Upside Down Living #2 - Mourning in a Time of Brokenness
Message Description
Dr. Kurt Bjorklund continues in the Beatitudes with Matthew 5:4 looking at 2 responses we can have to brokenness and mourning that happens throughout life and the hope we have in Jesus.
Message Transcript
Hey, welcome to Orchard Hill, Strip District, Butler County, Wexford, and those online. It is good to be together even in this continued time that doesn't feel like we're all together. And for those of you who are still in the place of saying we don't feel comfortable coming out to a church service, that's certainly understandable. We want you to be where you're comfortable, where it's safe, but just know that your presence is missed, and we look forward to the day when we can worship in spaces together again. I also just want to say quickly before we jump into the teaching, that we really are thankful for the giving that so many of you have done during this time. Your support has enabled us as a church just to continue to function. And so, thank you just for continuing that. And please just continue to remember the church in these days, just so that we can function well through this time.
I'm going to pray and then we're going to jump into what we have here today. Father, we thank you just for each person who's gathered, wherever we are, or however we're participating today. Lord, I pray that my words would reflect your work in content, tone, and in emphasis. And we pray this in Jesus name, amen.
So, you undoubtedly know what an oxymoron is. An oxymoron is basically to answer radical ideas that you put together and they shouldn't basically make any sense together. So, for example, if somebody were to say it's a minor crisis, you'd say, well, those two things shouldn't go together. If it's a crisis, it is not minor. Or somebody might look at something and say this is your only choice. Well, if it's a choice, then it can't be your only choice. That's an oxymoron. Or here's one, and maybe this is why they're closing all over the place, but Kmart quality would be an oxymoron, or postal service. Again, maybe it's a reason why FedEx and UPS have made the post office, much less of a player in terms of transportation. Well, in a sense, when we come to the Sermon on the Mount, which is what we began studying last week, and we're going to be studying for several months here, Jesus starts off with these Beatitudes is what they've been called, and they are in a sense, almost oxymoronic statements. Meaning, what he does is he takes two things that almost seem antithetical, we call it an upside-down kind of living, and he says these two things go together. And when you first look at them, you might say, how could that go together? And today we're looking at Matthew 5:4. It says, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted."
If you heard me teach last weekend, I talked about how happy, may not be the best translation for the word blessed. Sometimes people want to reduce the idea of blessedness to just simply saying its happiness. But one translation of this says this, happy are the sad. Although I don't think that happy is the best translation of that word, because blessed means much more than that, that captures the oxymoronic statement that we have here because we don't tend to think that we can be happy by being sad or blessed by being sad. What we tend to think is that my blessedness, my happiness, is contingent on never having anything that makes me sad. And this is part of why this is in many ways what I would call upside down living. Because Jesus continues to point to things that when we hear them, when we see them, we would say, that is not how I see the world naturally.
Derek Kidner who wrote a commentary on the book of Luke, and commented on the Sermon on the Mount there, says this, he says, "The people of God will prize what the world calls pitiable, and suspect what the world finds desirable." In other words, if you or I understand what Jesus teaches here, sooner or later, we will be suspect of some of the things that our world says these are the ultimate values. These are the things you need to have, and we will, in many ways prize some of the very things that people in our world say you don't want any part of that. I think this is one of these places when Jesus said, blessed are those who mourn, where this becomes especially true. Because here would be how our world would probably right this beatitude today, we would say, blessed are those who have everything go their way, whose lives are filled with joy, laughter, and comforts. Blessed are those who avoid hardship and rarely, if ever, are sad. But here's what you now and I know. And that is brokenness, pain, hardship, is a pretty universal experience. In fact, I don't know anybody who makes it from their earliest childhood experiences until the end of their life without some kind of brokenness, in their experience, in their life. And because of that, you and I cannot avoid this idea of brokenness, cannot avoid the idea of some kind of pain. All we can do is simply live our lives and say, okay, how do I respond to it?
Now, in the New Testament, there are nine different Greek words that are used for sorrow, or mourning, or hardship kinds of words. And the word that's used here by Jesus, for blessed are those who mourn, is the most severe of the words. And it's a word that was usually reserved for a mourning or a sadness of somebody who's almost inconsolable, often associated with death, sometimes with a loss of circumstances, but something where somebody would say that this is really hard for me. And here's what Jesus is doing here, and especially, you can see this clearly in Luke chapter six, which I mentioned a parallel to this, and that is Jesus is saying there will be a reversal. That when you mourn now then there will come a day when you'll be able to be comforted, or in Luke, he says, you'll laugh. And those who live with comfort now, those who laugh now, he says there will come a time when you will mourn. Here's how he puts it in Luke six. This is verse 21. And the second part of verse 21, it says, blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. And then the great reversal statement, just a couple verses later in verse 25, it says, whoa to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and you will weep. And so, Jesus is basically saying here is a reversal that you are going to experience. If you avoid mourning now, again, we can't avoid brokenness, but if you try to avoid mourning now, then you will in essence, not be comforted. If you laugh, now, you will mourn later, but if you embrace mourning, then you will experience comfort, you will find joy. Again, oxymoronic from our standpoint, our view of how the world works.
And so, here's what I'd like to do. I'd like to suggest that there are two approaches basically, to mourning that we can take, and there are more, but I kind of get this from nine words, and then kind of having a grading to the depth of mourning that we have. And so, I'm just going to simply suggest that we can mourn in a way that's kind of shallow for the brokenness that we experience. Or we can mourn in a deeper way. Now, obviously, nobody wants to mourn in a shallow way, in one sense, but yet there's this piece of me that if I'm honest, I actually prefer that because it's easier in the short term, but Jesus is helping us see that in the long term, it might actually be harder. And so shallow mourning will equal shallow comfort.
And here's, again, where we see this the Luke six that I just referenced, and then in Ecclesiastes chapter seven, we also have a reference to this idea of mourning. And here is what Ecclesiastes chapter seven tells us, verse two and following, it says, "It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart. 3 Frustration is better than laughter, because a sad face is good for the heart. 4 The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure." Now, again, this is not something people get a painting of and put on their wall in their house. Nobody keeps this as a screensaver somewhere and says, oh, this is what I want right now, is I want to do sadness or mourning. But notice what the writer of Ecclesiastes says, what Jesus says, and that is that mourning is actually better than basically partying. Having a good time, laughter. That contemplating death is actually good for us. That's what he's saying.
Now notice kind of the words that are used on the other side laughter, feasting, kind of an ignoring almost, that's not an exact word that's used, but an ignoring of the reality of death. And here's what I think you're seeing. And that is a shallow mourning is basically denying the brokenness or the hurt that something has for us. It's distracting ourselves with laughter, with merriment, with partying, and with feasting. And it might even be working our way through things to try to be successful because to feast, especially in the Old Testament time, was not something that was common. In our day and age, it's fairly common that we can feast whenever we want to. But in those days, the only people who could ever have a feast were people who had made it successfully. And so, what some of us will do instead of mourning is we'll say, let me throw myself into some kind of field where I can be successful in the world. The more successful I am, then the more likely I am to avoid mourning and all of it is a way to say I want to avoid the pain that I experienced in this world. And I would suggest that's a shallow mourning and it will equal shallow comfort.
Now, I probably don't need to even push that hard on one area that probably has become ubiquitous in recent months. And that is the kind of state of our current world, in terms of the quarantine, and some political divisions, and just some stories that are hard to watch, have become more and more prominent. Do you know what I think many of us have done? We've chosen to distract ourselves consistently. We're constantly looking for a new show on Netflix or Amazon Prime or something to say, can I just watch something that gets me not to think about it? Well, what is that? That's a form of denial and distraction of just saying, I don't want to actually deal with my own emotions, my own situations, or maybe the broader situations that are happening in this world. And the reason that this is shallow mourning and it's unhelpful, is because it will only lead to a shallow comfort. Because what we'll do is, we'll miss the deeper realities that mourning can help us experience. You see, ultimately you can be sad, and you can mourn.
And yet you can never experience comfort. In other words, you can go through something that's a really lousy part of living in a broken world. Maybe it's a personal loss, a frustration over something you did or didn't do, maybe it's a grander issue in our world, or maybe it's something in your family that you had no control over. But there was something that happened, and you just said, oh, that's lousy. And if you never come to the point of comfort, that at least in part it means that the mourning has been somewhat shallow. Now, there's certainly a future element to which Jesus is speaking here when he talks about mourning and the fact that you will be comforted in the future. But there's also a sense in which a lack of ever having some closure on mourning means that our mourning has in some sense, hasn't gone deep enough. Because what we've probably done is, we've mourned our own heartbreak, but we haven't mourned the deeper reality.
Now, there was a man in the Old Testament who suffered, his name was Job. And he suffered the loss of family, the loss of wealth, the loss of community, and he suffered physically. In other words, he suffered greatly. And if you've ever read the book of Job, what happens is several of his friends come along, and they give him advice, and the advice is bad. And so, it's interesting when somebody quotes Job, sometimes they'll quote Job, and if they aren't recording it in context, they can actually give the very wrong impression of what the book of Job actually teaches.
Because the advice that's given is usually the wrong advice. And this is one of the cases. This is Eliphaz, who comes to job after he's lost everything. And this is his advice on how to mourn. And again, I'm going to say this is shallow mourning. Chapter five, verse one, “Call if you will, but who will answer you? To which of the holy ones will you turn?” In other words, which god are you going to turn to? “Resentment kills a fool, and envy slays the simple. Resentment kills a fool and envy slays the simple. I myself have seen a fool taking root…” speaking of Job, he's saying you're a fool Job. “…but suddenly his house was cursed. 4 His children are far from safety, crushed in court without a defender. 5 The hungry consume his harvest, taking it even from among thorns, and the thirsty pant after his wealth.” And then he says this, verse six, “For hardship does not spring from the soil, nor does trouble sprout from the ground. 7 Yet man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward. Now, here's what he's saying. He's saying, Job, the reason you're having trouble is because of something you've done. Because trouble doesn't just sprout from the ground, you get what you plant in the ground. That's what he's saying to him. So, his comfort to Job is turn back to God because you clearly have turned away from God. And because of that, that's why you have trouble. Now, there's a sense in which that might feel comforting to some of us, because when we hear that we'll say, oh, maybe if I get it right, if I can do the right things, then I won't have any of this hardship, any of this trouble, or any of this mourning. And when people give that advice, what they're often doing is they're saying in essence, look, if you would do the things that I do, if you would get the checklist right, if you would honor God the way I honor God, then you won't have any of the problems you're having.
And what happens then is we either turn inward and we say, okay, I need to do a better job of trying to really live my life in a way that honors God so I can get a good outcome. Or we say God isn't a reliable source. But really, the whole point of the book of Job is that Job starts with basically saying he was a righteous man, devout, and then these friends come along and say all these things and Job asserts his righteousness, and even in the midst of it, he still suffers. Now, he wasn't saying that he was righteous ultimately in terms of his standing with God, but what he was saying is I haven't done something that caused this chain of events. You see, a shallow mourning says, I'm mourning my loss. I'm trying to deny it. I'm trying to distract from it. I'm trying to just focus somewhere else so I don't have it or will spiritualize it and basically say, well, if I just do right, then God will come through for me.
But I think there's a deeper mourning. And I think this is what Jesus is driving at. Again, the word that's used here is the most severe word for mourning. And I would say the deep mourning is what will equal deep comfort in our lives. And the word comfort that's used by Jesus in Matthew five, is a word that is often translated in a noun form for the Holy Spirit, it's paraclete. And, in the noun, it's the Holy Spirit. But in the verb here, comfort, it's the same idea. And it means to come alongside, to encourage to be with. And so here is what Jesus is doing, he's saying when you mourn deeply, I will comfort you, and you will experience this kind of comfort.
Now, there's a few places where this word is used in the New Testament, and a few of the places as I mentioned are for a loss or maybe even a circumstantial loss. But let me just give you a few other places where this is used. So, first Corinthians chapter five, verses one and two, use this word, and when it's used here, it is used for grieving around sexual immorality, but not just any kind of sexual immorality. Listen to this. “5It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate: A man is sleeping with his father’s wife. 2 And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have gone into mourning and have put out of your fellowship the man who has been doing this?” So, here's what he's saying. He's saying in the church, there is somebody who's sleeping with his stepmom. And the church is talking about how great it is in Corinth. He says you're proud of it. Shouldn't you instead go into mourning that this is the kind of thing that's going on? And so the deeper mourning here is at least in some ways to look at something and say, I can see this from God's perspective, and I can be grieved for the things that are harmful to people and offensive to God.
Now, there's a pretty easy one right now, in the news. You may have seen that the person who had helped Jeffrey Epstein, groom, and traffic children, has been brought into custody. And that's an easy thing for us in our culture to say, that is not God's intention for sexuality. But so often, when it comes to sexuality, what we want to do is we want to say, well, I'll define what is against the norm. And right now, as a society, we're saying that's against the norm, but there have been societies all through history who have said that's not the norm. But God's standard has been always to say that when a man and a woman live in a committed union marriage, that is the best sexual outcome for a society.
And in fact, if you think about it, if everybody simply said, the only person that I'll sleep with is the person that I'm married to, one person, a lot of the sexual ills in our society would go away. And what he's saying here is there's a sense in which a deeper mourning, and it's not just tied to sexuality, but it's tied to this idea of saying that God has a way for things to be and some of our mourning will not just be for our own losses but to say, I want the world to be a better reflection of God's goodness. James four also uses the same concept of mourning. James chapter four, verse eight, nine, it says this, “8 Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9 Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom.” So here James is saying, I want you to come to a point where instead of laughing and yucking it up all the time, that you can actually be so intense, so serious, that you will weep and wail and mourn over the sense of spiritual indifference of ourselves and of our world.
And then the concept, again, is very clear. And this is a different word but in Corinthians chapter seven, verse 10, it says this, “10 Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.” In other words, when we mourn or are sorrowful in a sense of understanding our sinfulness before God, it will lead us to repentance. Whereas when we're just having a shallow kind of mourning, that it leads to a sense of death.
And so, what we see here is what maybe the Old Testament prophets called lament. There's a whole Old Testament book called Lamentations. And probably if you've been around church the verse that you know from Lamentations is Lamentations three, great is thy faithfulness, but the whole book is just saying, here's what's wrong. And what lament is in the Old Testament, is it is a way not of complaining but a way of saying, here's what's broken, here's what's not right in this world, here's what's wrong, and lament actually becomes a form of worship because what we're doing is we're saying to God, your world, the world that could be, and should be, is better than the world that is.
Dan Allender who has written widely on many things says this when saying that "Lament isn't just simply being a complainer, or grumbler. A lament involves even deeper emotion because a lament is truly asking, seeking, and knocking to comprehend the heart of God. A lament involves the energy to search not to shut down the quest for truth. It is passion to ask rather than to rant and rave with already reached conclusions. A lament uses the language of pain, anger, and confusion, and moves toward God." And what that is, is it is the New Testament idea, I believe of mourning. And so, what is mourning? It's acknowledging the reality that God allows. That's what mourning really is. It’s saying I'm going to acknowledge the depth of this and say, God you're not apart from it. It doesn't deny it. But deep mourning says this is what you've allowed God.
And what it does is, it acknowledges this idea of our own sinfulness, that the sinfulness of our world that we live in, therefore the brokenness, and the brokenness of all of creation because of sin being part of this world. And so, what happens when we acknowledge the reality of ourselves or what God has allowed is sometimes, we will acknowledge that we do things that are hurtful and wrong, and things that are not what we would want. And when we do that, what happens is, now we can be comforted because instead of denying, instead of distracting, instead of arguing, what we're doing is we're saying now I'm in a place where I can receive grace. If you've ever done something that hurts somebody you love, then what you do is you realize that you've hurt them.
I've talked about the fact that we have a dog. His name is Zion, and this dog has become disproportionately loved in our house. And the other day, I was trying to get him to go somewhere and I took his collar and he stepped on my foot and his claws dug in and broke my skin on my foot. And I turned and I yelled at him like it was somehow his fault. And all of a sudden, he's skulking. Like, he does the whole like, sit down, okay, I'm so sorry, I did wrong and everything. And I felt horrible because I yelled at the dog. And what I realized was, my reaction, my anger, turned and caused the dog pain. Now, that's a goofy example. But what mourning is, is it's a willingness to acknowledge the places that we have made a mess of things. It's a willingness to see our culture, and some of the things that are hurting and broken in our culture, and then to even see just that we live in a fallen world. So sometimes it isn't even the sinful choices of people, but it's our own, just existence inside a fallen world.
But when we do this, here's the thing. And that is when we acknowledge that God has allowed some things in this world, what we realize is that it's worse than we think, and it's better than we think. And what I mean when I say it's worse, is we realize that the brokenness of our world is in many ways, much worse than we want it to be. But it's better because it isn't hopeless. Because the promise that the future part of the promise of Jesus is saying they will be comforted, is Jesus saying we're going to look ahead to a time when basically I will restore what's broken. I will renew all of the things that are wrong in this world. And therefore, your mourning, my mourning, if we're in Christ Jesus, if we've acknowledged our sinfulness and our need for Jesus as a savior, what happens is all of a sudden our mourning is not a mourning that has no hope or no answer.
In second Corinthians, chapter five, verse 21, we see this, it's about Jesus, it says, “God made him who had no sin to be sin[a] for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” You see, Eliphaz, Job's friend, he was wrong when he said, only those who are guilty suffer. Jesus proved him wrong because Jesus was not guilty, and he suffered. But he did it so that those of us who are guilty can end up in a place where our suffering is restored, and it's renewed. And that is Jesus's offer of hope in the midst of this.
There's one more place where mourning is prominent in the New Testament. It's in Romans 12:15, where it says mourn with those who mourn, rejoice with those who rejoice. Do you know what happens when you have the capacity to mourn? It allows you to be part of blessing and comforting people. In other words, it allows you to develop a deeper relational connection. And I wonder if at least in part, part of the blessing, this part of the comfort that comes from being able to mourn, is being able to walk with somebody who is in a hard place because you've done your own work of mourning and being able to be with them in that moment, and it becomes a blessing, an oxymoronic blessing again. Where it doesn't seem like a joy, but there's a joy in the community of walking with others. And then being in a place where people can walk with you. I know some of the hard times that we've had in our family over the years have been times that we have experienced some of our deepest and richest community. Because people have come around us and loved on us in ways that gave us comfort. And one of the things that happens when you're willing to say, I'm willing to mourn, I'm willing to listen, I'm willing to examine myself, I'm willing to enter into somebody else's pain, is then you experience the depth of community and a taste of comfort which pictures the ultimate comfort that Jesus promises because he took, who had no sin and experienced it, so that those of us who have sin can experience His ultimate comfort. And that will help you and me to mourn and to therefore live with a sense of comfort and hope even in a broken world.
Let's pray together. Father, we thank you for the fact that even though we live in a broken world, that you haven't left this world to be all there is. But we can live with a sense of saying there's something beyond this world that we can hold to and cling to when we experience the brokenness of this world. And therefore, we can mourn not shallowly, trying to avoid it, but deeply, fully, and in that experience, some of your deep comfort. So, we thank you for this today in Jesus name, amen.
