A Poor and Mourning Church

Our Lord tells us in the first two Beatitudes that his people are to be poor and mournful. More specifically, they are to be poor in spirit. Last Sunday I spent half an hour preaching to the adults in the congregation about what Jesus meant in Matthew 5:3 when he told his disciples that the it's the poor in spirit who enter the Kingdom. But I think it was, perhaps, clearer when I illustrated this in the children's sermon: Imagine you have a glass of rotten, sour, stinky milk and next to it you have a pitcher of cold, fresh lemonade. Before you can pour the lemonade into you glass you first have to dump out the sour milk -- and it's not enough to dump out some of the sour milk -- you have to dump it all out. That's what God does with us. He wants good things for us, but before we can receive them, we have to see our lives for what they are -- we're filled up to the brim with rotten, sour, stinky sin. We have to admit that we're rotten to the core and then let God dump that rottenness out, clean us up, and then fill us with his grace, his love, and his Spirit.

This week's passage, Matthew 5:4, gives us the emotional counterpart of being poor in spirit: to be mournful. It's not enough to know and confess our sin. We have to grasp the sinfulness of our sin. We have to mourn it. And the mourning becomes all the greater when we realise that the God whom we've offended is the same God who has mercifully died to take the penalty of our sins on himself that we can be freed from their penalty.

I've been pondering what this means not just for the individual, but also what it means for the Church. I think that if we as the Body of Christ mourned not only individually, but corporately we would have a much greater impact in the world for the good and growth of God's Kingdom. Instead, though, the Church has become self-righteous. We overlook our flaws, our shortcomings, and our sins. We think that everything within our walls is just fine and that all we need to do is evangelism. But what prompts self-righteous people to evangelise and what kind of evangelism do they do. What I've seen lately of the much of the Church's evangelism looks a lot more like condemnation. We're happy to walk with Jesus through Matthew 23, cheering for him as he pronounces those condemning words over and over: "Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees." But then as he weeps over the city filled with those same false religious leaders he goes on alone as we hang back, not quite willing to mourn over those whom he just condemned.

The contemporary Church has been doing a lot of shouting -- mostly "Woe to you...(insert specific sinful behaviour here)." And while we may be technically and theologically correct in what we say, is it the result of a Church that mourns? Is it coming from the heart of a people who can also acknowledge, "But for the grace of God, there go I"? If in the middle of your "evangelism" you have deliberately stop and insert the old "hate the sin, love the sinner line," my guess would be that you aren't really loving the sinner. And yet, if we, as the Body of Christ, were to be moved by our poverty of spirit and mourning to go out into the world to share the Good News, one beggar to another, I think that we would see far greater things happening in the Kingdom.