Sermon

And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her, and said unto her Weep not. And he came and touched the bier: and they that bare him stood still.

Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord. To write the same things to you, to me indeed is not grievous, but for you it is safe. Philippians 3:1

This is the first of four accounts of the resuscitation of a dead person that Luke has preserved – two in his Gospel and two in his Acts of the Apostles. It is worth recalling that Luke made the point in his preface to his Gospel that he was not an eyewitness to the events, but that he diligently followed the best practices of the historiographers of his day in order to present a verifiable and organized account of the narrative of Jesus Christ. This is the way he put it:

Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of things which have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account…

As you can see, an important principle of historiography in Luke’s day was the word of the eyewitnesse. Luke’s stated intention was to “write an orderly account” of the accomplishments of Jesus Christ; one that would answer important questions like, “Who is Jesus and what does it mean to follow him?” Luke locked onto the narratives and reports from eyewitnesses that go to the core of who Jesus is and what he wants from us.

He did the same in gathering material for his second volume – The Acts of the Apostles — albeit a huge chunk of Acts is Luke’s own first person account of St. Paul’s ministry. The point I want you to take away is that Luke consciously, intelligently, intentionally, studiously selected four accounts of resuscitations, from all the material he had, to include in his two-volume history that we call The Gospel of Luke and The Acts of the Apostles. 

Immediately following this first resuscitation we have the disciples of John the Baptist, on John’s behalf, making inquires into Jesus’ ministry. When our Lord answered John’s questions by alluding to fact that the dead are being raised, he is referring to the resuscitation of the widow’s son. The next resuscitation is the raising of Jairus’ daughter. 

In the Acts, Luke preserves two accounts of the Apostles Peter and Paul raising a dead person to life. Luke’s point in Acts is that apostolic authority and power to do such a thing comes from the resurrected Christ. In the first account Peter raises a Christian woman named Tabitha. In the second account, St. Paul raises a young man from the dead. This account of St. Paul is written in the first-person because Luke was there. From here on Acts is an eyewitness account. He and Paul and others traveled to Troas on a mission. They were there for about a week. On Sunday they gathered with the Church for the Eucharist and Paul preached a long sermon. In fact, St. Luke says he preached until mid-night! They were meeting in an upper room, three flights up — a room, Luke recalls, filled with lights. There was a young man named Eutychus and was sitting in the big open window. It was probably hot that night and the boy may have been trying to catch a cool breeze or maybe he was a look out. Paul kept on preaching and sometime after midnight, Eutychus fell into a deep sleep and then he tumbled out of the window, three stories high, and hit the pavement below and died. Luke’s memory is vivid. The boy was taken up from the pavement and he was dead. Paul ran down stairs, bent over him and held the boy.  He then told everyone not to worry because his life had returned to him. 

What these four narratives have in common is that they are accounts of resuscitations from the dead. What do I mean by resuscitation? This is another point I want you to take away today: I mean to distinguish resuscitations from the resurrection of the dead. Lazarus is probably the most famous case of resuscitation from the dead. Mary told Jesus not to go to his grave because Lazarus had been then for at least four days and he would stink. Death stinks. Dead people have to be buried. Tabitha was washed and no doubt already wrapped up in a shroud and spices for her burial before Peter came and called her back from death. But here is the point: every one of these persons eventually died again because they were not resurrected — they were resuscitated. When we are resurrected from death like Jesus was resurrected from the dead, we will never die again. In the resurrection we are still who we are, we do not become different persons, but all things are made new. We put on incorruption, we put on immortality, and we are raised to everlasting life never to die again. Please understand that the resurrection from the dead does not involve the annihilation of nature. Rather Christ will complete, he will perfect our nature. Grace never destroys nature it completes nature. Grace does not suspend the laws of nature; grace opens up our true nature. By his resurrection, Christ has not negated nature, he has rather fulfilled nature’s destiny – our nature burst into blossom in his resurrected body. But resuscitation is not a resurrection; resuscitation is not a bursting into blossom! But let’s get back to this account in the Gospel for today. 

Jesus and his disciples came upon the little village of Nain, which probably had a population of a hundred to a hundred-and-fifty souls. It is also about six miles south of Nazareth. As Jesus and his disciples approached the village near the gate, a funeral procession got his attention. Funerals would process out of the city gate to bury the person outside the city walls where the family cemeteries were located. Funerals were usually at the end of the day and as much as was possible it was on the day of the death of the person. Luke makes a point of telling us that this death involved an only-begotten son. The mother was a widow who was now childless. She had no family left and she had become an “orphaned parent.” This passage bristles with emotion. People in the village shared in the widow’s grief as they gathered around her in mourning. Such mourning was seen as an act of love by one’s neighbors. This is the sad scene that greeted Jesus as he enters the little village. 

The burial customs in Judaism in antiquity required that the person not be prepared for burial until the death was certain and then the family tore their cloths as a sign of mourning and physically shut the eyes of the corpse to show that they were dead. Next it was important to quickly wash and anoint the body for burial. They were not generally kept in the house overnight. The corpse was wrapped in linen and spices and placed on a wooden plank. This is what the text refers to as a bier. They were not placed in coffins. Everyone could see the corpse, wrapped in strips of linen, on the plank as they processed to the family cemetery. 

Jesus approached the widow and told her to stop crying. He then approached the men carrying the dead boy and he touched the plank. As soon as he touched the bier the procession stopped, not because of a miracle, but more likely out of shock because touching the bier defiled a person according to the Law. That person would have to stay out of the community and forsake the worship of God for seven days. Luke tells us that our Lord actions were motivated by his compassion for the widow. This motive –- the motive of compassion –- is attributed to Jesus in all four Gospels. Here is another point I want you to take away: part of the collective memory of Luke’s eyewitnesses was that on more than one occasion they witnessed the Word of God made flesh so moved by his very own human compassion for other people that he stopped everything he was doing and made the wrong thing right. And I submit to you that he still does that today. God does not wait for the lost to find their way back to him. Jesus took the initiative to raise the widow’s son.

Now, here is something else I want you to consider: what is absent from this account is the every present, every critical, Pharisee. But for the original audience, his touching of the bier was probably enough to bring back the contrast between Jesus’ love for people and the self-righteousness of those who had nothing to offer but the Torah. The righteousness of God is not attained in its pursuit, holiness does not glory in itself — but rather as we follow Jesus in his love for others, the righteousness of God overtakes us. 

We don’t know how the people carrying the plank responded to Jesus at first other than the fact that they stop in their tracks. When he started talking to the dead boy they and others may have thought he was deranged. Why would a stranger, who did not know this family, interrupt such a sad and necessary ritual at the most grievous moment? 

But unthinkable was about to happen: The way of all flesh had crossed paths with the Word made flesh.

And he (Jesus) said, Young man, I say unto thee Arise. And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak. And he delivered him to his mother.

This is the last take away I want you to have: This account of Jesus raising the widow’s son from the dead shows Jesus’ compassion and willingness to reach out and meet our most profound, existential needs. It is Jesus taking the initiative in this account. He comforts the widow and he restores her boy to life and health. This account also displays the power of Jesus to reach to the very limits of our personal existence. He can and does overpower death. Jesus offers humanity more than a signal that the Kingdom is coming. And please note once again that it is not that the Kingdom is coming in the future, not that the Kingdom has come in part, not that the promise of the Kingdom has come. No. The Kingdom of God has come. A new and happy state of being has come upon all creation through Jesus and he has put a stop to death:

And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her, and said unto her Weep not. And he came and touched the bier: and they that bare him stood still.

I say unto you, Be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than the food, and the body than the raiment? Behold the birds of the heaven, that they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feedeth them.

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And further on in Matthew 10 Jesus asked: “Are not two sparrow sold for a farthing?” So what is a sparrow worth? Not much we would say, except that at the end of the verse our Lord says, “And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Heavenly Father.”  

Over the years I have pointed out that our Liturgy is the prayer of the Bride of Christ and she intends to effect changes in the material world through this prayer. The effectual prayer of the Church is exactly that, a prayer that effects change. This change, this transmutation, this transformation does not destroy the thing it changes; grace perfects what it touches. Grace does not destroy nature. Just as our Lord by becoming a real human being through the agency of the Blessed Virgin Mary did not destroy the humanity he received from her in her womb, so the changes the Bride of Christ wishes to effect in the material world through her Liturgy will not destroy that which is changed; rather it is her intention to perfect nature. There are three changes we pray for in the Liturgy: First that the Bread and Wine will become the sacramental Body and Blood of our Lord. We feed upon the sacramental Life, the Body and Blood of Christ for the strengthening and refreshing our souls.  That points to the second change we intend by the Liturgy – that is that our interiority, our inward man, our interior life will be changed, transformed and over time perfected through the prayer of the Church. Having our interior life transformed by the love of Christ, we may then work and pray for good, wholesome, Godly, change in the world; the uplift of humanity, the Godly flourishing of all humanity. 

Like last week, I want to attend once again to the sort of changes Holy Mother Church prays for in the life of her own children. And this week I want us to ask ourselves what we believe about the God we worship? There’s many a false image of God in the life of Christians. Especially in stressful and troubling times, false images of God, offer a sort of satisfaction and comfort. These false images are alluring.  

In the days of our Lord’s flesh, the only signposts that nomadic tribes traveling the desert could depend on were the stars. The stars guided pilgrims who used to journey in caravans. These old desert navigators would plot their journey from oasis to oasis using their knowledge of the heavens. There are no fixed landmarks in the desert. The ever-changing landscape, the heat of the day, the cold night, the fear of dangerous animals and dangerous people; the longing for an oasis that would bring relief and some security. Frequently, desert pilgrims would observe what appeared to be the flickering light of a campfire off in the distance. The temptation to leave the chosen route of seasoned travelers and follow that light, what they came to call “ignis fatuus,” or “false light,” had to be resisted. What was required was a sort of remediation – a remedial education – so they could learn how to travel the desert safely. I want to suggest that most of us need remediation over and over again when it comes to knowing the kind of God Jesus revealed to us. 

Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.

How very difficult it is for people to believe what Jesus says in this passage. That God attends the death of a bird? Are you serious, Jesus? And know this, when he speaks of vesting the flowers in beauty, feeding birds and attending their dying, Jesus is not referring to God’s omniscience.  No — he is speaking of God’s love, his paternity and his providence. Jesus is describing a God who is lavish in what he gives away. I realized this sounds smaltzy and like a Hall Mark card, but this is exactly what Jesus said about his Father. Now this is the true light, not the false light that seems reasonable. And the Church, through the Liturgy, puts us through a perpetual program of remedial spiritual formation so that we not only identify and know the true light, but we are enabled to actually follow the true light. We have a tendency to keep on falling back upon our on natural and what we would argue are “reasonable” visions of God. Of course these are our own visions and not God’s. 

I once had a neighbor who had a license plate that read, “Ky2Life” – Key to Life. I thought that was clever. But when I saw him with the hood up the next morning, working on some mystery of the internal combustion engine, the cleverness turned into a joke.  And then at noon the hood was still up and way before the red evening sun set behind Afton Mountain he slammed the hood down in great frustration. 

That’s when I said to myself, “Self, isn’t that just like ‘the key 2 Life’ – our versions, our own visions?” Just when you need to get somewhere you can count on it breaking down. 

Look we do it all the time. We fashion a God we think is “reasonable.” But he is never the God Jesus revealed. He is often controlled by his emotions. He keeps count of all that is done amiss. He seems intent upon exacting, what we think, is the punishment we deserve for sinning and when we don’t get that punishment we question his existence. Our visions of God too often resemble our own bruised egos. And when we substitute our own ego-visions for God’s vision we can’t get anywhere. It’s like my neighbor’s SUV. The exterior looks pretty good, but it is all locked up under the hood. You can climb behind the steering wheel, look out the window, but you’ll get no further than your own driveway.  

In John 17, our Lord places his own life of flesh before his Heavenly Father. His own disciple was betraying him at that very moment. His own agonizing death is at hand. He puts his life and work before his Father and he says, 

For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received [them], and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me. 

Jesus declares that his Father delights in vesting the flowers in beauty, feeding birds and attending their dying. Jesus declares that his Father is a God of love, a God who is lavish. And you, my dear parishioner, happen to be the particular object of his lavish love. And the only way, or the most unmistakable way he chose to express that love is to offer you his own life. So this morning when you come to the altar and hold out your empty hands you will receive God’s own life. You will hold the life of the Lord of Creation, the life of the King of Love in the palm of your hand. 

I say unto you, Be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than the food, and the body than the raiment? Behold the birds of the heaven, that they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feedeth them. 

“And he said unto him, Arise, go thy way: thy faith hath made thee whole.”

The setting of St. Luke’s Gospel is a long journey to Jerusalem. And along the way Jesus moved in and out of Jewish territory, teaching, healing and casting out demons. It is the way his disciples would carry on with his ministry after his ascension. In the Book of Acts we have the account of Philip entering a city of Samaria, preaching Christ, healing the people and casting out demons. According to that account, “there was great joy in that city” because of the work of Philip. It is not unreasonable to suppose that some of the Samaritans in those cities recalled that only a handful of years back, Jesus Christ himself entered their cities preaching the Kingdom of God, healing folk, and freeing them from the work of the devil. One would expect that some had been healed or freed from demonic possession by Christ himself. Jesus worked so many miracles in his short ministry that St. John put a disclaimer at the end of his Gospel where he stated that had he recorded all of Jesus’ mighty acts the world could not contain the books that feat would require. And yet when Philip went through Samaria not one word is recorded that indicates the people there remembered Jesus Christ.

We assume that a person who has experienced a healing or some great miracle from Jesus would naturally be saved for good and therefore would follow him for the rest of their life. I have certainly made this assumption. I have assumed that those who were healed by Christ would have constituted the original Church in Jerusalem after Pentecost. But my assumptions were wrong. It appears that most of the people – this is astonishing to me – most of the people who witnessed and even those who were first-hand beneficiaries of his grace and mercy in fact did not end up following Jesus. Thousands and thousands of people were direct recipients of miracles at the hand of Jesus. How could a person experience a miracle – at the very hand of Jesus – and not follow him for the rest of their life in certain faith. But “certain faith” is not how we are saved.

I want to say something about this notion of certain faith. Some people would say that certain faith is a contradiction but it is not. There are different kinds of faith and there are different types of certainty. For example, there is mathematical certainty and that is just about as pure as certainty gets. But there is also logical certainty that is very much like mathematical certainty – it is sure as far as it goes. Of course, the most certain statements of all are tautologies, but the problem with tautologies is that they provide no new information. “If there is an election for President of the United States this year candidate X will either win or not win.” That is absolutely certain, but it does not provide us with any new information. However, when a woman says, “I am certain that my husband loves me,” she is not applying mathematical certainty or logical certainty to her affirmation of love, nor is she declaring a tautology. But she really means it. Now some people would say that she has “reasons of the heart,” by which they mean she has no reasons at all, but I don’t agree with that. She does have reasons for saying, “I am certain that my husband loves me,” and those reasons are complex, yes, but not so mysterious as to be hidden. The upshot is that she has an experience of congruence between his words and his deeds by which he declares to her his love for her. But even if she knows that her husband loves her that does not mean that she has faith in him.

Let me explain. The reason this is confusing is because people today use the term faith in an odd way. People today do not mean what the New Testament means by the faith. When Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing,” he was declaring that our beliefs are all psychological and if that is the case they say more about us than the things we believe. Today most people agree with that whether they acknowledge it or not. Today most people mean by faith something like the “reasons of the heart” or a mysterious feeling of trust or dependence. People today think that faith and knowledge are opposite one to another. Faith is a leap in the dark when I have no evidence for what I want to believe. Someone once said to me, “You don’t know that God exists, you have faith that he exists.” I disagree, that is not the way the New Testament uses the term faith – faith is not the opposite of knowledge. New Testament faith begins with trust and confidence in what is known. But even that – faith as trust and confidence – is incomplete for what Jesus taught about faith. And that is where the Gospel for today will help us.

As Jesus neared Jerusalem he continued to work miracles and to show mercy and to call on the people to have faith in God, by which he meant to trust, love and worship God. It so happened that Jesus and his disciples were about to enter a village when ten lepers cried out to him to have mercy on them. Luke is careful to point out that they “stood at a distance.” Lepers were not permitted to approach anyone, and they had to remain outside the village. But they had obviously heard that Jesus was a powerful healer full of mercy and kindness. They had a very simple request, and they couch it in the most respectful language that acknowledged his authority. They addressed him by his name and begged for mercy. Cries for mercy were commonplace in Jesus’ ministry. Keep in mind that all this is done at a distance. They raised their voice to get his attention to ask to be healed of a horrible and despised disease. Jesus looked at them and told them to go and show themselves to the priests just as the Law in Leviticus required. And as they went their way they were cleansed of the disease.

All of these men had faith in Jesus. They called him “master” and they acted on his directions. Obviously, a leper would not show himself to a priest until his was healed but Jesus told them to go on to the priests before the healing had occurred. His command shows that he will heal them. If they were healed the priest would certify that they were cleansed and allowed to return to their family and friends in the village. They believed that Jesus could and would heal them, and so they acted on his command and all ten of them were in fact healed. 

You know there is always a twist coming in the New Testament narratives, some sort of reversal, and an epiphany that the first hearers of the Gospel would quickly identify. Faith in Jesus, saving faith, the kind of faith that makes a person whole is not only confidence that he can and will work miracles. The kind of faith Jesus expected then and still expects today will be identified not only by confidence in Jesus’ extraordinary power to heal and restore; but the faith Jesus commends has the qualities of worship and gratitude.

“And one of them when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet giving him thanks: and he was a Samaritan.”

Well, there’s the twist. Ten lepers were healed but only one expressed gratitude for his healing and returned to Jesus to give him thanks and praise. The word Luke uses is one of his favorites: a form of doxa which means to celebrate, to praise, to honor, to cloth with splendor, to adorn with luster. We translate it as praise or to glorify. Note verse 17:

“and (the healed Samaritan) fell down on his face at his feet giving him thanks…”

Where before he and the other nine could only stand at a distance, Luke’s account has him coming right up to Jesus. This is another reversal. By coming within reach of Jesus he showed his confidence in his healing and restoration to human society. His approach to Jesus also visually shows his state of grace. The space between the former leper and God has dramatically shrunk. The space between God and the other nine who were healed continues to widen. Once the Samaritan was a stranger to God, but now he has been made close by Jesus the Son of God. By identifying the one person who returned to give glory to God as a stranger, an outsider, Jesus also identifies at least some of the other nine as Jews. This was and still is a hard fact of Jesus’ ministry. St. John put it this way:

“he came unto his own and his own received him not, but as many as received him to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name…”

This is another reversal. The ones who were expected to respond with praise and gratitude were the children of the Covenant. But it turns out to be the schismatic, the one who was far from the promises of the Covenant, who ends up with the blessing and holding on to the feet of the Son of God.

And he said unto him, “Arise, go they way: thy faith hath made thee whole. What about the other nine?” Jesus seems to turn to his disciples and wave his hands: “Were there not ten cleansed? But where are the nine?”

Why didn’t they praise God? Where is their gratitude?

Jesus’ questions are really a condemnation. He wasn’t expecting an answer from his disciples or anyone else. He rhetorically indicted the nine for not responding to God’s gracious act. They did not receive the blessing that was meant for the children of promise. It went instead to the stranger: “thy faith hath made thee whole.”

What I want you to see is that miracles do not certify the kind of faith Jesus says will make us whole. I believe in miracles, but miracles do not make people into faithful Christians. Do not base your faith on receiving a miracle. Base your faith on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Trust him. Count your many, many blessings. Recall the providential moments of God in your life and be thankful. Remember God’s past forgiveness; remember his tender mercies when you expected chastisement. Be thankful, express your gratitude to God and worship him.

And one of them when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet giving him thanks… And he said unto him, Arise, go thy way: thy faith hath made thee whole.