Pentecost 15
23 August 2026
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
W. Gregory Pope
Series: The Sermon on the Mount
THE HOPE OF MOURNING
Matthew 5.4. Isaiah 61.1-4. Revelation 21.1-5
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him, and he began to speak and taught them, saying: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Such is the second beatitude we read according to Matthew. From Luke we read: Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh. Comfort and laughter – both are gifts of God and evidence of grace.
This word of blessing is for those whose tears are real. Not the staged tears of Love Island, Married at First Sight, or The Bachelor. But those who are capable of truly mourning their own hurts, sins, and losses as well as the hurts, sins, and losses of others.
For centuries the mourning addressed in this beatitude was interpreted almost exclusively to mean mourning over one’s own personal sins. And it is important that we experience true sorrow for our sins and the damage they have caused. The psalms are full of such mourning.
But as interpreters looked more closely at the prayers of psalmists, the preaching of the prophets, and the tears of Jesus himself, our biblical understanding of faith expanded beyond an exclusively personal private faith to our responsibility for the neighbor who is hurting. We began to see in this beatitude that in addition to grieving our own sins, we are also called to mourn the pain of others and the suffering of the world – all that breaks the heart.
With these first two beatitudes, we see that Jesus is following the sequence of Isaiah 61. Isaiah’s words are quoted by Jesus later in Matthew and in his hometown synagogue sermon in Luke. Isaiah is speaking of the servant of the Lord – God’s people and God’s Messiah. He writes: The Spirit of the Lord is upon us to bring good news to the oppressed, the poor in spirit, to bind up the broken-hearted and to comfort those who mourn.
In Isaiah 61 the people are grieving their country, which in our case certainly brings tears to those of us who love it. This mourning comes when we look at the sad state of the world – all the world’s madness – the hatred, the cruelty, the violence, and the injustice suffered by millions across the globe, all those who die by war, starvation, treatable illness, and senseless gun violence.
In the depths of our godly mourning as we grieve that things are the way they are, we are moved to the point of action: to enter the suffering of others and to act on behalf of others – weeping with those who weep and comforting them with the comfort of God with which we have been comforted (2 Corinthians 1).
These are the mourners for whom the world holds no consolation. They are not just the nameless and unknown across the globe. They are our community neighbors, our friends, our
brothers and sisters in Christ – we weep with them and for them.
Abraham Lincoln said, “I’m sorry for the one who can’t feel the whip when it is laid on another’s back.” The faithful church of Jesus Christ will have people who can feel the pain of the whip on another’s back, hearts that are broken over someone else’s pain. Jesus says: Blessed are those who do not have the luxury of thinking everything is fine. Followers of Jesus feel the sorrow of others and mourn with them.
Some question the value of empathy, wondering what good there is in suffering over others’ troubles. To empathize is to follow the biblical mandate to bear one another’s burdens. And the opposite of empathy is to say: “I couldn’t care less.” To turn a deaf ear to the hurting and the oppressed is to turn a deaf ear to God.
But when someone we love suffers everything changes. Many of the things that seemed important the day before are no longer so important.
Jesus calls us to be open to the wounds of the world, to mourn humanity’s mourning, to be wounded by humanity’s wounds.
And then there are our own wounds to weep. Most of us know a thing or two about mourning. We’ve lost parents and children, siblings and friends. We’ve lost homes and jobs, hopes and dreams. As one old chaplain said: “Life is so wonderful and so hard to bear.”
Mourning is not a sign of weakness. King David wept. Jesus wept at the death of his friend Lazarus and at the sorrowful state of his beloved Jerusalem.
The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, speaking of someone she lost wrote: “Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.” This is the sorrow of loss.
But the sorrowing will end. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Your broken heart will mend. The hole will always be there, but you won’t fall in. As the psalmist sang: “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” (Ps. 30:5b). We may think the weeping will last forever, but comfort is on the way. Oddly enough, the comfort comes in the weeping.
We have a choice with our pain. When we experience loss we can suppress it and let it turn into anger or depression, or we can sit with the reality of loss, let the pain pour out in tears, and find comfort in the arms of God.
In just a few weeks we will mark the 25th anniversary of the terrorists attacks on 9/11. Four years ago my brother and I were in New York City on a trip we had planned to take with our father to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame, but he had died three weeks previous. Flights and hotels had already been paid for, so we decided to go anyway. In our own fresh grief we visited the 9/11 Memorial. If you’ve not been, I recommend that you do. There are two massive square waterfalls carved into the ground where the Twin Towers once stood. The designer calls them the “voids”
and says they were built to”render absence visible,” because there used to be two towers there and the lives of almost 3000 people were lost at that very place.
Sometimes when tragic loss occurs as a nation or as individuals we want to cover it up quickly and move on, bypassing our grief, appearing strong. But that’s not what we did as a nation in New York. Instead of building fresh monuments to our own power, we first built the voids. We created something to name and honor the absence. We memorialized the loss. The waterfalls sounded to me like a flood of perpetual tears. This was, I think, an act of public wisdom in line with today’s beatitude.
Escape from and suppression of pain does not bring comfort. Running from pain doesn’t
help. If your heart breaks and you don’t take time to mourn, the pain only goes deeper. And the sadness ends up leaking out in other ways like anger, stress, illness, depression, and addictions to numb the pain. Jesus invites us to face our pain because he has confidence in God’s presence to bring comfort.
Did you know that the psalms of lament is the largest category of psalms in the Bible. They teach us to: cry, weep, mourn, and protest. The loss isn’t blessed, but the mourning is.
Throughout the stories of our faith, grief is one of the most honest things God’s people give to God. Grief is a prayer, an offering of worship. God hears our cries. And when God hears the cries of God’s precious children, God rushes toward us with comfort. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Jesus speaks these words, knowing they offer only a crumb of comfort. Because the kind of grief we can’t mask, the kind we wish we didn’t have to wear on our sleeves, the grief that lives with us is heavy and unfixable – words don’t make it better or lighten any of the burden. For those who mourn, their hearts remain close to what was, what could be, what should be.
In order to make us whole, Jesus needs us to be honest. Without honesty, no matter how painful it is to name, we don’t have the chance to heal. So we bravely face the truth. By God’s grace, we name it out loud. And we let the cries that come pouring out – come – because God will hear them. And then we trust God to do what God does: breaking into the brokenness, to be with us, loving, caring, healing.
One day God will wipe every tear from our eyes, mourning and crying and pain will be no more. Until that day Jesus does not promise that the pain will completely go away. Like on that sacred land in New York City, the voids will remain. But God’s comfort will come.
The New Testament word for comfort, paraclete, one name for the Holy Spirit, means to “stand alongside.” God comes alongside us. The English word “comfort” means “to give strength.” It is more than finding solace. It is to be strengthened, fortified, defended, and eventually even find laughter again – the welling up and outpouring of deep joy. The wound in you makes larger space for the love of God, and Jesus says you shall be comforted.
Sometimes we think the problems of the world are so big that the only two choices are to turn away or be overwhelmed by despair. By God’s grace there is the third choice of sharing sadness and knowing hope. Genuine mourning will lead us to do something. When you grieve you open up a place in your heart to feel something and care about something.
The current reality of our world is not the world for which God hopes. We do not write off tragedy and injustice as the will of God. The Bible is clear that God hopes for so much more. There is always hope. There is hope in the truths of our faith, that forgiveness heals our hearts, and that we belong to each other. There is hope that though in this life we are living, in these bodies that are glorious and frail and painful, this life and these bodies are also full of God’s goodness and God’s presence that refuses to leave us alone even in our darkest night. If only we could see how loved we are by God, despite what the world does to us. We are never alone. Nothing separates us from God, not even, especially not death.
George Hartley was a medical doctor, a specialist in infectious diseases. He and his wife, Winnie, felt a special call. They left North Carolina and went to be missionaries in Liberia. They rode a little bonka boat as far as they could. Then they got out and found a clearing with natives looking from behind the trees and they said, “This is where we want to live and build our home, our practice.” With the occasional help of a person or two coming by Hartley put together a little home and a little medical clinic right beside it. Some of the natives occasionally would come to church when they tried to have worship on Sundays, but the Hartleys hadn’t been very successful
there in bringing people to Christ, but they cared for the needs a lot of people.
They had been there about a year or two, and they had a son, Robert. One day Hartley, looking out the window of his clinic, saw his son. The boy was running and would fall and then would get up again. Hartley was thinking to himself about a unique disease in that area, a neurological disease, and he thought to himself, “No, not Robert.” He did a thorough examination and discovered that his boy was indeed infected and he knew what the end would be.
In a couple of years little Robert died. Hartley said, “I went out with a shovel and dug the grave for my own son, weeping.” Native faces he had come to know through the little medical clinic watched him. All of a sudden an old man came out from behind a tree. He walked up to Hartley, got in his face, then jumped back and shouted: “White man, white man, he cry, he cry! He like one of us!” He went off through the bushes shouting, “White man, he cry.”
In just a few minutes he brought back with him a host of people, people George and Winnie had cared for through the two or three years that they had been there. And together these people helped dig the grave and put together a little box for the casket. George Hartley wrote: “I presided over the funeral of my own son with these people standing beside me weeping. Then the following Sunday, to my surprise, our little church was full of people.” As they broke through the barrier of language and culture, they began to see through this man and his tears that God cares.
Somewhere in this room this morning there is someone who carries in their heart a grief about things they’ve done or left undone. If there are tears in your heart because of the failures in your life, I want to tell you, “Jesus can change that.” Or maybe you’re carrying a heavy sense of grief over the losses in your life and you’re looking for a people who cry just like you. I don’t know all the burdens your heart carries. I just want to tell you that here in this place we worship a God who knows about suffering and death and we believe in resurrection. And I want you to know in the words of the hymn writer that for all God’s hurting children, “earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.”