This sermon is the second in a series entitled “Attitudes for Successful Living: The Power of the Beatitudes” Isaiah 61:1-3 Matthew 5:4 —Matthew 5:4 I gotta right to sing the blues, I gotta right to feel low down I gotta right to hang around. Down around the river. A certain gal in this old town. Keeps draggin’ my poor heart around. All I see right for me, Is... is misery. I gotta right to sing the blues. I gotta right to moan and sigh. I gotta right to sit and cry. Down around the river. The blues — we all get them sometimes. Nobody is exempt. We can get the blues about love and relationships, about family, about health, about the state of the world, about money, about death and loss . . . about any aspect of life. Some of us even get the blues about church. No matter what the blues are about, they aren’t any fun. And while I don’t mind singing the blues, I don’t particularly like to get them. They make me feel low down, tired, helpless and heavy. They are full of pain and sadness. I’d just as soon avoid them, but I can’t. Because, sooner or later I, like everybody else, will get the blues. I wonder if Jesus ever sang the blues. I kind of doubt it since the blues are a 20th century American art form. But I know that Jesus got the blues. He felt them and he experienced them just like we do. He cried over his friend Lazarus’ death, that was just before he raised him from the dead. He moaned over how the people of Jerusalem rejected him and his message. “Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how I long to gather you like a hen gathers her children under her wings, but you will not let me.” Jesus got the blues in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before he was crucified. Nobody is immune, not even Jesus. Everybody gets the blues sometime. And most of the time when we do get them there is a good reason why. “I got a right to sing the blues” because . . . ? But singing about them doesn’t usually make them go away. So, what do we say about the blues? More importantly, what do we do about them? Our culture has an answer. Avoid them. Don’t get the blues, shake them off, put on a brave face, keep a stiff upper lip, push the pain down, submerge the sorrow, keep everything running smoothly. Come on, life is about being happy and maximizing pleasure. Go shopping, have a drink, have another. Take a pill. See a shrink. Think about something else. Don’t dwell on it, it will only make things worse. Does it work? Does any of this stop the blues from coming? It make divert us for a little while. But how often can you shop or drink or take a pill. Pain in life is a reality that we can’t avoid. It is a reality that we shouldn’t try to avoid. Did I just say that? Don’t try and avoid pain — embrace it? Yes. Don’t go looking for pain, your fair share will come on its own accord. But instead of avoiding pain we need to learn how to deal with it. There is a great story about a man who was vacationing at an exclusive resort in the Caribbean. He paid top dollar to have access to a great golf course, tennis, scuba diving, boating, you name it. The day after he arrived, a tropical storm hit the island and after three days of rain, he was berserk. He ranted at the hotel staff, and complained that he wanted his money back and moaned about what a terrible place this was. But it kept raining. On the evening of the fourth day of rain, he noticed a elderly man in a wheel chair who had been sitting each day on the hotel veranda, just watching the rain. He went to the man in the wheel chair and said, “You look pretty serene about all of this. I guess the rain doesn’t bother someone in your condition.” The man looked up and said, “My condition has taught me something that you don’t know.” “Is that so,” said the man, “What do you know that I don’t?” The man in the wheel chair replied, “When it rains, I know how to let it just rain.” So how do we deal with pain? How do we deal with the rain that falls in our lives? What more can we do than just sing the blues? As usual, Jesus has an answer. It’s in the sermon on the mount. It’s one of the Beatitudes — the second one. to be exact. “Blessed are they that mourn, for the shall be comforted.” Listen carefully. “Blessed are they that mourn.” Blessed are those who get the blues. Wait a minute, what is He talking about? How are we blessed when we get the blues? How is hurting and being sad a blessing? The word “blessed” that Jesus uses here means gifted, and fortunate. He is saying that we are fortunate and gifted when we mourn, when we acknowledge that sometimes pain and sadness are a part of life. He is saying is that mourning at an appropriate time is accepting reality. He is saying that it is a fact that bad things and painful things happen, and that we need to realize that and acknowledge that, because sometimes it is our fault and sometimes it is someone else’s fault and sometimes it is just nobody’s fault. But bad things happen and we need to take seriously that sometimes we will experience pain and loss and there is nothing we can do to stop them. And what Jesus is saying is that those blues times are fortunate times for us because they stop us and catch us up short and help us to see life as fragile and unpredictable and out of our control. He says that that we cannot just “do life” on our own. We need to realize, to know, that God is necessary. But just knowing and accepting that bad things happen and even knowing that God is necessary isn’t enough. So what if we know it? What difference does that make? I like what Psalm 46 says: God is our refuge and strength, But how does God help in our times of trouble? What does he do? What did Jesus say? “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” “For they shall be comforted.” Oh, God gives us comfort in times of trouble. Comfort. I don’t know about you but when I’m hurting, being comforted is nice but it isn’t necessarily what I want. I think of being comforted as having someone hold my hand or pat me on the back, or even give me a hug and say, “I’m so sorry,” or “There, there, it’ll be alright, you just wait and see.” Being comforted is nice, but it’s not necessarily what I’m looking for when I am in pain. I want somebody to solve my problem. Make the pain go away, and fix what’s wrong in my life. I know what Jesus should have said. He should have said, “Blessed are they that mourn, for God will fix it. And He’ll fix it right away.” I would be a lot more comfortable with that, wouldn’t you? Look, if God is not going to keep bad things from happening, the least that He could do is to step in and fix things when they go wrong. After all, we try to be good people, we believe in God, why can’t He just make life a little more secure and comfortable for us? But that’s not what Jesus said. He said, “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.” There is a big difference between being comforted and being comfortable. Being comfortable means that we are in control of what is going on around us. We’re secure. We know what to expect and it is well within what we can understand and accept. When we are comfortable, nothing needs to change or be rearranged. That’s why comfortable people don’t want to hear about mourning. It reminds them that life can get out of hand, out of control and become unmanageable. The problem with being comfortable is that we don’t need God to be comfortable. In fact, God makes us uncomfortable because he keeps wanting us to grow and change and get closer to him and each other. If only God would just give us what we want when we want it, and not make so many demands on us, then, we wouldn’t have to worry about the blues, or pain, or mourning. Life would be so comfortable. But God doesn’t just give us what we want when we want it. God does make demands on us and on our lives. God demands that we deal with life, real life, with its joys and triumphs and with its losses and failures. God demands that we deal with all that life is and has to offer. But he also demands that we not deal with it alone. God wants us to deal with life in and through him. That’s what it means to be comforted. The word “comfort” in Greek literally means “to come to the side of.” When Jesus says that we will be comforted he means that God will come to our side in mourning and that he will see us through whatever is the cause of our blues. This is the very foundation of our faith. It’s the Easter story. God takes the crucifixion and mourning and he doesn’t fix it, he changes it. He changes crucifixion and death into the resurrection and hope. That means that our mourning, and suffering, and pain are never the last word.There is a great old Good Friday Sermon that is only one sentence. It goes like this, “It may be Friday now, but Sunday’s coming.” That is what Jesus is saying. “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.” It may be Friday now, but Sunday’s coming. Jesus says the same thing a little differently in the 16th chapter of John’s gospel. “In the world you have many trials and sorrows, but I have overcome the world.” “It may be Friday now, but Sunday’s coming.” Here’s the bottom line: We don’t have to be miserable. No matter what happens to us, we don’t have to be in despair and misery, ever. We don’t need to let the world and its troubles determine our attitude about life. We don’t have to let trouble and loss determine who we are and how we live. Because Jesus has overcome the world. No, Jesus didn’t eradicate the troubles of this world, he embraced them and he experienced them and he overcame them for us all. And that is the promise of comfort that he offers to each and every one of us. Now this is the part of the sermon where I tell you a profound and moving story about how God has touched someone’s life who was in mourning and loss and turned their pain and sorrow into a sense of joy and peace. And I could pick from any number of stories, but I don’t think that I need to. Because if you look back into your own life, into your own struggles, and acknowledge what God has done in your own life then you have much better stories to tell than I do. And the person who needs to hear your story of mourning into comfort is you. And if you don’t have a story, if you never experienced the redeeming love of God, and have never let God touch and change mourning in your life into comfort, then it’s high time you quit trying the manage the universe by yourself and open your heart and let him in. Because life is not about the blues, it is about how God’s love can and does bring us to the peace that passes all understanding. We really don’t have a right to sing the blues, because even though it may be Friday now, Sunday is coming. Let us pray. |