Sermon for Trinity 16
ALL THINGS NEW
Luke 7: 11-17
Trinity XVI
September 27, 2009
Grace, mercy and peace from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Some modern theologians claim the resurrection of Jesus is a metaphor. Christ, Rudolph Bultmann wrote, has "risen into the kerygma (or message) of the Church."
Don't feel bad. I don't know what that means, either.
If you tune in to PBS, you'll find Bill Moyers- himself a one-time Baptist pastor- holding forth on the theories of Joseph Campbell and Karen Armstrong and all sorts of writers who proclaim with great confidence that the message of the Gospel is a kind of picture language, an archetype of some sort which points to some remarkably hazy and nebulous reality behind and beyond it. That sort of thinking is very big on the theological Left. But it has one big problem which, alas, the Moyers and the Armstrongs and the Campbells have no answer for.
Our text tells us of a widow who, upon her husband's death, found herself alone- except for an only son. And now, that son had died. She was alone in the world.
But she was worse than alone. There was no way short of prostitution for a woman to support herself in First Century Palestine. To be left first without a husband, and now without her only son, meant that she had no way of keeping herself fed, or a roof over her head.
No metaphor would fill her belly. No archetype would fill the emptiness of her heart, and her life. As she followed the procession which was carrying her only son to his grave, in a very real sense her life was over, too. Her very livelihood from thence forward would depend upon the charity of others- when and if she could find it.
Few of us have been left quite that bereft by the death of a loved one. But all of us have stood by a loved one's grave. Mercifully, we've been in shock; it wouldn't be until later that the enormity of our loss would fully sink in, and that- in the providence of a wise and loving God- in stages. But when it does, no matter how well we cope with our loss, there will always remain a hole in our lives. Time will cause the wound to scar over. The pain will become first duller, and finally hardly noticeable. Life will return to something like normality, But the hole remains- and no archetype or metaphor will ever fill it.
I remember the morning my sister and my brother-in-law and my Alzheimer's-afflicted father and I sat in the living room of the house on Princeton Lane in one of Chicago's southern suburbs waiting for the limousine from the funeral home that would take us to my mother's funeral. She'd been killed in an automobile accident days before. That shock which God, in His mercy, has ordained should beshroud the minds and the senses of people in such a situation hung heavy around all of us. My dad- thank God- was shielded still further by the progress of his disease, and his inability to altogether sort out just who it was who had died.
As we sat there, waiting, my sister said, "I don't know how people who aren't Christians can bear times like this." I don't, either. We may joke about the poor atheist at his funeral, who is all dressed up but has no place to go. But to be alone and without hope in the face of that last enemy of both God and man- death- is an ordeal God never intended His human creatures to face. I don't know how unbelievers face it, either.
And there are other kinds of death. There is the death of a marriage- and that's a great deal more like the death of a loved one than most who have never faced it realize. There is that awful moment everyone faces- every man, certainly- when one is suddenly confronted with one's own mortality, and the finite amount of time and opportunity left, and the suffocating sense that the limitless possibilities of youth have collapsed into a finite and depressingly limited realistic prospect for one's career and prospects in life. We lose jobs, and status, and a sense of our own identity and worth in this life, as well as people. The days of man are indeed short, and full of sorrow, and it is not for nothing that the liturgy speaks of this sin-ravaged Earth as "this veil of tears."
We grieve. We mourn. We move on, if we can. We cope as best as we are able. But it is a savage lot we face, we fallen human beings, who live every moment knowing that all that gives live beauty or meaning or purpose is finite and transitory, and that some day we will lose it.
And so, we bemoan our loses, and soldier on. What else can we do? We are tempted to despair. We wonder how we can make it even through the next day, much less through all the years ahead.
But One has compassion on us in the midst of our sorrow and our mourning, and says, "Do not weep." Yes, I have to agree with my sister Kathy. Were it not for that One, I don't know how we could go on. I don't see how those who close Him out and will not listen to His words of compassion and healing can cope.
But to those who, by God's grace, have eyes to see Him and ears to hear Him, He comes in the moment of our sorrow and despair and says, "Do not weep." And He says to our hopes and our dreams and our hearts, "I say to you, arise." And they do.
They do because by faith we see the day when He will speak those same words to our loved ones who seem lost to us in death- and to us, too.
They do because by faith we know that neither our worth nor our prospects are defined by our accomplishments and achievements here on this earth, or by the time we have left. They do because we know that the One Who speaks these words is the One Who, in the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews, "gives life to the dead and calls into being things which do not exist."
"Behold," He says to us, "I make all things new." And He does. And in the face of the worst that either life or death can do to us, we cling to that promise.
But alas, that is not the case for everyone. There are those who mourn as those who have no hope because, in fact, they have none. No metaphors or archetypes will help them. And neither do those who listen to those who do what I vowed at my ordination not to do, and "offer... occasion for false hope or illusory comfort."
I have a friend who is a Baptist minister in Ontario, Canada. I remember his frustration at what apparently was the custom in the town where he had his first parish of the funeral director supplying the Scripture texts on which the funeral sermon would be preached. By implication, Dan Lundy used to say, the operating theology of the entire community was founded on the cardinal doctrine of "justification by death alone."
But that's a lie. And if the truth be told, in our heart of hearts we know that it's a lie. Death, the wages of sin, cannot be sugar-coated and Oprahfied that way. Our instinctive terror of the grave is well-founded. Our reflexive dismay at the howling, insane, inane emptiness of an existence in which we have hope only in this life is quite reasonable. Our horror at what lies beyond the door of death is well-founded. Death was never any part of God's plan. It is unnatural. It is beyond the bounds of anything a sane mind would ever have invented. It is the negation of everything God ever intended when first He said, "Let there be..."
No, I don't know what people do who face death- whether of a loved one, or of one's dreams, or one's own death- in the absence of that One Who comes near, and has compassion, and says, "Do not weep," and Who will say to our loved ones, to our hopes, and to our very selves one day, "I say to you, arise."
There are no substitutes for that Man. No metaphor or archetype will do. No illusions concerning our own merit or the nature of reality or what waits for us on the other side of the grave will help us. Without Him there is only hopelessness, and eternal loss, and perpetual despair.
But He comes to us, that Man- and now only in our moments of sorrow and bereavement. He comes to us day after day- and most especially Sunday after Sunday- in the Word of the Gospel, and in the Supper. "The medicine of immortality," the Church Fathers called that Meal, "the Antidote for death."
Day by day, as we live the covenant of our baptism, with the help of His Spirit we put our old selves to death in contrition and repentance- only to find the very Man Who met the funeral procession of that widow's only son waiting there in the water, and saying to us, "Arise."
And rise we do, day after day, out of the ashes of loses and sorrows and broken dreams and failed resolutions, to live before God in newness and wholeness once again. And as the years take their toll, and live deprives us of the things and even the people we hold most dear, we find in that encounter and in that Word and in that Meal the strength to rise again, and live.
Until finally, on that last great day, the Promise will come true in all its glory- at least for those who have not closed our eyes and our ears to Him in this life. Our loved ones who have died in the Lord will rise- and we will rise, too. They will be given back to us, and we to them, and all good things with them. And God will wipe every tear from our eyes, and there will be no more sorrow for us, or mourning, or weeping. For the former things shall have passed away, and all things will be made new.
We will not be required to sup on the thin gruel of metaphor or the sawdust of archetype. Instead, we will feast in blessed reality forever in the Kingdom of the One Who makes all things new- the very Man who once encountered a funeral procession at the gates of the city of Nain, and had compassion on the widowed mother of an only son, and touched his coffin, and said, "Young man, I say to you, arise."
May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
Luke 7: 11-17
Trinity XVI
September 27, 2009
Grace, mercy and peace from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Some modern theologians claim the resurrection of Jesus is a metaphor. Christ, Rudolph Bultmann wrote, has "risen into the kerygma (or message) of the Church."
Don't feel bad. I don't know what that means, either.
If you tune in to PBS, you'll find Bill Moyers- himself a one-time Baptist pastor- holding forth on the theories of Joseph Campbell and Karen Armstrong and all sorts of writers who proclaim with great confidence that the message of the Gospel is a kind of picture language, an archetype of some sort which points to some remarkably hazy and nebulous reality behind and beyond it. That sort of thinking is very big on the theological Left. But it has one big problem which, alas, the Moyers and the Armstrongs and the Campbells have no answer for.
Our text tells us of a widow who, upon her husband's death, found herself alone- except for an only son. And now, that son had died. She was alone in the world.
But she was worse than alone. There was no way short of prostitution for a woman to support herself in First Century Palestine. To be left first without a husband, and now without her only son, meant that she had no way of keeping herself fed, or a roof over her head.
No metaphor would fill her belly. No archetype would fill the emptiness of her heart, and her life. As she followed the procession which was carrying her only son to his grave, in a very real sense her life was over, too. Her very livelihood from thence forward would depend upon the charity of others- when and if she could find it.
Few of us have been left quite that bereft by the death of a loved one. But all of us have stood by a loved one's grave. Mercifully, we've been in shock; it wouldn't be until later that the enormity of our loss would fully sink in, and that- in the providence of a wise and loving God- in stages. But when it does, no matter how well we cope with our loss, there will always remain a hole in our lives. Time will cause the wound to scar over. The pain will become first duller, and finally hardly noticeable. Life will return to something like normality, But the hole remains- and no archetype or metaphor will ever fill it.
I remember the morning my sister and my brother-in-law and my Alzheimer's-afflicted father and I sat in the living room of the house on Princeton Lane in one of Chicago's southern suburbs waiting for the limousine from the funeral home that would take us to my mother's funeral. She'd been killed in an automobile accident days before. That shock which God, in His mercy, has ordained should beshroud the minds and the senses of people in such a situation hung heavy around all of us. My dad- thank God- was shielded still further by the progress of his disease, and his inability to altogether sort out just who it was who had died.
As we sat there, waiting, my sister said, "I don't know how people who aren't Christians can bear times like this." I don't, either. We may joke about the poor atheist at his funeral, who is all dressed up but has no place to go. But to be alone and without hope in the face of that last enemy of both God and man- death- is an ordeal God never intended His human creatures to face. I don't know how unbelievers face it, either.
And there are other kinds of death. There is the death of a marriage- and that's a great deal more like the death of a loved one than most who have never faced it realize. There is that awful moment everyone faces- every man, certainly- when one is suddenly confronted with one's own mortality, and the finite amount of time and opportunity left, and the suffocating sense that the limitless possibilities of youth have collapsed into a finite and depressingly limited realistic prospect for one's career and prospects in life. We lose jobs, and status, and a sense of our own identity and worth in this life, as well as people. The days of man are indeed short, and full of sorrow, and it is not for nothing that the liturgy speaks of this sin-ravaged Earth as "this veil of tears."
We grieve. We mourn. We move on, if we can. We cope as best as we are able. But it is a savage lot we face, we fallen human beings, who live every moment knowing that all that gives live beauty or meaning or purpose is finite and transitory, and that some day we will lose it.
And so, we bemoan our loses, and soldier on. What else can we do? We are tempted to despair. We wonder how we can make it even through the next day, much less through all the years ahead.
But One has compassion on us in the midst of our sorrow and our mourning, and says, "Do not weep." Yes, I have to agree with my sister Kathy. Were it not for that One, I don't know how we could go on. I don't see how those who close Him out and will not listen to His words of compassion and healing can cope.
But to those who, by God's grace, have eyes to see Him and ears to hear Him, He comes in the moment of our sorrow and despair and says, "Do not weep." And He says to our hopes and our dreams and our hearts, "I say to you, arise." And they do.
They do because by faith we see the day when He will speak those same words to our loved ones who seem lost to us in death- and to us, too.
They do because by faith we know that neither our worth nor our prospects are defined by our accomplishments and achievements here on this earth, or by the time we have left. They do because we know that the One Who speaks these words is the One Who, in the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews, "gives life to the dead and calls into being things which do not exist."
"Behold," He says to us, "I make all things new." And He does. And in the face of the worst that either life or death can do to us, we cling to that promise.
But alas, that is not the case for everyone. There are those who mourn as those who have no hope because, in fact, they have none. No metaphors or archetypes will help them. And neither do those who listen to those who do what I vowed at my ordination not to do, and "offer... occasion for false hope or illusory comfort."
I have a friend who is a Baptist minister in Ontario, Canada. I remember his frustration at what apparently was the custom in the town where he had his first parish of the funeral director supplying the Scripture texts on which the funeral sermon would be preached. By implication, Dan Lundy used to say, the operating theology of the entire community was founded on the cardinal doctrine of "justification by death alone."
But that's a lie. And if the truth be told, in our heart of hearts we know that it's a lie. Death, the wages of sin, cannot be sugar-coated and Oprahfied that way. Our instinctive terror of the grave is well-founded. Our reflexive dismay at the howling, insane, inane emptiness of an existence in which we have hope only in this life is quite reasonable. Our horror at what lies beyond the door of death is well-founded. Death was never any part of God's plan. It is unnatural. It is beyond the bounds of anything a sane mind would ever have invented. It is the negation of everything God ever intended when first He said, "Let there be..."
No, I don't know what people do who face death- whether of a loved one, or of one's dreams, or one's own death- in the absence of that One Who comes near, and has compassion, and says, "Do not weep," and Who will say to our loved ones, to our hopes, and to our very selves one day, "I say to you, arise."
There are no substitutes for that Man. No metaphor or archetype will do. No illusions concerning our own merit or the nature of reality or what waits for us on the other side of the grave will help us. Without Him there is only hopelessness, and eternal loss, and perpetual despair.
But He comes to us, that Man- and now only in our moments of sorrow and bereavement. He comes to us day after day- and most especially Sunday after Sunday- in the Word of the Gospel, and in the Supper. "The medicine of immortality," the Church Fathers called that Meal, "the Antidote for death."
Day by day, as we live the covenant of our baptism, with the help of His Spirit we put our old selves to death in contrition and repentance- only to find the very Man Who met the funeral procession of that widow's only son waiting there in the water, and saying to us, "Arise."
And rise we do, day after day, out of the ashes of loses and sorrows and broken dreams and failed resolutions, to live before God in newness and wholeness once again. And as the years take their toll, and live deprives us of the things and even the people we hold most dear, we find in that encounter and in that Word and in that Meal the strength to rise again, and live.
Until finally, on that last great day, the Promise will come true in all its glory- at least for those who have not closed our eyes and our ears to Him in this life. Our loved ones who have died in the Lord will rise- and we will rise, too. They will be given back to us, and we to them, and all good things with them. And God will wipe every tear from our eyes, and there will be no more sorrow for us, or mourning, or weeping. For the former things shall have passed away, and all things will be made new.
We will not be required to sup on the thin gruel of metaphor or the sawdust of archetype. Instead, we will feast in blessed reality forever in the Kingdom of the One Who makes all things new- the very Man who once encountered a funeral procession at the gates of the city of Nain, and had compassion on the widowed mother of an only son, and touched his coffin, and said, "Young man, I say to you, arise."
May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
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