PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Luke 7:11-17                                                                                    Jesus the Center
Sermon June 6, 2010:  People’s United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

            The Holy One with whom we have to do is a mystery to us—not the kind of mystery like a problem in Calculus, not the kind of mystery like Sherlock Holmes or one of his modern counterparts “solves.”  I’m using the word “mystery” now to mean “what we cannot know, but can only stand amazed before it.”  This story about the widow of Nain is a kind of parable of our own experience of that holy mystery, and like the people that day we are invited to amazement.  And it all happens around the man Jesus of Nazareth.

            Jesus went to a little village not far from Nazareth, called Nain; and as he came through the city gate he met a funeral procession.  Besides the pall-bearers there was only one mourner, the mother of the man who had died.  Jesus stopped and looked, and what he saw struck very close to home.  He saw a middle-aged woman who was a widow—just as Jesus’ own mother, Mary, was a widow by this time.  He saw her grieving for her only son, the man who had taken her into his home and cared for her and provided her livelihood—just as Jesus himself had continued to work as a carpenter and provide for his own mother after Joseph’s death.  And he saw the mother escorting her son’s body to the grave, wrapped in burial cloths—just as Mary would escort the body of Jesus to the Gethsemane tomb, wrapped in burial cloths.  He couldn’t turn away from the grief on her face, from the sound of her weeping, just as God—mystery that God is—can’t turn away from us as we face the powers that threaten us in our lives.  So Jesus stepped to the stretcher covered with a pall and put his hand on it to stop the funeral procession.  “Young man, I say to you, arise!”  The real power in these words is hidden.  This power isn’t in the word “arise,” nor even in the return of the man’s breath:  the real power present in this moment is wrapped up in Jesus’ word “I”—“I, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Mary, the Christ in whom God redeems the world from all the powers of evil and pain and death and destruction—I say arise.”  Whatever else this story may suggest to you, the center of this story is Jesus’ word “I.” 

            The dead man sat up and began to speak, and the pall-bearers probably set the stretcher down and began to shake in their sandals.  How would you have felt?  What would have gone through your mind if this had happened with you there?  The writer says that “fear seized them.”  I’ll bet it did!  I doubt if any of them got any sleep that night.  Their bereavement is transformed in the flash of a second’s time into fear.  But this is not just fright, not the kind of fear you feel watching a Boris Karlof or Christopher Walken movie.  Fright is triggered by the strange and the eerie; but this event is obviously more than strange and eerie.  In this moment the worst evil the human heart can know—the evil of death, and the death of a young man at that—has been overthrown.  All that’s wrong in the world has lost its power.  The pallbearers recognize this as the act of God.  So their fear is really awe:  it’s that response of the human heart to the deepest mystery of life.  They are catapulted into holy wonder, into amazement; and the writer says that:

GOD  HAS  VISITED  GOD’S  PEOPLE !  This is what the raising of the man at Nain means!  And how has God visited them?  In the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  In that man from Galilee God has finally showed up, and we see and realize that this mystery beyond our ken, God, is for us. 

            This is the message of the Bible.  This is what the New Testament is really about:  that in the man Jesus, God has met us.  This is the gospel which Christianity proclaims:  that in that Galilean, God is for us.  In all the struggles and turnings of our experience, this is what we depend on as the foundation of our living:  that God showed up as fully as we can behold God, and when we looked, we saw… Jesus of Nazareth. 

            Jesus is central to our living—not as a good teacher, nor as a charismatic figure, nor as a religious genius, nor as a good friend (though he was all of that):  Jesus is central for us because in that poor man from Nazareth, God has come and met us, and we are changed.  If my future is in the hands of this amazing mystery, then my choices are affected, my deeds are given direction, my words mean more than their Webster’s  Dictionary definitions.  I begin to behave as a follower of the man who said, “Follow me.”  And where I follow him, he makes life larger. 

            God has met you from time to time in other people:  the doctor smiles before he gives you your test results, your friend puts her hand on your hand as you watch evil threaten, one person in your life accepts you right now as God accepts you.  And each time something like this happens the mystery comes near to you.  But there was one time that one particular man, a poor man, came to the human family; and when we see him we see more than a smile or a comforting hand:  in this man we behold God. 

            He meets you on the road you travel, and sometimes he knocks you off the horse as he did Paul, blinded by the new light flooding in.  We meet him in the message of the Bible, the fellowship of the church, where one day in the middle of the usual and the routine he blazes forth and convinces us that we really were not wasting our time all those years.  Sometimes he meets us as a child dancing in the summer breeze, when the miracle of life can no longer be taken for granted.  We met him as an old, Black woman with arthritis so bad she is in constant pain, lying in a smelly bed in a nursing-home for the indigent; and she looks up into our eyes and smiles and sings along with the little group Harriet and I went with on a Friday night to sing hymns.  When the mystery comes near, we recognize him—that he is more than sunshine, or a book or a meeting, more than a wind in warm weather, or heroic struggle against pain:  God has come, and has come most completely in that man from Nazareth.  And we are saved. 

            This story about the bereaved mother from Nain not only urges us to look back and see how God has come to meet you:  this story also urges us to look forward in our lives.  Evil still poisons life, pollutes our humanity, threatens our world with subtle destructions.  In response to the growing crisis in the oil supply and the rising price of fuel, America finally said, “Okay, let’s drill offshore.”  It looked like a solution:  it became a very big problem when the BP Oil Company’s offshore drilling platform exploded, and nobody knows how to fix the growing crisis.  We’re trapped.  The Louisiana governor wants to build a barrier to protect the fish in the marshes, but scientists and the Army Corps of Engineers are balking because, they say, “A barrier will kill the fish.”  Do we have any more graphic confirmation that evil still poisons life?  Our lives?  For in the end, we, too, must die; and then what good are our appetites and desires and wealth and success and power? 

            But God has come to the gate of our town, and has met our funeral procession before it gets started, sees the bitterness of the day, and touches the casket to stop the procession.  The hand of God stays the ultimate end, and we hear the voice, however silently it may come:  “I say to you, arise!”  I, God, say—LIVE!  And death has lost its power.  The meaninglessness that so threatens us as a dark cloud   has an answer:  since the creation ultimately belongs to the Creator, your creation is bigger than your years, bigger than your joys and sorrows, bigger than your triumphs and mistakes.  Since the creation belongs to the Creator, you live in a whole different city where what was and what will be   transform you now and give you meaning and goodness and—shall I say it?—even give  you a little peek at the fact that you are already “saved.”  And when you open your eyes to see how your blessedness is communicated to you, you see Jesus of Nazareth—Jesus, the center. 

            Our religion is not in a system of ideas—we have a creed but our faith is bigger.  Our religions isn’t in a book:  the Bible for Christians is not like the Quran for Muslims, the actual, literal words of God.  Our religion isn’t in an institutional organization, though the church gives us a center for fellowship, worship and mutual support.  Rather our faith is in a Person, Jesus, the man in whom we have met God.  In him we have come to the mystery and it lives in us.  He lives in us.  He says to you, “Follow me.”  And the journey with him is most of all a journey into the grand mystery that gives you life itself.  Thanks be to God. 

AMEN