“The Blessing of a Broken Heart”

Matthew 5:4

A heart attack claimed my dad’s life three years and a couple of weeks after my sister died. One of his sisters remarked that he had died of a broken heart. Maybe so. My sister really was daddy’s girl. Theirs was one of those truly close kinds of relationships that only fathers and daughters can have. His grief over losing her eventually became more than he could bear. Because of his heartbreak his heart literally broke.

Where is the blessing in that; where’s the happiness and bliss promised in the second Beatitude? What is so blessed about a broken heart? If we’re talking about grief in general, nothing. Just as the rain falls on the just and the unjust, so, too, does grief. None of us get through life without suffering grief over friends and loved ones taken from us by death. We all go through times of mournful loss. Relationships end. Marriages fall apart. Homes, jobs, and friends must be left behind. Hopes and dreams are destroyed by life’s harsh realities, leaving us grieve and mourn. As one well- known writer said, life is difficult. Or to quote my Aunt Arlene, that’s just the way it is.

Grief is part of the human condition. Sorrow is inescapable. Today’s Beatitude tells us that those who mourn are blessed. Are we to conclude, then, that all grief is a source of blessedness? No, we are not. When I’m conducting a funeral I never tell the family of the deceased to cheer up because their time of loss is such a blessed moment. “Don’t worry. Be happy. Your grief is a good thing. This may be one of the most blessed days you’ll ever experience.” If I ever do say such a thing during a funeral, fire me!

Not all grief is a blessing. Not all sorrow is consecrated. There was no happiness in losing my father. There was no joy when my sister died. There was the blessed hope of heaven; the assurance of seeing them again that is given to those in Christ. But the shock, numbness, and darkness that were the immediate results of their passing were not a blessing. The comfort that came from knowing they were in heaven, wonderful as it was, did not fill up those great big empty places left in my life by their passing. Although blessings may eventually come out of the experience of grief, the experience itself is not necessarily a blessing.

“But pastor,” you may say. “Jesus said that those who mourn are blessed and that they will be comforted.” But Jesus wasn’t talking about generic grief. The Greek word translated as “to mourn” denotes the strongest grief that one can experience. It is the grief of enormous loss, a grief that cannot be hidden from the world. It is the grief we experience when we are brought face-to-face with our sin and the world’s sinfulness.

This is not a grief we experience because something has happened to us. It’s a grief that comes from knowing what we’ve done. It is that desperate form of sorrow we experience when we know how greatly our sins have offended God and hurt others. It is the broken and contrite heart of a confessing, repentant sinner. It is the heartbreak that overcomes us when look back to the cross and know the grief, pain, and sorrow our Savior bore for our sins. It is the heartbreak we experience when we look at the world around us and see how greatly sin has infected all of creation: Adam’s sin, human sin, our sin.

In last week’s sermon on the first Beatitude we dealt a bit with King David’s humility before God in the aftermath of his dalliance with Bathsheba. His pride led him far astray from the paths of righteousness. He committed blatant adultery. He gave orders that resulted in the murder of an innocent man. Brought face-to-face with not only the enormity of his sin, but also with his powerlessness to undo what had been done, he surrendered himself to God’s will. He threw himself upon God’s mercy.

Why? His heart was broken by the knowledge of the depth of his sinfulness. His great prayer of contrition that came to be Psalm 51 makes it clear that the sacrifice most acceptable to God is a broken and contrite heart. For David this wasn’t just some intellectual exercise that explored the theology of forgiveness. It was a description of a real-life experience. In the end, the only gift he had left to offer to God was his own broken heart: his desperate sorrow over his own sin and unworthiness. He had offended God, and in the process done great harm to other people.

That was a truth he could neither escape nor rationalize away. He was humbled by that truth. He was penitent over that truth. He truly was one of God’s sorrowful people. It was a hellish experience. It was also a blessed experience. It was an experience that brought him back to God. Or to once again use some of Eugene Peterson’s imagery, it was a moment of great loss that left David nowhere else to go but into the loving embrace of God. There, forgiven and redeemed, he knew the consolation that belongs to those whose horrible grief over their own sinfulness causes them to seek healing and wholeness in the arms of God.

When Jesus shared the Beatitudes with his followers he was defining discipleship. He was painting a picture for them and us of what discipleship looked like. Are we disciples? We are if we know that our lives are totally out of whack, and that the only way for them to get straightened out is to totally turn them over to God. We become disciple-like when we are thoroughly humbled by our inability to find righteousness within ourselves or through our own efforts.

We start becoming disciples when we truly realize that the only sacrifices acceptable to God – the only sacrifices pleasing to God - are our broken and contrite hearts. We begin faithfully walking in the way of discipleship only after we have become sorely grieved by our total lack of righteousness, only after our hearts are aching because we’ve finally admitted to ourselves and to God the depths of our sinfulness. We cannot be disciples until we are overwhelmed by the sorrow of knowing our true unworthiness in the presence of God. Until humility and penitence mark our lives, we are not faithfully following Jesus.

We don’t have to be perfect. Discipleship is not about perfection. It’s about being imperfect, and knowing it. Disciples aren’t full of themselves; they are filled with humility. Pride, arrogance, and smug self-satisfaction are not marks of discipleship. Disciples are people who know beyond the shadow of a doubt that their only real hope is found in Jesus Christ. Disciples may very well be the apples of God’s eye, but they’re also very much aware of how rotten they are. Disciples are sinners. The awareness of their sin drives them to their knees. Disciples know how much it cost God to redeem them, and their hearts break at that knowledge.

Disciples are not perfect. They are blessed. They experience the joy of knowing that they belong to God. They are happy in the knowledge that their lives, however they might appear to the world, are lives overflowing with an abundance of the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Their broken hearts are healed because they have given them to Jesus. They find courage and comfort within the loving embrace of their Father God. Such are the blessings of discipleship.

Blessed are we when we truly grieve over our sinfulness. We will find our consolation in God. Amen.