From a sermon preached at Humble Walk Lutheran Church, St Paul, MN on June 9, 2013.
Grace,
peace, and mercy are yours from the Triune God.
Amen
I struggled with
this week’s text because it leaves me with more questions than answers. Luke’s
Gospel provides story after story to illustrate why Jesus is the Messiah and
the Son of God and how God is doing a new thing in the world. This story is included for a reason, and it
has all the right components: a grieving
widowed mother, a dead man, a wailing crowd, and a miraculous healing.
So why this
particular man? Surely on this very same
day other sons and daughters in the same city died leaving behind widowed
mothers. Where were their miracles? And any one of us who has ever prayed for a
miraculous healing of a loved one and ended up planning a funeral instead or
tried to find meaning in a life smothered by depression, knows that miracles
don’t happen just because we want them.
I have absolutely
no doubt that miracles happen every single day, just look at an infant
discovering the world for the first time or getting the test result that the cancer
has gone into remission. But we want
miracles to come on our terms and when they don’t, we often feel like it is a
reflection of our faithfulness or quality of character. If we would have prayed more or tried harder
or were a better person, we like to think that we might deserve a miracle more than the person down the street. In a life that seems way too painful and out
of control, we need to feel like we can grasp onto something.
It is tempting to
read this text as a story of miraculous healing and the power of God that comes
through our actions of faith. A healing
does take place and it is because of the power of God. But this text, and other texts like it, which
we will read over the next couple months, in which Jesus performs miracles and
brings hope to impossible situations are twisted around by our human need to
control the outcome of things around us, particularly those things that have
the potential to cause us pain. We hear
that Jesus performs miracles, and we try to influence those miracles through
our own actions. There is an entire
ministry enterprise built on this, just turn on any Christian television
station. You declare your need for
healing, and “prayer teams are standing by” and in the midst of all this
praying, there are testimonials from those who have been healed. And stories like the widow at Nain that we
hear about in today’s Gospel are cited as evidence for the miraculous work of
Christ, you just have to want it enough to pray for it in the right way. I
think we sometimes want to read healing stories through this lens, but that is
not what is going on in this text.
Jesus and his
disciples and a large crowd are moving throughout the country. The disciples and the crowd had already
witnessed the miraculous work of Jesus.
This group came to Nain, a small city near Nazareth. Before they even enter the gates of the city,
this crowd meets another large crowd.
This group was carrying the body of a man, the “bier” that we hear
referenced in the text is a sort of rack for carrying a body wrapped in a
shroud, and they are headed out of the city for burial. This man is described as “his mother’s only
son” and his mother was a widow. At the
time, this woman would very likely become destitute without a spouse or
children to care for her, as there were no viable ways for a single woman to
support herself. This woman was in the
most desperate situation imaginable. She
had lost her husband, lost her only child, and now she was likely to lose her
home and her entire way of life.
But when we look
at the text, REALLY look at the text, the grieving widow is not asking Jesus to
bring her son back to life. The group
carrying the body has no expectation of healing. We do not hear about the widowed mother
begging and pleading for God to bring her son back to life. She has no idea who this Jesus character
is. She is just trying to summon all her
energy to get through this burial so she can go home and pull the shades and
finally sob in peace without being stared at by the neighbors. She is weighed down by death.
We have all been
in this place. The steely determination
of gathering all your energy reserves to get through one more day, one more
hour, one more minute, before you can collapse on the floor at home and cry. Maybe you have had to gather your own
emotions to be able to “hold it together” and put yourself on autopilot to plan
the funeral of a family member. Maybe
you are surviving a divorce or the grief of a broken relationship and it takes
everything you have to make it through a day of work. Maybe you are suffering in silence with
addiction or depression and feel like you are dead, yet you keep waking up
everyday anyway. Loneliness is
death. Fear is death. Sin is death.
We are all weighed down by death and cannot save ourselves. What are you carrying that is causing you to
die slowly? What do you need Jesus to
heal today?
Yet in this
widow’s unimaginable grief, in the dark tunnel that leads only to the grave
where she will bury her only son, Jesus notices her. Out of the crowd he picks her out, feels his
heart break for her, and says, “do not weep.”
And he touches the shroud that covers the body of her only son, and
commands the man to rise. For this
community, death was terribly taboo and against religious purity laws. By physically touching death, Jesus is
indicating that he is doing a new thing on earth. Walls will be broken down and change is
coming.
The promise that
we hear in today’s text is not that the sick and the dead will be restored to
their lives here on earth, and will be able to testify about it on the stage of
a low-rent televangelist on late night television, but that Jesus came to
earth, both fully human and fully divine, and knows the depth of human
suffering and promises to move towards us and be present in it. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what we
are capable of doing or praying or being.
We are all going to die. The man
in today’s text will die again. His
mother will die. All of the disciples
and the people in the crowd will die. Even
Jesus himself is going to die. And while
death is an inevitability for all of us, it does not have the final word.
This is the
promise of the Gospel in today’s reading.
We have Jesus, God incarnate, who came to earth to dwell among us so
that we might never have to be apart from God again, not in sin and not in
death. We have a God who KNOWS suffering
and who endures with us in our present suffering. We have a God who notices the grief of
widowed mothers and dares to comfort and heal in the midst of such grief and
suffering. We have a God who holds us in the midst of our
grief and dares to touch the parts of our lives that are dying. And above all, we have a God who has
conquered death on our behalf. Death
happens, even in the midst of life, but it is not the end and we are not
defined by it. Amen.
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