This Thursday, January 6, is the day in the church year known as Epiphany.  Epiphany is a Greek word, which means, "shown" or "revealed."  It celebrates two events.  The first is the revealing of Jesus to the Jewish people at His baptism in the Jordan.  The second is the revealing of Jesus to the Gentiles as symbolized by the visit of the Wise Men.  According to tradition, Thursday is the day they came to see the baby Jesus.  Incidentally, Epiphany is also the twelfth day of Christmas when the true love concluded sending so many fantastic gifts.

       Other important events took place in the early life of Jesus.  Eight days after His birth, today by our count, Jesus was circumcised and was given the name announced by the Angel Gabriel.  Then, after forty days, Mary and Joseph took Jesus to the Temple for His ritual purification.  They brought a pair of turtle doves to be sacrificed according to the religious law.  This was the custom for the purification of a first born who was a male.

       But something happens in the Temple, which is completely out of the ordinary.  There is a man in the Temple named Simeon.  Luke tells us that this Simeon is "righteous and devout, looking for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit is upon him."  Simeon has been promised through the Holy Spirit that he will not die until he sees the Christ ‑‑ the anointed one of God.  And when Simeon sees the baby Jesus he takes Him in his arms and says, echoing the words of the prophet Isaiah: “Lord, now let your servant depart in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation which you have prepared in the sight of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel."

       What is there about this man, Simeon, that he is awarded this great privilege of comfort by the Holy Spirit?  To put it simply, he cares.  He cares about his nation.  He cares about the direction the world is taking.  He is righteous and devout and he looks around on a world that is unrighteous and profane.  He fears for it.  He wants God to act to set things right.  He is looking, Luke tells us, for the "consolation of Israel."  Now, in Jesus, his eyes see God's salvation. As a result, he is comforted.

       When Jesus becomes a grown man, He speaks about people like Simeon. As He teaches the people on a hill above the Sea of Galilee. He says "blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted."  The Hebrew word translated, blessed literally means "on the right road." So, “on the right road are they who mourn."

       What does it mean to mourn as Jesus speaks of mourning?

       Well, it doesn't mean to suffer for show.  Dan Greenberg in his Book, How to Be a Jewish Mother, describes how to suffer for show.  "To master the art of basic suffering," he writes, "you should begin with an intensive study of the Dristan commercials on television.  Pay particular attention to the face of the actor who has not yet taken Dristan.  Note the squint of the eyes, the furrow of the brow, the downward curve of the lips ‑‑ the pained expression that only can come from eight undrained sinus cavities or sever gastritis.  This is the basic facial expression.  Learn it well.  Practice it before a mirror several times a day.  If someone should catch you at it and ask you what you are doing, say:  'I'm fine, it's nothing at all, it will go away.'  Greenberg concludes his advice with, "let your child hear you sigh every day.  If you don't know what he's done to make you suffer, he will."

       That may be the way to be a Jewish mother.  Someone named Greenberg should know.  But it’s not the way to live as a child of God.  Jesus condemns suffering for show ‑‑ the Pharisees who, when they fast, dress in special clothes to make sure that every one knows all that they are going through. To mourn is not to look mournful.  To mourn is to deeply care.

       I read recently of a little girl who came home from a neighbor's house where her little friend had died after a long illness.  Her father questioned her, "why did you go?"  She answered. "To comfort her mother."  The father asked, "what could you do to comfort her?"  I climbed up into her lap and cried with her."  That little girl knew what it means to mourn.

       The Greek word that Jesus uses for mourn is the strongest word in that language for mourning.  It is the word used to designate mourning for the dead.  To mourn is to care deeply ‑‑ to know godly sorrow for sin ‑‑ our own sin and the sin of the world ‑‑ to be deeply concerned about evil in our society and to know the meaning of suffering because of the sin, injustice and perversion in our world.  It is to deeply care for those who are not just misguided but eternally lost unless they come to know the gospel of the Lord.  It is to care for the hungry, the lonely, the imprisoned, the homeless.

       Mourning in this way can be very hard.  It opens us to stresses we might avoid just by closing our eyes or building a shell around ourselves.  In hard periods of human history such as our own, some people have always responded by saying that we cannot afford to be sensitive.  If today's person were to feel grief for all the pains of the world, he or she could not bear the load.  Therefore, we steel ourselves, stifle emotion, avoid thinking about pain and suffering.

       Just this last week when Carol and I were in the Bay Area, we went to a diner party with our good friend’s small group. As we arrived, one of the men, who is an engineer, was talking about the devastating tidal wave in the Indian Ocean.  He was making the observation that the loss of even two hundred thousand would be only a drop in the bucket compared to the huge population in the region so it wasn’t really that big a deal. 

     This shocked me.  Statistically he was right of course.  Human beings are not an endangered species on earth and especially in parts of Asia.   But human beings aren’t just a part of the whole.  They are individuals who are valued – who love and who are loved.  Each one of those deaths, reported in such mind-numbing numbers, is still an individual loss.  And if this man is going to get close to God’s heart, he is also going to have to get close to what is on God’s heart which is people.

       I asked my friend about this man later and was told that he would do anything for anyone he knows.  It’s just that he was unwilling to expand the borders of his caring and relate to the pain of people he has never met who live on the far side of the world.  The sheer immensity of the event pushed him to treat it as something outside his Christian compassion.

       When we see the pain in the world, it is easy to allow compassion fatigue to set in.  We don’t even want to know about it after a while so we skip the front page and head for the Calendar section and the sports page. 

       But that not the way of Jesus.

       The world was a mess in Jesus’ time too.  The Stoic philosophers were saying: "don't mourn.  Self control is the answer to sorrow."  A few decades after Jesus, Epiteus, a great man in many respects, said, "love your wife and your children, but not so much that you will be hurt when they die."

       But Jesus calls us not to avoidance of but participation in the world's pain.  If we do this we are on the right road because it is the road of Jesus.  He cares.  He wept over the city and at the tomb.  He didn't isolate himself from life and he will not isolate His people from life.  Those who deeply care are very open to pain.  But they are also open to a promise.  "On the right track are those who mourn ‑‑ for they shall be comforted."  For it is when we are the most open to pain that we will find the most strength from God.

       This is true not only for our general grief at the state of the world but in our own grief at our  own particular and personal losses.   God does not just care for the big picture of the world situation.  He also cares about what is going on inside of us and how we deal with the pain.

        When it is not dealt with, grief can cut us off from others. Grief can paralyze our day‑to‑day functioning.  None of us are immune from grief. That is why the Bible encourages us to 'weep with those who weep'. Grieving is best done when a loving community and family surround us with their thoughts and prayers. We have to fight the temptation in grief that makes us want to hide away and try to handle it ourselves. Time by itself heals nothing. In fact, refusing to weep with those who weep can actually make us sick, sick at heart, sick in body, sick in spirit.

       That is why Jesus promised “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”  Jesus knew that there is a healing that can come when we face our grief head‑on. There is a comfort that can come when we are willing to be honest about how tough it has been to lose our loved ones. There is a blessing that will come when we let the tears flow and allow others to listen deeply to our pain. Even Jesus went through intense grief and loss. The shortest verse in the Bible is simply 'Jesus wept'. Weeping is an expression of the depth of our love.

       I have found in my own life that grieving will not harm me, but refusing to grieve will. Grieving will not cause me to fall apart, but rather fall together. Grieving will not bring a breakdown, but rather a breakthrough. So many of the dysfunctional and addictive things that we do in life are the fruit of our unwillingness to do the hard work of grieving. But running from life always brings death, death of hope, death of peace and death of intimacy.

        But we have hope.  By embracing death on that painful cross, Jesus broke the power of death to destroy our hopes and dreams. By rising from the dead, Jesus proved that death does not have the final word. By faith in Jesus' resurrection, we will see our loved ones again. We need not fear as we grieve, for Jesus has them in His loving arms.

       Jesus assures us that as we look at the world around us in realism, we draw near to God and God, in turn, draws near to us.  We find that as we open ourselves to sharing God’s pain for the world, we are not out there on our own.  God is beside us strengthening us through the Holy Spirit. Then, as you open yourself to caring.  You will find that, though you mourn, you will not be mournful.  Like old Simeon, you will experience tremendous joy.

       My desire for this new year of 2005 is that it will be a year filled only with good news for each one here, those we love, and the world as a whole.  That is my desire but, frankly speaking, it is not my expectation.  This year like other years will contain disasters, and illness, and death, and parting, and conflicts, and famines and uncertainties.

       How should we approach this kind of year?  Jesus says that we should approach it with vulnerability to feeling ‑‑ with an ability to deeply care ‑‑ to open ourselves to the pain of caring for others with the promise that we will be opening ourselves even more to the strength and joy that come only from God.

       In this vulnerability we have an example set for us by Jesus.  He gathered with His disciples in the Upper Room.  He knew that one would betray Him, one would deny Him, and all would run away and desert Him.  But He didn’t retreat or close Himself off.   He took the step of caring and said, "this is My body broken for you.  This is My blood shed for you.  Do this in remembrance of Me."