A PRAYER TO START
This prayer from Psalm 119 as be re-phrased as a supplication, a request, to let the words and way of Jesus be both our salivation and our delight. Begin your time praying it 3xs…
I know how we so young in life can live purely and wholly, it’s by carefully following the map of your Word. May my mind and affections be so singly focused upon your way that I do not wander from the course laid before me. Let your word be deposited deep within me that no sin—my own and others towards me—would not rob me of life in you. Gracious Father, train me to live wisely. May the words that cross my lips have their origin in yours. Help me to delight more in your way of life than in gathering all the riches I think I need. Let me, Father, ponder persistently every one of your words. Let my eyes be fixed attentively on the way you live life. May I delight in everything you have told me about life, and never forgot a word of it. Amen.
DIVING INTO THE DETAILS
I am a consumer. I love to gorge myself especially on information. Not just any information mind you. I am not prone to podcast or YouTube bingeing, though ESPN can certainly be a rabbit hole I jump into. No, most often the information I consume like air is more “holy” than that. I love to read. Read the bible, read books about the bible, read good books that make me think about the bible. Which sounds all noble and pure, except that, like any “-ism”, consumerism twists things all up—including me. The irony is that the bible I so love actually speaks contrary to my consumeristic tendencies for more, more, more; even of a good thing. Rather, our scriptures encourage us to mediate on the words of God, not stuff them in us without thought. And meditation requires a slowing down, a quietness, a saying “no more” until what has been consumed has been fully digested.
These weeks between Gatherings will give us a chance to meditate, to let the digestive process get to work extracting the life giving nutrients from the course we have consumed prior. It’s not redundancy, its meditation. And I would suggest to you, as I do to myself, consume less (read less, watch less, listen to less) and pray more.
One way to get the digestive meditation processes rolling is to think slowly and deeply on one particular phrase, concept, or command that confronts us in the text. Now, there have probably been several words or ideas in the first five chapters of Matthew’s gospel story that have confounded your common sense, after all that is what Jesus and Matthew are attempting to do. But, there is one phrase that has stuck out in my pondering particularly,
“Bless-ed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” (5:4)
If you are like me, you read over this truth of Jesus and move on to the next one. Indeed, this is may be the most inconspicuous beatitude for our generation; perhaps because our propensity to avoid the cause of mourning. My inclination to pass quickly over the second beatitude has caused me to pause and ponder the question, "What exactly are the happy sad people actually mourning?"
The psalmist says that one young in life can nonetheless live wholly through the word of God. That is, mature, grown-up, without childish expectations, aspirations and fears. While our faith instills within us an assured hope for all things to be made new which compels us to courageously awake each day and strive for the hoped life, it does not lead us to naïve living. Rather, those who follow Christ are realist. We recognize the world as it is, even as it will be. Such eyes will notice naturally that if there is mourning, then there must be suffering. Yet, “suffering is an extraordinary teacher”, one that “rearranges our priorities” (Bailey, 70).
Why do we mourn? We mourn because of the clarity by which we see the brokenness of the world. A world made up of faces we love and faces we can hardly picture, each one inevitably suffering in some way, shape or form at one point or another. A world that groans with the pains of tidal waves and world wars. A world that whimpers when it cannot scream, and yells when it has the chance, even if lost in the noise: that children die each day for lack of basics that most us throw away that same day; that women are sold, abused, used and reduced for nothing more than sick appetites of men; that the economies of our prosperity often come at the cost of those we fail to see.
Why do we mourn? We mourn because of injustice, and we mourn because our wedding day was “the beginning, not the end, of the struggle to make love work”. We mourn because our job is not what we thought it would be. We mourn because we feel like the world is against us, a feeling exasperated by the tiny pricks of slow working cell phones and hair that just isn’t behaving. We mourn because the pains of childbirth did not cease at the birthing, and because friends offend us, family annoys us, and faith is difficult to keep.
Why do we mourn? Because we are contributors to the brokenness and suffering which causes weeping. You and I. We mourn because we fail to love God and love our neighbors. We mourn because we know our own propensity to live another way and realize our inability to overcome ourselves.
And so the teacher of wisdom in Ecclesiastes 7:2-4 says this,
It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting…Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of countenance the heart is made glad. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth [great merriment].
Mourning is where gladness begins and is sustained. The bless-ed continue to mourn, not in hopelessness but because of assured hope…we are comforted in the midst of the suffering that leads to mourning, we are comforted because we know that suffering is perhaps the most common way to grace.
Flannery O’Connor (137-138) noted the “violent” nature of grace. An observation that holds true for suffering that compels us who follow Jesus to continue to mourn. She says,
“Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violence [or suffering] which precede and follow them…I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning [people] to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work. This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader [of scripture or humanity], but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world.”
DEVELOPING DISCERNMENT
Because the path of kingdom life is so unintuitive for you and me—like being happy sad people—we need to learn to discern the layout, curves, dips, bends and bumps of the road less traveled. Don’t skip this part. Information is of little use in quickening a transformed life if we are undiscerning people. Take the time to thoughtfully answer these questions, and maybe use them as conversation starters in Gospel Community, at work or in your home. Doing so will pay dividends in the long run!
- Consider for a moment the causes and consternation of your own mourning. What in your life and the lives of others fosters in you sadness?
- What in your life and the lives of others forces you to avoid the emotion of mourning?
- In what ways does the story of God in Jesus comfort you in your mourning?
- Why might suffering both “precede and follow” those “intrusions of grace”?
- Think about those you know at work, school, in your neighborhood and in your home. What causes these, your friends and family, to mourn?
- How might the suffering that causes their mourning be an intrusion of grace?
- How might the story of God in Jesus comfort them?
- In what ways could being one who is “bless-ed” while mourning be helpful to being “the salt of the earth” and “the light of the world”?
As we begin to discern how “by the sadness of countenance the heart is made glad” we will become ones who can “truth in love”. Ones who live out the truth we speak to each other and our neighbors.
A PRAYER TO CLOSE
This prayer is adapted from John Ballie as a prayer of contrition for our part in causing mourning and a prayer of realize hope in the comfort we are given because we mourn our mourning.
O merciful Father whose heart is for me, I open my heart to you now. Let me keep nothing hidden from you while I pray. The truth about myself is humbling—loved by you even when I cannot love myself. Give me courage to speak my heart out to you in your presence. What I was not to ashamed to practice or believe, may I not be too ashamed to confess. In your wisdom use the pain of confession as a way of making me hate the sins confessed and receive it as an intrusion of grace.
I confess to laziness in this _____ and this _____ that have aided in the brokenness of my relationship with you and others.
I confess to unfounded pride in this _____ and this ______ that has caused division in relationships and in my own mind.
I confess to this _____ and this _____ indulgence in physical desires that has made others mere objects and caused my heart to be divided.
I confess to the habit of lying in this _____ and this ____; all to avoid suffering.
I confess to this _____ and this _____ unkind word that has caused pain.
I confess to having entertained this _____ and this _____ evil thought that has set my heart against another.
I confess to this _____ and this ______ lapse in caring for others because I was focused on myself.
O Father, your love in the human heart can burn like a fire all that is shameful and evil, let me now grasp your perfect love and righteousness and make it my own. Thank you for blotting out all my disobedience and letting my sins be covered by the suffering of Jesus. Help me to feel your hand upon my life, cleansing me from the stain of past wrongdoings, loosing me from the grip of evil habits, strengthening me in new habits of pure heartedness and guiding my footsteps in the way of eternal life. O Father, let Christ be formed in my heart through faith. All this I ask for his holy name’s sake. Amen.