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The following message for the moment is delivered by the Reverend Dr. Bruce Wheeler-Thielman. Today's sermon is entitled "All sunshine makes a desert." Let us continue in worship by giving attention to the reading of God's Word, the prophecy of Isaiah, chapter 43. I begin at the verse numbered one. "But now thus says the Lord who created you, O Jacob,

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he who formed you, O Israel, fear not for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you. When you walk through fire, you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.

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I give Egypt as your ransom, Ethiopia and Saba in exchange for you, because you are precious in my eyes and honored and I love you. I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life. Fear not, for I am with you. I will bring your offspring from the east and from the west I will gather you. I will say to the north, 'Give up,' and to the south, 'Do not withhold. Bring my sons

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from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth. Everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made. Bring forth the people who are blind, yet have eyes, who are deaf, yet have ears. Let all the nations gather together and let the peoples assemble. Who among them can declare this and show us the former things? Let them bring their witnesses to

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justify them, and let them hear and say, 'It is true.' You are my witnesses, says the Lord, and my servant whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no God was formed, nor shall there be any after me. I am the Lord, and besides me there is no Savior.'" And may God bless to us this reading from his holy word. Amen. Pray with me.

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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. "Happy are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." It sounds like a violent contradiction, doesn't it? It is on the face of it a very bewildering sentence. "Happy are those who mourn." Should we say then three cheers for the brokenhearted? Hats off to those who suffer.

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Congratulations to those whose eyes are filled with tears. Bottoms up to the bereaved. It sounds so strange. "Happy are those who mourn." Indeed, the meaning of these words is so profound that I am myself convinced that it takes a person of age and Christian experience to really understand them. Let me illustrate that by putting before you three quick pictures. The first is of a little girl. She

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is skipping through a field. Her face is alight with laughter and joy, and she is singing a song. Say to her, "Happy are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." The sentence is incomprehensible in such a context. Second picture. Here is a middle-aged man. He has been crushed by bereavement. He has been brought to the dust on his knees by business failures of one kind or another. His soul

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is in revolt. Say to him, "Happy are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." And the words sound like some kind of cruel mockery. But here's a third picture, an older person in the faith. They have known what it is to grow up as a child. They have endured the sufferings and the hurts that are off time part of life. They know what it is to love. They know what it is to lose. And they

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have discovered out of these experiences, strange as it may seem, that they are somehow stronger, for they are more dependent upon God. Say to them, "Happy are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." And the words seem wonderfully apropos. What I am suggesting is that it is the eyes which are cleansed with tears which see the most clearly. And this is what those eyes discover. First they

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discover that in the sadness of mourning, they see the gladness of sensitivity. I remember when I was in seminary, each of us was required once each year to preach to the entire student body and the faculty. And one of the brightest young men in our class was assigned this particular text on which to preach. And I remember very vividly the central thesis of his message, which was this,

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that Christians ought not to mourn at a time of bereavement. Because, he said in the first place, this is a natural process. Death is a natural transition in life, and it is the way God has ordered things, and we ought not to protest that. And because in the second place, he said, we move from the natural to the supernatural. As Christians, we go to the kingdom of heaven, and who would weep

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over glorying in such a wonderful place? And I thought that those thoughts brought some insight to the text until I was walking back to my dormitory room. And then I remembered what Jesus did when he came to the tomb of his friend Lazarus. It says, "Jesus wept." And if Jesus was weeping, so can we. I remember in Denmark seeing the great Thorvaldsson statue, Christus Consolator. It was

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commissioned by the king of Denmark. Now Thorvaldsson's idea was to create a very strong and commanding Christ, and so he modeled out of clay a tall figure with arms extended, head erect, looking out upon all the world with authority, regnancy, monarchy. And then Thorvaldsson was called away from his studio, and while he was away for a few days, the sea air somehow invaded the

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studio, and it affected the clay so that the arms dropped and the head bowed and the shoulders were somehow hunched. And when Thorvaldsson came in and saw this, he thought that the statue was ruined, and then he suddenly recognized that this was a better picture of the Lord than he had conceived. And he took his stylus and he wrote in the clay across the bottom of the statue, "Come unto me,

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Christus Consolator, the Consoling Christ." Jesus knew grief. He knew loss. He knew what it was to say goodbye, and he calls us to him at such a time. Now grief is very hard. Sometimes it is an agony. Sometimes it numbs one into the place where one can feel nothing. Sometimes you feel that you will lose your mind. Sometimes you wish you could lose your mind. It is perfectly natural in a time

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of grief, perfectly normal, to act in ways which are not normal to our usual behavior. At such a time, we are going to feel pain that we have not felt before. But notice this about what we endure. First, grief shows us how much we have lost. You remember when Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus, the Jews who were watching said, "See how much he loved him." When someone that we love dies,

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we become more aware than we have been perhaps for many years of how deeply we have loved them, of the oneness that we have known with them. Oftentimes, you see, passion is transformed into the commonplace. We get so used to one another that we do not remember our precious value to one another. Our tenderness is somehow tarnished, but death strips all that away,

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and that's good, for it leads us to remember how much we have loved, and it also calls us to remember more evidently and clearly those who are still here for our loving. Grief also shows us who our friends are. They are the ones whose hands are extended to us at such a time. They are the ones who, to a great degree, are so dependable, and the emptiness that we feel,

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they fill up with their caring. You know the old truism, "A friend in need is a friend indeed." The Bible says that much more profoundly, "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ." We value our friends at a time of loss. And further, if there is in us any of the grace of the Holy Spirit at all, we discover that in the pain that we feel, we somehow become more

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sensitive to the pain that others feel. It was Henry Nguyen who said that in God's army, only the wounded can serve. And grief has a way of enlarging our sympathies, of deepening our insights, of strengthening our commitments. And these, you see, are all good things. So at such a time, we should remember the words of the old Jewish prophet, "When you pass through the waters,

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I will be with you. When you walk through fire, you shall not be consumed. Fear not, I am with you." Jesus sums that with a single sentence. He says, "Happy are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted with a new sensitivity." And I would suggest also that sadness, the sadness of mourning, leads to the gladness of sanctification. Now, sanctification is the process by which we become

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more mature in Christ. Sanctification is a Christian growing to be more and more like the one who saved him. In the 13th century, one of the great Christians was a woman named Mechthild of Magdeburg, and she told a little story about a man who came to the gates of heaven, and he had been led there by sorrow. But when he got to the gate with sorrow, he entered in, but sorrow did

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not. And then sorrow, according to the story, said, "I make many holy, but I myself am not holy. I bring many to these gates, though I may never enter them myself." You see, in heaven there is no sorrow. In heaven there is no tears, there is no pain. All of these former things have passed away, but oft times it is sorrow that brings us to a confrontation with the things that are eternal,

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brings us to the gateway of heaven, if you will, to think about our souls and their health. It is in the time of grieving, when we have lost someone that we have loved, that we are often led to a deeper examination of our own spiritual selves and of the kind of life that we have been living, in the name of the one who was crucified on our behalf. You see, the great question that we will

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be asked when we stand before Christ in the kingdom of heaven is this. It is not, "Are we as good as our neighbor?" It is, "Are we as good as Christ?" For we are to have been growing in him, and when you confront that, and death brings you to the place where you do confront it, it should lead to repentance. You remember how in the early church in this country, those who were repenting

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sat in a certain place in the church, and that was called the mourner's bench? Well, there is a mourning for sin. Growth in Christ leads us to a sorrow about our own spiritual state, with a dissatisfaction with what we have been, and to a greater dependence upon Christ, so that we might be more in him than we had ever been before. Augustine, in his Confessions, chapter 9, part 12,

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puts it this way, "Your tears stream down. Let them flow as freely as they would, and make of them a pillow on which your heart is rested." Repentance becomes a resting place for the heart. Repentance leads to forgiveness, and forgiveness leads to welcome into the kingdom of heaven, and welcome leads to a more dependent discipleship. And when you have that greater discipleship than

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you have known before, when death has caused you to face yourself and to face the future and to become better because of it, then you know with a certainty you might not have known before that Paul was absolutely right when he wrote, "The sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed to us." So when you weep, mourn for

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your sin, but remember the words of that old Jewish prophet, "When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. When you walk through fire, you will not be consumed. Fear not, for I am with you," which Jesus summed in a single sentence when he said, "Happy are those who mourn, who weep for their own sin, who repent, for they are sanctified, and they are made more ready for

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glory." And finally, the sadness of mourning leads us to see the gladness of service. In this sense, Jesus is the greatest mourner of all time. It is said in Scripture that when he saw the multitudes, he had compassion on them. The word "compassion" means a feeling, an emotion which welled up from the very core of his being, from the deep, deep down center of himself. It is a kind of total

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sympathy, which is not satisfied with sympathy alone, but moves on to service. It may begin with tears, but it moves on to the doing of tasks. I often think of this when I read John chapter 8 at the 57th verse. This is where Jesus is having a conversation with some Jewish leaders, and they look at him and they say, "How can you know these things, for you are not yet fifty years of age?"

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Now remember, Jesus at this time was just about thirty years old, but this text suggests that he looked like he was almost fifty. What could have made him look so much older than he was? I would suggest that it was his suffering, serving, sympathy for all those who needed his help. The world has little blessing for people who are unhappy. Oh, it blesses those who are on top of

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things. Eat, drink, be merry. The world is like the photographer who cries out, "Come on everybody, smile!" But the Christian, after his Savior, seeing the sin disease that besets the earth, and knowing the certain destiny of those who do not separate themselves from it, the Christian weeps and mourns for so sad a place. When I was in college, I heard a missionary speak.

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He had served in Japan, and he told us of how about a week before the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor, that a group of Japanese soldiers, drunk, had broken their way into the mission compound. And there they had bayoneted his seven-year-old daughter and threw her body into the cesspool. And then this missionary said, "It was not a fitting death for so flower-like a

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little girl." But we prayed and continue to pray that God may use it in his work toward the redemption of the Japanese people. I shall never forget that. Here was a man who so sorrowed for the people, some of which horribly murdered his child, but so sorrowed over their state, that he was willing to endure that sacrifice and still serve them. Who are the mourners of

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which I now speak? They are those who ache for the blind, those who suffer for the starving, those who cry out for the unjustly imprisoned. They are those who sorrow for those who have not met Jesus Christ. They are those who sob for all people that are oppressed. They are people who weep because others must suffer in dignity. They feel from down in the very depths of themselves

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an immense compassion for those who bear the burden of racism and prejudice and intolerance. These mourners are the visionaries. They are the dreamers of the world, and they're willing to pay a price to make their dreams come true. They agree with that great missionary, St. Jim Elliot, who said, "That one is no fool who is willing to give what he cannot keep to gain what he can never

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lose." These are those who will one day hear the voice of God say, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Thou hast been faithful over a little. I shall make you ruler over much." Life, my friends, is a grindstone. Most people it wears down, but those who are in Christ, it polishes. Until the countenance of the Savior is reflected in them to all the world.

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So there is much here. When we sorrow at the death of a loved one, we should rejoice with gladness for increasing sensitivity. When we mourn over our own sin, we should still be filled with gladness at our advance in sanctification. And when we set about passionately wiping away the world's tears, we should rejoice that we can know the gladness of serving him. So remember,

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when your heart is breaking, the wisdom of that old Jewish prophet who said, "When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. And when you walk through the fire, you will not be consumed. Fear not, for I am with you." Or remember what an old Egyptian friend of mine named Suleyman Ghabri said to me one day as we traveled south out of Cairo. We finally got out of the car. We were

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going to visit Saqqara, the famed Egyptian city of the dead. And as we walked from the car across those hot sands, with only a bitter heated wind blowing about us, as we walked he was speaking to me about the trouble he was having with his son, about the serious illness of his wife, about the peril that his business now knew, and that what might happen when he was gone and could no longer

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speak to those things. And then suddenly he stopped. And he turned and he looked at me with that wrinkled, brown face of his, for he was in his 80s, and he smiled. And he said, "But," and then he gestured at the burning sand all about, "but we must never forget that all sunshine takes only a desert." Which Jesus said this way, "Happy are those who know the shadows of sorrow, and

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whose eyes run with the rain of tears, for they shall be glad, for they shall be comforted." Pray with me. Father, I pray now for all those who are passing through the waters, and who are passing through the fires. Oh God, fulfill thy promise to be with them, and help them, even in the midst of their

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fire, their grief, their mourning, their repentance. Help them to know that in the end, they will be comforted. Do this for Jesus' sake. I do thank you. Amen.