Ecclesiasticus 44:1-10, 13-14

Psalm 149

Revelation 7:2-4, 9-17

MATTHEW 5:1-12

Sermon – November 5, 2006

Blessed Are Those Who Mourn

I grew up in a place and in a culture that believed in over-protecting children, and especially in “shielding” them from sorrow, from loss, from trauma – or at least from any outward, emotional reactions to all those experiences. Some New Englanders are just like that, and especially in the 1950’s, when America as a society was profoundly in denial of the reality of death. So it was that I never went to funerals as a child; those people who had died simply disappeared from my life, with no rituals for me and no grounding in faith to help me respond.

But death is an “iceberg” which our personal ships will always encounter, like it or not. No amount of sheltering, no amount of suppression of expressions of emotions, no mountain of unasked questions will keep us from encountering the reality of death.

The day I first hit that iceberg was November 22, 1963. For many of you, that is just a date in history but Americans my age and older can tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been shot.

I was in 7^th Grade in Brookline, Massachusetts – not far from President Kennedy’s birthplace. The whole school was ushered into the gym and we were told that the President had been shot but was still alive at that point, and then our routines, incomprehensibly, went on. My routine that afternoon included boarding a bus to go to a soccer game which, incomprehensibly, we played. I remember driving up Beacon Street in Boston, just as the flag at the State House was being lowered to half staff in the President’s memory, while crowds of strangers on the sidewalks sobbed openly and held each other, mourning the loss of their home-town hero.

Nothing else would be routine for days as the entire country went into mourning and we were transfixed in front of televisions, including witnessing not only the President’s funeral but the assassination of his assassin on live TV.

Suddenly, here was a death which could not be ignored or be not talked about and about which emotions could be expressed – although the media endlessly told us how “composed” and “restrained” – I would now say “repressed” – the President’s widow was.

Here, indeed, was a death which – like those of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy less than five years later – would stir deep emotions for decades, not all of them healthy emotions. Conspiracy theories became a cottage industry, wild theories that JFK was still alive still filled supermarket tabloids years later, profound anger was expressed – especially after the murder of Dr. King, which prompted devastating riots.

Yet, still, America as a culture, in the face of all experience, resisted facing the reality of death as a part of life. In the 1970’s in her path-breaking book On Death and Dying, Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross ignored the insistence of the hospital where she worked that it had no dying patients, proceeded to find them and invited them to talk about their feelings. She wrote that, typically, someone facing a diagnosis of terminal illness goes through several stages (and may zig-zag back and forth through them, not proceeding through clearly and sequentially).

The stages she listed are: first, Denial, second, Anger, third, Bargaining, fourth, Depression, and finally either Resignation or Acceptance.

The same feelings can affect others who know the person who is facing a terminal illness – and can also characterize people mourning for someone who has died. All these feelings are normal and Christians can feel them legitimately. What’s important is to feel them and not to get stuck at any one feeling.

Denial is normal and, up to a point, healthy. Setting a place at the dinner table for someone who’s been dead for a year is not. Anger is normal and, up to a point, healthy. Acting out violently is not. “Bargaining” before someone’s death (“If I do this, they’ll get better, right?”) is a normal feeling and up to a point, healthy. Endless second-guessing of oneself and self-punishing after the death of a loved one is not. Depression is normal and, up to a point, healthy: it’s part of digesting the reality of the loss. A crippling depression which imperils the life or the living of one or more survivors is neither normal nor healthy. Any of these unhealthy symptoms I’ve mentioned indicate a person needs professional help. And seeking help is never a sign of weakness, but rather a sign of strength.

And then comes the big “fork in the road” between resignation (which means giving up and lapsing into cynicism and despair) and acceptance. Acceptance recognizes the reality of the death after processing over a period of time, which may last a year or more, all of the feelings which the impending death or the past death has brought up, which may include bushels of other deep feelings. The closer the person was to the bereaved the more mourning there is to do and, generally, the longer it takes, so the friendship of loving, caring and patient people is vital to the bereaved.

All feelings can be expressed to God in prayer – not just the feeling of an acceptance. In fact, prayer can help the bereaved get through what may be the roller-coaster ride of feelings. As an example, I lift up the experience of another famous person who also died on November 22, 1963: C.S. Lewis, the great Christian writer most famous today as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia.

Lewis was a confirmed bachelor who, in his 50’s, married Joy Davidman, seriously ill, at the time, with cancer. Unexpectedly, she experienced a dramatic remission – and became well enough for them to go on vacation together to Greece. Unexpected to him, Lewis found himself more deeply in love than he had ever dreamed of being. He was, therefore, all the more devastated when her cancer returned and she died. He wrote a journal of his first year as a widower called A Grief Observed which was published after his own death. He frankly chronicles how he then, the most famous living author of explicitly Christian writings in the world, was “torn down to his foundations” emotionally and spiritually by her death, and only slowly was rebuilt – or tenderly brought back to life by God before Lewis’ own death.

So getting to acceptance and hope is not always easy, but the journey can be made in the hardest circumstances. The key thing to remember is one of the beatitudes we hear from Jesus in today’s Gospel: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” That tells me that, when bereaved, we must mourn – or we won’t be comforted, we won’t be blessed that particular way. Refusing to feel our feelings will not help. And Christ does not merely sympathize with us, he empathizes with us, because after all, everyone we love, Christ loves too!

So it is worth remembering that in the Revised Standard Version translation, the shortest verse in the entire Bible is John 11:35: “Jesus wept.” This was Christ’s first reaction when he came to the grave of his friend, Lazarus. Then, and only then, did Christ raise him from the dead.

I have stood in the grave of Lazarus. It is empty.

I have stood also at the burial place of Christ. “He is not there. He is risen.”

The most depressing service of worship I have ever been to was a Unitarian funeral, done for the husband of a parishioner at my old parish in Massachusetts. The pastor talked about the deceased – how he’d loved his family and served his community – and how now his life was over. Done. Finis. Nothing more. “So let’s read some poetry and then go have coffee in the Church Hall. But at the request of the widow, any of you who happen to know the 23^rd Psalm can say it now.”

How wonderfully different is the opening of the burial Service in The Book of Common Prayer: “I am Resurrection and I am Life”, says the Lord. “Whoever has faith in me shall have life, even though he die. And everyone who has life, and has committed himself to me in faith, shall not die forever.”

Those are the words of our savior, Jesus Christ, to Martha, the sister of Lazarus, and they are his words to us as well. Beyond the acceptance of death, there is life: new life, by the grace and gift of God to whosoever God calls. We cannot understand or fully describe this new life any more than a fetus can understand or describe life after birth.

John of Patmos was granted visions of heaven, one of which is the passage from Revelation 7 we just heard: “of a great multitude which no one could number” praising God and singing, far beyond any pain or suffering, where Christ “will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

“So faith, hope, love abide,” St. Paul wrote. Our faith can sustain us in times of mourning, and give us strength to recognize our own mortality and take appropriate actions to care for those who will come after us whenever that might happen. Our faith can guide us as we strive to become some of “the saints of God” – not people who pretend to be perfect but people who strive to be faithful while serving God and loving our neighbors as ourselves. And our faith that “nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of Christ Jesus our Lord” can strengthen our hope that one day we may experience the fullness of joy in the presence of God, thanks most of all to God’s boundless love – “for the greatest of these is love.”

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Monmouth Junction, NJ