Luke 7:11-17
June 10, 2007
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Perhaps the most avoided topic in our society is death. Though it occurs to every living person, we have gotten very good at isolating ourselves from it.
In an earlier age, death was understood to be a natural part of society. People were allowed to die at home, rather than in a nursing home or a hospital. After death, they were not sent off to a mortuary, but kept at home in bed, and prepared there for visitation and burial. Once the bed had been vacated, it was put back into service for the living. How odd it would seem today to sleep in a bed that someone had died in. I can still remember how my mother upon the sudden death of my younger brother threw out his bed in time for the trash collectors to pick up.
People in less modernized cultures still deal with death the way we did in North America in a less antiseptic age. People of all ages come into contact with those who are sick and dying. Even children see the progression of life to death and become as familiar with it in people as they are with the death of house pets and farm animals. Some families own pets with a mindset that some day there’s a lesson of life that can be taught.
Today, for most of us, death is kept at a distance. It usually occurs in isolated places where only specialists have to deal with it. Afterwards, when families prepare to make funeral arrangements, more specialists step in to maintain a margin of insulation around the grieving. Most of us have little to do with death professionals. Undertakers, morticians, funeral directors: these terms—and occupations—make people nervous.
I can still remember growing up when my mother would warn me not to shake hands with a funeral home director. One often thinks twice before shaking their hands, knowing what they have been up to in their embalming chambers.
When I saw this Luke lesson assigned to this Sunday, I wanted to preach on one of the other passages. I was afraid of preaching on the topic of death since I was conditioned so well by my mother to not speak about such topics. And if you do, she would say, “What are you talking about? Go and wash out your mouth!” Or in more polite terms, “If you have to, here’s an even bigger lisee for you!”
This episode in Luke forces us to think about death for a change. Most of the time, we can relegate death to the specialists and deal with it only as it becomes necessary. But, it is useful for people of faith to have a better relationship with things relating to death. This is true, in part, because the more familiar we are with something, the less fearful of it we will be. But it is also true because faith is vitally about living and dying. They are inseparable.
Raising the Dead
In Jesus’ day, death was not so distant as it is today. But the death rate in his day was no different than in ours: 100% of all people born eventually died. But, there were no professionals on hand to deal with death and burial. The women would prepare the body; thus we see the story of the women being the first at the tomb to discover the risen Jesus.
In this story, a man has died. The people of the town of Nain are in the process of burying him when Jesus and his large crowd of followers encountered the funeral procession. This would not have been in any way out of the ordinary. It’s very normal to hear the Green Street Mortuary Band play while we are still in worship or when we encounter a funeral motorcade in the streets of San Francisco.
It would not have been out of the ordinary for Jesus to have compassion for the mother of the dead man because she was a widow, and with the death of her son came loss of income and all hope for future security.
This son was to take care of his mother in her old age. Now that he was gone, she had no retirement fund, no pension plan, no social security. She had only one son. Now that he was dead, and so was her hope for her future security. She had buried her husband, and now she was making the same painful walk to the cemetery to bury her only son. Who would support her in her old age?
There is a reason why the Law of Moses commanded the people to care for the widows and orphans, because they were among the poorest of the poor. For this woman the death of a husband plus the death of her only son may very well have added up to a life of poverty, hunger, disease, and an early grave.
More than an only son has died. Her own life is now in a desperate situation. The natural order of things was for the woman to give birth to a son who would care for her in her old age. She would die first, and later, his children would take care of him when he was too old to earn an income. The natural order of things was suspended in this story. Mothers should not have to bury their sons. Sons should bury their mothers. It was this imbalance that was altered by Jesus’ entering the situation and loosening the grip that death had on this family.
Jesus’ Compassion
The Gospel writer said, “When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her.” This is the first time Luke refers to Jesus as “the Lord.” This means that something of profound significance is being said here: “compassion” is the essence of Jesus’ Lordship.
The word for compassion in the Bible has its roots in the word, “womb.” Therefore to be compassionate is to feel and care for someone’s pain in a deeply visceral way. To experience someone else’s compassion is to feel deeply understood, not only from that person’s mind, but also from the person’s belly. Jesus felt the loss and suffering this widow was going through.
For us to trust Jesus as Lord is to trust in his compassion, and to trust that his compassion is a true expression of God’s. It is to also hear “compassion” as our true vocation in this world.
Walter Brueggemann notes “compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.”
Obviously, many other people felt this woman’s pain, for verse twelve says that a large crowd was with her as she made her tearful walk to the cemetery. They believed this was the natural order of things.
Then Jesus walks in and stumbles upon this funeral procession. He sees this widow and out of compassion—be moved to the depths of one’s heart, he touches the corpse and challenges what was perceived as the normal things in life. Children are supposed to die after their parents, not before. Jesus restores the natural order of things for this mother and her son.
Out of Order
It’s easy to preach from this text and understand the vocation of compassion that we may have as God’s people. We do that very well in our church. But the trickier part of this passage is that Jesus does not stop at expressing compassion in words, he uses the power he has from God to call that widow’s son back to life. Jesus combined compassion and power to help a woman apparently beyond helping. But in the real world, in our world, combining compassion and power is often problematic.
In Jesus’ work, power and compassion come together in a way they rarely do in this world, and those of us called as his disciples are challenged to follow his example. I admit this work is not easy. Things are sometimes out of order and we may have the compassion but we don’t have the power to restore the natural order of things.
Some of you know that my mother became a widow when I was in junior high school. And blessed with four sons to take care of her and serve as her retirement fund, she eventually buried three sons. I prayed to God that I would be blessed to live long enough to bury my mother when it was her time to go home to God. And when I was able to officiate at her funeral, I felt that I was given the privilege to restore some of the natural order of things for my mother.
For experienced pastors, we are able to tell stories of the children buried under our pastoral watch. Admittedly this work is never easy.
A pastor shared a story of a grandmother who came to him for grief counseling. Her story was a horrendous one. Two years before, her eldest son had died of an unusual illness leaving behind a beautiful four-year-old grandson she and her husband were helping to raise. They lived on a busy street where cars routinely sped and had repeatedly (and unsuccessfully) petitioned the city for a stoplight to make things safer. One afternoon, their grandson broke free just long enough to be struck by a speeding “hit and run” driver.
This grandmother’s pain was truly “gut-wrenching.” Week after week it poured out of her, like Rachael weeping bitterly for her children in Jeremiah 31:15. The pastor admitted that at times he found it hard to keep listening—to sustain the compassion of understanding in depth that she needed and deserved. Yet somehow the pastor and this grandmother “hung in there” as mourning, outrage, powerlessness, compassion, and long silence flowed for months.
It’s hard to explain how these encounters became empowering over time but they did. The grandmother’s depression improved as she found more and more constructive ways of channeling love for her own children and grandchildren into care for other people.
This grandmother also channeled her anger into advocacy. There are traffic signs in her neighborhood now.
These are small miracles to be sure. No body was raised from the dead; no mothers, no grandmothers or widows immediately were spared from grief. The “powers that were are still pretty much the powers that be” in city hall, and no one will ever know how many children’s lives were saved because of one grandmother’s traffic signs. But the gospel claims that wherever compassion and power come together for the sake of the vulnerable and suffering in this world, Godly wonders can and do occur.
This grandmother restored the natural order of things by what she did for her neighborhood and her family. When we direct people’s generosity at the death of a loved one in the form of donations that would support the heart association or cancer research or even memorial gifts for the ministries of our church, we are confronting the tragedy of death and using the power that we have in restoring our lives back to the natural order of things.
God’s Natural Order of Things
Now some of you may ask, “But if God is all powerful, why didn’t God protect that grandson from being killed?” Why did God allow my mother to bury three sons?
I don’t know. As a person who lives by faith, I find that I have to live with a lot of questions. I don’t have all the answers to why bad things happen to good people or to any people, but I do know about God’s power to resurrect.
In the story from Luke, Jesus uses this power to raise the widow’s son from death. Yet the power of God’s resurrection is far greater than the power of God to give our loved ones life after death. The power of God’s resurrection spills over into this life so that we who are the survivors of these tragedies can live with our sorrow and can overcome the deadly despair. The power of God’s resurrection is the power God gives to us slowly but surely, to pick up the pieces, wrap up our wounds, and create a new life for ourselves. The power of the resurrection is that God so loved the world that whosoever believes in him though have died will never perish but have everlasting life.
The good news is that God is ultimately not interested in death. God is interested in bringing life, and new life to God’s people. Giving life is the first and most important work that God does.
God first breathed the breath of life into creation in Genesis 1 where a breath or spirit from God swept over the face of the waters. God breathed into Adam the first breath of human life. And God breathed the Holy Spirit into the church at Pentecost. In the same manner, Jesus breathed new life into the young man of Nain by speaking the words, “Young man, I say to you, arise.” This story indicates that bringing life is what Jesus is about.
He does not ignore death, or seek insulation from it. He does not let the funeral procession pass by or demonstrate concerns about being among the unclean. Jesus sees death as the force contrary to God’s will and acts to over come it. When we are confronting the matter of death, we know that Jesus is with us as he was with the widow.
In the end, his whole life will be about one thing, overcoming the power of death and bringing new life in the world. Jesus restores the natural order of things. He may not keep all children from dying before their parents, but he does restore the power of life over death, and the power of God over everything else in all creation.
Let us pray.
God of life, you conceive of us even before our parents know of our existence. You knit us together in our mother’s wombs and fill us with life and possibility. When we are born, you give us days to live, people to love, work to do, and the opportunity to become what you have dreamed us to be. Yet, through all the days of our lives, there is a shadow that hangs over us. Though we may be filled with breath, we know that one day it will be extinguished. Even though we understand death to be a part of life, O God, we fear it and do all we can to avoid it. Take away, loving God, our fear of dealing with death. Help us to see in it a natural completion and transition. And, help us to believe what you teach: that you are a God of life, that you love to bring new chances to those who have failed to live rightly, and that you bring new and everlasting breath to all who die in faith. Let us live in the sunlight of your love and fear not the shadow of death. We pray in the name of the one who brings new life, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.