Mica 6:1-8; Psalm 15; 1 Corinthians 1:18-31; Matthew 5:1-12
This may sound strange coming from the person who is preaching but this is not the sermon I set out to preach today.
There are some wonderful scripture readings this morning from the prophet Mica and from Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians. So much wonderful food for thought and so much inspiration. I wish I could have used it.
The first time I was to preach about Matthew’s Beatitudes was the end of May 2009. I was attending the Preaching Excellence Program, or PEP Conference in Villanova, PA. The PEP conference is a program offered by the Episcopal Preaching Foundation, a one-week intensive conference and seminar offered to those who are on their way to being clergy or who already are clergy in the Episcopal Church. The purpose of PEP and the annual conference is very simple: to improve the preaching skills of current and future clergy in the Episcopal Church.
Other than attendance, the PEP Conference required two things from each attendee. One was a sermon that you wrote before you arrived, taken from any passage of scripture you wanted. The second was a sermon you would prepare and deliver while you were at the Conference. That second sermon would be based on the theme of the conference, and the theme in 2009 was the Beatitudes from Matthew’s Gospel.
The cool thing about the theme was that an artist brought his sculptures depicting each of the Beatitudes. They were gorgeous depictions, and they were two-sided. The flip side of each sculpture was the blessing associated with each Beatitude. So for example the one side of the sculpture “Blessed are you who mourn” was a side view of a person’s face in the excruciating pain of fresh grief. The other side of the same sculpture was a side view of the same face, but this time the face was peaceful and was held in the loving embrace of two large hands reaching down from above.
Piece of cake, right? You could write a thousand sermons based on today’s passage from Matthew. With the help of the visual aids it should have been like shooting fish in a barrel. I had nothing.
The conference started on Sunday, we broke into groups of eight or nine and each of us delivered our first sermon on Monday. We didn’t have to deliver our second sermon to our small group until Thursday. We sat through multiple daily inspirational sermons on the Beatitudes, we talked about them in our small groups, we spent hours meditating on those sculptures; I couldn’t think of a sermon of more than one paragraph. Nothing. Absolutely no inspiration.
Those around me were sharing their second sermon ideas on Monday evening. They were sharing their drafts with each other on Tuesday. Many were printing their sermons Wednesday morning. I was totally and completely lost.
Wednesday comes around. The schedule gave us 3 hours in the afternoon to write the final form of our sermons for Thursday. After lunch I look over the sculptures one more time; still nothing. Then I come to the one “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” The stress to pick a verse was overwhelming me, and as I looked at that sculpture I realized that it was the absolute LAST one I wanted to preach on. Just looking at it made me angry, and so I thought to myself, “Alright God, you asked for it; I’m going to preach what I really think about this passage, and whatever comes out will be your fault, not mine.”
So I went back to my room and wrote it. It was the most frightening, the most exhausting, the most vulnerable sermon I had ever written, and reading it over I realized that I could never preach it to a congregation. But I would preach it to my peers because I had to; I had nothing else. I didn’t even print it out because I didn’t want there to be any record of it; I preached it right off from my computer screen.
There were so many amazing sermons that Thursday. I still remember most of them. Through the luck of the draw I went last, fitting I thought. I walked to the front, I opened up my computer, and I started. I don’t remember much else. I could barely look up as I went. One page in, a woman in the group literally covered her ears and closed her eyes; she stayed that way through to the end.
I was angry, I was sarcastic; I never let God have it like that before, or since. I never let those who pastor others hear about my grief like that before. By the time I was done I was an emotional mess. The room was silent except for the sound of someone quietly weeping. I was so embarrassed, but as I recovered a huge weight was lifted from my shoulders. As others commented on my sermon about grief and comfort, it was a subdued conversation I’ll tell you that. A couple of people hugged me. The woman who covered her ears and closed her eyes apologized, saying she just couldn’t bear to hear that level of pain. The priest who was co-leader of the group, the one who talked the most about every sermon, wouldn’t make eye contact and, until forced by the other leader, didn’t say a word.
Their reactions to my sermon were not what surprised me that week. What surprised me was the way two years of grief and loss piled up and exploded in that sermon. I thought I had healed. I thought it was all behind me. I thought I had tied up all the loose ends and disposed of my grief. I thought surely two years was enough time to recover. I thought I believed “for they will be comforted.”
The strange thing is it wasn’t until I railed and screamed at God in that sermon that I actually began to feel comforted. A voice came out from me that took God to task for the unresolved grief in my life. I bared my broken and scarred heart to God and to those listening to me. Writing that sermon, finally working through my hidden anger and feelings of abandonment brought me to the place where I could ultimately be honest with myself and especially with God.
So here I am preaching on the Beatitudes, Matthew chapter 5, verse 4 AGAIN. This is not the sermon I started to write AGAIN. History seems to be repeating itself. But something is different this time, and that’s the message I want to share with you today.
Today my point in all this is to share 3 things I learned from my experience with unacknowledged grief since then. The first thing I learned is that grief is a strange animal. It hides, it morphs into other things like anger and apathy, it saps your energy and clouds your focus, and it can dull you into a life that is nothing more than going through the motions. Grief unexamined also hides beneath the surface and has a nasty habit of coming back up when you least want it or expect it.
But grief is just a symptom of what appears to be the loss of love, and there’s no loss more painful than the loss of someone you love. Don’t ignore grief, but don’t be fooled by grief either. Grief only exists because of loss, and loss only hurts because of love. Grief can be extremely powerful because loss is an extremely powerful thing to suffer. The Good News is that Grief doesn’t have to last forever, but love does last forever. Grief is strong because love is strong, but, in my 65 years as a human and in my 15 years as a priest one thing is clear: grief hurts, but ultimately love is stronger.
So here’s the second thing I learned; I didn’t used to think so, but comfort from grief is possible. Comfort is not about giving you back what you lost; that’s just not going to happen. But for comfort to happen I have to give up my fear of embracing my pain, yes embracing my pain. Do the last thing you want to do: find a safe space, sit down quietly by yourself, turn off your brain, open your heart, and hang on. Let it rage. Do what you need to do. Cry, scream, yell, whatever. Then, after you’ve really let yourself experience your grief, gently share your pain with those who love you, and especially, and most importantly, share your pain with God. Don’t be afraid to be angry with God, or to cry, or to even beg. Yes, God knows our pain, but God doesn’t want to hear about our pain second hand, God wants to hear about our pain directly from us, head on. Most importantly God is not afraid of our pain or our anger; God is ready to take our pain and our anger from us when the time is right, when we are ready to offer it up to God.
Here’s the third thing I learned: because of Jesus Christ, losing those we love to the shadow of death is just that – a shadow loss. Those that we lose to the inevitability of death are not lost forever, because in Jesus Christ death has no ultimate power, death has no permanence. Those who mourn are blessed because they will experience love for that special someone not just once… but twice, because the love that we find in this life is just a small fraction of the love we will experience in the next. God has promised us that.
God put us here so that we could experience love and respond freely to love; Jesus Christ died so that we could experience the fullness of love – God’s love – for us. Scripture reassures us about the impermanence of grief with these words of wisdom: “Those who sow tears in the evening will reap joy in the morning”. “Blessed are we who mourn, for through God we will one day find comfort.”