A Sermon Preached By

Rev. Peter W. Shidemantle

June 10, 2007, 10th Sunday in Ordinary Time

PEBBLE HILL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

5299 Jamesville Rd., DeWitt, NY  13214

Phone:  315-446-0960     FAX:  446-0672

phillchu@twcny.rr.com     http://pebblehill.presbychurch.org

         What strange things we encounter in the stories of the Bible!  In today’s readings alone we have oil cruets and containers of flour that never become empty.  We have a young body that is restored to life at a word from Jesus.  You might ask, “Are we really supposed to believe that these things happened?”  People in ancient times apparently did.  But we moderns suffer under the curse of Rudolph Bultmann’s famous lightbulb.  Bultmann, perhaps the premier biblical scholar and theologian of the 20^th century (and Antje Lemke’s father) put forward the example of a lightbulb to contrast the views of ancients and moderns toward miracles.  If ancient people saw light suddenly appear in the bulb, it would be a miracle.  We know why the light switches on.  Some have called this the “curse of rationality” that has caused us to apply our modern skepticism to isolated scenes or stories from the Bible, preventing us from seeing the Bible as one overarching story in which our own lives play a key role.

          When I see in my mind’s eye the body of a young man wrapped in a shroud and being carried on a bier outside the city gates for burial, followed by his widowed, grieving mother and all the relatives and neighbors and residents of the community, I also see the all-too-common sight of young bodies today being carried in much the same way surrounded by the same grief in that same small region of the world - often accompanied by rage that vows revenge.  The text does not say how the boy died.  Did he commit suicide, overcome with grief at his own father’s death?  Was he executed by the state?  Was he a soldier or an innocent bystander, killed in a senseless war?  Perhaps it is appropriate that we don’t know because the story includes all of these and more.  It is their story and ours.  It is the tragedy of young death that is the reality.

          Anyone who has been involved in the funeral of a young person senses that something is amiss.  Grandparents and parents are grieving while a child who should be out playing is being carried to her grave.  Sharon Weber laments for all who have known this piercing grief when she writes in A Recovering Widow’s Poems “How can you be gone?  I wasn’t finished with you yet.  Now I have to ‘finish with you’ without you.”  Something is amiss.  We can sense it, almost intuitively, something connected to a bigger reality, a bigger picture, the reality, as John Forsyth put it during World War I -  of a “wrecked world, gravely out of joint.”

          Where does miracle fit with this?  I don’t think it is just the skepticism of the modern, rational age that gets us stuck here.  And I don’t believe either that if one were truly “Bible believing” that you have to set aside your rationalism and in essence forget that we live in a vastly different world than the one inhabited by these biblical characters.  I think it is rather that we want to believe that we are the ones who are living at the center of history, that everything to this point is merely a prelude to the real action.  I think it’s tied to our own sinfulness, the arrogance which believes that military power, or the strength of the economy, or the mastery of knowledge that really makes the world go around - or the arrogance that abuses the scriptures to try to manipulate political events to fit into one’s own view of how God intends to establish God’s kingdom on earth - whether it is according to Muslim extremists or so-called Christian Zionists who advocate any means necessary to re-establish the biblical territory of Israel so that Christ will come again and purge the world of infidels and unbelievers.

          We are not the center of history.  Christ is the center of history.  The Word made flesh - God in the world, for the world.  There were a lot of miracle workers around during Jesus’ time on earth.  There was a first century healer and exorcist named Apollonius who, it was written, raised a person from the dead in a manner that is remarkably similar to the way Jesus does in this passage from Luke.  But who remembers Apollonius anymore?   Jesus spoke and acted from the very heart of God to the human heart, its hurts and its sorrows - and through the human heart to this “wrecked world, badly out of joint.”

          We don’t know how the boy died whom Jesus spoke to and brought back to life, giving him back to his mother.  We do know that Jesus was there almost accidentally, coming into the city gate as the funeral procession was coming out of it.  He had “compassion” on the widow now grieving her son.  It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.   His whole attention was on the mother, from his first word to giving her son back to her.  “Compassion” is how it is translated.  His “heart went out to her” is a common way of saying it, and that’s getting close, but even that doesn’t carry the full meaning of the word that is used here.  It is used only two other places in Luke - in the parables Jesus tells of the Good Samaritan, when the Samaritan tends to the Israelite beaten and left for dead by the side of the road; and the Prodigal Son, whose father’s heart went out to the son as the son returned home after wasting his inheritance and breaking his father’s heart.  Jesus was deeply moved, shaken up in his gut, his very soul, as he saw the mother’s grief.

          Walter Brueggemann insists that we should not see Jesus’ compassion as simply his personal emotional reaction but as public criticism in which Jesus dares to act upon his concern that her hurt is not to be accepted as normal or natural (as some would call, for example, the unintended consequences of war) - but is, in Brueggemann’s words, “an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.”  He acts on his concern in the face of the numbness of the society he serves.

          I think we understand this “numbness.”  We feel it ourselves.  I was hardly surprised when I saw the report of a recent study that gauged the responses of appeals for help for hungry and needy children to go down in number of responses as the number of children identified increased.  Is it any wonder that people seem to respond more compassionately to an abused kitten than we do to genocide in Darfur, or even to the grieving mother of a shooting victim in our own city?  What is “acceptable,” and what is not?

          How shall we understand the miracle of Jesus putting life back in the boy and giving him back to his mother, if the center of his concern was for his mother, and if it wasn’t just about his feelings for her grief, but also a public criticism of what was seen as acceptable and normal?  John called Jesus’ miracles “signs.”  They point to something else.  They were never meant to compel belief, but to give witness to the reality of God’s life in the world and to point to the day when every tear will be wiped away.  “Weeping may linger for the night,” the psalmist writes, “but joy comes with the morning.”  The mother weeps for herself and her son in her poverty and distress, but in the morning light, at the hand of God they both receive life.

          If we are skeptical, let us be skeptical not of what God can do, but of human claims that cannot deliver.  Let us be skeptical of those who claim that there is nothing that can really be done to eliminate human misery because it is just too overwhelming.  Let us be skeptical of those who insist that peace can be reached only through military force.  Let us be skeptical of those who say that any level of poverty or illiteracy or infant deaths or lack of health care in the richest nation in the history of the world is “acceptable.”  Let us be skeptical of these claims, and let us be believing that the Spirit of the Living God is active in our world, inspiring compassion and giving hope that the day of resurrection, of life eternal, when every tear will be wiped away, is coming - and that the whole creation will be restored.

          People of faith live by hope.  It’s the only way that faith can live.  Not the passive hope that one day things will all be better, or that we’ll see our loved ones again.  I believe that we most certainly will - but a living hope is stirred by our compassion, and tears - our own and the tears of others.  These are the fuel that ignites the deepest hope.  If things are going pretty well our hopes may be that things won’t change very much.  But small hopes like this are easily destroyed when change comes.  Let our hope be placed in what God can do, so that when change comes it is our hope in God that leads the way into the future, not our regrets or disappointments, or our despair.

          The power of the resurrection creates new life on both sides of the grave.  Our tears and our compassion can be God’s instrument in breaking through the numbness in our world and in ourselves, as we give in to hope, as we see our own lives not only for what we can make of them, but for what God can make of them.  Each of us has a part to play in the overarching story of God’s love affair with our suffering world.  Take hold of the new life that God gives in Jesus Christ – and hold on, as we are carried into the strange world where the last are first and the first are last, where justice and peace kiss each other, where lions lie down with lambs, and where death itself has no more power over us.

          To the glory of God, Amen. 

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