Sermon Title: "How Are Mourners Blest?"
Date: November 2, 2008
Minister: Rev. Charles E. Ensley, Jr.

Lesson:  Matthew 5:1-12

I never planned to speak at my mother’s memorial service.  When my father and father-in-law died, I did not speak at their services.  Just too close to my emotions.  I admire family members who can speak at services for their loved ones.

But when my mother died two-and-a-half years ago, her minister had only been at her church for two years.  Mother was deep into the throes of Alzheimer’s disease, and he was never able to have a cogent conversation with her, nor experience her as the active churchwoman she had been in her 48 years of membership at her church.  So my sisters and I decided we would speak:  I spoke about all the church activities she had been in; Kathy spoke of her love of flowers; and Joan, who shared the nursing profession with Mother, spoke of their close relationship and affinity for many things.  We all did well at the service.  I had told my sisters to write out what they were going to say, and read it aloud several times so they would be comfortable hearing the words coming out of their mouths.  Afterwards, at the reception, the picture looks as if we were at a wedding instead of our mother’s memorial service.  Maybe we were just relieved it was all over.

A month later, we gathered with our spouses for a brief committal service in front of Mother’s niche at Forest Lawn.  The three of us sobbed, cried nearly uncontrollably.  How did we do so well at her memorial service, but when committing her remains to their final resting place, we broke down?

I don’t think we actually mourned at her memorial service.  It was six days after her death.  We had all been caught up in the details of planning the service and what we were to say.  A month later, sitting in front of the empty niche, we were actually facing the finality of it, the loss of our mother, the woman who had given us life and raised us.

People use the word “loss” a lot around the subject of death.  That prompted me to use for today’s Meditative Moment the quote from the Rev. Daniel Poling about not losing his wife; she was gone instead, and he knew where to find her.  Our society really doesn’t deal well or comfortably with death.  We euphemistically say someone “passed away,” or, the word I’ve heard only in the past two decades, “passed.”  I’ve always been straightforward, and instead of saying, “I’m sorry for your loss,” as I heard a young funeral director rather insincerely parrot to a bereaved widow recently, I use the word “died.”

And if that word is hard to hear, if it makes us grieve, or mourn, then that is what we have to do.  We have to face the absence forever of someone from our lives.  Mourning is an age-old emotion.  I focus today on Jesus’ second beatitude:  “Blessed are those who mourn…”  It is a startling paradox.  The world says, “Live life!”  Christ says, “Grieve!”  A sharp denial of the world’s standards.  Our instinct is to avoid that which causes us mental anguish or emotional hurt.  There are dozens of ways we evade it, by not thinking about it, by acting as if it never happened, by drowning ourselves in pills or drink, or escaping on a trip or even a reckless lifestyle.

Yet there is a genuine benefit to mourning, and that, I believe, is where the comfort comes.  Mourners are blest by the comfort they receive when they think about and remember the loved one who has died.  When we read names this morning of those from our church, your family and friends who have died in the past year, we are thanking God for their lives, of course, but we are also remembering them.  By evoking their names, all kinds of remembrances come to our minds, of happier times, one not associated with illness or death, but of earlier days and wonderful experiences.

My father died thirty years ago last Sunday.  And over those years, the hurt of seeing him suffer from cancer treatments has dimmed in our memories, and time and time again, especially at family holiday gatherings, my sisters and I remark about how much Dad enjoyed cooking, how he loved to have one or two more people join us at the table.  I told my younger sister of the time he brought the six-foot redwood picnic table into the house and added it to the end of Mother’s beautifully-set Christmas table so some extra people could come.  Joan, the youngest, who cooks like our father and decorates like our mother, says she has blotted that image out of her mind, but she laughs about it anyway.

Instances like that are how mourners are blest and comforted.  Looking at family pictures.  Remembering vacations together, a recipe someone shared with you, how they taught you to sew or knit or make a pie crust.  Every time you remember, you are comforted by your memories.  Don’t be afraid to say to someone who has had a death in their family something like, “I remember best when your dad/mother/husband/wife used to [fill in the blank].”  You are helping them to remember happier times.  See if it doesn’t cause a smile to cross their face.

In my eulogies here for our church members who have died, I try to remember the first time I met them.  I recall something they said or did around our church.  When I hear of the death of someone from my past, I do the same.

In July, when we were in Ashland, Oregon, I looked in the phone book to see if one of the ministers who was my mentor in seminary still lived in Medford.  I found only his wife’s name and address listed.  When I came home, I looked up the obituary section in the past several editions of the United Church of Christ Yearbook, and found Fred had died in 2006.  I wrote his widow a letter, and told her how valuable Fred’s wise counsel and helpful attention had been to me while in seminary.  And I recalled the vesper services he used to lead at First Congregational Church in Berkeley.  For tonight’s service, I chose some of those same hymns from the same hymnal we used back then.  And I concluded my letter by saying I surely hope I can give some of my church members the same support I had received from her husband.  She received the letter over two years after Fred died, but it’s never too late to let someone know how much a person meant to you.

When we come to this place for the purpose of this All Saints’ Sunday worship, we are remembering not only the great saints of the past who have made the Christian Church what it is today, but the ordinary people you and I have known who have helped to make us who and what we are as well.  We have mourned . . . and we are comforted by our memories of what each of them meant to us.  Thanks be to God for their lives.