Luke
7:11-17
Don’t
get me started on funeral stories. It’s
not a good idea. But if I must (and this
text says I must), I will share at least one.
This happened about twelve years ago in a small town in Schuylkill
County.
I
had arrived during the viewing and had gone into the office to introduce myself
to the funeral director and found her leaning into a playpen. That was a little unusual, but okay. Maybe she was getting a head start on
Take-Your-Child-to-Work Day. She
explained that her sister had just been offered a new job and hadn’t had time
to arrange daycare, so she was watching her niece for an hour or two until the
mother arrived. We chatted for a little
bit while the baby dozed off, and then we slipped out the door quietly and then
joined the family in the main funeral parlor.
When the time came, she placed a lectern off to the side of the casket,
and the service began.
“Dying,
Christ destroyed our death. Rising,
Christ restored our life. Christ will
come again in glory. As in baptism
Charlie put on Christ, so in Christ may he be clothed with glory. …” Everyone
sat there, as people do, some of them paying close attention to the words and
some paying close attention to the flowers, and some paying close attention to
their memories of a man they had loved and still did love. Nobody was paying close attention to the door
just off to my left, including me. That
was why nobody noticed when it swung open only a little bit, just wide enough
for a little person to toddle out of the office and start moving unsteadily,
but with a big smile, right in front of me and head for the fascinating, big
box that stood at the center of the flowers.
But when his aunt noticed, she swooped in faster than I’ve ever seen
anyone move at a funeral, and swung him up into her arms and over her shoulder
and disappeared almost as quickly.
There
was some chuckling. Then I came to the
next words. “Here and now, dear friends,
we are God’s children.” It became laughter. God’s children were laughing together because
that’s what children do. They cry, and
funerals are one time for that, but they also laugh and smile at the pretty
flowers and the music and the people all getting together and that is right as
well.
I
doubt that when Jesus interrupted the funeral in Nain that laughter was the
general response, though. Jesus knew
better. An adult does not interrupt a
funeral. Doing so is a major violation
of all human decency, or a sign that someone is not quite right. (Okay, another funeral story. There I am up front at another funeral
home. The deceased is the sister of a
woman in the congregation and pretty much everybody at church knew her, so they
were all gathered together as the service began. The surviving sister, who was always a little
odd, then stood up and turned to the congregation behind her, lifted a camera
to her face, and the flash went off.
Then she turned to the people in the side alcove and pointed and the
flash went off again. Then she moved up
toward the front, toward the casket, and lifted her arm… the look on her poor
husband’s face! Quickly I said, “Let us
pray,” and down went the heads and closed went the eyes, and out shot her
husband’s hand to grab her arm and guide her back to her chair and he kept his
arm right there around her during the whole service.) One does not do that.
Jesus
interrupted the burial procession, which must have offended everyone at
first. But then he messed with the whole
process.
“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.” [Luke 7:14]
Raising a corpse back to life is very different
from waddling in where you don’t belong as a two-year-old who doesn’t know
better, or showing signs of dementia. Luke
says of the people who witnessed it that “they
glorified God” but that was only after their first reaction, when “Fear seized them”. [7:16] And well it should.
You
could say, which is true, that Jesus was showing compassion on a living woman
who in that time and place was likely doomed to a life of terrible poverty and
abuse because she had no male protector, no husband or son. You could say that Jesus, by raising this
man, was restoring what you might consider the natural order where parents die
before children rather than having to bury them. You could say that Jesus was demonstrating
his status as a prophet in Israel, echoing the way that Elijah had raised the
son of a widow in Zarephath. All of that
is true.
There
is one rule in life, though, that nothing is certain but death and taxes. People would test him another time about the
taxes, but on his own here Jesus makes the point that when he is in the
picture, dying is provisional.
“Death,
be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty
and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For
those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die
not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From
rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much
pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And
soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest
of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou
art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And
dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And
poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And
better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One
short sleep past, we wake eternally
And
death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”
Those
brave words come from John Donne, the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London at
a time when London was a city regularly emptied out by the plague. In 1665, thirty-four years after his death,
the last great outbreak of the Black Death carried away roughly 15% of
London. People were dying at about 7,000
per week. How could anybody in that
situation say,
“Death,
be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty
and dreadful, for thou art not so”
except
that they had reason to believe that there is something far stronger and a
reality far more deep than what they could and did see all around them? How can anyone today go into a refugee camp
or look at conditions in a field hospital somewhere in the Middle East or look
into the hollow eyes of a drug lord committed to a merciless business of
terror, except that they know how Jesus first held up his hand and said, “Stop
the funeral. Don’t give death the last
word.”?
That gives courage to the nurse
caring for the Ebola victim in Liberia and to the prisoner in jail for his
faith in North Korea. Lest you think
that only applies in the most dramatic situations, and not to those of us who
(thankfully) are spared those trials, here’s one more funeral story. Actually, it’s sort of a pre-funeral
story. A woman who was dying of cancer
handed me a piece of paper. It was a map
of a national park in Hawaii and had an ‘X’ marked on it. She asked me to hold it until her funeral and
then to give it to her grandson. It
showed where she wanted him to take her ashes and to leave them. I asked her what the significance of the
place was. “There isn’t any. But my grandson works hard and never takes a
vacation. This is my way of making him
take time off and go someplace nice.”
We interrupt this funeral to bring
you a word from our sponsor.
“God so loved the world that he sent his only Son, that
whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
No comments:
Post a Comment