00:00:00.000 - 00:00:24.000

When a smile hides a sorrow. A message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. Freya mustered his entire army and went up and besieged Samaria. And there was a great famine in Samaria as they besieged it. Until an ass's head was sold for 80 shekels of silver,

00:00:24.000 - 00:00:47.000

and the fourth part of a cab of doves dung for five shekels of silver. Now as the king of Israel was passing by upon the wall, a woman cried out to him saying, "Help my lord, O king." And he said, "If the lord will not help you, whence shall I help you?

00:00:47.000 - 00:01:06.000

From the threshing floor or from the wine press?" And the king asked her, "What is your trouble?" She answered, "This woman said to me, 'Give your son that we may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow.'

00:01:06.000 - 00:01:30.000

So we boiled my son and ate him, and on the next day I said to her, 'Give your son that we may eat him,' but she has hidden her son." And when the king heard the words of the woman, he rent his clothes. Now he was passing by upon the wall, and the people looked,

00:01:30.000 - 00:02:04.000

and behold, he had sackcloth beneath upon his flesh. And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his holy words. Let us pray. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

00:02:04.000 - 00:02:28.000

Amen. Jehoram was the son of the pitiful king Ahab, and the altogether evil and perverse queen Jezebel. And Jehoram turned out to be exactly the kind of boy

00:02:28.000 - 00:02:48.000

that you would expect those two to have as a son. Indeed, Scripture's only word concerning Jehoram and his parents is this, that Jehoram did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, though not like his mother and father.

00:02:48.000 - 00:03:08.000

That's small praise, indeed. Of course, we really couldn't expect anything other than that, could we? Like any other boy, he went to his mother and father for guidance, for direction, to have his feet set upon the proper path.

00:03:08.000 - 00:03:25.000

But they betrayed him. They led him not into the paths of goodness, but into the paths of evil. And that's not only something that happened two thousand years ago. That's something that happens today.

00:03:25.000 - 00:03:40.000

Oh, I'm not suggesting that parents openly, overtly, and deliberately teach their children those things that are wrong. We're much more subtle than that. But I am suggesting that many parents,

00:03:40.000 - 00:03:54.000

who should be the hope and the encouragement and the light and the compass of truth in the lives of their children, end up giving their children not the counsel of goodness, but the counsel of evil.

00:03:54.000 - 00:04:11.000

And children detect this. They know when the address of their house or the furnishings within it are more important than whether Christ dwells there or not. They know when the food on their dining room table has greater significance

00:04:11.000 - 00:04:28.000

than the bread and the wine upon the table of the Lord. They know when their parents are more concerned about their marks in school than they are about the marks of Christian service and stewardship which they bear upon their bodies.

00:04:28.000 - 00:04:47.000

They know when their mother or dad's chief concern seems to be the way they wear their hair on the top of their head rather than the commitment of mind and of spirit that goes on within their head. Children are sensitive to these things.

00:04:47.000 - 00:05:11.000

And if you don't believe that, then I'll take you to my office and show you the tear stains to prove it. So Jehoram was just the kind of boy you'd expect Ahab and Jezebel to have. There's only one noble deed of Jehoram recorded in scripture,

00:05:11.000 - 00:05:32.000

and that's the deed I read just a moment ago. It gives us some kind of hint of what he might have been like. The forces of the Syrian king Ben-Hadad had surrounded the city of Samaria. The word Ben-Hadad means "son of the storm god,"

00:05:32.000 - 00:05:46.000

and the armies of the Syrians had gathered like a mighty storm about the city, like ominous thunderclouds just ready to break. The soldiers were as numerous as the raindrops, and the troops of Ben-Hadad moved like lightning

00:05:46.000 - 00:06:06.000

to cut off any Israelite sorties out into the country in an effort to get food or wine to take to the famished in the starving city. Ben-Hadad and his armies sat brooding and silent, just waiting for the moment of attack all about the city of Samaria.

00:06:06.000 - 00:06:26.000

And inside the city there was no silence, but instead the screams of the dying and the starving and the articulated agonies of a perishing people. The head of an ass was being sold for $25.60,

00:06:26.000 - 00:06:46.000

a fabulous sum in those days. That kind of money being paid for food, which under normal circumstances would have been considered revoltingly unpalatable. And on every hand there is death and despair and hopelessness.

00:06:46.000 - 00:07:03.000

And then the young king, Jehoram, strides out upon the walls of the city. And the people look up and they see him, and they see the golden coronet upon his majestic brow, and they see how the precious stones in his royal robes

00:07:03.000 - 00:07:22.000

capture the glinting Syrian sun and send it back in many colored spangles. He is to them, you see, the leader of the people. And as they see him walk with confidence and calmness, with strength and surety of purpose, their hopes rise.

00:07:22.000 - 00:07:36.000

They are encouraged. They are enthusiastic at this spectacle of patriotism. And for a little while at least there's a whisper, a murmur, a sound of encouragement moving through the multitudes,

00:07:36.000 - 00:08:00.000

until a woman cries out, "Help my lord, O king!" That was the traditional cry for justice, which the king was obligated to answer. He expected it just to be another plea for food and drink he'd heard so many of them of late. And so he turns to her and he says, "If God will not help you, how can I help you?

00:08:00.000 - 00:08:19.000

Can I bring grain to the threshing floor when there is not there but dust? Can I bring wine from the press when there are no grapes?" And he turns and walks away, but he goes only about a dozen paces, and then turns and speaks to the woman with some gentleness,

00:08:19.000 - 00:08:34.000

"What is your trouble?" And then the hideous story is told. Through parched, cracked lips and stumbling over a swollen tongue, all of the grisly details spill out.

00:08:34.000 - 00:08:48.000

She's dragging another woman behind her. "This woman and I entered into a pact that to ease our starvation we would eat our children, and yesterday we boiled and consumed my son, and today we were to do the same thing with her son,

00:08:48.000 - 00:09:07.000

but she has hidden him and she will not bring him forth. Justice, O King, I demand justice!" And stunned by the horror of this, his spirit smashed by this hideous thing which has suddenly been poured out before him.

00:09:07.000 - 00:09:30.000

Remembering, I am sure, those words of Moses which had been uttered centuries before, that if the people did not follow God, God would turn against them in fury. In a fury, the text says, so that they will consume their own sons and eat their own daughters. With that kind of truth closing in about him,

00:09:30.000 - 00:09:55.000

"Justice, I reclaim is just, but is the end of Israel to be cannibalism?" Overwhelmed by that, the king reaches up and in typical Hebrew fashion, he grasps the neck of his royal garments and lends them to the hand. And the people see what Jehoram had labored to conceal.

00:09:55.000 - 00:10:23.000

They see sackcloth within upon his flesh. Sackcloth, the ruffian garment of suffering and sorrow. Sackcloth, that grinding, wearing thing, that formless garment that is called often the silent thob. The king had worn his royal robes to be a picture of splendor and encouragement to his people.

00:10:23.000 - 00:10:47.000

The king had walked upon the walls to lift their hearts and lift their hopes. The king had worn his coronets and all the regalia of his office, that they might have confidence in their nation once more, the nation that he personified. But inside, where they could not see, there he wore sackcloth.

00:10:47.000 - 00:11:14.000

His smile hid his sorrow. And I think there's something very splendid about that. And as I meditated about it, certain truths came to mind, which seemed to me to be important, important enough to share with you.

00:11:14.000 - 00:11:41.000

The first of those truths is this, that more people wear sackcloth within upon their flesh than most of us ever dream of. We're very prone to judge the inner state of a person's mental or spiritual condition by outward appearances. We look at the house they live in or the kind of car they drive or the jokes that they tell

00:11:41.000 - 00:12:06.000

and then make hasty generalizations about their spiritual temperature. That's not the way to tell how a man really feels. We say, "How are you?" and people say, "Fine," and they smile at us. But oftentimes the words "fine" and the smile do not reveal what is really true of them.

00:12:06.000 - 00:12:26.000

And many people wear more sackcloth than most of us begin to imagine. I think of Ezekiel, how he was commanded by God to go and minister to those Jews who lived on the banks of the river Kebar. And he didn't want to go because they were affluent and prosperous and rather haughty and stiff-necked.

00:12:26.000 - 00:12:49.000

And God said, "You will go," and he caused Ezekiel to sit in the midst of those people for seven days and for seven nights. And in that time Ezekiel had the opportunity to see beneath the silk of their outward appearance, to peek for a while beneath the smiles that they wore for other men. And the scripture's single word describing Ezekiel's attitude after he saw what was really true of them,

00:12:49.000 - 00:13:13.000

the scripture's single word is this, "He was overwhelmed." I remember how when I was very young there was a certain woman whom I loved with all my heart. She liked to play games and talk and take trips. She was a wonderful person who seemed to master every circumstance and difficulty.

00:13:13.000 - 00:13:42.000

She had some particular hardships with her children but managed to rise above them. And one day in conversation I said something to her which was very thoughtless and cruel. I didn't do it on purpose, but I did it anyway. And she passed it off as if it were nothing, but later in the day I chanced to find her in her room, weeping.

00:13:42.000 - 00:14:07.000

And as I talked with her, I discovered her sackcloth. And my love for her was deeper than ever before. You see, we tend to think that we're the only ones that walk the highway of human hurt. We tend to think that we're the only ones carrying burdens, that we're the only ones who know pain and hardship.

00:14:07.000 - 00:14:43.000

When all the while the person who sits to our right or to our left, the person at the next desk or across the backyard, may know the sting and the strain of sackcloth far beyond anything we've ever been called upon to endure. And it seems to me that we need to remember that, that most men hide their sorrows with their smiles. And Jehoram teaches me something else.

00:14:43.000 - 00:15:13.000

He teaches me also that we owe a round of applause, if you will. We owe an expression of thanks and gratitude. We owe the tribute of honor to people who bear their sufferings in silence in order not to be a burden to others. But I'm not speaking in praise of those who so bottle up their emotions,

00:15:13.000 - 00:15:34.000

who so encapsulate within themselves their hardships and agonies, that they do to themselves mental and spiritual and perhaps physical damage. I'm not for one moment suggesting that we should so hold within us all our heartaches that we literally tear ourselves apart inside. I'm not saying that.

00:15:34.000 - 00:16:08.000

But I am saying that there's something specially splendid about those persons who do keep within themselves those hurts and sorrows which it would not benefit anyone, including themselves, to have expressed. They suffer in silence, as it were, in order to be a blessing to others. Old folks who look back over their lives with heartache.

00:16:08.000 - 00:16:44.000

Young people who are, in spite of all their casually confident exterior, desperately afraid about tomorrow. People who've seen their hopes turn to dust, their accomplishments fade into nothing. All of their dreams disappear. People who carry sorrows and bereavements and secret diseases of which they do not speak, lest they become a burden to others.

00:16:44.000 - 00:17:08.000

I wonder if the Egyptians ever guessed how Joseph mourned for his lost family. In those days when he was ruling them and carrying them through times of famine and of great national anxiety, did they ever know about the sackcloth he wore? You remember how in the book of Genesis it tells us that when his family did come before Joseph,

00:17:08.000 - 00:17:34.000

that he went and sought a private place and there wept. And when he had wept, he washed his face and refrained himself and then returned to them. You see, when it came time to cry, lest his crying make others cry, he wept in his closet apart. Ethel Barrett tells about how early in her life she was a nurse,

00:17:34.000 - 00:17:53.000

and she was going down the hall in the hospital one day and a voice called to her out of her room, "Come here a minute," and she went in and there was a young man in the hospital bed and he said, "I see you go by every morning, but I only see you from the back and you go bouncing along and I've come to call you happy feet and I decided this morning I'd just like to see you face to face."

00:17:53.000 - 00:18:14.000

And they exchanged greetings and words of cheer and then every morning when she'd go by his room, she'd bounce in for a moment to find out how he was and he always answered fine with the words of enthusiasm and a great smile and they exchanged cheer and went on. And then one morning she happened to come by a little bit earlier than usual

00:18:14.000 - 00:18:44.000

and she bustled into the room as always only to discover the doctors and the nurses ministering to him at that moment and so she quickly exited, but not before she'd seen. The covers were down and she saw the hideous x-ray burn on his abdomen, how all the flesh was gone and the vital organs were separated from the outside by only a thin membrane.

00:18:44.000 - 00:19:11.000

She saw the doctor picking away the pieces of dead flesh from a skin graft that had not done what it was supposed to have done and the stench was beyond belief. And the next morning when she went into his room and said, "How are you?" Now with the covers in place and everything looking as it always looks, he said, "Fine, and how are you this morning, Happy Feet?"

00:19:11.000 - 00:19:48.000

And there was in her the deepest respect for him and for the splendor of the way in which his smile hid his sorrows. Compare that with the woman here in Glendale who said to me one morning, "Oh, Mr. Fieldman, I feel terrible because right now I'm good and I know when I'm good that pretty soon I'll be bad again." There's a man who plays football for the New Orleans Saints. His name is Tom Dempsey.

00:19:48.000 - 00:20:08.000

He's considered to be the best field goal kicker in the history of the sport. He holds the record of 63-yard field goal. The amazing thing about these field goals that Tom Dempsey kicks with his right foot is that Tom Dempsey's right foot is terribly deformed. He has only half a foot.

00:20:08.000 - 00:20:31.000

He wears a special shoe on that foot that costs $200. And the right hand with which he catches the ball when it's snapped to him has no fingers. His hand was deformed at birth too. Now that's really something when you think about it, isn't it? The world's greatest place kicker and field goal kicker who has a deformed right hand and a deformed right foot,

00:20:31.000 - 00:21:07.000

but Tom Dempsey refuses to describe himself as a handicapped person. And he doesn't talk about the sorrows and the hardships that are his, but he goes forward with his drums beating and his flags flying always. And I'm saying this morning that people like that, who wear their sackcloth inside, deserve our appreciation and our esteem and our highest regard. And just one last thought.

00:21:07.000 - 00:22:01.000

If it's true that so many people wear secret sackcloth, and if it's also true that many of them do this in order that they might not be a burden to others, then it seems to me obvious that we must cultivate within ourselves a kindness and a gentleness and a tenderness that will never make that sackcloth rub more raw. Please turn your cassette to the other side. That's not very profound. And if you came here this morning expecting me to be profound, I'm sorry.

00:22:01.000 - 00:22:34.000

But somehow it just seems to me that we are oft times so hurtful. We plant our feet right in the midst of the flower beds of other people's hopes. We walk with hobnail boots across the lawns of some people's greenest loves with our tongues. Carelessly or deliberately, it is an equal sin.

00:22:34.000 - 00:23:20.000

We set fires burning so that the tall trees of some people's most significant accomplishments are reduced to rubble and to ash. With our wars of insensitivity, we set age against age, friend against friend, associate against associate. We manufacture cynicism and sarcasm and shred to ribbons with cutting comments. It's a fabric of some people's only encouragement.

00:23:20.000 - 00:23:53.000

So it seems desperately important to me that we learn how to be tender and gentle and kind. That will only happen as we let Christ rule in our hearts. You know, we talk about the Incarnation, how he took upon himself flesh to dwell with us. We talk about the sufferings and the vicissitudes of his life.

00:23:53.000 - 00:24:19.000

We talk about how he climbed Calvary and died upon the cross. We talk about his resurrection, the power and the life that is brought to the Church. And we ought to talk about these things, and we must never stop talking about these things. But shouldn't we every once in a while just think about the simple kindness of man?

00:24:19.000 - 00:24:43.000

The gentleness, the tenderness that was so typical of him? Remember James Russell Lowell's magnificent poem, "The Vision of Sir Lawnfall"? Sir Lawnfall, when a young knight sets out in search of the Holy Grail, the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper,

00:24:43.000 - 00:24:57.000

and he leaves his castle resplendent in his knightly regalia, and as he leaves his castle he passes a leperous beggar by the side of the road. Now, many people would have ridden the beggar down. Others would have ridden past him without noticing.

00:24:57.000 - 00:25:21.000

But Lawnfall, as he went by, slipped to the beggar a golden coin, and it fell into the dust. And the beggar did not even bend over to pick it up, because he recognized that this coin was no real gift from Sir Lawnfall. It was just a casual kindness or courtesy, the kind of thing we do when, from the pulpit,

00:25:21.000 - 00:25:36.000

we talk about some desperate need, and you open your wallet and pull out a bill and slip it in the envelope and throw it in the plate, and don't even bother to record it for the IRS. Just one of those things that you do and don't pay much attention to.

00:25:36.000 - 00:26:00.000

A kind of insignificant gesture. So Lawnfall goes off and spends all of his life searching for the Grail and never finds it. And at the end of his days, old and tired and weak and lonely and cold and without resort, he returns to his castle, and they do not recognize him and they will not admit him.

00:26:00.000 - 00:26:25.000

And he turns away from the door, broken, and once again he sees the same leper, only this time more loathsome. And all Sir Lawnfall has is a crust of bread, and he breaks it in half. And one half he gives to the leper, and one half he keeps for himself.

00:26:25.000 - 00:26:57.000

And then the two go together to a stream, and they drink from the stream, and from a common cup. And in the moment of their drinking, the leper disappears. And in his place stands the Lord. You see, Sir Lawnfall, in all of his searching, had learned tenderness and kindness.

00:26:57.000 - 00:27:18.000

In his pursuit of Jesus, Jesus entered into him so that the same tenderness which was typical of the Christ became typical of him. And in that moment with that leper, in that moment when he reached out and put his fingers in the midst of the heart strings of another,

00:27:18.000 - 00:27:52.000

he discovered that the other was the Lord. The same one who taught him the gentleness to reach, became the one whom he finally reached. For inasmuch as you do it unto one of the least of your brethren, you do it to him. Well, it seems to me that this is what we have to learn, to be gentle like Jesus.

00:27:52.000 - 00:28:17.000

And those of you who've come here this morning with fat cloth within, those of you who cover your sorrows with your smiles, the relief that you're looking for is also to be found in him. You see, for most of us, the sun has already passed its zenith.

00:28:17.000 - 00:28:50.000

We're closer to the end of our days than we are to the beginning of them. So no matter what pain or hardship is ours, there will come a time soon when we will put aside the fat cloth and don instead white robes. And when we are with him, there will be no more pain or sorrow or weeping

00:28:50.000 - 00:29:21.000

for all of these former things will have passed away. Strange, isn't it? For those of us learning to be gentle and for those of us learning to live with pain, the answer to both of our needs is Jesus.

00:29:21.000 - 00:29:45.000

When I was a little boy, I used to wait for the first Tuesday in every month because that's when my Walt Disney comic book came. And in those days, they had a little character. I don't think they have him anymore.

00:29:45.000 - 00:30:24.000

And his name was Bucky Bug. And in one of those strips, he delivered himself of this very profound observation. Bucky Bug said, "Happiness is like perfume inside you on a shelf. And every time you pour some out, you spill some on yourself."

00:30:24.000 - 00:30:52.000

And you know what happiness is? Happiness, my friend, is a five-letter word. It spells Jesus. Let us pray.

00:30:53.000 - 00:31:40.000

O God, we pray for all those secret sufferers who wear their sackcloth beneath their smiles. Give to them the happiness of thy presence and of thy peace. O Father, we pray for all those whose lives touch the secret sufferers. Give to them gentleness and kindness and tenderness.

00:31:40.000 - 00:32:30.000

O Father, by thy grace, turn all the sackcloth of human suffering into the silk of being with Christ. And the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give to you and to all those whom you love his peace.

00:32:31.000 - 00:32:49.000

[Bell tolling] [BLANK_AUDIO]