Dear Friends,

This is the third message on Jesus’ statements from the Sermon on the Mount known as the Beatitudes.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted (Matt 5:4).

A prominent television preacher published a book back in the 1980s about the Beatitudes that carried the message that the key to happiness and success was our positive attitude in the face of problems. The grace-denying message that you can positively think your way out of the tough times of life annoy me like fingernails scraped down a chalkboard.

Bad things will happen in this life. Jesus was talking to afflicted, harassed and oppressed people and he was not offering them platitudes and placebos. Following our Lord does not spare us the valley of the shadow of death, but he walks every stony step of the passage with us.

When Jesus said, “Blessed are they that mourn, for they will be comforted,” he was describing a process. He was not sanctifying grief nor was he saying “the sadder we feel, the better off we are.” He was notably dismissive of those who turn their sorrow into a weeping and wailing spectacle (Mark 5:38-40).

Psychologist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote in her famous book, On Death and Dying, that there were five stages to the process of grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance (New York, NY: Scribners, 1997). In my experience, the traumatic loss of loved ones is likely to trigger most, if not all, of these stages in varying order over time.

Mourning is tough and exhausting, but one must work through sorrow and not around it to find new life with God and health. This cannot be adequately comprehended from books and sermons. To learn it, we must walk through the dark valley ourselves. Life in a mortal world where sin and death still exact their toll inevitably will take us through that passage.

My parents were already in middle age when I was born. Because of the age of their parents, siblings and friends, I experienced funerals in volume early on in life. They were solemn occasions with a clearly-stated emphasis on our hope of eternal life with Christ.

The point that the preachers typically made was that Jesus is in heaven waiting until his children’s hearts and minds are in a state of readiness for him to come back to earth. Then he will take us to heaven to live with the Lord forever along with the saints who died before us. We who are left are supposed to encourage and build up each other with the hope that there is a future beyond death with God (2 Thess 5:1-11).

The most important and best people in my life believed in the God who made this eternal life possible. They lived through difficult and painful circumstances and losses with peace in their hearts because of their belief, I came to believe it too of my own conviction. I still do.

There was, however, the problem of “Brahms’ Lullaby,” encountered as I took piano lessons.

In the second or third grade of John Thompson’s Modern Course for the Piano, a commonly used instruction book for piano students, I came to Johannes Brahms’ beautiful and well-known lullaby. I sat down and began to play it during the next practice after my teacher Mrs. Clayton assigned it to me.

Immediately, my mother came to the piano with tears in her eyes and said, “Don’t play that song.”

She had never before given me such a command. “Why?” I asked.

“Because it will hurt your father,” she said. “Why?” I asked again.

“Because he used to sing Bethie to sleep with it,” she said referring to an infant daughter who had briefly lived and died before I was born and about whom a pall of sadness still settled over the family. “It hurts too much for Daddy to hear it.”

I thought, but didn’t ask, “Doesn’t it hurt you too?” but I was respectful and said nothing.

At my next lesson, I told Mrs. Clayton that I couldn’t play that piece and why I couldn’t. She simply said, “Fine, then we’ll move on.”

I asked my brother Terry about the ban on Brahms and he said he had been told the same thing when he was my age.

Thus, I was exposed to the tension between the Christian hope in the world to come and pain and loss we suffer in this world. That tension can be unbearable and we are tempted to either deny it or to wallow in it. Instead, Jesus said to move through through our grief toward God.

Many years later, my brother was a hospital administrator making his administrative rounds when he walked through the neonatal intensive care unit. He spotted a grandmother sitting in a rocking chair holding a baby girl. Terry squatted down next to her and asked her how the baby was doing. The woman said, “She is dying and won’t make it past this afternoon. I am holding her close until the end.”

Terry said, “I am so sorry. I know this is so difficult because I had a baby sister who died.” He proceeded to comfort the woman even as a door opened in his heart to a room that had been closed off since he was five years old.  He had obediently stopped playing Brahms’ Lullaby, but no one had talked to him about the pain and sudden loss of his baby sister. Until that was processed, the wound in his heart scabbed over, but wasn’t completely healed.

Terry was a mature Christian by this time. He had an understanding spouse and good friends and the skills to bring the matter to closure. That’s where Jesus was pointing the crowd on the mountain. He was calling them to engage sorrow with prayer, thought and the actions of getting out of bed every day and living faithfully despite their broken hearts.

Jesus was calling them and us to follow his gaze away from the idols of grief and attachment to look up to our heavenly Father who didn’t even spare his own Son’s life to execute his loving plan to bring all his children home.

Anything that we believe that we cannot live without other than God is an idol whether it be physical, emotional or spiritual. We can idolize the past and worship it in our memories. We can idolize the future and sacrifice our present to our fantasies. Jesus is the intersection where the realities of this fallen, broken world meet God’s present truth that he loves us and will give us grace for today and the hope and strength necessary to reach the tomorrow of eternity.

It is only the active power of Jesus’ redeeming love that enables us to declare out of our broken hearts, “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it” (Ps 118:24).

I am not being glib about this. What I am saying is based on several personal traverses of the valley of the shadow of death myself. These includes the loss of my childhood sweetheart on the weekend in which we announced our engagement, the sudden loss of my sister to pancreatic cancer and many course-changing failures, rejections and disappointments.

I have learned that there is no sure-fire formula for living and no magical thinking or words that will immunize us from suffering and loss on this earth. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a Christ-denying charlatan. Christ himself said, “In this world you will have many troubles. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

Seeking God through painful loss has made the words of the Apostle Paul in Romans 5:1-5 come to life for me —
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Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us (emphasis added).

I have known grief that hit me like repeated kicks to my gut. I didn’t think that I could find the breath and strength to go on. Somehow the dark night of my suffering yielded to the light of the following day and the next day and the next even though I couldn’t tell why or how this could happen. Endurance came to me in spite of my leaden heart and blind groping sorrow simply because I got through from one day to the next.

Getting by built character in me as Paul said it would because I came to know that I really could find the strength and integrity to continue on living. If that was true than I might dare hope that there was a life and love ahead to be enjoyed. That hope did not disappoint me as I realized that the love of God was what had poured into my heart with the buoyancy of the Holy Spirit to lift and carry me.

I wouldn’t wish these experiences on myself or anyone else, but through them I learned that God is an alchemist who can turn the dross of ordinary living and the lead of disappointment into the shining gold of eternity. Only those will know this bless who make the choice of faith to mourn rather than to run away in denial or to worship in selfish misery before the idol of loss.

It has become an unfortunately hackneyed phrase but “let go and let God” was exactly what Jesus was saying when he said, “Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.” I have learned that I am almost never strong enough to let go, but the secret is asking God to change my heart and to pry from my tenacious grasp the thing that I am clinging to so desperately.

We only learn the deeper truths by living them. Mourning is the classroom where we learn who and what really matter. Jesus said that to know the fullness of the comfort of God we must finish the entire course.

“O taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are those who take refuge in him” (Ps 34:8).

Under the mercy of Christ,

Kent

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