Memorial Service 2013

All of us, to a degree, suffer from deafness or hardness of hearing, though not in the physical sense.

Sometimes we find it hard to hear what other people are genuinely saying to us – either hard in the sense of difficult, or hard in the sense of painful, and sometimes hard in both senses at once.

Somebody comes up and makes a remark about the weather – and all that we hear, or allow ourselves to hear – is a remark about the weather. “Looks like we  might be getting some rain later” is all that gets through to us, but what he’s really saying – and sometimes we know this and sometimes we don’t – is maybe “I’m lonely. Will you talk to me”. Or maybe “I know that you’re lonely, and I want to try and talk to you”.

But in our deafness, we don’t hear that. We hear the talk about the weather, or the crops, or the family or the ailment but oftentimes we miss what they mean. And more often than not, what they mean is: “I want you to listen to me. I want you to know me.”

When we speak, we’re not just communicating information. We’re also communicating something of ourselves,

Most of the time we’re too busy, or too deaf to pick that up in our conversations, but every now and again something reaches our ears that goes a little deeper.

The writer Fred Buechner tells of a time he went shopping with his wife, and as they stood at the checkout she berated him for adding a tub of full fat cream to the conveyor belt when he was trying to lose weight. “Oh well – you only live once” he said.

“And then it happened” – he writes. “This thing that broke for a moment through my deafness. It was a hot, muggy afternoon and the cashier had been working hard all day and looked flushed and hectic there behind her cash register and the racks of sweets and chewing gum and TV guides, and when I said “Oh well - you only live once” she broke into the conversation and what she said was “Don’t you think once is enough?” – That was it.

And of course, they laughed as she’d intended them to laugh. But afterwards, as he thought about it, Buechner found himself wondering where those words had come from within her. What was she really saying? Was she saying “I’m sick and tired of this job”. Was she saying “You’ve no idea how hard my life’s been lately”. Was she saying “I feel trapped, and I don’t see any way out”?

“You only live once” he said. “Don’t you think once is enough?” she replied – straight off the cuff.

Gets you thinking. Especially on a Sunday like this, when a good number of us are here because someone we love experienced too little of life, rather than too much of it.

Why would she say those words?

Well I guess we all know the weariness that can accompany our living at times. There are spells when life seems almost entirely drained of music or colour. Circumstances weigh us down; responsibility narrows our horizons; the drudgery of routine saps us of joy. Life, in those times, gets reduced to the business of simply getting through the day. If you’re speaking out of that place, small wonder that one life seems enough, or more than enough.

Or sometimes we’re just so busy that we miss life even as it happens to us. We’ve got a full schedule, a busy day, a host of commitments at work and at home. But the danger is that life then becomes a game of join the dots between those different commitments; getting from one meeting to the next, one appointment to the next; one task to the next as fast as possible. Kiss the kids on the forehead at bedtime and then get back to it again.

In the middle of that, even the best and most energetic of us find ourselves wondering if this is the life that we really wanted to have.

“Don’t you think once is enough?” she said. And for that kind of life, I guess maybe she’s right.

 

But here’s the thing. All of us know that life has more to offer than that. We’ve tasted it.

We love; we create; we tend and grow; we nurture, we laugh; we share; we worship; we play; we pray.

There are things we can happily lose ourselves in for hours and hours and they’re as unique as our fingerprints. For me it’s playing guitar or shaping words in poetry. Some of you run, some of you garden, some of you walk, some of you read; others love company or being with family, or travelling, or music.

We cherish those God-given moments and experiences, and when they’ve passed, we cherish the memory of them because they are what makes life worth the living.

And there enough of them, scattered throughout our days like little diamonds, to make the leaving of this life hard to bear for everyone concerned.

Hard for those who have lived out their days. Harder still when someone’s taken young and still with so much living to do.

“Don’t you think once is enough?” she said.

Of course once isn’t enough. It’s not nearly enough. But on this side of eternity, it seems to be all we get.

And if that were the end of the story, it would also be the end of hope.

I don’t decry the work of the humanist folk who take funeral services. I’ve always believed that as a minister, my job in a funeral service is twofold. To do justice to God and to do justice to the person who’s passed on, and I can’t fault the humanists on how well they do the latter.

But at the end of the day, no matter how much bonhomie and celebration there is of the life departed, a humanist service is devoid of hope. In that worldview, the person you loved, in his or her entirety, has ceased to be.

And as the Apostle Paul once said – ‘if for this life only we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men’.

But in Christ, the Christ who IS the resurrection and the life, the Christian dares to hope for more than that.

Fred Buechner puts it this way: “Once before, out of the abyss of the unborn, the un-created, the not-yet, you and I who from all eternity had been nothing became something. Out of nonbeing we emerged into being. And what Jesus promises is resurrection, which means that once again this miracle will happen, and out of death will come another realm of life.”

We live in a cynical, secular age. Any talk of life after death is written off as mere comfort for the gullible. But it’s a brave man who from this side of the chasm dares to tell us what’s on the other side, when he’s never actually crossed over himself.

I came across this wee story the other day which made me smile.

The story is that there were two babies in a mother's womb – we’ll say there was a boy and a girl.

"Do you believe in life after delivery?" asked the boy.

 

“Of course” said the girl. “There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we’ll be later on.”

"Rubbish," says the other. "There’s no life after delivery. What would that kind of life even look like?"

"I don't know” said the girl. “But I’d guess there’ll be more light than here. Maybe we’ll use our legs for walking and eat using our mouths?"

The boy laughed. "That’s nonsense. Walking’s impossible – you know that! And eating with our mouths? Are you kidding? We get fed through the umbilical cord, and any fool can see it’s not long enough to stretch very far.”

"Well I think there is something more than this, and maybe it's different from how things are in here." said the girl

"Wishful thinking” said the boy. “No one’s ever come back from the other side. Delivery’s the end of life. Once you’re gone, you’re gone.”

"I don’t think so" says the girl "I think we’ll see mother and she’ll take care of us."

"Mother??" You believe in mother? Where is she now?”

“She’s all around us. It is in her that we live. Without her this place wouldn’t even be.”

 "I don't see her” said the boy. “And until I can see her I’m not going to believe that she exists”.

 “I can’t see her either” said the girl. “But sometimes when we’re quiet I’m sure I can hear her and sense her. I know it’s hard to believe, but deep down, I’m sure that there is life after delivery. And I can’t help wondering if part of the reason we’re here is to prepare ourselves for what that life is going to be like”

When it comes to life on the other side, we are all still in the womb. None of us have crossed over, and none of us can speak with certainty . But there is one who can speak with certainty about the afterlife. He died on a Friday and was raised on the Sunday, and it’s in his name that we gather here today. And it’s his voice that I choose to listen to.

And he tells us: “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies. And whoever lives and believes in me will never die”

 

“Do you believe this?” – he asks Mary, whose brother Lazarus lay in the sleep of death.

This morning he asks you and me the very same question. “Do you believe this?”.

May God give us the faith to echo Mary’s answer –

 

“Yes Lord. I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world”.

(This sermon draws from a sermon by Fred Buechner called 'The Killing of Time')

Memorial Service - 2012

It’s just like moving into the next room, they say.

Or like crossing an ocean to a different shore.

It’s like being born into a new world.

Or moving down a dark tunnel towards a benevolent light.

It’s like a party, where all of the people you’ve ever loved are there.

It’s a golf course where the greens are perfect and the pensioners fourball in front of you all play like Rory McIlroy!

It’s everything you hoped it would be, and far far more.

It’s heaven.

We run out of language pretty quickly when we try to talk about heaven, and on this particular Sunday when we gather to remember the people we’ve lost to death over this past year, I feel a little bit like a tourist trying to describe a country I’ve never visited.

I can tell you what the guide book says,, but I haven’t got any personal experience to draw on.

And even the images we have in the Bible aren’t especially helpful because they’re just that – images. Clouds and harps and pearly gates are part of the iconography of heaven now, but we’d be daft to read too much into that.

The only person able to fill us in on how things really are would have been Jesus, who the Bible tells us came from heaven to earth to live among us.

And interestingly enough, he seems to have little or no interest in furnishing us with details. He’s far more interested in telling us how to get to heaven, and how to make the earth a bit more like heaven, rather than what it’s going to be like when we finally get there.

So for a few moments I want to set those interesting questions aside, though I promise to pick them up again later!

And instead, I want us to think a little about the threshold to the afterlife – this thing we call death – and how we respond to it. Seems to me we can make two equal and opposite mistakes when we’re thinking about death. We can pretend it away and belittle it, or we can make too much of it.

So let’s take the first of those – the danger of belittling death.

Sometimes at funerals people like to have particular readings that have meant something to them, and one of the most popular ones is the piece on death by Henry Scott-Holland which says:

"Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged”.  and so on.

And there’s a lot in that piece that’s helpful, I think, particularly the idea that there’s continuity between this life and the next. And I know that can be of great comfort to people, and rightly so. But I never use that reading unless I’m asked to because I just don’t agree with the first few lines. “Death is nothing at all. It does not count. Nothing has happened”. Is that really the case?

Some of you will remember the actress and comedienne Joyce Grenfell from the St Trinian’s movies and her regular appearances on Face the Music. Well, when her brother died she volunteered to write a poem for his funeral service because she so disliked the Scott-Holland piece.

"We can't have that thing about 'I have only slipped away into the next room” she said. “I mean, why go through the whole bother of dying just to find yourself in the kitchen?"

Of course, she’s being sarcastic, but I think she has a point. Doesn’t it belittle death, and our grief, to say that nothing has happened when someone we love dies?

Humans are physical beings, as well as spiritual beings, and if I want to hug you, or dance with you, or have a meal with you, or hear you laugh, or stroke your hair, it’s really not much comfort to my senses to know that your spirit’s only next door. It’s you I want. You as you were. And that’s the very thing that death has taken away from me.

That’s not nothing.

And the Bible agrees with me. In Biblical terms, death’s an enemy we’ll only get rid of at the end of days when everything that stands in opposition to God will finally be destroyed.

But until then, death has power over each and every one of us. None of us know when it's going to come or how it's going to affect those we love. And we're powerless to stop it

That’s not nothing.

But nor, secondly, is it everything.

We shouldn’t belittle death, but we shouldn’t give it too much respect either, because death is a beaten enemy. It just doesn’t know that it’s beaten yet.

In our Old Testament reading today, Isaiah prophesies that one day God will deal the death blow to death: “The Sovereign Lord will destroy death for ever. He will wipe away the tears from everyone’s eyes”.

But by the time we get to the New Testament, seven hundred years later, the writers are saying that the power of death is already broken. 2 Timothy 1:10 “This has now been revealed to us through the coming of our Saviour, Christ Jesus. He has ended the power of death and through the gospel has revealed immortal life”.

Now how could Paul write that? How could he write that death's power was over when all around him people were continuing to die just as they'd always done?

Well what Paul’s referring to here, is the work that Christ did on the cross; because he didn’t just die to deal with the problem of our sin. He died to deal with the problem of death.

Before Jesus’ time, people believed that death was like a prison, or a resting place. Your soul went down to the grave and that was it.  And if you read the Old Testament you’ll quickly discover that people in those days didn’t speak about heaven or hell. They spoke about Sheol – the grave – the common destiny of all, both good and bad alike.

But when Christ entered death through his own death on the cross he kicked down its back door and changed it from a prison into a tunnel. Death now leads somewhere – it leads us back into the presence of God.

And there, before him, one day all of us will have to give an account for the lives we’ve led. And I believe that where we have made room for him in our hearts, he will make room for us in his.

And that brings me back to the question of what heaven will be like.

“Who knows? is the answer! I’m sorry to disappoint if you were hoping for more!

But I don’t think it’s insignificant that when the Bible tries to talk about heaven it draws heavily on images and ideas that we’re familiar with.

The book of Revelation describes the new heaven and earth, as a city with streets, trees, fields and rivers. It talks about relationships – person to person and person to God. It talks about parties and feasts and celebrations and overflowing thankfulness. It talks about grief and sadness and tears being wiped away. It’s an earthy vision – a very human vision – of the life to come.

Whatever heaven is like, I think it’s going to have a strong flavour of earth about it – all that’s best in our human experience made more, in and through Christ.

I think that’s a helpful idea to hold onto today. and I’m going to end with a poem that expresses that thinking far better than I ever could. It’s called “When I’m in Heaven” and it’s by Adrian Plass….

When I’m in heaven,

tell me there’ll be kites to fly.
The kind they say you can control,
although I never did for long.

The kind that spin and spin

and spin and spin.
Then sulk and dive and die
and rise again and spin again
and dive and die
and rise up yet again.

I love those kites.

When I’m in heaven,
tell me there’ll be friends to meet
in ancient, oak-beamed Sussex pubs,
enfolded by the wanton downs.
And summer evenings
lapping lazily against the shore
of sweet, familiar little lands
inhabited by silence,
or by nonsenses.
The things you cannot safely say
in any other place.

I love those times.

When I’m in heaven,

tell me there’ll be seasons
where the colours fly.
Poppies splashing flame
through dying yellow, living green,
and autumn’s burning sadness
that has always made me cry
for things that have to end; for winter fires that blaze like captive suns
but look so cold when the morning comes.

I do love the way the seasons change.

When I’m in heaven,
tell me there will be peace at last.
That in some meadow,
filled with sunshine
filled with buttercups
and filled with friends,
you will – chew a straw?
and fill us in on how things really are.

And if there is some harm

in laying earthly hope at heaven’s door,
or in this saying so,
well – have mercy on my foolishness,
dear Lord.

I love this world you made.

It’s all I know.

When I'm Gone

(This sermon was preached at our Memorial Service, where we're joined by the relatives of folk in the parish who have passed on in the previous calendar year. Their names are read out and family members can light a candle in their memory if they wish as part of the service.)

Two observations and a story to begin with this morning.

I wonder how many times those of you who drive have come to your senses after you’ve been thinking about something, or listening to the radio, and realised, to your horror, that you have no recollection of driving the last three or four miles you’ve just driven.

And I wonder how many of us have had the experience of chatting to someone on a Monday morning and when they ask you what you did at the weekend, your mind goes completely blank. What did I do?

There are enough smiles around to suggest this isn’t just me!

Hold on to those observations as I tell you the story, which comes from the Eastern tradition.

Tenno had completed his ten years apprenticeship in Zen Buddhism and had risen to the rank of teacher. One rainy day he went to visit his master and as was the custom, he took off his clogs and left his umbrella outside the front door before entering.


As he walked in, his master smiled and welcomed him. Then he said “Tenno, you left your clogs and umbrella outside, didn’t you? Tell me – did you place the umbrella to the right side of the clogs, or to the left?”


Tenno was embarrassed because he didn’t know the answer. He realised that he lacked awareness. So he apprenticed himself to the master for another ten years so he could learn the art of constant awareness.

Two observations and a story that help give some substance to a thought. How much in life passes us by.

We’re so busy getting from A to B that we overlook the journey.

We’re so preoccupied with getting things done that time and experience slip past almost unnoticed.

Without determined effort on our part, we don’t cultivate the discipline of awareness that adds depth and richness to our living.

To quote Pink Floyd – a phrase which gives you an insight into just how contemporary my CD collection is – “And then one day you find ten years have dropped behind you, no-one told you when to run. You missed the starting gun”.

Life runs away while we’re still tying our shoelaces. Life happens to us, whether we’re ready for it or not. We’re born into the world and before we know it we’re being swept along in a crowd that dwarfs the London Marathon, running hard, trying to keep up, focused on what’s round the next bend, keeping our heads down, puffing and panting our way to the end of the human race.

But every now and then something happens to us that makes us pull up and stop running. Something so significant that we have no choice but to pull up a chair and sit on the sidelines for a while, as the rest of humanity goes streaming by.

Sometimes it’s one of life’s great gifts that hauls us out of the fray for a while. An encounter with beauty, in music, or words; in art or in nature. The birth of a child. The blossoming of love.

Miracle as they are, these things can never be hurried along. They deserve to be savoured. And in those moments we come to our senses and realise again that the human race means very little if we don’t take time to enjoy the journey.

But, and this is why many of you are here today, there are times when what stops us in our tracks is not gift, but grief.

A phone rings, a conversation takes place, information is exchanged, and you put down the receiver a moment later in a world that is changed utterly. Someone is gravely ill. Someone has died.

You find yourself sitting at the side of the road with your head in your hands wondering how on earth all these other people can keep obliviously running, when the world – your world at least – has stopped turning.

I got a call like that in January of last year – many of you know the story.

My father was going into hospital for surgery and on the day he went in, my mother had a stomach aneurism and nearly died. I had to drop everything and go back home straight away. Poor Mary Reid stepped in to take the Sunday service, and little did we know what the rest of the year would hold in store for Mary and her family.

Mum had 3 months in intensive care, and another three recuperating in hospital before she finally got home. And within her limitations, she’s doing pretty well now, though her health is still very fragile.

But those were strange days. Normal life was on hold. In the beginning it was hard to focus on anything other than what had happened to her. The family closed ranks, pulled together and got through, but we lived in this heightened atmosphere where her illness, for a while at least, became paramount for us. We lived daily with the prospect of losing her.

Why, for so many of us, does it take a brush with death to make us really appreciate what we have in life?

It’s a year and a half on, now, and I’m back in the human race again, jogging along; but something changed for me in that time – something that’s hard to put into words.

I think it’s the realisation that time isn’t just short, it’s precious. And in the time we have left, I want to find ways to be with my folk in ways that are truly meaningful. I want to know them and be known by them.

One of the saddest things in my time as a minister in some of the tougher corners of Glasgow was the experience of going to visit families who’d lost their mother – and it always seemed to be a mother – and when I asked them to tell me about her, all they were able to say was that she liked the soaps and she loved the bingo. Seventy, eighty years of life, and that’s all they were able to say about her.

Thankfully, that was a rare occurrence and I’ve not found the same thing up here. More often than not, the problem I’ve had is trying to condense everything you’ve had to say about the person who’s passed on!

And that overflow of stories and memories and laughter and tears that pours out when I visit bereaved folk highlights the point that I’m trying to make: when death visits our families, and none of us would ever want that visit, it leaves us a strange and unexpected gift. A heightened appreciation of the richness of this thing called life. For a few days or weeks or months we get it. We understand just how precious the gift of life really is.

But that heightened appreciation doesn’t last forever. It gently fades away like the ring of a bell. In time, some of us return to a life that seems infinitely greyer because that dear person has passed on. Others tie up our laces and fall back in step with the rest of the human race. Either way, the danger is we forget what we learned in those fraught days and weeks and months: that life is precious. That our lives are precious: not to be wished away or frittered away on things that don’t really matter. We only get the one life – we need to make the most of it.

I’ve never heard that idea better expressed than in the words of a song called “When I’m Gone” by Phil Ochs.

There's no place in this world where I'll belong when I'm gone
I won't know the right from the wrong when I'm gone
You won't find me singing on this song when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here


My days won't be dances of delight when I'm gone
The sands will be shifting from my sight when I'm gone
Can't add my name into the fight when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here


I won't see the flowing of the time when I'm gone
The joys of love will not be mine when I'm gone
My pen won't pour a lyric rhyme when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here

I won't breathe the bracing air when I'm gone
I won't be worried about my cares when I'm gone
Can't be asked to do my share when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here


I won't be running from the rain when I'm gone
Won't even suffer from the pain when I'm gone
Can't say who's to praise and who's to blame when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here


And I won't be laughing at the lies when I'm gone
I won't question where or when or why when I'm gone
Can't live proud enough to die when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here

He puts it well, I think. We owe it to those we love to make the most of the time that we have been given. But where Phil Ochs and I part company is in his assumption that death is the final end.

Christianity dares to hope for more than that, and I want to finish this morning with these words from writer/minister Fred Buechner:

“Unlike the great oriental religions, Christianity takes death very seriously, which is of course why it takes life very seriously, why there is such urgency about living it right and living it now. In the New Testament there is no doctrine of endless rebirths on the great wheel of life, no doctrine of a soul which by its nature cannot die. On the contrary, by our nature we do die, as Christianity sees it, with our bodies and souls as inextricably one in death as they are in life.


But if death is the end in Christianity, it is not the final end; it is the end of an act only, not the end of the drama. Once before, out of the abyss of the unborn, the uncreated, the not-yet, you and I who from all eternity had been nothing, became something. Out of non-being we emerged into being. And what Jesus promises is resurrection, which means that once again this miracle will happen, and out of death will come another realm of life. Not because by our nature there is part of us that does not die, but because by God’s nature he will not let even death separate us from him finally.


In love he made us and in love he will mend us. In love, he will have us his true children before his work is done”.

Thanks be to God for life now, and the promise of life hereafter. Amen

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