Stop the Funeral Procession

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

June 9, 2013; 3 Pentecost, Proper 5, Year C

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(1 Kings 17:17-24)  The son of the woman, the mistress of the house at Zarephath, became ill; his illness was so severe that there was no breath left in him. She then said to Elijah, "What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance, and to cause the death of my son!" But he said to her, "Give me your son." He took him from her bosom, carried him up into the upper chamber where he was lodging, and laid him on his own bed. He cried out to the LORD, "O LORD my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am staying, by killing her son?" Then he stretched himself upon the child three times, and cried out to the LORD , "O LORD my God, let this child's life come into him again." The LORD listened to the voice of Elijah; the life of the child came into him again, and he revived. Elijah took the child, brought him down from the upper chamber into the house, and gave him to his mother; then Elijah said, "See, your son is alive." So the woman said to Elijah, "Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the LORD in your mouth is truth."

(Luke 7:11-17)  Soon after healing the centurion's slave, 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. Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying, "A great prophet has risen among us!" and "God has looked favorably on his people!" This word about him spread throughout Judea and all the surrounding country.

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Remarkable stories!  Elijah prays to God and the life returns to the widow’s son.  Jesus stops a funeral procession and raises the dead son of another widow.  There are at least two ways to think about stories like these.  First, these stories are metaphors of how God transforms our own deadness and makes us alive.  Second, stories like this happen.

I have a friend who was keeping vigil by his young son’s hospital bed on the night when the medical team expected the child to die.  The child was horribly ill, discolored, fevered, and every organ but his brain was compromised by more than 40 tumors that had not responded to treatment.  His condition seemed medically hopeless.

In the intensive care unit the patient had a nurse solely responsible for him.  She was toward the rear of the room sometime around four a.m. when an elderly woman, simply dressed, approached the bedside and told my friend, “I need to wash the child.”  It was more of a command than a question.  The father nodded his silent consent, and she took a cloth and passed it over the little boy, as if she were cleaning him.  After she appeared to be finished, she said, “I need to do it again,” and she repeated the movements, not touching the child but making cleansing movements over his body with a cloth. 

Immediately he changed.  The fever and discoloration left.  My friend called the nurse to come.  “Something has happened.”  The nurse came to the bedside and began examining.  The child appeared to be completely healthy.  Every symptom of illness had disappeared.  So had the old woman.  She was nowhere to be seen.  But the child was well.

My friend asked the nurse, “Did you see an elderly woman come in here?”  No, she hadn’t seen anyone.  But my friend had.  And so had the little boy.  Both of them saw the woman and remember her to this day.  My friend says she was an angel.  And he believes.  His son, now an adult remembers the woman.  No, she wasn’t an angel, he says.  He doesn’t know who she was.  But she was there. 

Follow-up examinations showed that there was no sign of cancer.  The tumors were gone.  There has never been detected a single cell of the cancer that had ravaged his body to the point of death.  Doctors joyfully and tearfully recorded it as “spontaneous recovery.”  My friend calls it a miracle; and he believes an angel from God healed his son.

These things happen.

But these things also happen in other ways.  Over and over in the Gospel stories, people who met Jesus found that they became alive in new ways.  A Samaritan woman with a scandalous reputation met Jesus at a well where she was drawing water alone at the hottest time of the day.  Maybe she was avoiding the other women; maybe their words or their body language told her they judged her.  But Jesus didn’t judge her, and she found he gave her living water, internal refreshment that changed everything about the way she thought of herself.

A couple of weeks ago our children’s choirs gave a wonderful musical performance of the story of a tax collector, short of stature, who though rich and powerful, found himself alienated from his community because of his complicity with an unjust and corrupt economic system.  When Jesus saw the little man watching from a distance in a tree, he said, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.”  And that day Zacchaeus made amends for his dishonesty and changed his entire life.

Jesus approaches us with total love, complete acceptance, unbounded compassion.  Then, Jesus opens infinite potentiality toward all of the dead ends of our lives.  As we trudge along, walking down our familiar, habitual, deadly paths, Jesus stops our funeral procession and says, “Weep no more.”  Or stop whining, or stop making excuses, or stop faking, or stop being miserable.  Whatever it is that we need to stop in order to halt our own particular funeral procession. 

Then he invites us to stand up and regain our voice.  He lets us throw our shoulders back, breathe deeply and clearly, and reclaim our lives and our identity as God’s beloved children.  He takes us by the hand and invites us to live in union with him.  As surely as a branch receives its nutrients from the vine, so we are invited to live in conscious union with Jesus.  His spirit becomes our spirit.  His love flowing in us and our love flowing toward him – love overflowing with radiant acceptance that allows us to be who we are, to be who we are created to be, so that like him, we can simply love our neighbors as ourselves.

I’ve recently done a bit of exploring about people who undergo a near-death experience, something like what happened to my friend with his child.  People who have tasted death and experienced something that they identify as the “other side,” return to this life with a certain freedom and joy.  They aren’t afraid of death any more, but more than that, they aren’t afraid to be truly alive.  They describe their lives as transformed.  They feel a conscious connection with something alive, transcendent, loving and purposeful.  They know themselves to be safe and loved.

The church invites everyone to have a near-death experience.  We call it baptism.  In baptism we are buried with Christ in his death, and by it we share in his resurrection.  Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit, and we are given God’s own indwelling Spirit.

The experience of death and resurrection is a repeatable event.  Every time we have a baptism here at St. Paul’s, we all renew our baptismal covenant, and remind ourselves who and whose we are.  Every time we pray, we can die a bit – letting go of our ego, our self-absorption and our guilt – and we can rise reborn in infinite love and light.  My spirituality professor used to say his best days were those when he died sometime before breakfast.

What is killing you?  What is eating at you like cancer?  …consuming your heart or mind?  Where are the dead ends in your life?  What old habit or destructive pattern needs Jesus’ touch to stop its continued procession toward death? 

Let infinite love and acceptance lift you from your funeral bier and restore you to life.  Stand up transformed.  Regain your voice.  Live in the light as God’s beloved.  Today you can experience your own death and resurrection.