Don t Cry 1 Kings 17:18-24; Luke 7:11-17 First Presbyterian Church of Greenlawn The Rev. Frederick Woodward June 6, 2010 1 Kings 17:8-16(17-24) (NIV) Then the word of the LORD came to him: "Go at once to Zarephath of Sidon and stay there. I have commanded a widow in that place to supply you with food." So he went to Zarephath. When he came to the town gate, a widow was there gathering sticks. He called to her and asked, "Would you bring me a little water in a jar so I may have a drink?" As she was going to get it, he called, "And bring me, please, a piece of bread." "As surely as the LORD your God lives," she replied, "I don't have any bread-- only a handful of flour in a jar and a little oil in a jug. I am gathering a few sticks to take home and make a meal for myself and my son, that we may eat it-- and die." Elijah said to her, "Don't be afraid. Go home and do as you have said. But first make a small cake of bread for me from what you have and bring it to me, and then make something for yourself and your son. For this is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: 'The jar of flour will not be used up and the jug of oil will not run dry until the day the LORD gives rain on the land.'" She went away and did as Elijah had told her. So there was food every day for Elijah and for the woman and her family. For the jar of flour was not used up and the jug of oil did not run dry, in keeping with the word of the LORD spoken by Elijah. Some time later the son of the woman who owned the house became ill. He grew worse and worse, and finally stopped breathing. She said to Elijah, "What do you have against me, man of God? Did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son?" "Give me your son," Elijah replied. He took him from her arms, carried him to the upper room where he was staying, and laid him on his bed. Then he cried out to the LORD, "O LORD my God, have you brought tragedy also upon this widow I am staying with, by causing her son to die?" Then he stretched himself out on the boy three times and cried to the LORD, "O LORD my God, let this boy's life return to him!" The LORD heard Elijah's cry, and the boy's life returned to him, and he lived. Elijah picked up the child and carried him down from the room into the house. He gave him to his mother and said, "Look, your son is alive!" Then the woman said to Elijah, "Now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the LORD from your mouth is the truth." Luke 7:11-17 (NIV) Soon afterward, Jesus went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went along with him. As he approached the town gate, a dead person was being carried out-- the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. And a large crowd from the town was with her. When the Lord saw her, his heart went out to her and he said, "Don't cry." Then he went up and touched the coffin, and those carrying it stood still. He said, "Young man, I say to you, get up!" 1
The dead man sat up and began to talk, and Jesus gave him back to his mother. They were all filled with awe and praised God. "A great prophet has appeared among us," they said. "God has come to help his people." This news about Jesus spread throughout Judea and the surrounding country. Don t Cry I once commanded a dead person to get up, but she did not get up. The person who did not get up was my mother. If she had gotten up and had stayed up, she would have celebrated her 99th birthday yesterday, but she died in her 63 rd year. At the time, 63 seemed awfully old; but to most of us here, it no longer seems very old at all. I want to assure you that I did not actually command my mother to rise up from the dead. At least, I did not really expect that she would get up at my command. I may have been crazy at the time- and I was crazy with unvoiced grief- but I was not that crazy. I was distraught and overwhelmed by a death I could not then accept. I was, as we say so glibly today, in total denial. Of course, my denial, my refusal, in effect, to permit my mother to die, quickly ran aground of the facts- for she had died, and nothing I could either do or say was going to change that fact. My mother had died suddenly and unexpectedly on New Years Eve following my first semester away at graduate school. I had invited friends over to celebrate New Years Eve together, and when my father called in the early evening with his terrible news, a few of my friends had already begun arriving for dinner. We were already relaxing with one another, and when the phone rang, one of my pals called out a stupid phone greeting that I repeated as I picked up the phone. I forget my exact words, but I pretended that the caller had reached not a private residence, but a funeral home. I said something like, Joe s Mortuary. You stab em, we slab em, or some other such non-sense. There was a long pause, and then my father said, it s about your mother. Did you ever say something you regretted? Well, I regretted those words, and it took a very long while for me to accept God s forgiveness of me for saying them. Anyway, after receiving my father s news, I packed a suitcase in record time, rushed to the airport, and boarded a flight back to New York. The clock struck midnight as our jet was taxiing to the terminal at LaGuardia. When the stewardess wished us all a Happy New Year, I thought to myself, there is nothing at all happy about this New Year. But I did not cry. Once back in Huntington with my father, brothers and sister, we did together what families do on the occasion of death. We began making funeral preparations, and we shared meals and stories. The time came for us to receive visitors at Jacobsen s funeral home, but before they arrived, we were permitted time alone with my mother s body. Now I want to assure you that I did not put my hand on my mother s casket with the conscious intention of raising her from the dead. But when I saw my mother laid out in a dress she had recently worn to mark a very special occasion in my own life, and wearing a pearl, jade and gold pin that I had given her to celebrate a very special occasion in hers, I encountered the surprising tenacity of my own denial. 2
But I did not cry. I did not cry because I could neither really believe nor fully accept that my mother had actually died. She was lying there in front of me, the first dead person I had ever seen in my life, and I refused to believe it. And so as I stood over her open casket, a voice arose within me quite despite myself saying, Mom, get up. But she did not get up. And she did not get up even after those words rose from within me with increasing insistence and desperation. She did not get up, and still, I did not cry. It is difficult for a young man to lose his mother, and it is no easier, I am sure, for a mother to lose her young son. Luke tells a story about such a mother, a widow, who grieved not only the loss of her only son, but also what surely must have seemed like the end of her own life. For to be a widowed woman without a male child in ancient times was to be cut off from all means of economic and social support. Since her son s death practically declared a sentence of death upon her, this widowed woman might as well have been walking to her own grave. But on the way there, she encountered Life. She encountered Jesus. Permitting this death march to proceed directly into the precincts of his own heart, Jesus changed the situation, as he always does, with both word and deed. As the widow made her way with the other mourners, Jesus went over to her and said, don t cry. Has anybody ever told you, don t cry? And have you ever said the words, don t cry to somebody else? Maybe you said those words to a small child, or maybe you received those words from a close friend. Sometime the words, don t cry, are good words, caring words, but sometimes they are neither caring nor good. The words, don t cry, may not be good words if they reflect my inability to enter into the pain of the one who weeps. If I tell someone not to cry simply because I cannot bear to see anybody grieve, mine are selfish words that may help me to take care of myself, but they are of no use to anybody else. Sometimes, the words don t cry may even be cruel words, especially if they hijack the grief process while failing to address the underlying situation of loss or death. In Jesus case, however, the words, don t cry were words of power, promise, and deep compassion. When Jesus said, don t cry, he was announcing his authority to alter the underlying situation of death. He was restoring hope in a circumstance marked by hopelessness. Jesus words amounted to a down payment on a promise, a promise that Jesus would change the situation so that neither stopped-up nor gushing tears would any longer be the order of the day. And when Jesus said, don t cry, he was not standing off at some safe remove from the widow who grieved. Our translation understates Jesus visceral response to the widow s grief when it reports only that his heart went out to her. What the original Greek suggests is that Jesus wrenchingly identified himself 1 with 1 Splagnizomai is a verb formed from the noun splagnon which refers to our inward parts or entrails, and is used figuratively to describe the seat of the emotions. The verb is used only three times in Luke s Gospel. Outside of this passage, the verb is used of the Samaritan who was deeply moved at the plight of his neighbor who was robbed and left for dead (10:33). It is also used of the father s response to the return of the prodigal whom he runs to greet and kiss (15:20). 3
this widow whose son s death marked the effective end of her own life. Jesus risked himself to take on her pain. And because so much was at stake for the widow, Jesus dared to make himself ritually unclean by coming into direct proximity with the dead (Numb. 19:11; 16). He did that by placing his hand on the coffin and immediately bringing the funeral procession to a halt. Jesus compassionate action was directed toward the mother, and only rather incidentally toward the son. She was the prime beneficiary of Jesus miracle. The miracle was not so much that Jesus restored a dead man to life, but that he restored a dead son to his widowed mother, and so restored life to her. The miracle was that Jesus, like the prophet Elijah before him, gave a woman back her son (Luke 7:15b; 1 Kings 17:23b). When Jesus said, don t cry, he was not, in other words, offering cheap consolation. We all know what cheap consolation feels like and what it accomplishes in our lives: cheap consolation is an insult and it offers us nothing. Jesus does not offer anyone cheap consolation, he changes our world. What in your world needs changing today? What sort of death march are you making right now? What coffin are you accompanying to the grave? Maybe the death you mourn today is not a physical death. Maybe it is the death of a hope, the death of an ideal, or the death of a dream. Or might it be for you, as it was for me when my mother died, that you are denying that you have even come into the presence of death at all? To embrace the good news of the resurrection, we need to acknowledge the reality of death. We must acknowledge that death is real, although it does not have the last word. Among our greatest impediments in receiving Jesus gift of life is not simply our refusal to trust in Jesus, but also our denial of the death around us and in us. If there is no death, there will be no tears. But where there has been no death, there can be no resurrection. There are all kinds of death, of course. Death visits not only our individual lives but also our corporate ones. People die, but so do businesses, enterprises, institutions and even civilizations. Many writers today speak of the death of Christendom, the death of the old reality when to be an American was to be a Christian, and to be a Christian was to be an American, when everybody joined the church as an expression of the obligations of good citizenship, although not necessarily as an expression of faithful discipleship to Jesus Christ. Have we begun to mourn the death of Christendom? Have we acknowledged that there is even a death to mourn? A good place to start our grieving process would be at our ball fields on Sunday mornings, whether across the street or down Pulaski at the high school. When we ask, as we do, where are all the children who used to be in the church, one answer, of course, is that they are at the ball fields. And that they are at the ball fields or home at their computers on Sunday mornings, something unimaginable when my mother was still alive, is pretty good evidence of the death of Christendom. At the local level, I wonder at times, whether we have properly marked the death in this place of the church of the 1960s and 1970s and even 1980s. Perhaps we need to properly grieve the death of our formerly robust membership, the death of our formerly flush finances. Perhaps we need to mark the death of our former self-confidence as a 4
church boasting of more than 1200 members. That church is no more, and perhaps we do not do ourselves any good by simply repeating the words get up over that open casket. To permit ourselves some genuine expression of grief over our diminishment and our loss of self-confidence as a programsize 2 church may not be such a bad thing, for God does not call us to self-confidence, but to confidence in the steadfast love and provision of our God in Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. In our confidence in Jesus, we may better resist the temptations of struggling congregations to turn to the technicians of church growth who make grandiose promises about returning struggling churches to their former days of glory. In our confidence in Jesus Christ, we may resist the temptation of looking for quick fixes to fill our church with children. In our confidence in Jesus Christ, we may think harder together about what our purpose is as a church anyway. Are we here after all to make good citizens or faithful disciples? In our confidence in Jesus Christ, we may better resist the temptation to believe that our church s future in our secular society is dependent upon our own efforts to stay alive. The belief that the church s survival depends on our own efforts is actually an expression of atheism. Such a belief effectively denies that Jesus is with us and gives us everything necessary for our life for him and with each other. It was not until I was heading back to the airport after my mother s death that the floodgates to my tears were finally opened. But I still did not grieve her death well, and my failure to grieve her death well was very much related to my own crisis of faith. I could not let my mother not be because I did not trust that God will be. I did not trust that if only God is and will be, then all will be well. I could not let my mother die 35 years ago because I had stopped believing in the resurrection. Do you believe in the resurrection? Really believe? Do you believe that Christ has the power to breathe life into all the dead bones around here, the dead bones that are in us, that are in you, and that are in me? Do we trust Christ enough to face death squarely, or will we be a people who deny death at all costs, even when it is laid out in front of us? What death do we need to acknowledge around here before we can truly live again as a resurrection people? When Jesus said to the woman, don t be afraid, he was not offering the woman false consolation. When Jesus said to his disciples, I am with you always, he was not offering the church false hope. Jesus was offering the church the key to its life. And as we come together to celebrate this common meal, let us trust in the one who not only gave a widow her son back, but who also comes to give the church its own life back, if only we will trust that He is with us now and always. Halleluiah and amen. 2 Various writers discuss the structure, characteristics, relationships and needs of congregations in terms of their various sizes. According to a classic typology offered by Arlin Rothauge, Sizing up a Congregation for New Member Ministry (Episcopal Church Center: New York, 1986), there are four different congregational sizes: family (up to 50 active members); pastoral (50-150); program (150-350); and corporation (350-500). 5