Grace for the Heart-Broken (Lamentations 3.13-26 and Luke 7.11-17)

Introduction

I was saying at the bereavement service in Long Newton the other week, and if you were there you’ll remember it, that one of the unique features of being human is that we cry.

One of the ways we know that Jesus was fully human as well as fully God is that he shed tears. The shortest verse in the Bible, John 11.35, contains just two words; “Jesus wept.” It’s how we know that Jesus took flesh and blood and came to earth to fully experience every aspect of life that we do.

According to recent YouGov research, 66% of men and 93% of women say they have cried at some point in the last year. Almost one in five women and one in twenty men say they cry at least once a week. Whether that shows that women have a harder time of it than men do or that women just know better than men how unhealthy it is to bottle things up I don’t really know.

Machines never cry. I don’t think they’ll ever make a computer that will get upset when I make a mistake at the keyboard or forget to save my work and lose it all. We don’t expect our mobile phones to get all emotional when we leave them at home by mistake do we? Machines don’t cry.

Animals don’t really cry either. All animals are created with tear ducts but only to lubricate the eyes. Actually, with the possible exception of elephants, no animal ever sheds tears of emotion. And even with elephants we don’t really know. Even our closest cousins (chimps and orangutans) share 97% of our DNA but they never cry to express feeling. Crocodiles do actually produce tears but never when they’re sad; they only cry when they are eating their victims. Perhaps their prey is just a bit too tasteless without salt and pepper…

Plants don’t cry. Although scientists at the University of Bonn in Germany suggest that plants might possibly secrete a hormone when they’re being cut or pressed – and that is supposed to be equivalent to shedding tears. I just hope this vital research isn’t being funded by your hard-earned taxes.

But we cry because we’re human. It’s part of our makeup in this broken world and it seems to be unique to our species. It’s as human to cry as it is to have flesh and blood.

Our tear ducts are wired to the part of our brain that commands the emotions so we weep when we experience pain, when we feel lonely, when we share the burden of someone else’s sorrow, when we feel bereft, and most of all when we go through loss and grief.

The Psalms speak of the world as the Valley of Baka, it means a vale of bitter tears, an existence just flooded by a river of pain and loss bursting its banks.

And because we all cry at some point in our lives, and some of us often, the Bible has a place for tears; the Book of Lamentations. It’s probably the least cheerful book in Scripture but God has given it to us for a reason.

Of all the books in God’s word, this one gives expression to what people in Paris have been feeling since Friday 13th. There are tears running down children’s faces as they flee carnage in Syria and this book is for them too. There are tears running down mothers’ faces as they grieve another day without their kidnapped schoolgirls in Nigeria; this book conveys their pain as well.

That is public grief but so much pain is private. Who hears the sobbing of the woman whose world has fallen in because she’s just discovered her husband is having an affair with a younger woman?

Who dries the eyes of the man who’s been given his P45 and who’ll never work again after 30 years in an industry for which there is no future?

Who sees the tears of the young lad whose daddy walked out and never came back? There’s no man about the house, no masculine model he can look up to and admire, how is he ever going to relate to God as Father?

Who wipes away the tears of the woman whose husband has got dementia and is getting worse? She can’t face putting him in a home but she doesn’t recognise the man she fell in love with in her youth; his personality has changed, he shouts at her all day, he doesn’t seem to know who she is and she can no longer cope.

In this fallen world there are tears of loss, tears of rage, at every funeral, after every divorce, in every war, after every terrorist outrage. What a wretched world this is. What a mess we’re in.

But there is grace for the broken-hearted. God reveals himself in the Old Testament as the Father to the fatherless, the husband to the widow and the refuge to the foreigner. In 2 Kings 20 he says, “I have heard your prayer and seen your tears; I will heal you.” In Psalm 126 he promises that “those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy.”

When Jesus came, it was said of him, “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smouldering wick he will not quench.” The world breaks bruised reeds. It snuffs out smouldering wicks. But Jesus restores and strengthens. He sets ablaze with life and hope.

Jesus mends people who are downtrodden and heartbroken. He fixes people who feel they’ve reached the end of the line, who are hopeless, who don’t see any future.

With Jesus dawns a new day for people who have been ravaged by the cruelty of life, who have been weighed down by inherited darkness, who self-harm and get into all sorts of mess. If despair and dejection is where you are today, there is good news for you in this place because Jesus is here.

A Lament for Jerusalem

When you read Lamentations you find the utter despair of a man who looks around his city and all he can see is rubble.

It’s a book that was written by the prophet Jeremiah the morning after his city was attacked and destroyed. We know from secular history exactly when this happened; 586 B.C. Buildings were smashed to the ground. Bodies lay in the streets. The markets, usually bustling with trade, were laid empty and silent.

So Jeremiah looks around, takes his pen and starts to write down what he sees and how he feels.

How deserted lies the city, once so full of people….

Young and old lie together in the dust of the streets…

My eyes overflow with tears, they fail from weeping…

He goes on to say, “He pierced my heart, he has filled me with bitter herbs, he has broken my teeth with gravel.” He’s blaming God for the disaster in front of him. He’s saying “God did this.”

And the shocking truth is that God did do that. For over 200 years, prophet after prophet was saying, “If we continue as a nation on the path we’re on, God says he will withdraw his promise of blessing on our land. So turn your hearts back to what you know is right.”

No one listened. People blocked their ears and said “la, la, la, I can’t hear you.” They locked the prophets up or put them to death. Or both. And in the end, God withdrew his hand of protection, and what he said would happen happened. The Babylonians came and the nation of Israel fell into their hands.

But when we read the saddest, heaviest, bleakest book in the Bible, Lamentations, when our own tears are falling on the page we suddenly run into a moment of grace. It’s the grace that Jesus came to bring; healing for the broken-hearted. Here’s what it says:

“Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope:

Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,

for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
I say to myself, ‘The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.’

The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, 

to the one who seeks him;
it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.”

There is no place on earth so low and so dark that hope is gone forever.

Beauty for Ashes

A few years ago, one of our mission partners told us about a man he knew called William Sempija. William fled Rwanda after his parents and siblings were butchered before his eyes during the genocide. As a refugee he ended up as a street kid in Kampala in neighbouring Uganda. Imagine his broken heart.

He lived ten years on the streets before he was spotted by a Christian and fostered. Miraculously, William began to achieve among the highest school grades in Uganda. After some time, William became a Christian and he now works with street children in Kampala. Over 250 children, orphans from war, AIDS or victims of poverty, are now cared for every day by his charity.

“Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,

for his compassions never fail.”

Among the things I get to do as a minister is take funerals. I have one tomorrow as it happens. Once in a while, a funeral is utterly depressing. Usually they’re very moving and, especially when the deceased was young, some can be absolutely heart-breaking.

There is no greater pain than that of a mother burying her child. I’ve seen it. It’s unbearable. The part of her that she has just lost will always be missing. No consolation is adequate. No affliction in human experience seems to compare with this one.

So you can picture the ghostly, grief-stricken face of the widow of Nain in Luke chapter 7 as it describes two groups of people converging at the town gate.

The first crowd is the funeral cortege making its way out of the town to the cemetery. The second crowd is a large gathering of interested followers surrounding Jesus who just happens to be passing that way.

What’s going through this woman’s mind? She’s at that stage in the grieving process where everything is numb. Nothing has really sunk in yet. She still can’t believe what has happened to her. She had already lost her husband, she was a widow. Now her only son has died too and with his death the family line has ended.

With her son gone, this woman has just lost her last source of income. In a culture with no social security she is now facing destitution. Her son was her one and only pension plan – and the basic income that she would need in old age was now gone forever.

In a few hours, the crowd of mourners would give her a hug, say ‘goodbye’ and then all go home. When the last one leaves she’ll be penniless and alone.

We know her son was grown up (it says he was a man) so we can guess that she will have been in her forties - and in her society, at that age, her prospects for remarriage are practically zero. The bottom line is this; she is facing a bleak future - probably begging bread.

But her funeral procession on the way to the grave meets Jesus and his followers and immediately everyone knows that something is not quite right.

Normally, Jesus and those with him would just stand respectfully to one side as the funeral party passed by – or perhaps they’d join the back of the crowd out of sympathy. To interrupt a funeral procession was completely taboo. It was one of the most serious faux pas you could think of in 1st Century Jewish culture.

To touch the cart on which the body lay, meant that, according to the Law, Jesus would be ritually unclean for the rest of the day. To touch the body he would be ritually unclean for a week.

But Jesus never let that sort of thing get in the way of binding up someone’s broken heart.

The funeral party would have been led by the widow (the next of kin always went out in front); so she’s the one Jesus will have met first. When the Lord sees her, it says, “his heart went out to her” and he says, “Don’t cry.”

He turns to the dead young man. A body ready for burial would usually be anointed in fine spices to cover the smell of decay, dressed in strips of linen, and a shroud would be covering the face. “Young man, I say to you, get up!” The dead man sits up and begins to talk, and Jesus gives him back to his mother.

Someone once came up to the American pastor John Wimber after a Sunday service once and said, “I feel God is calling me to make myself available to you for the next three months. I’m in between jobs and I’ve got some money saved up. How can I serve you?” He said, “OK, tell me, what do you do?” She says, “I’m a palliative care nurse, I specialise in looking after people who are dying of cancer.” He says, “I’ll let you know if we need it.”

He thought it was a bit random and put it to the back of his mind but later he felt God say, “Don’t dismiss this, I’ve sent her to you, listen to what she says.”

Not long after, the phone rang. It was Lonnie Frisby. Lonnie was a former Vineyard pastor who was an amazing evangelist and gifted in the prophetic and healing ministries. But he was flawed, and he avoided accountability and he made some big mistakes. It happened to David, the man with a heart for God, and it can happen to anyone. He left his wife, he got involved with some other woman, and generally went off the rails.

So he calls John Wimber and says, “It’s Lonnie. I’ve got AIDS. I’m dying. They’ve told me I’ve got three months to live. And I’ve got nowhere to go.”

So John Wimber says, “You come here. You come home.” And he rented an appartment, and got this nurse in. And she cared for him round the clock until he died. And the church paid for it.

God’s grace for the broken-hearted. It means beautiful things come from even life’s ugliest self-inflicted tragedies.

Ending

It’s because of Jesus. In the very last book of the Bible, it says of Jesus, “Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah… has triumphed.”

And looking forward to the day when he returns to judge the living and the dead, it says, “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

Let’s pray…

Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 22nd November 2015

Thanks to Simon Ponsonby at New Wine 2015 for some of the Introduction