A sermon based upon Luke 7: 1-17
Charles J. Tomlin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
2nd Sunday of Pentecost, June 6th, 2010
Last month, the popular website “You Tube” celebrated its 5th anniversary. As a part of the celebration, the news media reviewed some of the most viewed videos. One of those was the unforgettable wedding that went from processional and party as the bridesmaids, groomsmen and bride joyfully danced down the aisle.
The same kind of thing happens at a New Orleans Jazz funeral. The Jazz funeral begins as the funeral procession as it walks away from the church and toward the grave with the playing of somber, serious, and sad funeral dirges with songs like, “Just as Closer Walk with Thee”. There is no improvising, no frills and nothing but “blue” sadness being blown from the brass band lead by a muted snare drum.
Once the final words are spoken and the body is lowered into the ground, the mood shifts. Bright umbrellas burst open, the snare drummer removes the mute, and the funeral procession heads back in positive, party mode with the festive strains of “When the Saints God Marching In” and “Didn’t He Ramble?” Folks waiting along the roadside, who moments before watched the procession go by playing somber notes of hymns played low, now hear a celebration approaching and wait in renewed anticipation. (Bbased upon Kim Buchannan’s sermon “From Procession to Party” at DayOne.org).
DEAD MAN SPEAKING
Today’s Scripture gives us two, not one, reason to celebrate. Luke tells us of two healing miracles of Jesus; the distant healing of a centurion’s son (7:1-10), and the raising of a widow’s only son from death (7:11-17). But it is in this second story that we find the high moment of both stories when it says: “The dead man sat up and began to speak...” (7:15). As Luke records this miracle, it was just as surprising and unexpected then, as it would be now.
Once a pastor was performing a graveside service and accidently did the unthinkable. He took a step backward and accidently stepped into the grave and brought the casket down too, crashing it down into the grave. He commented later that there was “no graceful” way out of such an embarrassing situation, unless you could bring the corpse back up with you. But that just does not happen in any normal way of thinking.
Death is life’s most fundamental truth, but our text today would give us an exception. Gaining wisdom for living must be more than just knowing that death is coming. You don’t even need the gospel to gain this kind of wisdom. But knowing how death can be interrupted, delayed and even conquered, that is something much more. In this story, Jesus refuses to perform a funeral. Jesus did not come just to get us to face the inevitable, but Jesus came to challenge the inevitable with all kinds of new possibilities.
Last Sunday, I as Memorial Day came to a close I watched a 60 minute spot about the risk certain soldiers took to find and disarm roadside bombs in Afghanistan. These soldiers were highly trained and knew full well the risks and dangers such a job entailed. The news reporter asked one of them point blank: “What enables you to do such a risky and brave thing, when you know full well that you could be maimed or worse, killed, as have many been, who have taken on this job? What drives you to dare such a dangerous mission? The soldier paused and moment and answered first with humor, “I guess you have to be a little crazy” but then became more serious and continued, “and I also have this feeling that what I do makes a difference.”
In one sense, it would be very ridiculous for anyone to think that a human might have the ultimate powers of life and death---that is, that we could stop death from coming or that we could create a life. But on the other hand, there is a very real sense that all of us have this power right now in our own mind by the way we see things and in our own hands by the way we do things. Every single one of us, as decision-making humans, make choices daily that have the potential to create life or move us more quickly toward death. Moses once informed the people of Israel of their own ability to “interrupt death” with life, when he challenged them: “See, I have set before you life and prosperity, death and destruction, …. Now choose life, that you and your children may live.” (Deut. 30: 15; 19).
The first thing this gospel story has to say, is that no matter whether we are young or old, death can be interrupted. Although on the day we are born, an imaginable death certificate was filled out with our name on it, the date was left open. Death is certain, but the why, how, and when of it has much more to do with how we decide to live. Like a military “bomb squad”, we too have been given the ability to interrupt death.
Of course, when you’re young, when the rest of your life is in front of you, and if things are going well for you at the moment, it can be difficult to grasp the culture of death that threatens life. Unless you realize that you live in a war zone, like they do in Afghanistan, you could be very much unaware of all the negative triggers and powers which can challenge or steal life at any time. But if you doubt that spiritual battle is always close at hand, just underneath the surface of society’s public face, just take a trip to Japan. There, in very small country in comparison to ours, a person takes their own life every 15 seconds. “Collective death pacts” are also a concern for epidemic among youth. An article in “Asia Times Online” headlines, “Suicide also rises in the land of the rising sun.” Despite signs of economic recovery, this trickle of good news that recovery is coming doesn’t seem to reach those still unemployed, the young who have fewer opportunities or those still going bankrupt in Japan, who are locked out of life by their despair. Since 2003, one place in Japan called Aokigahara woods, located at the base of the picturesque Mount Fuji, is today known as “suicide forest”, because since in that one area, 78 middle-aged men committed suicide by hanging themselves from tree branches. What I found most “sobering” is that a longer than expected “economic slump” is a real factor in the rising culture of death in Japan. (www.atimes.com/atimes/Japan/FG28Dh01.html
If that is not proof of what “lies at the door” (Gen. 4:7) or might loom just over the horizon, come a little closer the “culture of death” that recently invaded the pristine campus of Cornell University in New York. This spring, in less than month, 3 University students jumped off bridges that crossed over deep gorges surrounding the campus. The University took the matter so seriously, that during exam week a few weeks ago, professors stopped classes to inform students they cared for them, personally, not just academically. Then, during exam week, residential advisors knocked on dorm doors to ask students “how they were doing?” Even the president of the university, David J. Skorton, took a full page in the University paper for an article in which he wrote these words: “Your well-being is the foundation upon which your success is built. If you learn anything at Cornell, please learn to ask for help.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/education/17cornell.html)
Let’s take one step closer, just a couple of miles down the road from us, at Bear Creek Baptist Church near Mocksville. I recently went there for an Associational meeting and was informed that the church had recently experienced an increase in attendance. I walked up to their new pastor, a retired missionary and asked what was happening? He told me all they were doing to turn their church around was to respond to the suicides that had taken place in their own church community. A church---growing through suicides---who would ever think of such of thing?
What more do I need to say to illustrate how quickly the “culture of death” can threaten, especially when a society or when people have become “fixated” on defining our lives by “what” a person thinks they must have rather than focusing on “who” or “what kind of person” we are, and can become, even in the midst of loss and death?
LIVE MAN LOVING
Of course, the million dollar question of “interrupting death” is “how”? What empowers people to challenge the “throws of death” around us? How can we turn a potential “funeral” in our hard times, into a party of life?
Consider what “empowered” life and this dead man to “sit up and speak” in our text, by first comparing the two stories of healing and new life which Luke gives us. In the first story, Jesus enters the resort town of Capernaum, where a prominent, Roman centurion comes to make a request for the healing of his prized servant. In the second story, as Jesus approaches the much smaller, less significant town of Nain, when he comes upon a funeral procession where a man was being carried, but there is no request for help. This is a funeral procession and it’s presumed to be over. In the first story, the centurion is speaking in behalf of his slave, who is ill, but no one is speaking in behalf of this widow who has lost her only son. Nobody approaches Jesus on his or her behalf. Finally, in this first story, very strangely, it is Jewish Elders who take the initiative to approach Jesus, asking him to go to the home of this Roman and his slave, but in the second story it is Jesus himself who sees the son’s mother, who was also a widow; and our text says, “when the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, “Do not weep.” (7:13).
What I find so arresting about this second story is that when no one was invited, nothing was expected, and nothing was asked for, this is when the most amazing thing happened and God’s power over death is displayed. It was in the worse and most desperate situation that death was interrupted. All this happened, Luke tell us, because of one word we dare not overlook or underestimate: this one word is “compassion.”
Compassion may be the most powerful resource we can have to confront the culture of despair, death and destruction before us and our world in these days. And what is most revealing about this word is not what it says, but what it does. The word carries the idea of much more than feeling pity “for” someone, but it carries the action of the Latin word “com” which means “together”, combining it with the Latin idea of “pati” or “suffering”, which means “suffering together” rather than suffering alone.
When I consider how Jesus interrupted death with the power of compassion, I see something that the world needs so much, but seldom asks for. In this world that has become so demanding about so many things, the one thing we seldom ask for is what we need most: compassion---this ability to feel with and for each other in our moments of our deepest hurt and pain. Compassion for and with each other is the “passion” we need most and which can interrupt the culture of death that threatens.
Recently, my Foot Doctor in Charlotte, who has five young sons, told me about a church he’d been attending, called the “Elevation Church.” “It’s the fastest growing church in Charlotte and in the Southeast”, he told me. He continued to explain how “The music in the service is young and it is rock, but the pastor and the message is incredibly forthright and daring.” I went online to the church’s website to learn a little about the church and its Baptist pastor, Steven Furtick, and I discovered something that really turned me off, at first. In a bio sketch, the pastor seemed to be bragging to all those 20 something’s who make up bulk of the target worshippers, about how he never even kissed his girl friend, who became his wife, until they were married.
At first I thought to myself, how ridiculous, but then I kept on thinking about it. Then I thought, “Hey, this could be the one radical thing these young people needed to hear to shake them from the demonic presupposition, that in order to be really happy, you’ve got to take it all when you want it.” Maybe this young pastor, being a child of his age, has understood perfectly what’s going on, and understood that to take on the world’s culture of death, you must turn your “passion” into “compassion” and do something that would help shake himself and lead others away from a culture so deathly obsessed with sex and the satisfaction of the flesh. In his “wild” and “extreme” act, he focused on what was most important for “life” in his relationship, and in doing so, he challenges others toward a culture of life, rather than death.
LIVING PEOPLE CARING
Our world desperately needs people who will translate their passions for life into a compassion for others locked in a culture of death. We have, even in our own lives, the ability to be a people who can interrupt “death” with the God-given powers of life and hope. As John wrote in his first letter, “We know we have passed from death to life because we love one another…. (1 John 3.14).
I guess this is the part where I’m suppose to challenge you graduates and anyone else here today, to go out into this world and try to “interrupt death” by living like Jesus in this world. It is the right thing to do, but I’m going do something else. I want to encourage you to open your heart passionately to God in a way that keeps your heart compassionately open to the needs of the world around with a love that is “stronger than death.” Of course, we don’t have the power to “raise the dead” just like Jesus did, but It might just surprise you how much power for life you have, even in very simple choices we make to live and to love with both passion and compassion each and every day.
Major League baseball umpire Jim Joyce made a bad call on first base, calling a runner safe, when it became clear the runner was out, it prevented Detroit Tiger pitcher Armando Galarraga from his perfect game and from making history with what could have been only the 21st perfect game pitched in Baseball history. After the blunder by the umpire became evident, there were all kinds of calls for the acceptance of Instant replay in baseball and there were also calls for Baseball commissioner Bud Selig to overturn the call, which so far he has refused to do.
What I think did come out of major league baseball this week is something even better than perfect plays or perfect calls. What took place was something we all needed to see---two grown men actually acting like they were grown up by showing understanding and compassion and respect for each other, as one asked forgiveness and the other granted it. This is game sports are supposed to be teaching and displaying. What could have been a culture of selfishness and anger moving our culture ever closer to its death, became instead a moment of forgiveness, understanding moving us toward compassion, understanding and a culture of life. Sports Illustrated even headlined the event a “hug out” rather than a “slug out”. Isn’t it amazing the power humans have to make the world a better place, not because we are perfect, but because we make the choice to have compassion, not just for people we like, but also for the people who are hurt, or even for the people who hurt us?
Roger Gustafson, tells how at a recent church assembly, a band played for worship and during the breaks between sessions. Various members of the band would occasionally say a few words by way of introduction; except one, the rhythm guitarist. She simply played and never said a word, until the last morning.
That morning, as the assembly members were sitting and chatting with each other at their tables, she stepped up to her microphone and said, "I just wanted to say thanks." The conversation died down as everyone turned their attention to the stage.
"A few years ago," she began, "my life was pretty messed up. I was on the outside, looking in. I didn’t care about much. Church? Couldn’t care less. God? Couldn’t care less."
"But then," she told the assembly, "something happened. You came out to me. You were on the inside, and you came out. You welcomed me. You told me that the tattoos didn’t matter. You told me that the body piercing didn’t matter. You meant it! You were real. After a while I started to get to know this Jesus, and I got to know him through you. "So, I just wanted to say thanks." (From a sermon, “Change The World, Yes You!” @ Goodpreacher.com).
People stopping the march of death, by speaking simple words of forgiveness and grace and bringing forth life. Who knows what potential lies in people who have been given the ability to interrupt death with life! Amen.
© 2010 All rights reserved Charles J. Tomlin, B.A., M.Div. D.Min.
© 2010 All rights reserved Charles J. Tomlin, B.A., M.Div. D.Min.
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