In the name of God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
When
you’re going through the ordination process, one aspect of the formation is to
work as a chaplain intern. So the summer after my first year of seminary, I
worked at Alamance Regional Hospital in Burlington. Part of the work was to occasionally
stay over-night at the hospital, being on-call for any pastoral emergencies. I’ll
never forget the first time that pager went off in the middle of the night, I
scrambled to look presentable and rushed down to the ER. There, I watched a man
in his early 60s come in on a stretcher. He wasn’t breathing, and the doctors
and nurses did everything that they could to revive him, but it was too late. In
a hospital, death is a medical diagnosis before it is a pastoral situation, so
the doctor has to be the one deliver the bad news to the family in a small
waiting. In most situations, including this one, as soon as the doctor did his
job of notifying the family, he’d leave the room and it was then my job to do
what I could to comfort the family.
Jesus
clearly never went through such training, as his first words to this grieving
mother were “Don’t cry.” I haven’t yet tried that as an opening line to a
grieving family, and I’m not sure that I ever will. Then again, I’d never be
able to back up such a statement with a miraculous resuscitation. I struggle
with all of the healing stories in the gospels. Not because I don’t believe
that they happened – I do; but because I so know people who I’d like to be
healed.
So how do we read a
passage like this one from Luke, where Jesus brings a dead son back to life, or
from 1 Kings when Elijah asks God to bring a dead son back to life, and God
does? Was there something special about these people that made God want to heal
them? Has God forgotten about us or decided not to be so flashy with miracles? Have
we done something to become unworthy of God’s saving action? Or are the
atheists right, that religion is merely superstition that masqueraded itself as
science, but in the modern world is just an “opiate of the masses”?
As with all of Scripture,
context matters. At the time of books of Kings, monotheism was a fairly new
concept, and often the various gods were seen as being in competition with each
other. As we heard last Sunday in the contest between Elijah and the priests of
Baal, Elijah sought to show the people that the Lord
indeed is God. The same thing is going on in today’s passage from 1 Kings.
Sidon, the setting for
this story, is Baal’s territory and Baal was a fertility god, being in charge
of rain. So it was rather problematic for the followers of Baal to be in the
midst of a severe drought. The drought had caused a famine in the land, as evidenced
by the short supply of oil and wheat. Baal could not sustain this widow, but
through the Lord’s saving grace,
she never runs out of meal or oil. Though, she hasn’t yet come to put her trust
in the Lord over Baal. And so when
Elijah comes again to visit her, she thinks his visit is to blame her for not
believing in the Lord and causing
her son’s death. The son comes back to life, and the woman comes to faith. It
is a story about showing that the God of Israel, the Lord, is trustworthy and true.
In Luke’s worldview,
Elijah was an archetype for Jesus, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Luke
tells a story about Jesus raising a widow’s son that almost exactly mirrors
Elijah’s story. Again, context matters. In 1 Kings it was about Baal versus the
Lord, and here in Luke it’s about whether
or not Jesus is the long-awaited Messiah. Different contexts, but the same
purpose – is God in charge or not? Right after this story ends, Luke records that
some disciples of John the Baptist come to Jesus and ask him “Are you the one
who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Isn’t it interesting that these
people who lived in the same time and place as Jesus struggled with the same
questions that we have today – if Jesus is the Messiah, why do we still have
disease, death, and discord? Jesus replies to them, “Go and tell John what you
have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers
are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news
brought to them.” Jesus never directly answers the question with a “yes” or “no,”
he says “What have you seen?”
Paul, writing to the
Galatians, reminds his audience of his earlier life when we was violently
persecuting the church. What changed for Paul was that he had a divine encounter
that shifted the way that he saw the world. In the middle of today’s reading, Paul
writes “But when God…” That is the language of conversion and faith. The widow
at Zarephath in 1 Kings likely said something similar: “We had only a little
meal and even less oil and my son died, but
when God provided for us and brought him back to life, I knew that the Lord indeed is God.” When the widow at
Nain told everyone about that day, she likely said something like “I was a
widow and my only son died, and I was at the end of my rope. But when God restored my son to me, I knew
that the Lord indeed is God, and
that Jesus is indeed the Messiah.” Paul’s autobiography, had he written one,
would probably say “I thought that Jesus was a false prophet and that his
followers were corrupting our faith. But
when God revealed himself to me, I became a disciple of Jesus.” And those
people who were asking about whether Jesus was the Messiah or not may have
said, “We weren’t sure if Jesus was the Messiah, but when God raised the dead and healed the sick, we knew that
Jesus is indeed the Messiah.”
I wonder what the “but when God” of your faith and life
is? Where has God taken you from doubt to faith? When did you go from being
unaware of God’s presence with you to knowing that God is with you? Maybe you’ve
had an incident like one of these widows and have seen a dead person comes back
to life, that would certainly qualify. As much as I’d like to be a witness to
that, I haven’t yet, and I’m not expecting to see that happen. Perhaps you’ve
seen smaller miracles, such as there being abundance when you thought there was
scarcity. Perhaps there are miracles all around us that we’re too busy to
notice or too proud to recognize that God’s hand is at work more than our own. Near
the end of the Gospel according to John, the author writes “Now Jesus did many
other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this
book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the
Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his
name.” What experiences have brought you to faith? The wonder of beauty, the
birth of a child, calm amidst a storm?
These
stories about healings and bringing people back to life bring us to faith, showing
us that the Lord indeed is God, giving
us confidence to trust in God. As much as we’d like these miraculous healings
to be normal occurrences, I don’t think that’s why the Bible tells us about
them. The probability that a dead person comes back to life is still pretty
much zero, but these stories give us an expectation that God’s power doesn’t
stop at death. These stories show us that God is in charge, not the grave, not
Baal, not Rome, not evil, not sin, not a broken situation. These stories show
us that God is right in the thick of it with us.
The
turning point in the passage from Luke comes when the text says “When Jesus saw
her, he had compassion for her.” God saw her, and God sees you and has
compassion on you. If you look up “compassion” in the dictionary, you’ll find several
incorrect definitions such as “pity, sympathy, care, concern.” “Compassion”
though actually and literally means “to suffer with.” To have compassion isn’t
a feeling and it isn’t about giving someone a pat on the shoulder saying “there,
there.” No, compassion is feeling the pain that they have and going into the
depths with them.
This is radicalness and
blessedness of our faith – that the Creator of all that is has compassion on
each of us, that God is with us, that God cares for us, that God know our pain.
The reality of the world is that pain, disease, and death happen. Why? That’s
beyond my knowledge. Could God have made the universe in such a way that death could
have been avoided? I really don’t know. If God was merely an impersonal fixer
of our problems, disasters would continue to knock us down; God would
reconstruct the house of cards, and it would fall over and over again. Instead,
what we have is a God who sits with us when it all falls apart, who gives us strength
to walk through the rubble, who is always ready to catch us with loving arms. Today’s
Psalm says that while weeping may last for a night, that joy comes in the
morning; that God’s favor lasts a lifetime; and this is the miracle of our
faith, that there is always a new dawn that awaits us, even in the darkest of
nights.
What gives me hope and
faith is knowing that amidst the changes and chances of life, that God is with
me. We are never alone. God comes to us in people like Elijah, showing us God’s
compassion. So perhaps the next time you are suffering, and someone comes to
you to speak a word of comfort or love, you might say “I was in pain and
feeling alone, but when God came to
me through that friend, I was able to make it.” Or when you see someone in
need, you might say “I didn’t know what to do, but when God nudged me to sit with them, I knew God’s peace and
love were with us.” Our faith doesn’t say that God makes us invincible, but
rather it says that God is always with us in love. Love is stronger than duct
tape, and loving presence is what God gives us.
These
healing stories might make us question why God seemingly chose to heal people
way back when, but not today; but these stories instead are intended to show
that God has compassion for us, that God knows our pain, and saves us not by
fixing our problems, but by being with us through the ups and downs of life.
When have you known this presence? What have been your “but when God” moments? How could you slow down and pay more
attention to these “but when God” experiences?
Pain, loneliness, and death are not the final words, instead, the words of
faith are “but when God.” Thanks be
to God.
