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June 10, 2007
2 Pentecost
St. Edmund’s, San Marino
The Rev. Rob FisherSecond 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.
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