Sermon: How Mourning Blesses Us.
Passage: Matthew 5:1-11
This sermon comes from my long reflection on Jesus’ Beatitudes as proclaimed in today’s Gospel: When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain. Then, along with the other Beatitudes, He quite mysteriously proclaimed “Blessed are those who mourn.”
Today’s sermon was inspired by my questions on how mourning may bless us as we reflect on war, not only the 1st and 2nd World Wars, but the contemporary wars such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on our losses and the mourning we undergo for the soldiers who have died in battle.
Everyone’s experience of war is different. I am from Korea, a country divided into two different entities, North and South Korea, through the armistice agreement of 1953. An armistice doesn’t equal true peace; there is a demilitarized zone that runs along the 38th parallel, with armed soldiers keeping constant watch on both sides. My mother and father were born in the midst of the Korean war but they were, luckily, never touched directly by its scarring force. I learned as I grew up what it is like to live in a country that has been deeply wounded by war, where the many ugly traces and marks of a tragic history still spark political and personal division. These divisions tear between generations and regions. My home country will always have deep and injurious struggles as long as other powerful countries, particularly the US and its pervasive military presence, continue to intervene in Korea’s already fractious political dynamic. I have learned why and how other nations’ political, geographic, economic, and military strategic interests may never leave Korea to make its own way into true liberation. Wars, mark, trace and trauma of them have never gone away; they’ve infected every corner of our world, even in the 21st century. My experience, and the example of my country, shows that our world has entered into an era of armed globalization. Where can there be a ‘good’ war, a ‘just’ war, when all too often, war follows capital, creating huge fortunes for supply companies like Halliburton and private armies like Blackwater?
This sermon comes from prayerful study and research, from my intellect and my conscience. I spent a lot of time pondering the message that the words, “For they have sacrificed their lives that we may live in this country peacefully” conveys to us. I do believe this belief, this hope, originates from and resembles our Christian confession toward Christ – the theology of atonement - which is that Christ bled and died on the cross so that God would forgive our sins and save us from eternal punishment. I feel a little bit of bitterness to see that Christian churches across this nation do not make a prophetic witness about what our holy scripture, especially our Gospel, teaches about war, any war, regardless of how its causes are expressed or justified; keeping in mind not only Jesus’ saying, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” I am also thinking of our foremost Christian statement: “Love your enemies.” And I believe that the more important thing for us to do is to ask the question of HOW, such as “How can we apply our love and trust and faith in the Gospel – which is the Good News – toward understanding and changing the reality we all are involved in and experience as we continue to live in this era of perpetual warfare?”
Here are some of the questions I have been pondering and hope to share with you. WHO WILL WE PRAY FOR ON REMEMBRANCE DAY? Can we pray for the comfort of “all who are victims of violence in war zones” as we pray for the families of our own soldiers? It’s human nature to mourn our own dead first, but it is Christ’s teaching to include the family of the unarmed Afghan child who was shot in cold blood when he strayed too close to American soldiers, and the nine-year-old Iraqi boy who was killed in his own garden while trying to escape a raid on his house. Those who died fighting the US and their allied troops - surely even if they are our “enemies”, the command that we love them, the command given by Christ to “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you” must extend to mourning their deaths and their families’ losses.
This Sunday, as we talk about Remembrance Day, I hope we can take the time
to pause and reflect on who we are, and remember our unique calling as Christians. Before we are citizens of this nation and people of the Commonwealth, we are Christians. We are the Body of Christ; we are the people of God. Our identity as Christians extends beyond our national, ethnic identities and loyalties; it also means that our hearts can and should enter into the sorrow of others.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus said: “Blessed are those who mourn.” I think we need to wonder HOW this Beatitude may be an invitation to deepen our understanding of how mourning may bless us. It takes imagination and an open heart to enter into other people’s grief, to mourn truly and generously not only those whose absence puts a sword through our hearts, but those who lie in unmarked graves, whose names we will never know.
Marilyn McEntyre rightly says “One way to mourn authentically the dead whom we may have come to regard as enemies... Is to connect the dots that trace a path between us and them – the policies, the expropriation of resources, the forms of protectionism and attitudes of American exceptionalism that need to be renounced in order to recognize that the earth was their home as it is ours.”
So, as I conclude my message, I would like to emphasize again with my utmost sincerity and hope that between this morning and tomorrow, we can take the time to pause, to truly examine the ideologies that may lie beneath Remembrance Day and beneath our consciousness, especially how wars are represented and described in our media, in our politics, in our everyday conversation. The pure essence of Remembrance Day is not the glorification of war but a Christian reflection on loss and mourning, a discovery of how to mourn in a way that leads us to understand the true, deep damages of war. Our laments for our own losses may be accompanied by confession of our complicities in the losses of others. McEntyre puts it, “Only when we grieve for those we have killed as well as for those we love who have been killed will we be able to enter into the mourning that links us to all humans who live with the aching agony of loss.”
When killing has occurred, when wounding has occurred, we have not killed the unknown, the ‘other’; we have killed and wounded one another, our brothers and sisters. Koreans call the Korean War “Our Great Tragedy of Mutual Killings of One’s Own Brothers and Sisters.” The North and the South still point guns at each other on the 38th parallel; Russia and the US and their allies used my country for their proxy war and they are using it still. The US still builds naval bases in South Korea despite the local people’s strong protests. The phrase, “For they have sacrificed their lives that we may live in this country peacefully” does not translate comfortably into Korean. All are wounded. All are hurt. There is no hero. The others are not unknown - they are someone’s parent, brother or sister, uncle or nephew, someone’s child. We try to love, but it so hard to reach out while we hold a weapon in our hand.
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