Sarcastic Lutheran

Sermon on the Widow of Nain

    

Luke 7

11Soon afterwards he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him.  12As 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.  13When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, "Do not weep."  14Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, "Young man, I say to you, rise!"  15The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.  16Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying, "A great prophet has risen among us!" and "God has looked favorably on his people!"  17This word about him spread throughout Judea and all the surrounding country.

As awkward as this feels, I need to admit that a friend of mine kinda wrote this sermon.  Some of you know that Hans Peterson, a good friend of mine died 2 months ago in a work related accident. Hans was this compact little distance runner with white blond hair and a smile so bright that even the very best clichés couldn’t describe it.  I had coffee with Hans while I was in San Francisco 2 weeks before his death and part of me still can’t believe he’s gone. And a really big part of me doesn’t understand why  he’s gone.

But this past Monday night I dreamed of Hans.  It was one of those dreams so real it takes awhile after you wake up to realize it was a dream.  We were just sitting around chatting like normal when all of the sudden I remembered he had died.  I walked up to him, kissed his scruffy blond cheek and said “Sweetie, I’m so sorry you’re dead.” To which Hans simply looked me in the eyes and replied “It’s ok.  I lost myself in a collision with God’s grace.”  Then I woke up.

 

It’s ok that I’m dead because I lost myself in a collision with God’s grace. I have no idea what that means.  But I think it’s beautiful and maybe true.  So it feels like Hans wrote this sermon on the Widow from Nain. 

 

We only hear of her in Luke’s gospel, this Widow of Nain.  She is a nobody from a nowhere. What we know is that her husband has died.  What we know is that she has but one son and now he too is dead.  What we know is that without husband or son she has no real place in society.  Without a man to define and defend her she is now barely visible.  And it is from this nobody status in the midst of her grief for her dead son that she is joined by the townspeople in a funeral procession.

Of course the entirety of the Gospels is about this Jesus of Nazareth.  What we know is that he was born of an unwed virgin.   He is a nobody from nowhere.  What we know is that he has left his mother and her guardian.  He has left his home and siblings  and has no real place in society.  It is from this status of outsider that he has gone about the country side healing the sick, raising the dead and always touching things he shouldn’t in blatant disregard for biblical teachings .  And he is joined everywhere he goes by the crowds and hangers on in a march of mercy. This day is no different. 

 

 For it is on this day that the childless widow of Nain is  joined by a swarming crowd of townspeople in a funeral march as they move toward the city gate - her dead son carried on a plank of wood.  Walking with the crowd I imagine her looking up to heaven and wondering why has God abandoned me?  Where now is my God? Knowing that there is no one left to protect and provide for her I imagine her questioning why this had to happen.  From her isolation in the midst of the throng she searches the heavens for answers to why God has abandoned her. Yet the crowd keeps moving.

Meanwhile coming toward her,  a crowd following  Jesus makes their way closer and closer to the same city Gate.  They just keep following this God-man who heals on the Sabbath, insists we should love our enemies and then backs that ridiculous claim up by raising a Roman Centurion’s servant from the dead.  Like flash mob of grace this great multitude following Jesus move from outside the town toward inside the town while at the same time a great multitude of the funeral procession move from inside the town to outside the town. Like an epic battle scene, two great forces, two formidable armies move Braveheart style toward one another.

I wonder if the crowd following Jesus that day knew they were about to collide with a death march?  I know that we ourselves make such brave attempts in our death-denying culture to avoid the inevitability of death.  As though we can all live forever with the right combination of positive thinking, herbs, diet, exercise and elective surgery.  Then when death happens we wonder, like the Widow of Nain, where is our God now?

But here’s the thing:  as she walked with the multitudes in a march of death searching the heavens for answers, she suddenly walked smack into God in the flesh. Death and Grace collided.

And at the moment of impact Jesus sees her.  He sees this husbandless childless widow and the text says he has compassion on her - only that’s an unnecessarily polite translation of a Greek word which means something closer to “his guts churned for her”.  He looked upon this woman who has lost everything and his reaction was intestinal in nature.

And at this same moment of impact the widow does not receive answers to her questions.  But she receives God’s own self. We too might have a lot of questions in our grief and isolation and despair but the faith is not where we find answers to questions.  The Christian faith is where we have a collision with God who insists on being in the places we are sure are God-forsaken.  Andrew Root says that “Christianity is faith in a God who enters death”

See, Jesus can never seem to just keep a safe distance from death and impurity. The funeral procession and the march of grace collide, he sees the widow, his guts churn for her then he totally ignores the rules in the Bible and reaches out and touches the wooden plank holding the dead body of her only son.  Jesus defiles himself by touching death.  Now ritually impure, Jesus hands the young man back to his mother foreshadowing when he will give his own mother a new son from the cross.  So in this collision, rather that Jesus fighting death, which death would expect, he simply touches it.  Like on the cross, Jesus enters death as though to say “I will even be found here… death will not keep me from you.  I will not stand above this earth indifferent to your despair and dying.  I will reach out and touch death itself.”

So as we might either deny our mortality or despair in the inevitability of it, Jesus is being present in it – having been the one to take on death mano y mano. And he continues to pull life out of death in a gut-churning compassion for the world.

         So while people keep dying and life keeps happening and questions keep forming, maybe the church, Christ’s body on Earth, need not pawn ourselves off as some kind of answer dispensary when what people really need is God.  But as Christ’s body may our guts churn for those who suffer and may we extend our own hands to touch what the world calls impure for the sake of compassion.  And may our outstretched hands point to nothing but the light that shines in the darkness - a God who comes to us in cradle and cross touching death until it too rises to new life.  Because God brings more life than answers.

Sermon on Haiti and the Wedding at Cana

I will not keep silent.  Says the prophet Isaiah.  I will not rest, he says, until the promises of God are fulfilled.

My family and I returned from vacation Tuesday to news reports of the devastation in Haiti.  I, like all of you, listened in shock to the reports of 10s of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands left without shelter, without food, without family.  And within hours everyone realized…and on top of it all, there’s no running water.   Knowing this was going to be on everyone’s hearts and minds I thought to myself “I have to preach Sunday I wonder what the Gospel text is …” when I realized it was the wedding at Cana I thought Great.  Jesus at a big party making sure the wine flows freely.  No one wants to hear that today.  Not today.  Nobody wants to hear a quaint little miracle story about how generous God is when poorest country in this hemisphere lays in even greater waste than it already did on Monday.  Nobody wants to hear of an abundance of wine when people on the streets of Haiti are thirsty.  Who dares speak of a party when our cantor Drew is mourning his friend Ben who died in a collapsed building in Port au Prince? When thousands of mothers are mourning their children? 

This week’s events bring with them a lot of questions about God, and none of them have to do with parties.  One atheist blog I read this week sneeringly used the earthquake to make a case against believing in God at all.  The writer implying that he could not believe in a God who would inflict such suffering on so many people, which made me admit that according to that definition I must be an atheist too because I don’t believe in that God either. 
But after reading the wedding in Cana story over and over again this week I realized that I think Mary, the distraught mother of our Lord , might just be the key to seeing how this text speaks to our mourning and confusion and the death and suffering this week has brought to so many.
Our Gospel text for today has what sounds to us to be a rather abrupt and somewhat awkward interaction between Jesus and his mother.  They’re at a wedding when Mary looks to her son and says the wine has run out.  “Woman”  Jesus says to his mother seemingly dismissive and perhaps even disrespectful, “my hour has not yet come”  To which Mary is like oh yeah?  too bad.  Ok she didn’t really say that, but she did simply turn to the servant and said “do whatever he tells you” 

Mary tugs at the shirt of God and says I will not keep silent. I will obey you and I will tell others to obey you but I will not keep silent. People are thirsty.  See, In John’s gospel Mary is not the young virgin pondering sweet things in her heart.  In John’s Gospel Mary is not surrounded by singing angels.  She is never even mentioned by name.  She is simply “the mother of Jesus”  And she shows up exactly twice in the entire book.
So Mary stands here in a long line of prophets who have not stayed silent.  The prophet Mary stands and says Lord, we’ve run out of wine and people are thirsty.
And Jesus hears her.   So Jesus does this crazy thing: He could have filled the actual wine jugs up with water to be turned to wine.  That would have been the logical miracle (if there is such a thing).  Instead, Jesus takes 6 ceremonial purification jars and has THOSE filled with water to turn into wine. Purification Jars used in his own religion, the religion he grew up in the religion of his own family.
Jesus transforms this purification water into the wine of a new creation, the wine of a radical new family.

They are thirsty says his mother.  And Jesus responds. But he responds in an almost embarrassingly excessive way.  180 gallons. Surely that’s too much.  But that’s how Jesus is.  180 gallons of fine wine which…go back and check…is not called a miracle in John but a  sign.   It’s a sign of what God is doing in Jesus, namely that the very abundance of this gift means that maybe it’s not meant only for you and me.  I mean we can try and keep 180 gallons of wine for ourselves but it will just become something we like to call “vinegar” unless it’s shared.  In Jesus God is reconciling all creation to God’s self, not just his own religion and his own people, something today we might call “having really bad boundaries”

 I think this is why Mary is called “woman”. He refused to abide by society or religion’s definitions of good and bad and pure and impure and family and stranger and who is in and who is out.  His own mother is another woman, Like every other woman, every suffering mother.
So, Mary only shows up twice in John’s Gospel and both times her son calls her “woman. “ Once is here at the wedding when she refuses to be silent because people are thirsty.  The other is when she stands at the foot of the cross.  She watches as her son and her Lord hangs innocent from a cross with the weight of the world’s suffering tearing his very flesh. 

This is our God.  Not a distant judge cruelly indifferent to our pain and not some monster causing calamity, but a God who weep.  A God who suffers not only for us but with us. Nowhere is the presence of God amidst suffering more salient than on the cross.  Therefore what can we do but confess that this is not a God who causes suffering.  This is a God who bears suffering.   God does not initiate suffering…God transforms it.

It is suffering transformed which we see on the cross when again Christ calls his mother “woman” and initiates an adoption between her and the beloved disciple. This is the new kinship we all share.   A kinship in which our identity is not based on country, blood, or religion but on our belovedness as God’s children. 

That passage in John reads like this:

standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said, “I am thirsty.”   

I am thirsty he says.  I am not watching this from a distant heaven. Jesus says I too am thirsty. 

As we hear the cry of our Hatian brothers and sisters let us discern the other voice we hear with them…that of Christ saying  I am thirsty.

The reports that came in that first 24 hours following the quake said that When night fell on the streets of Port AU Prince people were singing hymns and psalms. Blessed be God, they sang.  People were singing praises to God amidst their entire world destroyed. 
Pat Robertson is wrong by the way. There is no reason for this destruction – but there IS meaning. And this meaning is to be found as we again become the human family of God’s new creation without country, religion, boundary or race to divide us. In this moment to the extent that we take up the responsibility of a mother caring for her son, a son for his mother,….In this moment to the extent that we act like Jesus and love and care for those suffering from the earthquake as if they are our own beloved family, we are all Haiti.

So we, with Mary, tug on the shirt  of God and say we have run out Lord. We need wine.  Good wine.  Enough for all, flowing over.  We too will not keep silent.  We will join with the family of God in the singing of hymns and psalms.  And then we will listen to Jesus’ command and fill some jars with water for the thirsty.
Blessed be God.
Amen

mourning in real time

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Rachel's post to her mother made me cry. Why is it that it's only when someone dies that we really celebrate them? I'm so guilty of finding my mother annoying more often than finding her to be a treasure. Currently I'm struggling with her life of self-indulgence. Her and my father are on their 9th vacation in the past 12 months, which is fine...they are "enjoying their retirement" which is the American Dream, it's just tough to muster up the whole "Oh, guys I'm SOOOO happy that you're finally going to have a nice vacation/cruise/trip to thailand to get some deserved rest and recreation" like, every other frickin' week. So parents are supposed to be annoying, right? Yes they make me crazy, but the thing is if my mind ever drifts toward the eventuality of their deaths, I freak out. I cannot imagine life without them. Is there a way to cherish parents and loved ones in Real Time?

Tuesday I'll be in Minneapolis attending the funeral of Natalie, wife of Mark from Mercy Seat and mother of an 8 and 2 year old. I prayed for her healing every day for 10 months...fervently. Here's a piece of what Mark said in his e-mail about her passing:
The grief overwhelms. But, strangely, it is bit by bit. Grief comes in
sharp, stab-me-in-the-gut-and-twist-the-knife-in moments, stretched out over
laughter and memory and gratitude. We keep forgetting; assuming she is there to help us.
We keep thinking that, especially in these times of utter confusion, we can
simply ask her what to do next--and then we suddenly realize that she is not
here. She was so filled with wisdom, and clarity, and was so very decisive and
confident about what to do next. That's what made her a great physician, a
great mom, and (most of the time--o.k., all the time, in retrospect) a great life-partner.

We are grieving. There is no other way to put it. It hurts.

But we have profoundly deep comforts:

We have this story of Jesus and his passion, which Christians
throughout the world are observing now, during lent; this Jesus who so
deeply entered into our sorrow, our suffering, our flesh. Natalie's
passion has mirrored the passion of Christ. The stories intertwine.
And, per the wisdom of one of my colleagues, I can't help but think of
Natalie's death as a sort of transfiguration--she is being changed into
the body of Christ. Her body is becoming the body of Christ. Even, and
especially, now, in her rotting, decomposing flesh. Christians
confess the resurrection of the dead, and I've never believed in it
more. But Christians also confess that Jesus was "conceived by the
Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried; and he descended to the dead." To
me, right now, that's an even more profound confession than the
resurrection. God is with us. Even, and
especially, in Natalie's rotting, discolored, lifeless flesh. Maybe
that's mostly where God is, working yet another sneaky subversive
surprise. God's audience: the worms and the dirt and all things that
till the thawing soil beneath us.
No matter what we do, we can't seem to shake these amazing friends who would
do anything to comfort and help us. Every gesture, every thought, every
prayer--we are so deeply grateful.

Pray for those who love this woman.

Cherish those you love.

I'll try and do the same.

AMEN