street from eye to heart, it’s more like a roundabout. What I take in through my eyes affects my heart, but it's equally true that how my heart is determines how I see things.
So now that we’ve followed our tangent, let’s digress back to the beatitude.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
But what does it mean to be pure in heart?
Is he talking about folk who are naturally guileless and straightforward? Is he talking about the super-holy? The goody-two shoes? The spiritual high-achievers?
Come to think of it, can anyone ever really be pure in heart?
I don’t think there’s even one of us here who would dare to claim that title. We know our pitfalls and our weaknesses only too well.
So whatever this is about, I don’t think it’s an expectation of perfection. Christ knows that’s beyond us.
I’ve thought long and hard about that this week, and what helped was when I picked up that word ‘pure’ and ran with it for a while.
It’s important to remember that anything that we call pure doesn’t start out pure. It has to become pure. Even the platinum in Kate Middleton’s engagement ring had to be dug up and refined several times to get rid of all the dross.
Purification is a process – something that takes time and effort. But what we’re aiming for at the end of it is one thing, whether it’s a metal, or a chemical, or a liquid or whatever. When we get down to that one thing, we can say we’ve reached a state of purity.
So what does it mean to be pure in heart?
I think it means that you’re the kind of person whose heart and eyes are focused on the one thing. On God himself.
You’re still a real person. You get up, wash, have breakfast, go to work, love your family, pay your bills. You don’t walk around in a holy trance! But God’s at the centre of it all. He’s the canvas you paint your life on. The field your sow your life in. The sun at the centre of the universe which is you. He gets the priority he warrants, as God. He gets your time and attention.
Are any of us there yet? No.
Should we be discouraged by that? No.
I’m fond of quoting a verse from the book of Hebrews that’s stayed with me since the first time I heard it. Hebrews 10:14 which says that through his sacrifice Jesus has made perfect forever those who are being made holy. What that tells us is that in eternity, it’s a done deal! Our future with God is certain. But for now, we are being made holy. We’re being purified. And that can be a messy process.
So this is not about never messing up. It’s about keeping going with singleness of mind and purpose, even when you do mess up.
How set are you on God? It’s an important question for a couple of reasons.
For one thing, there are several places in the Scriptures that suggest that how we approach God will determine what we find in him.
Psalm 18 is typical: the Psalmist says
25 To the faithful you show yourself faithful,
to the blameless you show yourself blameless,
26 to the pure you show yourself pure,
but to the crooked you show yourself shrewd.
If we’re lax or lukewarm in our dealings with God, do we expect him to be otherwise with us?
Every now and again, folk say to me that they wish God would make it easier to know him – that he’d come alongside and overwhelm them with some profound experience. And THEN they’d be able to believe.
It happens for some that way. But for most of us, it’s not like that. For most of us, I think God keeps a perfect distance to see just how serious we are about going after him. Any woman who’s ever courted the affections of a man will know the sense in that! It’s called playing hard to get! And it sorts out those who are really interested from the timewasters.
It’s the pure in heart, says Jesus, who will see God. Not the perfect or the faultless, but those who genuinely set their heart and mind on knowing him. They’ll stumble, they’ll fall, they’ll mess up. But they’ll keep going because they’ve come to believe that the answers they’re looking for aren’t to be found in anyone or anything else.
Whether you’re just beginning your pursuit of God, or you’ve been at it for years, today’s beatitude is an encouragement to keep going. It’s a promise that those who seek earnestly will find.
I’ll finish with some words from the book of Proverbs that I love, written a thousand years before our Gospel reading today. I’ve always heard them as a word from God directly to me, and you should hear them that way too.
My child, if you accept my words
and store up my commands within you
turning your ear to wisdom
and applying your heart to understanding
and if you call out for insight
and cry aloud for understanding,
and if you look for it as for silver
and search for it as for hidden treasure,
then you will understand the fear of the LORD
and find the knowledge of God.
It’s all there – everything we’ve been thinking about this morning. Searching, learning, looking, understanding, finding.
Eyes and heart, focused on the one thing, bringing blessing.
Amen
Showing posts with label beatitudes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beatitudes. Show all posts
Sunday, 9 January 2011
Wednesday, 5 January 2011
Blessed Are Those Who Are Persecuted for the Sake of Righteousness
Today we come to the penultimate beatitude in this series of eight we’ve been looking at in the build up to Christmas:
“Blessed are those who are persecuted because they do what God requires – the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as them”.
It might seem like a strange topic for the season of goodwill: but given that this is a communion service where the cost of following God to the end is shown graphically in the elements of bread and wine, perhaps it’s not so strange.
Now there are two obvious Sermons to preach today and I don’t intend to preach either.
The first is to hold up examples of Christians who are persecuted in today’s world and say “there you go, folks. That puts whatever problems you’re facing because of your faith into perspective”.
It would be very easy to do.
If you Google “Christian Persecution”, you’ll quickly find several websites that spell out the reality of life for an estimated 100 million Christians across the world. I lifted these headlines at random from one website, but there were pages and pages of other stories I could have chosen.
“Europe urged to halt death sentence of Iranian pastor”
“Pakistani teenage Christian nearly stoned to death in prison”
“Hindu militants attack Punjabi Church”
“Gunmen break into Iraqui Christian home and kill 2”.
“Chinese house churches raided – two pastors missing”.
And they’re just headlines, but behind every one there are people being denied basic human rights, and families worried sick for their loved ones and for themselves.
And though it has to be said that people of all creeds (and none) face persecution in different parts of the world, the fate of Christians, particularly in Islamic and Communist countries, is especially precarious in today’s world.
And it would be easy to use their stories to flagellate ourselves for how little we suffer for our faith; but that’s not a sermon I want to preach.
And nor do I want to put on my Daily Mail hat and rail against the so-called persecution of Christians in Britain today. You know the kind of thing – the Airport worker who’s told she can’t wear a crucifix round her neck at work. The healthcare worker who’s struck off for offering to pray with a patient.
These kinds of small-scale persecution are cropping up with regularity now because we live in a culture of overcautious political correctness. But although stories like that are saddening and maddening, they’re hardly surprising.
Minorities often suffer at the hands of the majority, and we live in an age when only 15% of the UK population attend church at least once a month. We’re a minority now. And instead of spluttering our outrage about it, we’re going to have to learn all over again what it means to live creatively at the margins.
But I digress.
So those are the two sermons I’m not going to preach this morning.
Instead, let me tell you four things the Bible says about persecution and leave it at that.
Firstly – Anyone who’s trying to live a Christian life will come up against persecution of one form or another. That’s guaranteed. If you choose not to follow the crowd, don’t be surprised if the crowd turns on you now and again.
Now some folk bring it on themselves – the Dot Cottons of this world with their moany self-righteousness. But there are many good souls, doing nobody any harm and plenty of folk good, who still find themselves at the sharp end of criticism.
As Jesus spoke with the disciples on the night he was betrayed, he warned them that the going ahead would be tough “Remember the words I spoke to you: ‘No servant is greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also”.
Expect it, he said. Do your best to live at peace with everyone, but don’t expect that it will always be successful. If you choose to live the way of the kingdom you won’t always fit in. And you know what the world does to people who don’t fit in. It kicks them until they’re the right shape, or it pushes them to the margins where they can safely be ignored. Don’t be surprised when it happens.
Don’t be surprised when you don’t get the invitation; or they pass you over for promotion because you’re not ruthless enough or you prioritise your family and your church life over your career.
Don’t be surprised when tongues wag, or emails fly because you choose to live differently. Don’t be surprised when some take great delight in misrepresenting you.
Persecution of one sort or another will come. Expect it, says Jesus.
But remember, secondly, that you’re not alone in it. Christ is with you in your suffering. Expect God’s presence.
Some of you will know the story of how Saul became the apostle Paul. As one of the most devout Jews of his day, Saul was tearing about the country persecuting the newborn church; presiding over the execution of some of its key members.
And then on the road to Damascus, he was blinded by a shining light from heaven. And he heard the voice of Jesus saying “Saul, Saul . Why do you persecute me?”. Not “Why do you persecute my church? Why do you persecute those poor believers? Why do you persecute ME”.
Now by this stage, Jesus was long gone. Saul never laid eyes on him except in this encounter. But for Jesus, persecuting his church was the same as persecuting his very self. He is with us in our suffering.
Much, much later in life, after he’d struggled long and hard in the service of the gospel, Saul – now Paul - set down these words in his letter to the Romans, and they’re words that are born out of experience:
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
We are not alone when we suffer for his sake. God is present with us.
And that is hugely important, because the next thing he asks us to do, we couldn’t do without him
Jesus asks us to pray for those who persecute us. We need to Express Prayer for them.
Nothing represents the whole upside-down, counter-intuitive philosophy of Jesus’ kingdom way, better than this command.
Just a few verses on from where we read this morning, Jesus says these words:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven".
Martin Luther King, who had more enemies than most of us, put it this way: “He who would change someone must first love them”.
How will our enemies, our persecutors, ever change if we refuse to love them and return hate for hate?
Desmond Tutu tells a story from the work of the Truth and Reconciliation committee’s work in South Africa. A black woman whose son and husband had both been brutally killed by security police officers found herself in the same room as the man who had orchestrated their killings. After he’d finished giving his testimony, the commissioners asked the widow how she wanted justice to be done.
“I want three things” she said.
“I want to be taken to the place where my husband’s body was burned, so I can gather the dust there and give his remains a decent burial”.
“My husband and my son were my only family, so the second thing I want is for Mr Van Broek to become my son. I want him to come twice a month to the ghetto where I live so I can pour out on him whatever love I still have within me.”
“And thirdly, I want someone to come to my side and lead me across the courtroom so I can take Mr Van Broek in my arms and embrace him and let him know that he is truly forgiven”.
"Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse”, says Jesus. Why? Because it’s the only way to break the cycle of hate. It’s the only way that love can triumph.
Expect persecution. Expect God’s Presence. Express Prayer, and lastly, Embrace Powerlessness.
One of the worst things about persecution of any kind, is the feeling of powerlessness that goes with it. But in the kingdom, that powerlessness needn’t be a hindrance. It can be an opportunity.
In the second letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes about an especially difficult time in his ministry where he felt utterly powerless. But in that situation he heard God say these words which have been a comfort to many suffering Christians:“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
When we come to the end of our own strength, there’s nothing left for us but to rely on God’s strength. And when accept that, we find the power to endure.
Mother Julian of Norwich was a 14th century mystic who lived in a time of great turmoil and uncertainty with the land ravaged by plague and warfare. And in the midst of it all, she had several intense spiritual revelations from God which she wrote down, and they can still be read today. There are her words:
'You will not be overcome, ' were said very insistently and strongly, He did not say, 'You will not be laboured, you will not be disquieted; but he did say: 'You will not be overcome'.
Persecutions will come. We can expect them. But we can also expect God’s presence in the midst of them. And when we express prayer for those who seek to wound us, and embrace our powerlessness, we will find the strength to get through, even in our weakness.
There’s the blessing. Thanks be to God.
“Blessed are those who are persecuted because they do what God requires – the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as them”.
It might seem like a strange topic for the season of goodwill: but given that this is a communion service where the cost of following God to the end is shown graphically in the elements of bread and wine, perhaps it’s not so strange.
Now there are two obvious Sermons to preach today and I don’t intend to preach either.
The first is to hold up examples of Christians who are persecuted in today’s world and say “there you go, folks. That puts whatever problems you’re facing because of your faith into perspective”.
It would be very easy to do.
If you Google “Christian Persecution”, you’ll quickly find several websites that spell out the reality of life for an estimated 100 million Christians across the world. I lifted these headlines at random from one website, but there were pages and pages of other stories I could have chosen.
“Europe urged to halt death sentence of Iranian pastor”
“Pakistani teenage Christian nearly stoned to death in prison”
“Hindu militants attack Punjabi Church”
“Gunmen break into Iraqui Christian home and kill 2”.
“Chinese house churches raided – two pastors missing”.
And they’re just headlines, but behind every one there are people being denied basic human rights, and families worried sick for their loved ones and for themselves.
And though it has to be said that people of all creeds (and none) face persecution in different parts of the world, the fate of Christians, particularly in Islamic and Communist countries, is especially precarious in today’s world.
And it would be easy to use their stories to flagellate ourselves for how little we suffer for our faith; but that’s not a sermon I want to preach.
And nor do I want to put on my Daily Mail hat and rail against the so-called persecution of Christians in Britain today. You know the kind of thing – the Airport worker who’s told she can’t wear a crucifix round her neck at work. The healthcare worker who’s struck off for offering to pray with a patient.
These kinds of small-scale persecution are cropping up with regularity now because we live in a culture of overcautious political correctness. But although stories like that are saddening and maddening, they’re hardly surprising.
Minorities often suffer at the hands of the majority, and we live in an age when only 15% of the UK population attend church at least once a month. We’re a minority now. And instead of spluttering our outrage about it, we’re going to have to learn all over again what it means to live creatively at the margins.
But I digress.
So those are the two sermons I’m not going to preach this morning.
Instead, let me tell you four things the Bible says about persecution and leave it at that.
Firstly – Anyone who’s trying to live a Christian life will come up against persecution of one form or another. That’s guaranteed. If you choose not to follow the crowd, don’t be surprised if the crowd turns on you now and again.
Now some folk bring it on themselves – the Dot Cottons of this world with their moany self-righteousness. But there are many good souls, doing nobody any harm and plenty of folk good, who still find themselves at the sharp end of criticism.
As Jesus spoke with the disciples on the night he was betrayed, he warned them that the going ahead would be tough “Remember the words I spoke to you: ‘No servant is greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also”.
Expect it, he said. Do your best to live at peace with everyone, but don’t expect that it will always be successful. If you choose to live the way of the kingdom you won’t always fit in. And you know what the world does to people who don’t fit in. It kicks them until they’re the right shape, or it pushes them to the margins where they can safely be ignored. Don’t be surprised when it happens.
Don’t be surprised when you don’t get the invitation; or they pass you over for promotion because you’re not ruthless enough or you prioritise your family and your church life over your career.
Don’t be surprised when tongues wag, or emails fly because you choose to live differently. Don’t be surprised when some take great delight in misrepresenting you.
Persecution of one sort or another will come. Expect it, says Jesus.
But remember, secondly, that you’re not alone in it. Christ is with you in your suffering. Expect God’s presence.
Some of you will know the story of how Saul became the apostle Paul. As one of the most devout Jews of his day, Saul was tearing about the country persecuting the newborn church; presiding over the execution of some of its key members.
And then on the road to Damascus, he was blinded by a shining light from heaven. And he heard the voice of Jesus saying “Saul, Saul . Why do you persecute me?”. Not “Why do you persecute my church? Why do you persecute those poor believers? Why do you persecute ME”.
Now by this stage, Jesus was long gone. Saul never laid eyes on him except in this encounter. But for Jesus, persecuting his church was the same as persecuting his very self. He is with us in our suffering.
Much, much later in life, after he’d struggled long and hard in the service of the gospel, Saul – now Paul - set down these words in his letter to the Romans, and they’re words that are born out of experience:
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
We are not alone when we suffer for his sake. God is present with us.
And that is hugely important, because the next thing he asks us to do, we couldn’t do without him
Jesus asks us to pray for those who persecute us. We need to Express Prayer for them.
Nothing represents the whole upside-down, counter-intuitive philosophy of Jesus’ kingdom way, better than this command.
Just a few verses on from where we read this morning, Jesus says these words:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven".
Martin Luther King, who had more enemies than most of us, put it this way: “He who would change someone must first love them”.
How will our enemies, our persecutors, ever change if we refuse to love them and return hate for hate?
Desmond Tutu tells a story from the work of the Truth and Reconciliation committee’s work in South Africa. A black woman whose son and husband had both been brutally killed by security police officers found herself in the same room as the man who had orchestrated their killings. After he’d finished giving his testimony, the commissioners asked the widow how she wanted justice to be done.
“I want three things” she said.
“I want to be taken to the place where my husband’s body was burned, so I can gather the dust there and give his remains a decent burial”.
“My husband and my son were my only family, so the second thing I want is for Mr Van Broek to become my son. I want him to come twice a month to the ghetto where I live so I can pour out on him whatever love I still have within me.”
“And thirdly, I want someone to come to my side and lead me across the courtroom so I can take Mr Van Broek in my arms and embrace him and let him know that he is truly forgiven”.
"Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse”, says Jesus. Why? Because it’s the only way to break the cycle of hate. It’s the only way that love can triumph.
Expect persecution. Expect God’s Presence. Express Prayer, and lastly, Embrace Powerlessness.
One of the worst things about persecution of any kind, is the feeling of powerlessness that goes with it. But in the kingdom, that powerlessness needn’t be a hindrance. It can be an opportunity.
In the second letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes about an especially difficult time in his ministry where he felt utterly powerless. But in that situation he heard God say these words which have been a comfort to many suffering Christians:“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
When we come to the end of our own strength, there’s nothing left for us but to rely on God’s strength. And when accept that, we find the power to endure.
Mother Julian of Norwich was a 14th century mystic who lived in a time of great turmoil and uncertainty with the land ravaged by plague and warfare. And in the midst of it all, she had several intense spiritual revelations from God which she wrote down, and they can still be read today. There are her words:
'You will not be overcome, ' were said very insistently and strongly, He did not say, 'You will not be laboured, you will not be disquieted; but he did say: 'You will not be overcome'.
Persecutions will come. We can expect them. But we can also expect God’s presence in the midst of them. And when we express prayer for those who seek to wound us, and embrace our powerlessness, we will find the strength to get through, even in our weakness.
There’s the blessing. Thanks be to God.
Blessed Are Those Who Hunger and Thirst for Righteousness
Maybe it’s the snow, or having the kids around the house more this week, or the imminent arrival of Christmas and all that goes with it, I’m not sure. But I’ve found it harder than usual getting going with the sermon this week.
I did my reading, took notes, tried to shape them, tried to put things down on paper, but somehow nothing seemed to be clicking into place. Five years in, I’ve learned that this is one of the challenges of the job – being creative is one thing; being creative to order is something entirely different.
I watched a documentary on the artist Peter Howson this week - a really interesting and complex man. He’s had a difficult and tortuous life, Howson – spells of homelessness, mental illness and alcoholism are some of the things he’s had to contend with. But his work is exceptional, and since the year 2000 when he had a profound spiritual experience, his paintings have often had religious themes.
In 2008 he was given a commission by the Archdoicese of Glasgow to do a painting of St John Ogilvie, a priest who was tried and hanged for treason after the Scottish Reformation.
He spent eight months working on an execution scene which had something like 600 individual figures – and we watched this magnificent painting emerge from his imagination and evolve over time. But one day, having stood back and surveyed it all, he took a great black brush, painted over almost everything he’d done and started again. It just wasn’t right, he said.
On a far smaller scale, I had my own mini-Howson moment this week – a sermon which was most of the way there, but which ended up in the bin. Why? Because it just wasn’t right.
And that, I realised, was my way into a better sermon.
It got me thinking about ‘rightness’.
If I say that something’s not right, that’s a loaded statement. It means that out there, somewhere, whether in reality or in my brain, there’s a way that things should be. And the success of what I create is measured by the extent to which it captures what I’m trying to describe.
If I paint a picture of John Ogilvie’s execution which doesn’t capture my sense of how things were for him in that moment, then it’s not right.
If I cut two piece of wood at 45 degrees and they don’t make a right angle when I join them, then it isn’t right. Literally.
If I write a sermon which doesn’t get to the heart of what I think God wants us to understand from the text that week, then it’s not right either.
Two of my three kids are learning piano at the moment and one of the joys of that – when you’re not trying to write a sermon – is hearing how the pieces they’re learning improve over time.
At first there are just the plain mistakes. A crotchet rest instead of a minim. A black key instead of a white key.
But in time those mistakes get ironed out. And as they practice, the piece begins to take on more fluidity and character. It even begins to take on some of their own personality. They get it about as right as any child of their age could, and it’s lovely to hear.
There’s something in us that loves rightness. Rightness matters. It matters whether we’re talking about an objective fact like two plus two equals four, or a subjective aspiration like painting the best picture or writing the best sermon you can. There’s something in us that wants to get things right.
Now, with that excursus behind us, we’re in a better place to look at the beatitude that falls to us today, the sixth in our journey up to Christmas.
Jesus says: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. For they shall be filled”.
So what’s he saying here? What is this righteousness that Jesus is talking about?
Well, some hold that this beatitude’s about those who are hungry to be made right with God.
And although that’s true, I don’t think it’s the whole story. And the reason I say that is when you dive into the Bible and spend some time looking at the 200 or so uses of that word righteousness, you begin to get a feel for that word in all its richness.
And one of the most significant insights that emerges is that on more than 30 occasions, righteousness and justice are linked together. They’re linked together in the prophesy we heard earlier on from Isaiah, looking forward 700 years to the birth of the Messiah:
He will reign on David’s throne
and over his kingdom,
establishing and upholding it
with justice and righteousness
from that time on and for ever.
Justice and righteousness go together like salt and pepper in the Biblical story. And what that points to, I believe, is that this word righteousness is about more than individual salvation. It’s about the rightness God wants for his world. Righteousness is the rightness God wants for his world. Right relationships with God, with one another, with the planet. It’s cosmic in scope.
Instinctively, we know that Rightness matters. Howson wanted his painting to be right. I wanted my sermon to be right. And God wants his world to be right.
But the world is far from right. I don’t mean to be a pessimist – just a realist. Read the papers. Watch the telly. You don’t need me to spell it out for you.
There is a rightness – a way the world should be. That’s what Jesus means when he speaks about the kingdom. But the world is very far from right. And it breaks God’s heart. Because the one thing he will never do is force our hand. The price of making creatures who could freely choose to love him, was the risk that they would choose not to love him. We chose badly, and the world became what it now is.
But all of us are haunted by the idea that this is not the way things should be. That there’s someone or something who can bring rightness. And there are times when we ache for that rightness. We wouldn’t put it in those terms, maybe, but we ache for it.
We see a relationship going to pieces; battle-lines hardening; friends taking sides. And we ache for a resolution.
We see someone we love suffering in ways we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemy. And we ache for it to come to an end.
We see some tragedy or some staggering evil unfolding before us on the TV news, and we ache for the victims and the survivors.
We long for things to be made right. We may not know what that rightness looks like: we may not know where it will come from; we may not consider ourselves religious people, but we still find ourselves hungering and thirsting for rightness. And the Bible tells us there’s only one place we’ll find it – and that’s in God himself.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” says Jesus. “For they shall be filled”.
This beatitude isn’t a pat on the back for the religiously devoted. It’s an encouragement for every single person with a tender conscience; everyone who finds themselves yearning in some way for a world made right.
It’s a promise that the king whose humble birth we celebrate at this time of year, is bringing in his Kingdom; and when it comes there will be, in John’s memorable words in Revelation, no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things will have passed away.
The Rev Martin Luther King put it this way: I am convinced that the universe is under the control of a loving purpose, and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship.
There is a rightness. And one day it will dawn in all its glory. And all that mars and spoils will melt away like winter snow in sunshine. The Sun of righteousness, says Malachi, will rise with healing in his wings.
Until then, we play our part in the story by doing our best to live aright with God, with one another, with the planet and with ourselves. And we let out hunger pangs remind us that in this struggle for rightness and righteousness, we are not alone.
I did my reading, took notes, tried to shape them, tried to put things down on paper, but somehow nothing seemed to be clicking into place. Five years in, I’ve learned that this is one of the challenges of the job – being creative is one thing; being creative to order is something entirely different.
I watched a documentary on the artist Peter Howson this week - a really interesting and complex man. He’s had a difficult and tortuous life, Howson – spells of homelessness, mental illness and alcoholism are some of the things he’s had to contend with. But his work is exceptional, and since the year 2000 when he had a profound spiritual experience, his paintings have often had religious themes.
In 2008 he was given a commission by the Archdoicese of Glasgow to do a painting of St John Ogilvie, a priest who was tried and hanged for treason after the Scottish Reformation.
He spent eight months working on an execution scene which had something like 600 individual figures – and we watched this magnificent painting emerge from his imagination and evolve over time. But one day, having stood back and surveyed it all, he took a great black brush, painted over almost everything he’d done and started again. It just wasn’t right, he said.
On a far smaller scale, I had my own mini-Howson moment this week – a sermon which was most of the way there, but which ended up in the bin. Why? Because it just wasn’t right.
And that, I realised, was my way into a better sermon.
It got me thinking about ‘rightness’.
If I say that something’s not right, that’s a loaded statement. It means that out there, somewhere, whether in reality or in my brain, there’s a way that things should be. And the success of what I create is measured by the extent to which it captures what I’m trying to describe.
If I paint a picture of John Ogilvie’s execution which doesn’t capture my sense of how things were for him in that moment, then it’s not right.
If I cut two piece of wood at 45 degrees and they don’t make a right angle when I join them, then it isn’t right. Literally.
If I write a sermon which doesn’t get to the heart of what I think God wants us to understand from the text that week, then it’s not right either.
Two of my three kids are learning piano at the moment and one of the joys of that – when you’re not trying to write a sermon – is hearing how the pieces they’re learning improve over time.
At first there are just the plain mistakes. A crotchet rest instead of a minim. A black key instead of a white key.
But in time those mistakes get ironed out. And as they practice, the piece begins to take on more fluidity and character. It even begins to take on some of their own personality. They get it about as right as any child of their age could, and it’s lovely to hear.
There’s something in us that loves rightness. Rightness matters. It matters whether we’re talking about an objective fact like two plus two equals four, or a subjective aspiration like painting the best picture or writing the best sermon you can. There’s something in us that wants to get things right.
Now, with that excursus behind us, we’re in a better place to look at the beatitude that falls to us today, the sixth in our journey up to Christmas.
Jesus says: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. For they shall be filled”.
So what’s he saying here? What is this righteousness that Jesus is talking about?
Well, some hold that this beatitude’s about those who are hungry to be made right with God.
And although that’s true, I don’t think it’s the whole story. And the reason I say that is when you dive into the Bible and spend some time looking at the 200 or so uses of that word righteousness, you begin to get a feel for that word in all its richness.
And one of the most significant insights that emerges is that on more than 30 occasions, righteousness and justice are linked together. They’re linked together in the prophesy we heard earlier on from Isaiah, looking forward 700 years to the birth of the Messiah:
He will reign on David’s throne
and over his kingdom,
establishing and upholding it
with justice and righteousness
from that time on and for ever.
Justice and righteousness go together like salt and pepper in the Biblical story. And what that points to, I believe, is that this word righteousness is about more than individual salvation. It’s about the rightness God wants for his world. Righteousness is the rightness God wants for his world. Right relationships with God, with one another, with the planet. It’s cosmic in scope.
Instinctively, we know that Rightness matters. Howson wanted his painting to be right. I wanted my sermon to be right. And God wants his world to be right.
But the world is far from right. I don’t mean to be a pessimist – just a realist. Read the papers. Watch the telly. You don’t need me to spell it out for you.
There is a rightness – a way the world should be. That’s what Jesus means when he speaks about the kingdom. But the world is very far from right. And it breaks God’s heart. Because the one thing he will never do is force our hand. The price of making creatures who could freely choose to love him, was the risk that they would choose not to love him. We chose badly, and the world became what it now is.
But all of us are haunted by the idea that this is not the way things should be. That there’s someone or something who can bring rightness. And there are times when we ache for that rightness. We wouldn’t put it in those terms, maybe, but we ache for it.
We see a relationship going to pieces; battle-lines hardening; friends taking sides. And we ache for a resolution.
We see someone we love suffering in ways we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemy. And we ache for it to come to an end.
We see some tragedy or some staggering evil unfolding before us on the TV news, and we ache for the victims and the survivors.
We long for things to be made right. We may not know what that rightness looks like: we may not know where it will come from; we may not consider ourselves religious people, but we still find ourselves hungering and thirsting for rightness. And the Bible tells us there’s only one place we’ll find it – and that’s in God himself.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” says Jesus. “For they shall be filled”.
This beatitude isn’t a pat on the back for the religiously devoted. It’s an encouragement for every single person with a tender conscience; everyone who finds themselves yearning in some way for a world made right.
It’s a promise that the king whose humble birth we celebrate at this time of year, is bringing in his Kingdom; and when it comes there will be, in John’s memorable words in Revelation, no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things will have passed away.
The Rev Martin Luther King put it this way: I am convinced that the universe is under the control of a loving purpose, and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship.
There is a rightness. And one day it will dawn in all its glory. And all that mars and spoils will melt away like winter snow in sunshine. The Sun of righteousness, says Malachi, will rise with healing in his wings.
Until then, we play our part in the story by doing our best to live aright with God, with one another, with the planet and with ourselves. And we let out hunger pangs remind us that in this struggle for rightness and righteousness, we are not alone.
Wednesday, 1 December 2010
Blessed Are The Meek
Blessed are the poor in spirit,
Blessed are those who mourn,
Blessed are the peacemakers
And today, blessed are the meek.
You’ve already had a few moments to consider what meekness might be. Let’s spend a moment or two thinking about what meekness definitely isn’t.
(At this point we watched a clip from 'The Apprentice' where the candidates are introduced in all their arrogant glory!)
Rhona and I don’t sit down to watch much TV together, but the Apprentice is one of the few programmes we just can’t miss. There’s something absolutely compelling about watching folk like that falling flat on their faces week in and week out.
I’m sure the TV production company egg the contestants on, but they all come out with this utterly arrogant tosh at the beginning of the series and part of the fun is seeing Alan Sugar puncture their egos when they make a mess of the tasks they’ve been assigned to.
They start out the series pumped up, aggressive and ruthless because they believe that’s the way to get on in business, and to a degree they’re probably right. But even in the hard-nosed world of Lord Sugar and his ilk, too much of that’s not a good thing.
The most aggressive contestants are often the first to be fired because they haven’t got the skills to get on with other people. And the ones who do best tend to be the ones who learn a little humility and humanity along the way.
Arrogance, in all its forms, gets peoples’ backs up. A lesson, perhaps, for any billionaires planning to make substantial investments in the North East of Scotland.
We don’t like arrogance. But equally well, the jury’s out on ‘meekness’. It’s not a popular word in our day and age. It carries overtones of spinelessness or timidity. If someone described you as meek, I’m not sure you’d take it as a compliment.
So part of what I want to do today is redeem that word, because in the ancient world, and in the thought world of the Old and New Testments, meekness was seen as a virtue, and not a failing.
Aristotle thought of virtue as a happy medium between two extremes, and meekness – the Greek word ‘praus’ – is exactly that.
Aristotle observed that there are folk who are too easily angered, and folk who don’t care enough to get angry about anything. In his view, ‘meek’ is the word that describes the person who gets that balance right. The person who gets angry at the right time about the right things.
And there’s clearly something in that. Gentle Jesus meek and mild took children in his arms and blessed them, but he also threw the tables over in the Temple courtyard and chased the moneychangers out with a whip. Angry at the right time about the right things. Measured, in other words.
That same idea is found in a nautical use of the word ‘praus’. A meek wind, was just what you were needing if you were a sailor. You didn’t want a gale that could wreck your ship, or a light breath that wouldn’t carry you anywhere. But a fair, strong wind – a ‘praus’ wind - was just right for making progress.
So we can see right away that meekness isn’t the same as weakness. Meekness is strength that’s measured and under control.
Another everyday usage of ‘praus’ in the ancient world came from farming. Horses or donkeys which had been broken and tamed for use were described as ‘meek’. They were both controlled and controllable. They could get things done.
Sometimes the word was used in medicine. Doctors spoke of a ‘meek’ remedy, which was one that was soothing and could take away pain.
But more often than not, meekness was held up as a virtue against pride. The meek person was aware of his or her limitations and was teachable, unlike the proud person who thought he or she knew it all.
Quintilian, the great Roman teacher of oratory once said of a class he was taking “they would no doubt be excellent students if they were not already convinced of their own knowledge!” Had he been living in our day, he would have been tuning in to the Apprentice!
So contrary to what we might have thought, it’s good to be meek.
And when Jesus said “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth”, his original hearers would have picked up on something straight away. They’d have heard echoes of Psalm 37 which says almost exactly the same thing.
The Psalmist urges his hearers not to worry when they see the wicked or arrogant prosper, and not to try and copy them. Why? Because in God’s good time, “the humble will possess the land, and enjoy prosperity and peace”. Or as it says in other translations: “the meek shall inherit the earth”.
Now throughout Psalm 37, the writer contrasts the way of self-reliance against the way of meekness or God-reliance:
Self-reliance/ God-reliance (meekness)
Fretting / Trust
Envy / Contentment
Anger / Delight
Scheming / Hoping
Impatient / Patient
Restless / Settled
Prosper Now / Prosper in Future
“Driven out” / “Inherit the earth”
Throughout the Scriptures, Old Testament and New, this is writ large time and time again so we don’t miss it. If we rely on our own strength and ignore God we’ll find trouble, If we admit our need, and make room for God, we’ll find blessing.
Now let’s pause for a moment and remember to whom Jesus was speaking that day. A mishmash of a crowd, and closer to hand, his own disciples. Was this a message they needed to hear?
Do you remember the four ways people responded to the threat of Rome?
Pharisees – all about purity. They were angry and worried, scheming in the background. Envious of Jesus’ popularity.
The Herodians – all about compromise. They wanted to prosper now by making alliances with Herod and with Rome. They were worried about their place in society.
The Zealots – Impatient for change; Angry at living under occupation. Plotting revolution.
And the Essenes – They fretted about sin and were restless for change, so they washed their hands of everybody else and tried to set up their own Utopian societies in the desert.
Not much meekness or trust or patience evident in those responses.
And we might have expected better from the disciples, but they didn’t have a monopoly on meekness either.
The brothers James and John were nicknamed “Boanerges” which means “Sons of Thunder”. Judas and Simon had revolutionary tendencies, and Peter was just Peter – bumbling and barging his way through life like the big burly fisherman he was. Opening his mouth and putting his foot in it almost every time.
Remember how Jesus caught them arguing about which one of them was the greatest? And the time James and John cornered him and asked him if one could sit at his right hand and one at his left when the Kingdom finally came? The very opposite of meekness. They needed this teaching too, these young Apprentices.
And so do we,
Perhaps some of us will be naturally inclined to meekness. But I think most of us will have to stir ourselves in one of two ways.
Remember what Aristotle said about meekness as a virtue – it’s always found somewhere in the middle of two extremes?
Maybe those of us at the timid end of faith need to find the courage to stand up and be counted. Doing nothing and saying nothing while professing faith is not meekness. It’s weakness. As the Irish politician Edmund Burke reminds us, “All that it takes for evil to prosper is that good people do nothing”.
And maybe those of us at the more vociferous end of the spectrum need to learn to tone it down a bit. Not to bully or cajole with our words. Not to present every option in the form “it’s my way or the highway”. Not to act like we always know it all, but to swallow our pride and become teachable.
If you cast your eye across the pages of the Scriptures, it’s staggering how many of the leading lights were, in their own way, meek individuals. Moses had a stammer; Jacob was always second best to his brother Esau, the alpha-male; David was the runt of the litter; Ruth was a refugee; Jeremiah was just a scared young lad when he was called to be a prophet; Mary was an unmarried teenager when she gave God her yes.
It’s reminding me of an old adage you’ve heard from me before: God doesn’t need our ability. He needs our availability, In the light of what’s been said this morning, maybe we could put it this way. God doesn’t need people who think they know everything. He needs folk who are humble enough to learn. People who are meek.
This Tuesday is the tenth anniversary of my ordination. And I spent the year leading up to that as an apprentice, working with a minister called Martin Forrest in Possilpark in Glasgow. I hadn’t intended to do my probationary year in the inner city because in the long term I didn’t see myself in that kind of ministry, but I really liked what I saw of Martin and his church and knew he’d be a good guy to learn the ropes from.
I’d had some exposure to inner city ministry prior to that, but Possil was a notoriously bad area, even for Glasgow. Crime and drugs and all that goes with them were endemic. Martin had between 80-100 funerals a year and many of them were drug or violence related deaths. And I remember talking to Martin right at the beginning of my time there and wondering aloud whether I would be tough enough to survive fourteen months there, full time.
“It’s not about being tough” he said. “There are more than enough tough guys in this parish. That’s not what people here need. They need somebody who can be kind and listen to them and treat them with respect.”
Crucial words for me, right at the beginning of my time there. That’s exactly how Martin was with folk, and that why, after 13 years of service there, he was missed as much by the community as was by the church.
“Blessed are the meek” says Jesus. “For they shall inherit the earth”.
Not the pushy ones. Not those who court the powerful, or take up arms, or act tough, or think they know it all. The meek.
And when will they inherit it? In God’s good time. It may be a long time coming. But the future, in him, is certain.
One last observation before I go, in the form of a question. Why is it the meek who inherit the earth, and not some other group of folk?
As I thought about that, I remembered a key scene from the Lord of the Rings movies.
In the story, a Ring of immense magical power is forged by the dark Lord Sauron. The ring is lost, but after millennia it’s finally rediscovered and a council of all the races of Middle Earth is called to decide what to do with it. Some want to use it as a weapon against Sauron, others want to hide it somewhere safe, but it becomes clear that their only real option is to destroy it in the volcanic fires in which it was forged. But who will bear the ring on this quest? Can anyone be trusted with it, or will its power corrupt them and see them using it for their own ends?
Old enmities come to the surface as the meeting descends into a shouting match. The different races can’t agree about who will bear the ring.
And in the midst of all the chaos, a Halfling called Frodo – a member of the smallest and least significant race – steps forward and offers to carry the ring to its doom, and quite possibly his own. His courage and humility shames the others into silence, and they agree to his becoming the ring-bearer.
And what we come to understand later is that Frodo is exactly the right person for the task, because he’s the only one who didn’t covet the ring for himself.
In Tolkein’s story, the meek one is given the ring.
In God’s story, it’s the meek who inherit the earth,
The reason’s the same in both cases, I think:
the meek are the only ones with whom it can be trusted.
Amen, and thanks be to God.
Blessed are those who mourn,
Blessed are the peacemakers
And today, blessed are the meek.
You’ve already had a few moments to consider what meekness might be. Let’s spend a moment or two thinking about what meekness definitely isn’t.
(At this point we watched a clip from 'The Apprentice' where the candidates are introduced in all their arrogant glory!)
Rhona and I don’t sit down to watch much TV together, but the Apprentice is one of the few programmes we just can’t miss. There’s something absolutely compelling about watching folk like that falling flat on their faces week in and week out.
I’m sure the TV production company egg the contestants on, but they all come out with this utterly arrogant tosh at the beginning of the series and part of the fun is seeing Alan Sugar puncture their egos when they make a mess of the tasks they’ve been assigned to.
They start out the series pumped up, aggressive and ruthless because they believe that’s the way to get on in business, and to a degree they’re probably right. But even in the hard-nosed world of Lord Sugar and his ilk, too much of that’s not a good thing.
The most aggressive contestants are often the first to be fired because they haven’t got the skills to get on with other people. And the ones who do best tend to be the ones who learn a little humility and humanity along the way.
Arrogance, in all its forms, gets peoples’ backs up. A lesson, perhaps, for any billionaires planning to make substantial investments in the North East of Scotland.
We don’t like arrogance. But equally well, the jury’s out on ‘meekness’. It’s not a popular word in our day and age. It carries overtones of spinelessness or timidity. If someone described you as meek, I’m not sure you’d take it as a compliment.
So part of what I want to do today is redeem that word, because in the ancient world, and in the thought world of the Old and New Testments, meekness was seen as a virtue, and not a failing.
Aristotle thought of virtue as a happy medium between two extremes, and meekness – the Greek word ‘praus’ – is exactly that.
Aristotle observed that there are folk who are too easily angered, and folk who don’t care enough to get angry about anything. In his view, ‘meek’ is the word that describes the person who gets that balance right. The person who gets angry at the right time about the right things.
And there’s clearly something in that. Gentle Jesus meek and mild took children in his arms and blessed them, but he also threw the tables over in the Temple courtyard and chased the moneychangers out with a whip. Angry at the right time about the right things. Measured, in other words.
That same idea is found in a nautical use of the word ‘praus’. A meek wind, was just what you were needing if you were a sailor. You didn’t want a gale that could wreck your ship, or a light breath that wouldn’t carry you anywhere. But a fair, strong wind – a ‘praus’ wind - was just right for making progress.
So we can see right away that meekness isn’t the same as weakness. Meekness is strength that’s measured and under control.
Another everyday usage of ‘praus’ in the ancient world came from farming. Horses or donkeys which had been broken and tamed for use were described as ‘meek’. They were both controlled and controllable. They could get things done.
Sometimes the word was used in medicine. Doctors spoke of a ‘meek’ remedy, which was one that was soothing and could take away pain.
But more often than not, meekness was held up as a virtue against pride. The meek person was aware of his or her limitations and was teachable, unlike the proud person who thought he or she knew it all.
Quintilian, the great Roman teacher of oratory once said of a class he was taking “they would no doubt be excellent students if they were not already convinced of their own knowledge!” Had he been living in our day, he would have been tuning in to the Apprentice!
So contrary to what we might have thought, it’s good to be meek.
And when Jesus said “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth”, his original hearers would have picked up on something straight away. They’d have heard echoes of Psalm 37 which says almost exactly the same thing.
The Psalmist urges his hearers not to worry when they see the wicked or arrogant prosper, and not to try and copy them. Why? Because in God’s good time, “the humble will possess the land, and enjoy prosperity and peace”. Or as it says in other translations: “the meek shall inherit the earth”.
Now throughout Psalm 37, the writer contrasts the way of self-reliance against the way of meekness or God-reliance:
Self-reliance/ God-reliance (meekness)
Fretting / Trust
Envy / Contentment
Anger / Delight
Scheming / Hoping
Impatient / Patient
Restless / Settled
Prosper Now / Prosper in Future
“Driven out” / “Inherit the earth”
Throughout the Scriptures, Old Testament and New, this is writ large time and time again so we don’t miss it. If we rely on our own strength and ignore God we’ll find trouble, If we admit our need, and make room for God, we’ll find blessing.
Now let’s pause for a moment and remember to whom Jesus was speaking that day. A mishmash of a crowd, and closer to hand, his own disciples. Was this a message they needed to hear?
Do you remember the four ways people responded to the threat of Rome?
Pharisees – all about purity. They were angry and worried, scheming in the background. Envious of Jesus’ popularity.
The Herodians – all about compromise. They wanted to prosper now by making alliances with Herod and with Rome. They were worried about their place in society.
The Zealots – Impatient for change; Angry at living under occupation. Plotting revolution.
And the Essenes – They fretted about sin and were restless for change, so they washed their hands of everybody else and tried to set up their own Utopian societies in the desert.
Not much meekness or trust or patience evident in those responses.
And we might have expected better from the disciples, but they didn’t have a monopoly on meekness either.
The brothers James and John were nicknamed “Boanerges” which means “Sons of Thunder”. Judas and Simon had revolutionary tendencies, and Peter was just Peter – bumbling and barging his way through life like the big burly fisherman he was. Opening his mouth and putting his foot in it almost every time.
Remember how Jesus caught them arguing about which one of them was the greatest? And the time James and John cornered him and asked him if one could sit at his right hand and one at his left when the Kingdom finally came? The very opposite of meekness. They needed this teaching too, these young Apprentices.
And so do we,
Perhaps some of us will be naturally inclined to meekness. But I think most of us will have to stir ourselves in one of two ways.
Remember what Aristotle said about meekness as a virtue – it’s always found somewhere in the middle of two extremes?
Maybe those of us at the timid end of faith need to find the courage to stand up and be counted. Doing nothing and saying nothing while professing faith is not meekness. It’s weakness. As the Irish politician Edmund Burke reminds us, “All that it takes for evil to prosper is that good people do nothing”.
And maybe those of us at the more vociferous end of the spectrum need to learn to tone it down a bit. Not to bully or cajole with our words. Not to present every option in the form “it’s my way or the highway”. Not to act like we always know it all, but to swallow our pride and become teachable.
If you cast your eye across the pages of the Scriptures, it’s staggering how many of the leading lights were, in their own way, meek individuals. Moses had a stammer; Jacob was always second best to his brother Esau, the alpha-male; David was the runt of the litter; Ruth was a refugee; Jeremiah was just a scared young lad when he was called to be a prophet; Mary was an unmarried teenager when she gave God her yes.
It’s reminding me of an old adage you’ve heard from me before: God doesn’t need our ability. He needs our availability, In the light of what’s been said this morning, maybe we could put it this way. God doesn’t need people who think they know everything. He needs folk who are humble enough to learn. People who are meek.
This Tuesday is the tenth anniversary of my ordination. And I spent the year leading up to that as an apprentice, working with a minister called Martin Forrest in Possilpark in Glasgow. I hadn’t intended to do my probationary year in the inner city because in the long term I didn’t see myself in that kind of ministry, but I really liked what I saw of Martin and his church and knew he’d be a good guy to learn the ropes from.
I’d had some exposure to inner city ministry prior to that, but Possil was a notoriously bad area, even for Glasgow. Crime and drugs and all that goes with them were endemic. Martin had between 80-100 funerals a year and many of them were drug or violence related deaths. And I remember talking to Martin right at the beginning of my time there and wondering aloud whether I would be tough enough to survive fourteen months there, full time.
“It’s not about being tough” he said. “There are more than enough tough guys in this parish. That’s not what people here need. They need somebody who can be kind and listen to them and treat them with respect.”
Crucial words for me, right at the beginning of my time there. That’s exactly how Martin was with folk, and that why, after 13 years of service there, he was missed as much by the community as was by the church.
“Blessed are the meek” says Jesus. “For they shall inherit the earth”.
Not the pushy ones. Not those who court the powerful, or take up arms, or act tough, or think they know it all. The meek.
And when will they inherit it? In God’s good time. It may be a long time coming. But the future, in him, is certain.
One last observation before I go, in the form of a question. Why is it the meek who inherit the earth, and not some other group of folk?
As I thought about that, I remembered a key scene from the Lord of the Rings movies.
In the story, a Ring of immense magical power is forged by the dark Lord Sauron. The ring is lost, but after millennia it’s finally rediscovered and a council of all the races of Middle Earth is called to decide what to do with it. Some want to use it as a weapon against Sauron, others want to hide it somewhere safe, but it becomes clear that their only real option is to destroy it in the volcanic fires in which it was forged. But who will bear the ring on this quest? Can anyone be trusted with it, or will its power corrupt them and see them using it for their own ends?
Old enmities come to the surface as the meeting descends into a shouting match. The different races can’t agree about who will bear the ring.
And in the midst of all the chaos, a Halfling called Frodo – a member of the smallest and least significant race – steps forward and offers to carry the ring to its doom, and quite possibly his own. His courage and humility shames the others into silence, and they agree to his becoming the ring-bearer.
And what we come to understand later is that Frodo is exactly the right person for the task, because he’s the only one who didn’t covet the ring for himself.
In Tolkein’s story, the meek one is given the ring.
In God’s story, it’s the meek who inherit the earth,
The reason’s the same in both cases, I think:
the meek are the only ones with whom it can be trusted.
Amen, and thanks be to God.
Blessed Are The Peacemakers
Prior to sermon we watched an excellent video clip by Poppy Scotland in which veterans reflect on their experiences in the forces and in war. The opening quotation picks up on the last line of the video.
“I wish to God somebody would just sit down and say “let’s stop this carry on”.
I first saw that clip a couple of years ago and it’s stayed with me ever since. Not only is it beautifully made, it sums up a great deal of what needs to be said on Remembrance Sunday.
It reminds us of the courage and camaraderie of the men and women who served, and serve, in our armed forces. It gives us some idea of the burdens they carry – the heavy responsibilities and terrible memories that they have to live with. And it reminds us of the sheer waste of war and the awful consequences for our world when nations or governments or neighbours decide they have no better option than to fight one another.
“Why do the nations rage, and the peoples plot in vain” says the Psalmist.
Why indeed?
It strikes me there are only a handful of reasons why wars are ever fought: greed for land or natural resources; enmity for people of a different race or religion; or fear of the consequences of not taking military action.
Very rarely, wars are fought to restore justice or protect the innocent, but by and large, most wars start because of greed, enmity or fear. And if you wanted, you could distil that down even further into one good-old fashioned Biblical word – the word ‘sin’, which is shorthand for leaving God out of it and going our own sweet way.
Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?
Because of sin. The basic problem of the human heart. A problem that sets us against God, against one another and even against ourselves: bringing division and robbing us of peace. And it has always been so.
In the Genesis story, we’re told that in the beginning, Adam and Eve were at peace, walking with God in the cool of the day. But then comes the famous incident with the apple. The newly created humans go their own sweet way. And what happens? Division. God blames Adam. Adam blames Eve, Eve blames the serpent, innocence is lost and harmony evaporates.
And the sins of the fathers are visited on the children.
Eve has two sons, Cain and Abel. Abel offers an acceptable sacrifice to God, Cain doesn’t. Cain gets jealous and decides to murder Abel. And God says “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!”.
And it still cries out to this very day; from the gutters of Baghdad, the hills of Helmand Province, the back streets of Belfast, the ovens of Auschwitz, the beaches and fields of Northern France, the grassy plains of Africa; from every place where blood has ever been shed in anger.
And with a remarkable unanimity, those who’ve fought in and survived these wars find themselves echoing the last soldier’s words in the video we’ve just watched.
“I wish to God somebody would just sit down and say “let’s stop this carry on”.
Well somebody did sit down; 2000 years ago on a hillside in Galilee; with a group of folk around him as divided and diverse as they could possibly be.
Orthodox Jews, pagan Gentiles, city dwellers, country folk, rich and poor, righteous and unrighteous.
And on seeing that crowd, rife with cultural, religious and social tensions, Jesus spoke these words: “Blessed are the peacemakers. For they shall be called children of God.”
We’ve been speaking about the Kingdom of God these past few weeks, and part of what the Kingdom’s about, is you and I learning to heal the divisions that opened up in Eden. Learning to choose the way that leads to peace, even when that way is immeasurably tough.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
I wonder what you think of when you hear the word ‘peacemaker’? Perhaps like me you’re thinking of some worthy individual in khaki fatigues sitting down in a tent somewhere, trying to get two warring sides to agree.
Or someone in a suit, patrolling the halls of the United Nations building, whispering urgently into the ears of the politicians and generals who hold the balance of power in the worlds’ conflict zones.
Whatever truth there is in those images, I don’t think that’s what Jesus means us to take from these words.
It’s much more down-to-earth than that. It’s about how you and I are in daily life. Are we the kind of folk who divide and polarise, or the kind of folk who draw people together and bring unity? Are we troublemakers or are we peacemakers? Willie Barclay puts it this way – “Blessed are those who work for right relationships – for they are about God’s work”.
You see, the way of the world since Eden, is to reduce things to the comfortable falsehood of back-and-white certainties. We’re right, they’re wrong. We’re good, they’re bad. We’re chosen, they’re not chosen. God loves us; God hates them.
We’re expected to take sides, because that’s how things work in a fallen world. You have to choose sides, they say. Are you with us or are you with them? Black and white.
But here’s the thing – if God has met me, in all my ambiguity, in all my mixed motives and incompleteness, and if God has spoken into all of that, and declared his love for me despite all that I am, how can I deny God the right to speak into others lives in the same way, even if I think of them as my enemy?
When you really get a hold of the grace of God – or better still, when the grace of God really gets a hold on you – suddenly the world doesn’t seem as black and white as it once did. You’re less ready to pigeonhole; to give up on people; to assume the worst. Because God hasn’t pigeonholed, or given up on, or assumed the worst of, you.
The more you begin to see others from God’s perspective, the more reluctant you are to judge them or condemn them. It sounds terribly wishy-washy and liberal doesn’t it?
But it sounded that way on Jesus’ lips too. Later on in this same chapter of Matthew’s gospel he says: “You have heard that it was said, “Love your friends and hate your enemies”. But now I tell you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may become the children of your Father in heaven. For he makes his sun to shine on bad and good people alike, and gives rain to those who do good and to those who do evil”.
“But God – don’t send your rain and sunshine on those people! You know what they’re like. Don’t bless them. Bless us! We’re your children”.
“And they too are my children, though as yet they may not realise it. And if you come at them in my name with hatred and venom and fear, is it any wonder they get confused about what my love is like?”
How do you come at people? How do you view and respond to them?
Troublemakers can’t see beyond the differences and divisions between folk, and they deal with people accordingly. Greed, enmity, fear, argument, progroms and war follow.
Peacemakers see further, because they see the other with the eyes of God – a God who wants nobody to perish and everyone to come to repentance and faith. Healing, reconciliation and true peace – shalom – follow.
Want to know which you are this morning? Troublemaker or Peacemaker? Look behind you. If there’s a trail of argument, fall-outs and grudges littering your past, maybe that’s your answer. And maybe today’s word is a word for you. It’s not too late to change, but you’ll need God’s help to do it.
But let me finish with one more observation. Jesus says blessed are the peacemakers. He doesn’t say “Blessed are the peace-lovers”.
We all love peace, but in a world like ours it has to be made. Peace will not fall into our laps. It has to be worked for.
And the temptation is always to sit back and not deal with things, supposedly in the interests of peace, when what’s really needed is that we take the bull by the horns and deal with situations instead of avoiding them.
There’s a high cost in that. Because sometimes, in working for peace, you ruffle feathers that need to be ruffled. You expose things that others would rather sweep under the carpet because you know that real peace isn’t possible until everyone faces up to reality.
As I was thinking about today, it struck me with renewed force just how ironic it is that one of Jesus’ titles, according to the prophet Isaiah, is the Prince of Peace.
When you take a look at his life and ministry, it strikes me that it was anything but peaceful. The ongoing battles with spiritual evil, the very public spats with the Pharisees, the plotting and scheming that went on among his enemies, the controversy that followed him almost everywhere he went. And then, at last, of course, his arrest and scourging and crucifixion.
That’s what the world does to peacemakers.
But right ‘til the end, what’s he doing? He’s doing what peacemakers do. He’s trying to reconcile people with one another and with God.
He looks down and sees his mother, weeping: standing beside the beloved disciple, John. And feeling her loss, he says – “Take this man to be your son. John, take this woman to be your mother”.
To the thief, dying beside him and finally admitting his guilt, he promises reconciliation with God – “Today you will be with me in paradise”.
And in a black-and-white world where we’re taught to hate our enemies, he prays that those who nailed him to the cross might be reconciled with God: He says “Father, forgive them. For they don’t know what they’re doing”.
Blessed are the peacemakers, said the Ultimate peacemaker. For they shall be called children of God.
Where in your little corner of life, is there a need for a peacemaker?
At home, maybe? Or at work? In the clubhouse, or in the boardroom?
Someone who can be strong enough not to take sides, and risk falling foul of everyone because you refuse to caricature people. Someone who refuses to write people off. Someone who can say what needs to be said in the right spirit, rather than shooting from the hip and aiming for maximum damage.
It’s a costly way to live. But it’s the Kingdom way. And it leads both to blessing, and to peace.
“I wish to God somebody would just sit down and say “let’s stop this carry on”.
I first saw that clip a couple of years ago and it’s stayed with me ever since. Not only is it beautifully made, it sums up a great deal of what needs to be said on Remembrance Sunday.
It reminds us of the courage and camaraderie of the men and women who served, and serve, in our armed forces. It gives us some idea of the burdens they carry – the heavy responsibilities and terrible memories that they have to live with. And it reminds us of the sheer waste of war and the awful consequences for our world when nations or governments or neighbours decide they have no better option than to fight one another.
“Why do the nations rage, and the peoples plot in vain” says the Psalmist.
Why indeed?
It strikes me there are only a handful of reasons why wars are ever fought: greed for land or natural resources; enmity for people of a different race or religion; or fear of the consequences of not taking military action.
Very rarely, wars are fought to restore justice or protect the innocent, but by and large, most wars start because of greed, enmity or fear. And if you wanted, you could distil that down even further into one good-old fashioned Biblical word – the word ‘sin’, which is shorthand for leaving God out of it and going our own sweet way.
Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?
Because of sin. The basic problem of the human heart. A problem that sets us against God, against one another and even against ourselves: bringing division and robbing us of peace. And it has always been so.
In the Genesis story, we’re told that in the beginning, Adam and Eve were at peace, walking with God in the cool of the day. But then comes the famous incident with the apple. The newly created humans go their own sweet way. And what happens? Division. God blames Adam. Adam blames Eve, Eve blames the serpent, innocence is lost and harmony evaporates.
And the sins of the fathers are visited on the children.
Eve has two sons, Cain and Abel. Abel offers an acceptable sacrifice to God, Cain doesn’t. Cain gets jealous and decides to murder Abel. And God says “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!”.
And it still cries out to this very day; from the gutters of Baghdad, the hills of Helmand Province, the back streets of Belfast, the ovens of Auschwitz, the beaches and fields of Northern France, the grassy plains of Africa; from every place where blood has ever been shed in anger.
And with a remarkable unanimity, those who’ve fought in and survived these wars find themselves echoing the last soldier’s words in the video we’ve just watched.
“I wish to God somebody would just sit down and say “let’s stop this carry on”.
Well somebody did sit down; 2000 years ago on a hillside in Galilee; with a group of folk around him as divided and diverse as they could possibly be.
Orthodox Jews, pagan Gentiles, city dwellers, country folk, rich and poor, righteous and unrighteous.
And on seeing that crowd, rife with cultural, religious and social tensions, Jesus spoke these words: “Blessed are the peacemakers. For they shall be called children of God.”
We’ve been speaking about the Kingdom of God these past few weeks, and part of what the Kingdom’s about, is you and I learning to heal the divisions that opened up in Eden. Learning to choose the way that leads to peace, even when that way is immeasurably tough.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
I wonder what you think of when you hear the word ‘peacemaker’? Perhaps like me you’re thinking of some worthy individual in khaki fatigues sitting down in a tent somewhere, trying to get two warring sides to agree.
Or someone in a suit, patrolling the halls of the United Nations building, whispering urgently into the ears of the politicians and generals who hold the balance of power in the worlds’ conflict zones.
Whatever truth there is in those images, I don’t think that’s what Jesus means us to take from these words.
It’s much more down-to-earth than that. It’s about how you and I are in daily life. Are we the kind of folk who divide and polarise, or the kind of folk who draw people together and bring unity? Are we troublemakers or are we peacemakers? Willie Barclay puts it this way – “Blessed are those who work for right relationships – for they are about God’s work”.
You see, the way of the world since Eden, is to reduce things to the comfortable falsehood of back-and-white certainties. We’re right, they’re wrong. We’re good, they’re bad. We’re chosen, they’re not chosen. God loves us; God hates them.
We’re expected to take sides, because that’s how things work in a fallen world. You have to choose sides, they say. Are you with us or are you with them? Black and white.
But here’s the thing – if God has met me, in all my ambiguity, in all my mixed motives and incompleteness, and if God has spoken into all of that, and declared his love for me despite all that I am, how can I deny God the right to speak into others lives in the same way, even if I think of them as my enemy?
When you really get a hold of the grace of God – or better still, when the grace of God really gets a hold on you – suddenly the world doesn’t seem as black and white as it once did. You’re less ready to pigeonhole; to give up on people; to assume the worst. Because God hasn’t pigeonholed, or given up on, or assumed the worst of, you.
The more you begin to see others from God’s perspective, the more reluctant you are to judge them or condemn them. It sounds terribly wishy-washy and liberal doesn’t it?
But it sounded that way on Jesus’ lips too. Later on in this same chapter of Matthew’s gospel he says: “You have heard that it was said, “Love your friends and hate your enemies”. But now I tell you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may become the children of your Father in heaven. For he makes his sun to shine on bad and good people alike, and gives rain to those who do good and to those who do evil”.
“But God – don’t send your rain and sunshine on those people! You know what they’re like. Don’t bless them. Bless us! We’re your children”.
“And they too are my children, though as yet they may not realise it. And if you come at them in my name with hatred and venom and fear, is it any wonder they get confused about what my love is like?”
How do you come at people? How do you view and respond to them?
Troublemakers can’t see beyond the differences and divisions between folk, and they deal with people accordingly. Greed, enmity, fear, argument, progroms and war follow.
Peacemakers see further, because they see the other with the eyes of God – a God who wants nobody to perish and everyone to come to repentance and faith. Healing, reconciliation and true peace – shalom – follow.
Want to know which you are this morning? Troublemaker or Peacemaker? Look behind you. If there’s a trail of argument, fall-outs and grudges littering your past, maybe that’s your answer. And maybe today’s word is a word for you. It’s not too late to change, but you’ll need God’s help to do it.
But let me finish with one more observation. Jesus says blessed are the peacemakers. He doesn’t say “Blessed are the peace-lovers”.
We all love peace, but in a world like ours it has to be made. Peace will not fall into our laps. It has to be worked for.
And the temptation is always to sit back and not deal with things, supposedly in the interests of peace, when what’s really needed is that we take the bull by the horns and deal with situations instead of avoiding them.
There’s a high cost in that. Because sometimes, in working for peace, you ruffle feathers that need to be ruffled. You expose things that others would rather sweep under the carpet because you know that real peace isn’t possible until everyone faces up to reality.
As I was thinking about today, it struck me with renewed force just how ironic it is that one of Jesus’ titles, according to the prophet Isaiah, is the Prince of Peace.
When you take a look at his life and ministry, it strikes me that it was anything but peaceful. The ongoing battles with spiritual evil, the very public spats with the Pharisees, the plotting and scheming that went on among his enemies, the controversy that followed him almost everywhere he went. And then, at last, of course, his arrest and scourging and crucifixion.
That’s what the world does to peacemakers.
But right ‘til the end, what’s he doing? He’s doing what peacemakers do. He’s trying to reconcile people with one another and with God.
He looks down and sees his mother, weeping: standing beside the beloved disciple, John. And feeling her loss, he says – “Take this man to be your son. John, take this woman to be your mother”.
To the thief, dying beside him and finally admitting his guilt, he promises reconciliation with God – “Today you will be with me in paradise”.
And in a black-and-white world where we’re taught to hate our enemies, he prays that those who nailed him to the cross might be reconciled with God: He says “Father, forgive them. For they don’t know what they’re doing”.
Blessed are the peacemakers, said the Ultimate peacemaker. For they shall be called children of God.
Where in your little corner of life, is there a need for a peacemaker?
At home, maybe? Or at work? In the clubhouse, or in the boardroom?
Someone who can be strong enough not to take sides, and risk falling foul of everyone because you refuse to caricature people. Someone who refuses to write people off. Someone who can say what needs to be said in the right spirit, rather than shooting from the hip and aiming for maximum damage.
It’s a costly way to live. But it’s the Kingdom way. And it leads both to blessing, and to peace.
Tuesday, 9 November 2010
Blessed are Those who Mourn
Of all the Beatitudes - this surely is the one that sounds strangest to our ears.
Blessed are those who mourn.
In the face of all that we know about human suffering and have experienced of human suffering, those words can sound terribly glib to our ears.
Blessed are those who mourn.
How? We might well ask. How are they blessed?
Where’s the blessing for the widower standing beside a grave, or the mother burying her child, or the man or woman who feels for a spell that their whole world is collapsing because of something that’s happened to them?
Where’s the blessing for those who mourn?
We might find ourselves silently seething at Jesus’ words. For a while at least.
And then we might remember the time he took himself away to a lonely place when he discovered his cousin John had been executed by Herod. Beheaded for the sake of an old man’s pride and lust. Or the time he stood at a tomb and wept because his friend Lazarus had died. Or the time his own mother stood at the foot of the cross, watching the embers slowly dying in her son’s eyes.
Blessed are those who mourn
However strange those words sound, they’re birthed out of all the pain of human experience. And it’s wise to remember that this morning, as we begin to try and understand just how those who mourn can be considered blessed.
When we think about mourning in our culture – quite naturally, the first thing we think about is death and bereavement. And I’ve never found the pain of that particular kind of loss better expressed than in this poem by Kathy Galloway, who composed it on the death of her mother. It’s called “You were here, and now you are not”.
There is nothing to compare with the pain of death.
You were here, and now you are not.
That’s all.
I search for you in old photographs, letters,
Things that you touched,
Things that remind me of you,
But they cannot fill the space you occupied.
The space is in me too,
Bleeding round the edges where you were torn away.
In the night, strange shapes haunt the space….
Regret, fear, fury,
All the things we might have done.
All the shattered dreams.
How can I go on with this hole inside me?
Partial person!
Don’t let me fill the space with the wrong things.
Don’t let me cover it up,
To eat me from within.
Give me courage to bear my emptiness,
To hold it gently
Till the edges stop bleeding;
Till the darkness becomes friendly;
Till I see the star at its heart;
Till it becomes a fertile space,
Growing new life within it.
If I had not loved, I would not have wept.
This love you have given me;
This love I have carried;
This love has carried me.
And I know that though I cannot see you, touch you,
The love does not go away.
Carried by this love,
We are not divided.
And there will be no more weeping.
Until you’ve experienced it, and we all will at some point, there’s no way to sum up the pain of bereavement.
It comes to us in different ways- for some, the mourning starts long before death as we watch a loved one decline mentally or physically. For others, it comes with a terrible suddenness through illness or tragedy.
For a spell everything seems unreal, then too real. We find it hard to focus, we feel numb. We struggle to function. We find great support and solace from the folk around us, but we know too that in a few short weeks, or even days, they’ll return to their normal lives while we’ll still be carrying the pain of our loss.
With time, and prayer, the pain diminishes and the scars heal over. But the emptiness remains with us. And we must reckon with it.
Give me courage to bear my emptiness, Kathy Galloway says.
To hold it gently
Till the edges stop bleeding;
Till the darkness becomes friendly;
Till I see the star at its heart;
She’s asking for help to find the blessing for those who mourn; the star at the heart of her empty darkness.
And in the next verse she begins to realise what that blessing might be, and where her comfort might come from. She says:
“If I had not loved. I would not have wept”.
She’s realising that the measure of her pain is also the measure of her love. She only feels such sorrow because she’s been so richly blessed in her mother.
The loss is terrible, but the loss itself awakens her to the reality and strength and selflessness of love, both human and divine. And that, in the middle of her darkness, gives her a star of hope to navigate by. A star that can guide us, like the wise men of old, into the presence of God,
Is that the blessing for those who mourn, maybe? That in the displacement and sorrow that mourning brings, we realise how fragile life is, and how much we need the comfort our eternal, compassionate God promises us?
Eugene Peterson thinks so – he translates this beatitude with these words:
"Blessed are you when you feel you've lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you"
As I’ve thought about this strange beatitude this week, one of the things I’ve come to understand is that mourning, in all its shapes and forms, is not always about death, but it is always about loss.
That came out in the brainstorm. People find themselves mourning for a host of different reasons.
For some, it’s the irretrievable breakdown of a relationship. After years of investment in a marriage, a couple decide they have to go their separate ways. After years of loving care, a son or a daughter makes some bad choices and cuts off all lines of communication. After years of friendship, things turn sour somehow and the relationship’s spoiled. And we mourn the loss of the way things were.
For others, it’s their hopes and dreams that they mourn. The life partner who never materialised; the child who never came safely to term; the relationship that seemed to offer so much but didn’t deliver; the job that held such promise but proved to be a dead end. The painful loss of things that now can never be,
Others find themselves mourning because of the kinds of things they see going on around them in the world. Milton wrote of Paradise Lost, and even a cursory glance at the papers or the news reminds us daily how far we are from paradise. And on a more local level, if I had a pound for every time people tell me things were better in the old days, I’d be a wealthy man. Folk mourn for changes in the way of life that nurtured them, and the countryside and the villages in which they grew up. We’ve lost something compared to those days, they feel.
And still others mourn because we seem to have lost God in our part of the world. You don’t need me to rehearse that story. Where are the young people? Where are our own children on a Sunday morning? Why don’t they feel the same way about faith as we do? Do you remember the days when this or that church organisation was bursting at the seams?
And maybe, in some of us, there’s an even deeper sense of loss which says “And you know what – I’ve been in the church all my life, and I still don’t feel as close to God as I’d like to or as I ought to. I can’t seem to shake off the flaws and sins that hold me back. Sometimes I wonder if God’s wasting his time on me, or whether I’m wasting my time on him”.
Mourning is all about a sense of loss –
Regret, fear, fury,
All the things we might have done.
All the shattered dreams.
And though Kathy Galloway’s words are about bereavement, they could just as well be about any of those situations I’ve just described:
There isn’t one of us here who isn’t, in some deep place, mourning for something.
This morning, in this beatitude, Jesus is announcing that blessing comes, even in those places. There is a star at the heart of that darkness.
Following it will take time and faith, but if you can find the courage to do so, you will find the comfort that Christ promises.
I want to finish with another poem that’s dear to me. It’s by the French Priest and Palaentologist Teilhard de Chardin and it’s called Slow Work. And I offer this as a promise of God’s comfort to everyone here today who needs that particular blessing. Whatever the nature of your loss, these words are for you.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are, quite naturally,
impatient in everything to reach the end
without delay.
We should like to skip
the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being
on the way to something unknown,
something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability –
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you.
Your thoughts change gradually –
Let them grow,
let them shape themselves
without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today
what time and grace and circumstances
will make you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
And accept the anxiety of
feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
Let us pray
God, in our mourning and our loss,
we know, perhaps more than ever, that we are incomplete.
Help us not to hide it, but to own it.
Not to evade it, but face up to it,
Because you promise us a blessing, even in our loss.
As our frailty becomes clear,
Reassure us with your strength.
As our brokenness comes into the light,
Continue your slow work of healing,
And bring us,
By the light of a friendly star,
To the comfort and rest that are found
In your presence alone.
Hear us because we ask all these things in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ,
The Suffering Servant and The Risen Lord.
Amen
Blessed are those who mourn.
In the face of all that we know about human suffering and have experienced of human suffering, those words can sound terribly glib to our ears.
Blessed are those who mourn.
How? We might well ask. How are they blessed?
Where’s the blessing for the widower standing beside a grave, or the mother burying her child, or the man or woman who feels for a spell that their whole world is collapsing because of something that’s happened to them?
Where’s the blessing for those who mourn?
We might find ourselves silently seething at Jesus’ words. For a while at least.
And then we might remember the time he took himself away to a lonely place when he discovered his cousin John had been executed by Herod. Beheaded for the sake of an old man’s pride and lust. Or the time he stood at a tomb and wept because his friend Lazarus had died. Or the time his own mother stood at the foot of the cross, watching the embers slowly dying in her son’s eyes.
Blessed are those who mourn
However strange those words sound, they’re birthed out of all the pain of human experience. And it’s wise to remember that this morning, as we begin to try and understand just how those who mourn can be considered blessed.
When we think about mourning in our culture – quite naturally, the first thing we think about is death and bereavement. And I’ve never found the pain of that particular kind of loss better expressed than in this poem by Kathy Galloway, who composed it on the death of her mother. It’s called “You were here, and now you are not”.
There is nothing to compare with the pain of death.
You were here, and now you are not.
That’s all.
I search for you in old photographs, letters,
Things that you touched,
Things that remind me of you,
But they cannot fill the space you occupied.
The space is in me too,
Bleeding round the edges where you were torn away.
In the night, strange shapes haunt the space….
Regret, fear, fury,
All the things we might have done.
All the shattered dreams.
How can I go on with this hole inside me?
Partial person!
Don’t let me fill the space with the wrong things.
Don’t let me cover it up,
To eat me from within.
Give me courage to bear my emptiness,
To hold it gently
Till the edges stop bleeding;
Till the darkness becomes friendly;
Till I see the star at its heart;
Till it becomes a fertile space,
Growing new life within it.
If I had not loved, I would not have wept.
This love you have given me;
This love I have carried;
This love has carried me.
And I know that though I cannot see you, touch you,
The love does not go away.
Carried by this love,
We are not divided.
And there will be no more weeping.
Until you’ve experienced it, and we all will at some point, there’s no way to sum up the pain of bereavement.
It comes to us in different ways- for some, the mourning starts long before death as we watch a loved one decline mentally or physically. For others, it comes with a terrible suddenness through illness or tragedy.
For a spell everything seems unreal, then too real. We find it hard to focus, we feel numb. We struggle to function. We find great support and solace from the folk around us, but we know too that in a few short weeks, or even days, they’ll return to their normal lives while we’ll still be carrying the pain of our loss.
With time, and prayer, the pain diminishes and the scars heal over. But the emptiness remains with us. And we must reckon with it.
Give me courage to bear my emptiness, Kathy Galloway says.
To hold it gently
Till the edges stop bleeding;
Till the darkness becomes friendly;
Till I see the star at its heart;
She’s asking for help to find the blessing for those who mourn; the star at the heart of her empty darkness.
And in the next verse she begins to realise what that blessing might be, and where her comfort might come from. She says:
“If I had not loved. I would not have wept”.
She’s realising that the measure of her pain is also the measure of her love. She only feels such sorrow because she’s been so richly blessed in her mother.
The loss is terrible, but the loss itself awakens her to the reality and strength and selflessness of love, both human and divine. And that, in the middle of her darkness, gives her a star of hope to navigate by. A star that can guide us, like the wise men of old, into the presence of God,
Is that the blessing for those who mourn, maybe? That in the displacement and sorrow that mourning brings, we realise how fragile life is, and how much we need the comfort our eternal, compassionate God promises us?
Eugene Peterson thinks so – he translates this beatitude with these words:
"Blessed are you when you feel you've lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you"
As I’ve thought about this strange beatitude this week, one of the things I’ve come to understand is that mourning, in all its shapes and forms, is not always about death, but it is always about loss.
That came out in the brainstorm. People find themselves mourning for a host of different reasons.
For some, it’s the irretrievable breakdown of a relationship. After years of investment in a marriage, a couple decide they have to go their separate ways. After years of loving care, a son or a daughter makes some bad choices and cuts off all lines of communication. After years of friendship, things turn sour somehow and the relationship’s spoiled. And we mourn the loss of the way things were.
For others, it’s their hopes and dreams that they mourn. The life partner who never materialised; the child who never came safely to term; the relationship that seemed to offer so much but didn’t deliver; the job that held such promise but proved to be a dead end. The painful loss of things that now can never be,
Others find themselves mourning because of the kinds of things they see going on around them in the world. Milton wrote of Paradise Lost, and even a cursory glance at the papers or the news reminds us daily how far we are from paradise. And on a more local level, if I had a pound for every time people tell me things were better in the old days, I’d be a wealthy man. Folk mourn for changes in the way of life that nurtured them, and the countryside and the villages in which they grew up. We’ve lost something compared to those days, they feel.
And still others mourn because we seem to have lost God in our part of the world. You don’t need me to rehearse that story. Where are the young people? Where are our own children on a Sunday morning? Why don’t they feel the same way about faith as we do? Do you remember the days when this or that church organisation was bursting at the seams?
And maybe, in some of us, there’s an even deeper sense of loss which says “And you know what – I’ve been in the church all my life, and I still don’t feel as close to God as I’d like to or as I ought to. I can’t seem to shake off the flaws and sins that hold me back. Sometimes I wonder if God’s wasting his time on me, or whether I’m wasting my time on him”.
Mourning is all about a sense of loss –
Regret, fear, fury,
All the things we might have done.
All the shattered dreams.
And though Kathy Galloway’s words are about bereavement, they could just as well be about any of those situations I’ve just described:
There isn’t one of us here who isn’t, in some deep place, mourning for something.
This morning, in this beatitude, Jesus is announcing that blessing comes, even in those places. There is a star at the heart of that darkness.
Following it will take time and faith, but if you can find the courage to do so, you will find the comfort that Christ promises.
I want to finish with another poem that’s dear to me. It’s by the French Priest and Palaentologist Teilhard de Chardin and it’s called Slow Work. And I offer this as a promise of God’s comfort to everyone here today who needs that particular blessing. Whatever the nature of your loss, these words are for you.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are, quite naturally,
impatient in everything to reach the end
without delay.
We should like to skip
the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being
on the way to something unknown,
something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability –
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you.
Your thoughts change gradually –
Let them grow,
let them shape themselves
without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today
what time and grace and circumstances
will make you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
And accept the anxiety of
feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
Let us pray
God, in our mourning and our loss,
we know, perhaps more than ever, that we are incomplete.
Help us not to hide it, but to own it.
Not to evade it, but face up to it,
Because you promise us a blessing, even in our loss.
As our frailty becomes clear,
Reassure us with your strength.
As our brokenness comes into the light,
Continue your slow work of healing,
And bring us,
By the light of a friendly star,
To the comfort and rest that are found
In your presence alone.
Hear us because we ask all these things in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ,
The Suffering Servant and The Risen Lord.
Amen
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)