Rev - DOC

							                                                All Saints’ Day

              “Blessed Are Those Who Mourn”
                                                  Matthew 5:1–12
               Rev. Norman Nagel, ThD, professor emeritus, Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri
Note: This message was preached at Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana, on Nov 1, 1981. Excerpted from
Norman Nagel, Selected Sermons of Norman Nagel from Valparaiso to St. Louis (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing
House, 2004), 314–17.
                                                Sermon Outline
  1.    In the face of death, we are prone to make pretenses—for others and for ourselves.
  2.    But against all falsehood, God and the Lamb are inseparable as our judge who answered for our sins on
        Calvary.
W E ARE FREE, FREE TO MOURN WITH A MOURNING THAT IS FREE OF PRETENSES.
  3.    For “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
                                                     Sermon
     This morning we name the names of our dead, those of our family and of this university who have died since
last All Saints’ Day. We name them here together before the Lord.
                                                         1.
     For some of us, there will be a name of a person we know a little or one whose life was intertwined with ours,
intimately known, loved or not loved, or both. There will be a name of someone with whom we had happiness or
pain or both. Before the Lord, we have courage to be honest. Nothing else will do before him. Of those whom we
mourn we remember things that we would rather not remember, things that make the funeral parlor talk ring hollow.
“He was always such a good man.” “She was always so sweet.” Not true, yet we are prone to fall in with such
pretenses. Pretenses do not change the facts, but in our grief, even the fact of death is something we are prone to
make pretenses about. We are encouraged in this by those who encourage the pretenses out of social obligation, for
profit, or even from friendship. But the fact remains a fact.
     In Noel Coward’s play This Happy Breed, a man’s son is killed in the war and his friends try to help him with
pretense talk and euphemisms for death. Out of the emptiness of his heart, he finally cries, “He didn’t pass on, pass
out, or pass over; he just bloody well died.” Such honesty can crumble a man. His son was all that mattered to him.
What is the point of going on living when the one most precious in all the world has died? Such grief is possible
only when we know that life is to have a point, meaning, and worth, but you cannot read that looking into a grave.
This we have to face, yet death is a fact that, for all its finality, is not the final fact.
     You have not faced death fully unless you have faced the death on Calvary. Jesus was, in fact, a good man. Two
bad men were dying along with him. One of them acknowledged the truth: “We have it coming to us, but not this
one.” Jesus was different, yet he was on the center cross, dying along with them. He was not guilty. He cries, “My
God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46). That is ultimate death, the forsakenness of God. The death
of no more brain waves, breath, or heartbeat has its final weight not in the nullification of any worth, meaning, or
happiness that we may have known or hoped for, but in the fact that we are accountable for our lives. This fact is
acknowledged also by those who deny God, for they would still justify themselves, claim some meaning, worth, or
at least a little happiness, and make a case for themselves.
                                                         2.
     The greater the insistences, the greater the uncertainty, for we do not do the final judging. Who does? Today’s
Epistle [Rev 21:9–11, 22–27; 22:1–5] answers, “God and the Lamb.” Which of the two will be your judge? God?
What God? The God of our God talk, of our construction or definition? If you insist, that kind of God will be your
judge before whom you make your case. Yet they are not separate; there is one throne, the throne of God and the
Lamb. “They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads” (Rev 22:4). On your forehead? Yes, for his
name was put on you with the water of Baptism, as we confess with the cross put on your forehead and on your
heart, the cross of the Lamb who was slain, the Lamb who bore the sins of the world, the Lamb who bore your sins
for you in your place and was forsaken of God, where your sins put you but where he was for you in your place.
     When Jesus cries, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” have God and the Lamb come apart,
opposite each other? Yes, for the Lamb is where we are, opposite God, in our place as sinners. He bears our
punishment of sin, the forsakenness of God. Anyone bearing his or her own sin is finally lost, but not Jesus. He is
bearing not his own sin, but ours; he is not opposite God, but doing the saving will of the Father. He won’t let go of
us, and he won’t let me let go of God. Out of the ultimate darkness of ultimate death comes the cry, “It is finished”
(Jn 19:30). Jesus is through. He has done it. Then he goes through the little death also. The one who was crucified,
the Lamb who was slain, is the risen one who sits on “the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Rev 22:3). From that
throne God is for us as the Lamb is for us, no other God for us but as he is for us in the Lamb.
      To separate God and the Lamb, to insist that God is not like that for you, is to tear Calvary apart. It is to insist
that the Lamb did not bear your sins for you but that you will answer for them yourself before God apart from the
Lamb. That is the final folly of those who go into the final death, as it says: “Everyone who loves and practices
falsehood” (Rev 22:15). This is the falsehood of separating God and the Lamb, the falsehood that denies your sin is
answered for and forgiven. Forgiveness refused means that you answer for your sins yourself. This expunges his
name put on you, and your name is not then in the Lamb’s Book of Life (Rev 21:27).
      We read the names this morning trusting in that forgiveness won on Calvary by the Lamb who was slain. It is he
who is our judge, he who answered for our sins on Calvary. What Christ did is given us as ours, his death for us, his
life for us, and so we are forgiven and righteous with his righteousness, holy, saints. That is all ours from the Lamb,
and the Lamb who is our judge cannot deny himself or what is ours from him, no more than God can be undone by
separation of God and the Lamb. We are justified by grace through faith for the Lamb’s sake.
      The Lamb is not one who coerces. He suffers himself to be rejected. Such unbelief chooses to be judged
differently, and we may have that option. The Lord knows whether any of the names we read this morning are those
who rejected the Lamb and his forgiveness. We must respect that fact too. If some people insist that they are not
Christian, we may not make pretenses that they are. There have been times when a person who committed suicide
was not given a Christian burial, his or her last act an act of rebellion against God. That may be so. In confirmation
class, I used to suggest that the man who jumped over the cliff might repent on the way down. God knows, and how
he is toward us is not according to this or that moment in our lives. If he is, who could ever be surely saved? The
hands that hold us are the hands pierced on Calvary. They hold us while the wired-up body lies in intensive care and
the machinery keeps some heartbeat going and we wonder whether the person is still there. Whether the body is
inert or wrenching, we stand in reverence before what may be passing between that person and the Lord. He knows.
With our prayers we draw closer. We hope that person is in the hands of the Lamb who was slain for him, for her,
for you. No separation there either.
                                                           3.
    Knowing that,
                                     WE ARE FREE, FREE TO MOURN
                             WITH A MOURNING THAT IS FREE OF PRETENSES,
free fully and truthfully to mourn, free to weep the tears that Jesus shares with us as we hear his words: “Blessed are
those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Mt 5:4). The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the Law.
But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. He, the Lamb who was slain, has
been through it all and made the way through for us. He doesn’t just talk comfort; he has done it at Calvary for us.
     Calvary is for you, from him, a gift. Blessed are those who are given to. They are “the poor in spirit” of the first
beatitude. If there is any hope of deliverance, it can only come from God. The poor in spirit wait on the Lord. As he
gives, they are given to. His giving to them is not blocked or hindered by what they have crammed together and
would use for bargaining. “God gives into empty hands,” says Augustine, not into hands full of what we would
boast of before God. There is no room for the gifts to be given into. Sometimes, with drastic mercy, our Father
empties our hands so there may be room for his gifts. Blessed are those who are given to by God. Blessed are they
who receive their death as a gift from his hands. Nothing is outside his hands. Despite the pain and perplexity of any
way of dying, we are never outside his hands, and within his hands and from his hands our deaths are a gift by way
of which he brings us to the fullness of his promises. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven” (Mt 5:3).
     In the Gospel, this word blessed is always in relation to Jesus. It rings with gladness, as is pointed to by the
translation that says, “Happy are those who know their need of God.” But happiness is often something so fleeting
or shallow, and here is something from our Lord, a lively, joyful gift for all our living and all our dying. Not
spoonfuls, not bucketfuls, but the “river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of
the Lamb” (Rev 22:1). “And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace” (Jn 1:16). You were “buried
with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who
raised him from the dead” (Col 2:12). You who were dead in sin God made alive together with him, having forgiven
us all our sins, having blotted out the charges of the Law against us. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. “For
you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will
appear with him in glory” (Col 3:3–4).
    Happy All Saints’ Day. “Rejoice and be glad.” “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” “The throne of God and the Lamb.” “The
Lamb’s Book of Life.” Amen.