June 10, 2007
(Second Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 5)
Turning Back a Flood
by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer
1 Kings 17:8-16 (17-24) Psalm
146 or 1 Kings 17:17-24 Psalm 30
Galatians 1:11-24 Luke 7:11-17
(From
The Lectionary Page)
I was amazed at how quickly the Missouri River rose about a month ago. In the course of a single workday at the Cathedral, the river went from being moderately high at 8:00 in the morning as I drove south, to being at flood stage at 5:30 in the evening as I drove north. Those of you whose daily commute takes you by the river may well remember the media circus that pitched its tents at Kaw Point and Parkville and Platte City and points downriver. Midwestern rivers flood regularly, but each flood, it appears, becomes utterly fascinating, worthy of news reporters in helicopters and mobile units. I get it. I am fascinated by it myself how something as ordinary as the Muddy MO takes on a dangerous, almost malevolent sense in nearly the blink of an eye. At floodwater times, sensible people recognize that we are powerless. Once a flood begins, all you can do is move to higher ground and wait it out. You can sandbag and sometimes itll help protect your property, but once the waters begin the rise, once that watery momentum has begun, no human being on earth can reverse a flood. The waters will recede only when Ma Nature gets darn good and ready.
That sense of momentum, of unstoppable forward movement, permeates our gospel passage for today. By the seventh chapter of Luke, Jesus has begun his ministry in Galilee, teaching and healing wherever he goes. In the verses immediately preceding todays passage, Jesus has healed the servant of a Centurion, demonstrating that his ministry was for all who believed, be they Jew or Gentile. He is gathering momentum. From Capernaum he travels to Nain where he encounters at the city gates a different kind of momentum a funeral procession.
The last funeral procession I was in was that of my father-in-law. As officiant at that funeral, I rode to the cemetery in the hearse. As is the custom in many rural places in the Midwest, the funeral procession drove slowly. Oncoming cars pulled over because funeral processions have the right-of-way. You may be on your way to someplace important, but at that moment, the funeral procession takes center stage if not the very center of the road itself.
Funeral processions in Galilee would have had the same kind of momentum. By the time a procession would reach the city gates, virtually the entire community would have been swept up in the flow. And so our gospel passage today gives us two unstoppable forces colliding there at the city gates of Nain a procession of death, and the giver of Life. And life wins because Gods default setting is always, always compassion for the vulnerable. A widow has lost her son. There are few obscenities greater in this world than for your child to die before you; but for a widow in Israel, this was double-indemnity. With a husband dead, she would have relied on her son for food and shelter. Her son had now died and now she was, herself, as good as dead. Unlike the centurion ten verses earlier, she makes no show of faith. Luke doesnt even suggest that she knows anything about Jesus or would have had any truck with him if she did. She asks for nothing. All that she has is her unbounded vulnerability. Jesus, exercising the preferential option for the poor that is the hallmark of Gods own ethic, restores her son to life. And in language that intentionally echoes a healing performed centuries earlier by Elijah for the widow of Zarephath, Jesus gives her son back to her. It is as though a raging, tumultuous, flooding river has been stopped in its path and turned back. Such is the power of Gods own compassion.
Its a vivid account, and yet an unsettling one for us post-modern folk. Even as our hearts are lifted by them, we often find it difficult to take the stories of miraculous healing at face value. Skeptics among us might rightly query why God allows the 3,490 young men and women who have been killed in Iraq to remain dead. Why have not they been brought back to life and given back to their parents? Are the widows in Kansas City who have lost their sons and daughters to community violence any less worthy of having their beloved children restored to them?
It was a teachable moment in Galilee that day, as it perhaps is for us as well every time we encounter passages like this in Scripture. The people at the city gates of Nain saw Jesus as a prophet and observed that God had looked favorably on his people. They didnt yet make the connection that Jesus healed the sick and restored life to the dead because that is what God desires for creation. Left to our own devices, the momentum of human history carries us toward death. God desires something different than death for us and of us, and sent his Son to incarnate that desire.
And when we do as Christ himself did -- when the hungry are fed and the naked are clothed, and the sick and the suffering are healed then the forces of life outstrip the power of death, no matter what the literal outcome of our lives may be. When we Christ-followers can be as hardwired as Christ himself toward lives of compassion and justice; when can we focus the whole of our lives on those things that are life-giving and not death-dealing; then we will have aligned our selves, our souls, and our bodies with Gods holy will. And when that happens, death may have temporal reality, but no eternal dominion. For then we are living in the resurrection.
At the City gates, Jesus turned back a flood and death for once was halted in its inexorable flow. It was an early foretaste of what will happen on the third day after his own death. Jesus does miraculously what we, his followers, are called to do pragmatically. He responds to suffering with compassion. He brings new life, and shows us that this is the momentum we are to engage.
