Luke 7:11-17
A Sermon Preached by the Reverend Dr. Howard W. Boswell, Jr.
Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 6, 2010
Kenmore Presbyterian Church
Kenmore, New York
In the June Crossroads, I wrote about a question people have about worship. Often they ask me, “What’s Ordinary Time?” I explained how it simply refers to those weeks in the church year that do not fall in Advent, Christmas, Lent, or Easter. Yet, I added how “during Ordinary Time, we discover… Jesus makes the everyday anything but ordinary by his presence.”
According to psychologist, Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, we live our ordinary lives from a set of beliefs about how the world works. We believe bad things will not happen. We expect events will make sense. We assume all events will fall into neat categories of good and bad. We may argue we know how life is not fair, how tragedy doesn’t make sense. Yet, when the world comes crashing down around us, nearly all of us ask, “How could this happen? Or why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?” Tragedy turns our ordinary lives upside down. It pushes us beyond our everyday understanding.
We do not need to know anything about the status of widows in Jesus’ time to feel our way into the scene we encounter in Luke 7:11-17. We grasp how at this moment, for this one woman, the worst possible thing happens, nothing about it makes sense, and the death of her son, her only son casts aside every neat category. In Jesus’ time, widows were pushed to the margins of society. Yet, this woman found herself pushed even further. With the death of her son, her only son, everything she had would revert to her husband’s family. She had nowhere to turn, except to the kindnesses of strangers.
She finds herself at the gate of the village of Nain, inconsolable in grief. You see, even today, people in the Middle East do not keep mourning the sterile, silent affair we do in the West. They mourn loudly, with many tears. The scene Luke depicts could be seen repeated in villages and towns from Gaza to the Golan Heights, from Tel Aviv to Amman. The whole village joins in grieving and nothing can stop the tears.
Except, on this day, the kindness of a stranger stop the tears. His first words to the weeping widow are “Do not weep!” Of course, we know who this stranger is and where he’s been. He’s just been in Capernaum, where he healed the centurion’s slave, and celebrated this Gentile’s faith as unlike anything he’d ever seen. The slave was nearly dead, when the centurion told Jesus, “But only speak the word, and let my servant be healed.”
Yet, here at an ordinary funeral in Nain, Jesus sees the widow’s grief. He knows her world crashes down around her and her life and her livelihood lies dead beneath the burial cloth. For the first time, Luke calls Jesus the Lord, as if to signal what’s about to happen. Yet, it’s love that gives the Lord power over death itself. Really something more than love compels him; it’s compassion. Jesus feels her loss deep down, in his gut. He crosses the ordinary barrier between men and women to speak to her. He breaks another barrier when he touches the bier, risking ritual corruption, so that he might bring resurrection. He speaks to the young man, addresses him as a person, saying, “Young man, I say to you, rise!” When he rises, he returns him to his mother, restoring her son, her life, her world to her.
I don’t need to tell you how we experience moments like the widow. Maybe, we may not face the absolute destitution she did, but we need to know there are places on this planet where women in her situation would. Yet, we know how sad it is to bury a parent, a sibling, even a spouse, but to bury a child is tragic. My experience as a pastor proves Ronnie Janoff-Bulmann’s theory, because when children precede their parents in death, it dashes the way we think the natural order of life works.
Yet, we know other tragedies that defy our ordinary way of looking at life. A man sacrifices everything for his wife and children, only to find out how she’s chosen another. A woman works for a company for decades, only to discover her pension’s gone. A family realizes a dream and buys a home, only to have it wrecked in the mortgage crisis. A nation watches as an oil spill threatens to destroy a region barely recovering from one of the worst hurricanes in history, only to learn how fragile a thing is life. I didn’t really need to tell you the story again, because we live it everyday. It’s the tragic reality that confounds our core beliefs and makes us wonder, “Where in the world is God in the midst of all of it?”
We can find the answer to our question in the question itself. God is in the midst of all of it, if we opened our eyes and our hearts to those moments that are anything but ordinary, when we hear Jesus say, “Do not weep!” when we feel Jesus’ touch, when we answer his command and rise! This story of the widow of Nain is unusual for a couple of reasons. First, only Luke tells it and he tells it beautifully. It’s really a masterpiece! It points back to the story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath. It points ahead to when Jesus himself, a son, an only son will die, and be raised by the command of his Father. It reminds us of a central theme in his Gospel, Jesus’ love of the oppressed and marginalized as a sign of God’s kingdom.
Yet, I find one thing most unusual. We’d miss it, if we weren’t looking for it. Almost every other miracle includes a request. The centurion asks Jesus to heal his slave. Jesus’ mother asks him to do something about the lack of wine. The blind, the lame, the leper, everyone asks Jesus to do something, even if he has to ask them first, What do you want me to do for you?” even if they only manage to ask, “Lord, have mercy!”
Yet, here, the widow makes no request, shows no faith. We can’t even say for certain whether she knew who Jesus was. She doesn’t ask, because she doesn’t know anything can happen. Instead, Jesus sees her need and out of compassion, from sheer grace, he raises her son from the dead and returns him to her.
Things that are anything but ordinary happen around us and to us all the time. Maybe, we don’t ask for them to happen, but they happen anyway. We may not recognize them as miracles, but that is what they are. It’s a miracle when the tears finally stop and we begin to heal. It’s a miracle when the man finds the strength to forgive her, maybe not for her sake, but for his. It’s a miracle when the woman receives help from others to rebuild her life. It’s a miracle when the family finds a way to make a new home. It will be a miracle when the marshes of Louisiana return to life, one day, if we work and pray.
Yet, the greatest miracle may be when we see Jesus for who he really is. With those villagers in Nain, we may be afraid at first to realize it, but we will come to glorify God for he is a great prophet, even more he is our Savior and Lord, the only Son of the Most High. In him, God looks favorably upon us and visits us in the losses of our lives, restoring us to life and wholeness.
©2010 Howard W. Boswell, Jr.
