TRISTAN SHERWIN

Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s, Metro Christian Centre, Bury & Whitefield service (dated 1st August 2021). You can also listen via our YouTube channel (Ps. please give sometime to allow us to upload the video).

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We’re continuing our series looking at the Beatitudes. [If you missed any of it so far, then you can catch it up on our YouTube channel, or with my blog notes (BE : AT // What is Jesus On About?, BE : AT // Blessed are the Cracked)].

As a reminder of what I’ve said in previous weeks, Jesus is speaking to the people of Israel, his own people, in his ‘Sermon on the Mount’. They are tired of being under the boot of the Roman Kingdom. They are longing for God’s Kingdom to come on earth. They want comfort, justice, liberation, vindication, and mercy. They want to inherit what God has promised. They are restless, anxious, troubled. And in their frustration and anxiety, in their temptation to strike back at the empire and their desire to attempt and forcefully bring in God’s reign, they are forgetting their calling to be light and salt to the world, to be a blessing to the nations.

Israel, understandably, like many of us, want God to sort out the world. But, to quote one of my favourite theologians, the challenge of Jesus’ beatitudes is that ‘when God wants to sort out the world… he doesn’t send in the tanks. He sends in the meek, the broken, the justice hungry, the peacemakers, the pure-hearted and so on.’[i]

And so, through the beatitudes, Jesus is inviting Israel to embrace how God’s reign of earth is expressed in the lives of God’s people. ‘This is what you should be at.’

These words speak to us, also. If we desire to participate in what Jesus has launched, and what Jesus is building, then we also, as individuals and as a church, need to recall what we should be at.

Last time I spoke, we explored ‘Blessed are the Poor in Spirit’ (Matthew 5:3), and that we have been invited to be a people who taste of humility.

This week, I want to explore, ‘Blessed are those who mourn’ (Matthew 5:4), and suggest to you that we have been invited to be a people of lament.

READ: MATTHEW 5:1-16 (NLT)

‘THIS’ IS NOT ‘THAT’

I don’t know if your make lists. I do. My desk has lists all over it. When I go food shopping, I make a mental list (which doesn’t always help). The notes app’ on my phone, has numerous lists within it. I have a wish list of books I’d like to read. And at home, there’s an “unspoken” list of tasks that have yet to be started and tasks yet to be finished…

Lists allow us to bring similar and related things together, and they are used in various ways. But not everything that looks like a list, is actually a list.

I’m saying that because there’s an inherent problem in preaching a series on the beatitudes in the way we’re doing, were we take each of these statements in turn and explore them separately each week: it can leave the impression that Jesus is presenting an itemised list of eight separate, though loosely-related groups of people.

We can hear it wrongly, as if Jesus is saying that there is a group of people who are poor in spirit and there’s a promise given to them. And there is another a group over there that is in mourning, and there’s a particular promise for them, as well. And there’s a further group over here of meek people, and there’s a specific promise to them, too, etc.

But it’s more complex than that. This is not a list, even though it is often mistaken for being one.

It’s not alone. There are other so-called “lists” in the Bible. For example, in Galatians 5, the Apostle Paul describes the fruit of the Spirit, and we can wrongly think Paul is talking about nine separate things, when Paul is actually describing one thing.

It’s the same here. The beatitudes is not a list. They’re more of a description. Maybe a better way of hearing them would be that Jesus, when describing the shape of God’s Kingdom and the flavour of its people, starts from a point and he just keeps amplifying it, and that each succeeding beatitude is really an explanation, a clarification of the previous beatitude. And so Jesus isn’t talking about eight things, here, but describing one thing.

If I was to stretch to an analogy, imagine with me that you have been away somewhere, and you come back excited to share the memory with others. So you begin to tell them what it’s like.

Imagine describing what you have seen. You never just say something like, ‘it had a street’. That doesn’t really paint the scene, does it? Everyone has seen a street. And the last thing you want is someone picturing a village lane in the Cotswolds to be like a back alley in Bolton town centre. You know that this is not that. So you draw on the details; the landmarks, the house shapes, styles, and sizes. You throw sounds in there, and textures, colours and smells. You keep drawing on the details; anything and everything that will help to paint what you have experienced into the minds of others, in order to help them see that the Cotswolds doesn’t look at all like Bolton.

In other words, you start with a scene, and you begin to colour it in.

In the beatitudes, Jesus is colouring in, describing a scene, adding in the sounds and the textures as he goes along, in order to help his audience grasp the picture he’s painting:

‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’ Jesus says. And to help us better visualise that, he adds more details: ‘To be clear, the poor in spirit aren’t boastful or arrogant, they mourn. And by the way, people who mourn are people who are meek, not people who are forceful, dominating, aggravating or motivated by a grudge. Oh, and while we are at it, that doesn’t mean that meek people are passive or timid, either. They actively pursue justice, they hunger and thirst for it, but they don’t go about it the way that forceful people do, by fighting fire with fire and seeking revenge. In fact, justice people, meek people, mourners, humble people, they operate out of mercy and compassion. To put that a better way, they’re pure-hearted. What I mean to say is that they are not corrupted by the tactics and the patterns and the rat-races and the power-struggles of this world. They are peacemakers; they work for peace. And because they resist the ways of this worldorder, they’re persecuted for it; persecuted because they embody the worldorder of the Kingdom of God.’

Grasping that will help us grapple with the snowballing weight of these words and the challenge that they bring.

In our case today (as we explore Matthew 5:4), ‘Blessed are those who mourn…’ adds texture to ‘Blessed are those who are poor in spirit…’

If I was to put it another way: if there was a sound to being poor in spirit, then that sound is lament. Lament is the language of humble people.

In a way, we already spoke about this last time. People who are poor in spirit are not boastful or arrogant. They know they are the stuff of grace.

But what does it mean to mourn, to lament?

LES MISÉRABLES

To be clear, Jesus is not encouraging us to become like Victor Meldrew.[ii] Jesus is not encouraging a miserable temperament or outlook on life.

In the past, some parts of Christianity wrongly understood Jesus’s words in that way. They adopted a kind of thinking that avoided anything that may elicit joy or delight in them. They wore black. Avoided jokes. Didn’t feast. They had the kind of thinking that went down the line of, the more miserable you appeared to be, the more holy you were.

Being grim is not godly.

Jesus is not calling us to be grumpy, cantankerous, complaining, misers. And before we run away with ideas like that, the next detail Jesus gives us, ‘blessed are the meek’, helps us see that we are not invited to be grating, irritating, grim, chip-on-the-shoulder, complaining, bitter-filled, resentment-fuelled, misery-guts. We are invited to gentleness. We’re not invited to add to the grief, but to offer comfort.

We also need to remember that Jesus wasn’t a miser, and neither was Jesus fuelled by resentment, or driven by bitterness. Some people actually complained that Jesus feasted too much (Matthew 11:19). When I read the gospel texts, I get the impression that Jesus was pretty good company.

But, Jesus wept, too. (Luke 19: 41, John 11:35). Jesus knew suffering, and rejection. Jesus was ‘a man of sorrows’ (Isaiah 53:3). Jesus knew lament—but it didn’t make him a foul person to be around. Jesus feasted, but he didn’t avoid mourning. Jesus lamented, but he still celebrated what was beautiful and good in the world, and his life created beauty and goodness in the world. To repeat something I said the first week, Jesus enhanced the God-flavours of the world and highlighted the God-colours of the world.

To lament does not mean that we’re pessimists. Lament calls us to see things as they are, and to see how they should be.

‘Lament calls us to see things as they are, and to see how they should be.’

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The Scriptures, as a whole, don’t shy away from the language of lament. The writers of the Psalms, for example, certainly had no problems with saying it how it is. The Psalms are full of raw emotion, primal screams and cries of sorrow. And yet, strangely mixed in with that raw honesty—maybe, because of that raw honesty—they also contain what the author Rob Merchant describes as the ‘pivot of hope’, ‘when the psalmist is in full flow of desperation and throws in a ‘but’ or ‘yet’’, as they remember God’s intent, God’s goodness, God’s faithfulness.[iii]

The Bible also contains a book called Lamentations. It’s title gives away the content—it’s a book of lament, of grief, of tears, or mourning, written by the prophet Jeremiah, who has earned himself the nickname ‘the weeping prophet’. It’s an abrasive book, again full of the raw language of heartache and suffering. Like the Psalms, Lamentations also contains some of the most beautiful statements of hope. ‘But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope’, Jeremiah writes. ‘The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.’ (Lamentations 3:21-22, NRSV).

The world of scripture does not presume, and has never presumed, that everything is rosy, everything is awesome, or that everything is as it should be. What we see, instead, is that the acknowledgement that everything is not as it should be which generates both lament and it’s twin, hope.

Lament and hope. Hope and lament.

Even in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul, when writing about the work of the Holy Spirit in Romans 8:18-27, teaches that the Spirit groans and sighs within us, and that we, who have the Spirit of God within us, also groan.

Sure, Paul writes in other places that we should always rejoice (Thessalonians 5:16-18), but here, in Romans, Paul is saying those who have God’s spirit in them, people being crafted into the image of God’s son, also groan. Furthermore, Paul’s is suggesting that we groan because we have tasted what is to come—through the Spirit, we have experienced a sample, a foretaste, of God’s ultimate intent for creation, for life.

To put that another way, because we hope, we mourn. We know what is to come, and so we acknowledge that things are not as they ought to be, we know things won’t always be like this.

We’ve often misunderstood hope: we can confuse it with blind hope, a plain denial of the facts. But hope—real hope—is not a wilful ignorance of how bad things are. Hope is the audacious admittance that things are not as they should be. We have seen something else, and we know that this is not that. And so we groan.

‘Hope is the audacious admittance that things are not as they should be. We have seen something else, and we know that this is not that. And so we groan.’

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Again, to repeat myself, we are not called to be grumpy, resentment-fuelled people. But we are called to be real. We are invited, by hope, to acknowledge the pain around us.

Hopeful people, lament, to such an extent that they refuse to be comforted.[iv]

OBEY THE SADNESS

The problem today is that we avoid lament, we avoid mourning. We are easily comforted.

We love entertainment and distraction. I’m not saying entertainment is wrong—it’s not. But I’d rather be made to feel happy and distracted than embrace the reality that all is not right in the world, and that all is not right within myself.

By the way, I’m not talking about the world beyond the church, here.

An American pastor, called Soong-Chan Rah, writing about the state of the American church, says that, ‘The American church avoids lament.’[v] I don’t think it’s just the American church, though. We, in the UK, avoid lament, too. We prefer to party. We prefer the escapism of an adrenaline-fuelled church meeting, and there are plenty of prosperity teachers out there offering us quick fixes, and peddling the idea that everything is awesome, that a life of faith is a life of bliss, where everything is upward and onward.

There’s plenty of preaching that offers nothing but Botox solutions to life’s harshness, and that gives out spiritual aspirin, instead of acknowledging the pain, past trauma, doubt and burdens that people carry. There are shelves of Christian books packed full of platitudes, self-help anecdotes and trite mottoes, because it’s easier to medicate with distraction, instead of doing the real, long work of healing. Some forms of religion are undeniably (to borrow the words of Karl Marx) the opium of the masses.^[vi]

We love comfort, but not everything is awesome. Not everything is upward. Not everything is bliss.

Without lament, we don’t challenge the status quo. Without lament, we don’t cry out against injustice. Lament recognises the struggles and suffering, the abrasiveness and the inhumanity, the sin and the apathy, the trauma and the violence around us. And it recognises it for what it is—it is not of God. This is not God’s will. These things are not as God intends.

I shouldn’t really have to say that, but I feel I need to. Only because, it’s not just amusement that comforts us as Christians. Sometimes, it is well-meaning platitudes, which are full of bad theology.

One of my favourite authors, a writer called Sarah Bessey, in her book Out of Sorts, writes a beautiful chapter called Obey the Sadness.

Within that chapter, she shares her heart on some of the things we say as an attempt to offer comfort, but that actually fills up our heads with the wrong ideas about God. We talk about the things we should be lamenting as if they are God’s will. ‘God could have stopped it, but he didn’t, therefore it must be God’s will.’ ‘God could have healed, but he didn’t, therefore, it must have been God’s will.’

So suddenly God becomes the instigator of everything, as if everything manifests God’s will. Not only does this ignore the matter of free will, not only does this remove our complicity in the pain of the world, and oversimplify the complexity of life, it also forgets that evil and suffering are not God’s will.

Sarah Bessey writes reminding us that, ‘God is against evil and suffering in the world. He is not the origin of evil nor does He “use” evil as a means to justify some cosmic end. Rather, God fights evil.’[vii] And that God’s ‘[s]overeignty is redemption, it’s not causation.’[viii]

‘[God’s] sovereignty is redemption, it’s not causation.’

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It’s important for us to remember that this is not God’s will. God is fighting evil. When God came in the flesh, Jesus didn’t announce that everything in the world already manifested God’s will—Jesus set out to establish God’s will, and Jesus taught us to pray and to participate in God’s will being made manifest on earth as it is in Heaven.

That’s the source of our hope—we know this is not that. That one day, we will be comforted. There will be no more death, no more sorrow, or crying or pain, or suffering. All things will be made new. All things will be healed. (Revelation 21:4-5)

At some point in the future, the final word will be spoken. God is going to intervene, God will judge, God will put things right, and lament is one of the ways we defiantly say, ‘This is not over!’

‘God will put things right, and lament is one of the ways we defiantly say, ‘This is not over!”

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I suppose we could say that lament is the sound of the in-between.

BE : AT

You see, Lament will not allow us to revert to easy answers and clichés. It leads us to hope in God’s goodness—we thirst for righteousness, for God’s faithfulness. It leads us to not only hope in God’s goodness in life, but to also embody it, here, now.[ix]

Tom Wright, when commenting on Pauls words in Romans 8:18-25, writes, ‘The whole creation is in labour, longing for God’s new world to be born. The church is called to share that pain and that hope. The church is not to be apart from the pain of the world; it is to be in prayer at preciously the place where the world is in pain.’[x] That is where we’re invited to be at.

Our goal as a church is not to trick you into thinking that everything is alright, or to goad you into being hyped-up and excited. It’s to help each other walk this balanced line between lament and hope. Too much one way, without hope, and we slip into despair. Too much the other way, neglecting lament, and we become unreal, unable to suffer with others and incapable of offering genuine hope.

We are not immune from suffering just because we are Christians. We are not impervious to pain just because we have faith. We are followers of the crucified God—the God who knows suffering and who is on the side of those who suffer, and whose endgame is resurrection.

Blessed are those who groan, those who acknowledge the pain of world, and those who embody a hope in the midst of that pain, for they shall be comforted.[xi]

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‘All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is our merciful Father and the source of all comfort. He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us.’

2 Corinthians 1:3-4 (NLT)

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[i] N. T. Wright, The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is.

[ii] Victor Meldrew is a character from the British television comedy, One Foot in the Grave. Well worth a watch, if you haven’t seen it.

[iii] Rob Merchant, Broken by Fear, Anchored in Hope, p.85

[iv] I’m reminded of another of Israel’s stories, another narrative from the life of Jacob. It occurs in Genesis chapter 37, where Jacob’s sons return home from the fields carrying the bloodstained robe of their brother Joseph, leading their father to believe that a wild animal had mauled Joseph to death. Verse thirty-five of this chapter recalls that, despite the best efforts of Jacob’s sons and daughters, Jacob mourned and refused to be comforted. Commentating on this story, the Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks remarks that Jacob refused to be comforted because ‘he had not yet given up hope that Joseph was still alive’ (Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Covenant & Conversation, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings, p. 254). I certainly think there is plenty of scope in this thought. The biblical text itself, in the very next verse, reminds its listeners that Jacob’s refusal to be comforted is not without good reason, as we read, ‘Meanwhile, in Egypt, the traders sold Joseph to Potiphar…’ (Genesis 37:36).

[v] Soong-Chan Rah, Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times.

[vi] Karl Marx’s famous quote comes from the introduction to his work, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Published in 1843, 1844).

[vii] Sarah Bessey, Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith, p. 187.

[viii] Ibid, p. 185

[ix] Lament doesn’t lead us to resignation, either. As the beatitudes proceed, as Jesus adds detail, as Jesus helps us see that this is not that, we see that Kingdom people hunger and thirst for justice. Jesus is not describing feelings, here—they are verbs: mourning in action. Because we know of the comfort to come, because we hope, we are people who participate in that hope, and who speak of that hope, now. F. B. Meyer puts it this way, ‘But the mourners are not content to shed tears only, they hunger and thirst after righteousness.’ He goes on to add, ‘Every moan of pain, every consciousness of failure, every triumph of reactionary and destructive forces—elicits the more urgent and persistent prayer, “Thy Kingdom come”.’ (F. B. Meyer, The Directory of the Devout Life, 1904, p.26)

[x] Tom Wright, Romans for Everyone, Part 1, p.153.

[xi] There’s always much more that can be said, especially on a topic like mourning. One thing I would like to add, here, is that as well as the Holy Spirit groaning within us, Jesus taught that the Holy Spirit is also a comforter (John 14:16).