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Second Sunday after Pentecost Texts: 1 Kings
17:17-24; Psalm 30; Galatians 1:11-24; Luke 7:11-17
May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of
our hearts, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our
redeemer Amen.
I have never seen a
person who was dead come back to life. Have you?
Here is the closest
thing that I have seen to that:
I was on-call one night
at Bridgeport Hospital, in inner-city Connecticut, serving as a chaplain.
It was around 10pm, and I was sitting in the chaplain sleep room which
was actually a hospital room on the unused top floor of the hospital
where all the on-call doctors and other hospital staff had rooms to
spend the night. The pager by the side of my hospital bed started to
ring its horrible ring, and I saw that it was the Intensive Care Unit
calling for me.
I put on my jacket,
tie, and name badge, and took the elevator down to the ICU. I had been
called because there was a family gathered, and they wanted to pray
together over their elderly father who was comatose, and had been for
days. They seemed like they did not expect him to come out of it. I
remember the unit, late at night, being dark and peaceful. There were
no sounds other than the beeping of machines keeping these patients
alive.
We all held hands and
prayed over this beloved man. We prayed for a while, and opened our
eyes when we finished our prayers.
One of his daughters
said, “Oh my God! He’s moving. Look at his feet.
We looked and saw that
his toes were moving the sheets up and down.
She started rubbing
his forehead, and she put her face close to his. She said, “Dad, if
you can hear me, move your foot twice.”
We all looked at his
feet, expectantly and we saw his toes move the sheets exactly twice.
Everybody gasped in
amazement. They asked him some more very simple questions, and he answered
them with his feet, communicating from beyond his coma.
Over the next few days,
I returned to visit him. He improved quickly, and eventually was moved
out of the Intensive Care Unit into a regular hospital room. We sat
on his bed together and talked one evening. It was a very normal conversation.
I asked him if he had any memory of that night, and he said he did not.
He said it was as incredible for him to hear about as it was for us
to experience.
In a few more days,
however, his condition caught up with him again, and he was returned
to the ICU, and eventually died.
***
From this morning’s
texts, we hear two stories about people being brought back from the
dead. They are parallel stories.
The first, from the
Old Testament, takes place when the prophet Elijah is traveling in an
ungodly land, heading toward the place of the ungodly King Ahab. Elijah
does not really want to travel to this place, but the Lord has called
him and he obeys.
He comes to a place
where there is a poor widow who lives with her son, and he asks her
for a morsel of bread to eat. She says that she has nothing baked. In
fact, she is going to go home and use the tiny bit of meal she has in
a jar, and the little bit of oil she has in a jug to cook. Their plan
is to eat it and then die, because the drought has caused them to lose
hope of getting anything more to eat.
Elijah tells her not
to be afraid, and says that she will be able to make food from her meager
resources to feed her son and her, and even Elijah, and that they will
be fine until rain comes. This is what happens.
But then her son becomes
so ill that, according to the text, there was no breath left in him.
His breath (the Hebrew word neshama,
also meaning “spirit,” has left him.)
Elijah stretches himself
out upon the boy three times and called out to the Lord, and the boy’s
life is restored.
And then the text says
that Elijah “gave him to his mother.”
The healing story in
Luke is a parallel to this. Jesus meets a widow whose only son is dead.
The fact that he is her only son is important because his death will
leave her with no social standing and no economic security. She will
have no choice but to become a beggar.
When Jesus restores
her son to life, the text says that he “gave him to his mother,” which
is a direct quote from the Elijah miracle.
***
What a gift breath
is. Have you ever watched someone you love while they were sleeping?
Most of you know that
Sarah and I are new parents. We often walk into our baby’s room to check
on her, but not waking her up, and we look for her tiny chest rising
and falling, and listing to her breath pass through her tiny nostrils.
When a person is asleep,
they are remote from us but there is a sign of their precious spirit,
something beyond for now, but which will become present to us again
when they awake. The breath giving us the promise of it.
The author Frederick
Buechner writes:
I think of breathing—the body in its wisdom
taking its sustenance out of the air even when the conscious mind,
the will, the hunger both for life and for death, are asleep. I think
of the breathing of one who is asleep, how suddenly in some dark passage
of the night the breathing becomes a word, the dreamer speaks, and
through his word the fragment of a dream passes from inner world to
outer world. The visible effects of the invisible manifest themselves.
Like standing beside
the bed of someone who is asleep, we find ourselves on similar ground
as we meditate on the mystery of life and death.
We find ourselves standing
on the edge of the unknown, staring into that which we know as darkness,
but where life has come from and where life goes when its mortal time
is done.
From these stories
we know that God wills for us restoration. God’s place is to say to
us, “Here is your beloved, from whom you were estranged.”
When we lose a loved
one, we suffer, but the promise to us is that restoration awaits us
in the mystery of life beyond our earthly lives.
It is painful now when
we have lost someone. But as terrible as this pain may be, it is ephemeral.
God’s love is eternal. That is the meaning of the psalm:
Weeping may linger
for the night,
But joy comes in the morning.
Our baby hates to go
to bed at night. She is a happy baby most of the time, but when she
knows she is being put to bed, she often goes into a fit. She looks
at us with eyes that say, “How dare
you!” She would prefer to stay up all night playing. She of course does
not understand how much she actually needs her rest.
Many nights, her protesting
is much more than mere weeping that lingers in the night, as with the
poetic words of the psalmist. Rather, we get wailing and indignant,
heart-breaking howls.
But for her, joy does come in the morning. Unlike her parents, who are not
morning people, our child wakes up at 5:30 or 6am, happy and smiling,
singing and babbling to herself cheerfully.
***
Perhaps, ultimately,
these mysteries of life and death, waking and sleeping, are a matter
of perspective.
What seems devastating
and permanent to us is merely temporary to God. I have used this wonderful
quote from Bill Coffin before, but I will say it again: What is death
but a horizon? And a horizon is nothing but the limit of our sight.
Amen.