To the Church in Exile,
Please note: Pastor Doug has also included a video version of today’s devotional. For some of you, that version may be more accessible – you can find it by clicking here at this link.
Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Our scripture is not from today’s lectionary passage, but from yesterday’s. Monday’s lectionary included all the beatitudes in the beginning of Jesus’ sermon on the mount. I just could not pass this up. So today, we’ll focus on the second beatitude and tomorrow the third. Then we’ll move on from the beatitudes. Hear then Jesus’ words from Matthew 5:4:
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
I want to talk about mourning, grieving. All of us in this season have experienced some kind of loss: loss of job, routines, schooling, loss of loved ones, loss of freedom of movement, loss of connection. I think it’s important those losses be named and felt. I define the process of grieving as primarily giving yourself the freedom to feel in the time of loss whatever you feel, whether that be anger, sadness, guilt, relief, frustration, etc.
I remember reading about an interview with Ivan Illich, the Austrian philosopher who commented, “There’s this American myth that denies pain and the sense of suffering. It’s almost as if they should not be…. The problem is that this denies our encounter with reality.” I want to join the Bible in naming the reality of suffering and loss. I love how the Bible doesn’t explain away suffering, or fix our suffering or grief; it simply bounds it with the mercy and love of God.
When we name suffering and when we grieve, we encounter the reality of our own humanity. We discover that we are not automatons, or cogs in the economic wheel. We are beings who lose and weep just as much as we triumph and rejoice. When we mourn our losses, we discover who we are.
And when we mourn, we discover community. I think this is what we’re experiencing every Sunday during our online worship when we pray and type in our losses, laments, and frustrations and lift them up to God together. We are exhibiting what Paul describes as a key practice of Christianity in Romans 12: we “rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.” When we mourn, we discover the reality that we’re not alone.
And finally, we discover in our grieving that there is a comforter, that the depths have a bottom. We are held in the arms of a loving God. I have shared before of a woman who had lost a family member tragically and turned to me “Pastor Doug, I can’t cry for fear I’ll never stop.” She of course, was just hanging on with all she had. I was heartened over the next months to see her free herself to experience her emotions and to live into her mourning, for she discovered that God could meet her in the depths of the pain and not just on the surface of the storm.
Oh Bethany, let us mourn. For it is there in the anger, the tears, the fatigue and in the numbness that God will meet us. And it’s there that we experience resurrection hope.
Lord God, free us to grieve our losses in this season of so much loss. Be the solid rock beneath our feet that you are. Give us fellow travelers in the dark journeys we face. Comfort us, God. In the name of our Lord Jesus we pray. Amen.
Peace in Christ,
–Doug
__________________________
Doug Kelly, Senior Pastor
Bethany Presbyterian Church
dougk@bethanypc.org
(206) 284-2222, x11