Luke 7:11-17 and I Kings 17:8-24

We were home the other evening, watching a moving on TV. I lost the toss, and we eschewed a movie about Queen Victoria in favor of a movie starring the very nice-looking Viggo Mortensen, a post-apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy tale called “The Road.” An hour and twenty minutes into the sepia-tinted, desperate world of a man and his small son who fought hopelessness, starvation, and bands of violent cannibals while walking across a desolate and lawless land toward the ocean, the father was shot by a cross-bow and died and we looked at each other and said—we should have gone for Queen Victoria, at least she won. It was a movie whose order of the day was mere survival in the face of certain death—a road I would not care to walk again, or ever.

The gospel of Luke, our second reading this morning, tells this story: Jesus went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. As he approached the gate of the town a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow, and with her was a large crowd from the town. When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, “do not weep.” Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “young man, I say to you, rise!” The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.

This morning, all around our communities, in every corner of the globe, this is what we see: a young man dies in combat, and the order of the day goes on. A child or two is shot playing on the road in front of their home—a casualty of a drive by meant for someone else, and the order of the day goes on. A pelican, dripping with oil, is lifted from the tide waters, and cradled gently by a weeping volunteer, but still, the order of the day, the order of death, goes on. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that death is commonplace in our lives, unavoidable, even, in our worlds. . .but this morning’s stories are more deeply about another kind of death: that is, what Walter Brueggemann calls daily seasons of death that beset us; how, in the face of fear, grief, guilt, hate, and self-absorption, we draw more and more into a closed, self-preoccupied world that is killing us. This story is about that kind of dying. . . .and what we can do about it, if we are sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.

In the Elijah story from I Kings, we can see both kinds of dying, the physical and the spiritual, having their way in a diminished world. Elijah has foretold, and begun to survive, a season of desperate drought that has placed his land at the point of death. In a dream or a prayer, he is directed go now to Zarephath, where I have commanded a widow to feed you. There he finds a woman and a child more desperate than he.

She claims impending physical death for herself and her son, and has lived daily seasons of dying as well: an “order of the day” that dismisses women, widows with their children and “aliens” as beneath notice, beyond community.

Warily, defensively, the woman and the prophet make common cause – they survive together because they must. . . and somehow, the risk they take proves to be a God-thing: the jar of meal continues to hold just enough; the oil for cooking does not run dry. But other than merely surviving, nothing changes. And lest we think that such miracles, these “God-things”, are unambiguous, joyous moments that sweep away human limitation, erasing the daily seasons of death forever with a Divine “happily ever after,” the story of the order of the day does go on. The drought continues, the child becomes ill and declines until there is no breath in him. The tenuous truce that binds Elijah and the widow erupts with accusation, guilt, and mutual suspicion, threatening to rupture everything, including their fragile connection with the sacred…

And then, not a moment too soon, the silent complicity with the daily seasons of death is shattered by a word of power. Oh God, oh, God! Let this child’s life come into him again. It is not God’s word that breaks the silence, the cycle of death and desperation: it is a human one.
A voice from a man who, like us, has learned to survive, but finally wants more.

A voice from a soul who has been worn down by the daily seasons of death, by guilt and accusation and suspicion and self-absorption and not caring—but who has finally had enough. A voice from a believer who had long been looking for a sign from God and who at last has looked into the mirror and found the sign he longed for: himself.

He has seen the face of God, his own face, and he throws his body—vulnerable but resolute, over the body of the boy, and life is snatched from the jaws of death—for the child, for Elijah, and for the widow, who gasps—‘atah yada ‘ti—a confession of faith out of fatalism: now I know that the word of God in your mouth is true.

Last week, on Trinity Sunday, I invited us to consider what holy Name, what image of God was the one we needed, each of us, in this moment of time, in whatever season we find ourselves in. After the service, Isabelle came up to me and said—that brown pelican you mentioned? Covered with oil? I saw it—it was Christ, it is being crucified for our sins.

And I was stunned, and all this week, as the oil has crept nearer and onto our own state’s shores, my carefully balanced compromise of prayer, anger, cynicism and hopeful dependence on BP, the MMS, Congress and Barak Obama to step up and fix everything has been crumbling under those ten words, the image of a Brown Pelican, a Christ, being crucified so that we might rise up and have life through him.

When Jesus stopped the funeral cortege in Nain, confronting those silent people in their daily season of death—he spoke only ten words: Do not weep. Young man, I say to you, rise. When the young man sat up, the gospel tells us that he began to speak…

I imagine that he is speaking still, if we would but listen. I imagine that he is telling us that if we are not the ones to stretch our own bodies, like Elijah did, over those who are weary to the point of death, to cover them with our love, and speak a word of life on their behalf to God, then, who will? I imagine him saying that if we are willing to pass by death in silent complicity with friends and fellow citizens who have all but given up on living with meaning, if we refuse to Stand Up, then there really is for him and others like him, no hope. I imagine him saying, with Jesus: things can be different. Do not weep. Stand up. Do something, for my sake, for God’s sake. And when we do, when we do, I know he will be speaking again, in mighty chorus with a long forgotten widow and her son, and every forgotten one since…. ‘atah yada ‘ti: Now I know, now I know, now I know , that the word of God in your mouth. . .is true.