Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri

The Worship of God · June 6, 2010

Litany of Praise

From Psalm 146

Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord all my soul!

            I will praise the Lord as long as I live.

The Lord sets the prisoners free, opens the eyes of the blind, watches over the strangers, and upholds the orphans and the widow.

            The Lord will reign forever in all generations!

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost;

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,

World without end. Amen. Amen.

Pastoral Prayer

Jacob Thorne

You, O God, are the way of healing, the touch that makes all things new. We meet you in the dawning of each new day in life awakening to start afresh. We meet you in the blooming of the summer flowers and the smell of the freshly-cut grass. We meet you in each gesture of forgiveness, in each word that sets us free. We meet you in each quiet moment that renews our hearts, and in each act of kindness that rebuilds our hope. We meet you wherever strength is revived, spirits refreshed, or love restored.

On this day, we come together to worship you and to meet you once again. So, we ask, O God, that you may grant us your touch. Raise us to life that is full and fully yours. Renew your people. Renew your creation, and renew your world.

Hear us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: for thine is the kingdom, the power, and glory, forever. Amen.

New Testament Lesson

Luke 7:11-17

Soon afterwards Jesus went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. As he approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow; and with her was a large crowd from the town. When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, “Do not weep.” Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, rise!” The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying, “A great prophet has risen among us!” and “God has looked favorably on his people!” This word about him spread throughout Judea and all the surrounding country.

Message

The Widow of Nain

Tim Carson

I’m sure that my reading of the passage before us this morning has been forever changed by my recent viewing of the provocative Korean film, Mother. If you ever want to experience the depths of obsessive desperation of a mother for a son, this is the movie to see. You will never think about mother love again in the same way after seeing that film. By its sheer excess, we can never see that mother son relationship in the same light again. It demonstrates the lengths to which such love may take us. But what if there is nothing left to do, nothing we can do for the sake of that love? In that case, you will have to be taken to the Scripture before us today in Luke’s gospel.

As we watch Jesus approaching the threshold of the city of Nain, the city gate, we see him almost collide with a funeral procession that is winding out of the city to the burial grounds. To give you an idea what that might look like, remember the news stories you have seen of funerals in the middle east where they are carrying the bier, the pallet for the dead, through the streets, usually open to the air. There are throngs of people around. The men family and friends of the deceased carry the bier, and the family is weeping and tearing their clothing as they walk behind. You might then get a sense of the Palestinian burial and what Jesus encountered as he entered Nain. 

We hold our breath as we dare glance toward the moving funeral bier before us. There is a dead man, suspended above the earth over which he travels one last time. Male friends and family bear the burden of his weight on their shoulders. And who is the deceased? He is the only son of a widow woman. We watch this mother tread the trail of tears, stumbling along slowly, step by step, treading the trail of tears. First, it was her husband. And now it is her son, her only son. Children aren’t supposed to precede their parents in death. It seems out of order, beyond what any reasonable person could ever begin to imagine. And now she alone is left. Lacrimosa – can anyone know my sorrow? And there is not only the sheer weight of grief. The death of an only son spelled economic catastrophe for a widow. She would have no source of support and reduced to charity, begging and maybe worse.

As in so many other stories of Jesus encountering suffering and death, it is loving compassion that moves him to act. He reaches out to this woman in her grief. He tells her not to cry, and then he touches the funeral bier, a dramatic act that violates Jewish purity laws. In keeping the Jewish law, you don’t touch dead bodies or the things that carry them. But, he pushed right through that, anyway. He commands the son to arise, and so he does. Then, the story says, “Jesus gave him to his mother.”

For Luke, and anyone else familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures, this whole episode draws on the Elijah tradition in I Kings 17. In that story, Elijah approaches a city only to encounter a woman who gathered firewood to prepare the last bit of food for her starving son and herself. When she is faithful and trusts God to provide for the prophet, the meal and oil never run out and she is saved. But her son eventually falls fatally ill and lays motionless in the loft of their house. Elijah comes to the house, goes to his deathbed, and hovers over him, breathing into him the breath of life. He rises and in the same way, Elijah gave him to his mother.

It is no accident that Luke grafts his story into the story from I Kings. It is because Luke is presenting us with an interpretation of who Jesus is. Just as the gospel of Matthew presents Jesus as the new Moses, so Luke presents Jesus as the new Elijah, the healing prophet who announces the reign of God. This was an occasion for the glory of God to shine.

So what was it like for the dead son? I have wondered that? Was he well into the tunnel of light when he found himself dramatically yanked back to this world? Was he withdrawn from the peace and wonder only to re-enter this world of woes? Was Jesus responding to a spiritual code blue and resuscitated him with the defibulator paddles of his own hands? What would it be like to re-enter life while in your own funeral procession?

What would his life be like from then on? Would you have to endure a media circus and have great expectations placed upon you to demonstrate your gratitude? Or would you view this as the opportunity of a lifetime, to have a second chance, to make up for the past and determine to live differently from then on?

What would you do if you were raised from your death and had a second chance? How would we act differently and how would we live differently now? If I get to walk out of my own funeral procession alive, how am I going to walk differently? Do I pick up where I left off? Or is everything changed, including me, a whole new life, and world?

As I’ve worked with people facing death over the years, I have heard a goodly number of “life after life” stories, the way in which people who have been clinically dead were revived and returned to share their experience of that nether-nether world between here and there. Inevitably, the experience is not a bad one but rather filled with peace and a sense of holy awe as they stood poised at edge of the great mystery. In most cases, the one thing that seems to vanish is the fear of death, because fear is our trembling before the unknown.

Is this how this revived son will face the rest of his life, fearless and full of reverence and awe? And would that be matched by the relief of an inconsolable mother who was delivered from her despair? Was she raised from death in her own way as much as her son was, and would she live every second differently because of it?

Think of the times that you’ve had a second chance. What have you done with it?

It’s possible to take it for granted, like those who’ve waited to strike it big in the lottery, but having won, squandered it all. What do we do with our second chances? It is possible not to take your second chance seriously. The gravity of life takes us back to the familiar, to our patterns, to our habits, to see things in the same way, to act the same way, to have the same relationships, to do the same job. It’s easy to go back to the same place and not change. What do we do with our second chances?

At times we feel like the living dead, biding our time on the trip to perdition, while at other times we feel like the ones in the funeral procession, mourning along the way. Sometimes we feel like the dead on the pallet, moving from here to there to the end of life. We are walking through life, but we are not really living. Sometimes we are in the procession; we’re carrying the heavy burden of our grief. The good news, though, is that there is always the hope for resurrection and new life – all in the touch of grace.

But there is another way to view all this. Get behind Jesus and follow him into the city. Look over his shoulder this time. He is the sign and presence of God in the midst of human fear, misery, and grief.

His compassion leads him to reach out with loving, healing, restoring touch. And the Spirit is at work in that reach. If we are the body of Christ, the ones who live in him and him in us, then we may become, together, the Christ at the city gate. I like the way Teresa of Avilla put it:

Christ now has no body on earth but yours,

   no hands but yours,

   no feet but yours,

Yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion sees the world;

Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good;

Yours are the hands with which he is to bless humanity now.

This is as simple as becoming what we already are, Christ’s body.

Do you know that there are people “at the gate” right here, in this very sanctuary?

            They are passing through the valley of the shadow of death;

            They walk the path of life with heavy feet and heavy hearts;

            They stand at a great intersection and don’t know what way to turn.

If Broadway Christian Church is to become the healing body of Christ in the world, in Columbia, Missouri, and far beyond, where will we walk, to whom will we reach, and when shall we act?

Where is the gate of the city and who is passing through that intersection right now?

            Isn’t that gate found wherever human need intersects with God’s grace?

            Isn’t that gate found wherever spiritual hunger is met with spiritual food and presence?

            Isn’t that gate found wherever we reach out to those in the great passages of life?

            Isn’t that gate found at the slender boundary between hope and despair?

Isn’t that gate found wherever Christ’s love makes us whole, heals our

lives, and gives us a new future?

Here is my testimony:

            I have experienced the power of God that brings life out of death in my own life.

I have witnessed people who were brought back from the edge of oblivion to live bountifully and joyfully;

I have even watched churches that, as though dead, rose from the dead to live again in the Spirit.

I have witnessed all of these things.

Transformation at the gate happens right now…

            Every time that Christ is present in our living and our dying;

            Every time that the Church dares to be the Body of Christ,

            and become his hands and feet in the world.

I say to you, rise!

Benediction

And now may the healing hope of the gospel fill your heart and every heart, in Jesus Christ. Amen.