An Open Table where Love knows no borders

In the Face of Death

A sermon on 1 Kings 17:8-24 & Luke 7:11-17 by Nathan Nettleton

There are times when the Church’s set cycle of Bible readings for Sunday worship clashes jarringly with the events in our lives, and for us here, this is one of those weeks. At the recent funeral for baby Greta, I quoted the growly old prophet Athol Gill as saying that any version of the gospel that couldn’t be preached in front of a mother grieving over the death of her children wasn’t worth preaching at all. Well, today that is very much our challenge, because Liesl and Dom are back with us for the first time since the funeral of their baby, and the lectionary throws up not just one but two stories in which miraculous interventions raise dead people to life and return them to their grieving mothers. Even if we hadn’t already buried Greta, none of us would be expecting a miracle to restore her to us, so what is the good news that we are to proclaim from these stories? These events affect us all and in the last fortnight I have had pastoral conversations with quite a few of you who for whom this has stirred up old griefs and/or prompted serious faith questions about how such tragedies can happen to people who have been surrounded by the prayers of a faithful community offered to an all-good and all-loving God. Some of you have also mentioned the crippling illness that Paul and Merryl’s granddaughter is facing. Where is God in such situations, and if God is good and we are faithfully praying, how come innocent children still suffer and die? Some of your painful questions have helped shape this sermon.

I’m going to focus on these questions more than the Bible readings tonight, but it is hearing these readings at this particular time that forces the questions into such painful clarity, so I’m certainly not going to ignore them and I want to start with a couple of general observations about them before focussing in on our questions. Firstly, the reason that the two stories come up together when they are so similar is because they are intentionally related to one another. Luke, the gospel writer, is deliberately alluding to the older Elijah story in the way he tells this story about Jesus, and indeed, Luke has already told us about Jesus quoting the story about the widow and her son at Zarephath in the sermon that nearly got him killed in Nazareth. Jesus quoted it when he was making the very unpopular point that God is just as willing to love and save the foreigners as the Jews. And Luke lets us know here that his point hasn’t really sunk in yet, because when Jesus raises the young man back to life, the people respond by saying “God has looked favourably on his people!” They are still sure that God has favourites, and it was quite normal for religious people of that day to imagine that God would listen to their prayers and not the prayers of outsiders. So at Nazareth Jesus was seen as violating good and proper religious boundaries of clean and unclean, acceptable and unacceptable, and he is similarly unconcerned about such boundaries in tonight’s story. Luke tells us that Jesus stepped forward and touched the wooden bed on which the body was being carried to the burial ground, and that is something that people did not do. Only the immediate family and the bearers would ever touch it, because to touch it made you ritually unclean. Take the modern aversion to touching coffins and multiply it a hundredfold. But Jesus has no fear of crossing this boundary and touching the dead. His willingness to encounter death is important in another way too, because Luke is not only alluding back to the story of the widow of Zarephath. He is also alluding forward. The next time his story introduces a widow grieving the death of her son, the son will be Jesus himself. So, among other things, Luke is emphasising that Jesus is always ready to get intimately involved with the suffering and tragedies of our lives and deaths. When death comes trampling into our lives, Jesus does not shrink back from touching it or being touched by it.

But how come it comes trampling in at all? If God is all-loving and all-good and wants only the best for us, how come the world God has created is so constantly afflicted by random suffering and death? This is, of course, an enormous question that has occupied the world’s best thinkers and filled shelves of books, and even if I had all the the answers, there is no way I could do it justice in a few minutes tonight. So I will attempt little more than pointing in the direction of a few possible answers. There is one false answer that we cannot avoid, because it comes up so often and it comes up in one of our readings. Faced with the death of her son, the widow at Zarephath turns on Elijah and says, “What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance, and to cause the death of my son!” And similarly, over and over, we hear people cry out “What have I done to deserve this?” One of the things such questions reveal is how desperately we want to believe in an orderly and fair universe where bad things only happen to those who deserve them. Because if suffering only came as a punishment for wrong doing, then we could keep ourselves and our families secure by being good. But despite all the religious voices that try to construct such a simple, black-and-white universe, the Bible holds up Job and Jesus as the living proof that evil and suffering are not under control and goodness does not protect you from their random attacks.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but so far I have been leaving a line out of the usual way this classic question of suffering and evil is expressed. I’ve referred to God being all-loving and all-good, but usually the question also refers to God’s power. Because, of course, we accept that plenty of people are loving and good but lack the power to really change the way things are, but if God is all-loving, all-good, and all-powerful, then surely God would both want to and be able to eliminate suffering and evil from the world. But there are two good reasons — both relevant to our questions tonight — why we might conclude that the idea that God is all-powerful may be misleading. Firstly, and most importantly, if we believe that Jesus is the primary and ultimate self-revelation of God, then that self-revelation, ending as it does in rejection, suffering and a tortured death, is hardly one that demands the label of all-powerful. Jesus seemed to be much more on about, as the Apostle Paul put it, emptying himself of power. Which leads us to the second reason.

Not only the revelation in Jesus, but even basic logic should probably be understood as pointing to the idea that in creating the world, God voluntarily relinquished the power to control everything that goes on in it. Why? Because God is love and God created the world for love. And love and control are mutually exclusive. If God were to program the world so that nothing and no one could ever do wrong, and we all loved God not in freedom but because we were pre-programmed automatons who could not do otherwise, would that really be love? Could God take delight in such a relationship, in such ‘love’? Would any of us ever want to create such relationships really? If Liesl and Dom could be given a cast iron guarantee that their next baby would be born safely and in perfect health, but only at the cost of its freedom so that it was really a kind of robot that could only ever do what it was programmed to do for the rest of its life, would they choose to create such a baby? I doubt it. The cost would be too high. I’m sure they would rather take the risk again of creating a baby who will be free to become whatever it will become. The same risk God took in creating us, in creating the world, voluntarily creating a universe that could not be pre-programmed and controlled, a universe that was free to go wrong. And unfortunately that free universe has now been so damaged by so many generations of freedom used badly, that all sorts of things go horribly wrong and most of the causes are so clouded in the mists of time that they are impossible to unravel.

God not only took the risk of creating a free world that could go wrong, God took the risk of being left to wear the blame for it when it does go wrong. And so it is no sin to get angry at God and shake our fists at heaven. In creating the world with such freedom, God willingly took on the responsibility for what happened next. God took the risk of being left to carry the blame for the damage done and the suffering caused by what was created. We are rightly disgusted by leaders who try to distance themselves from all responsibility for what is done by those beneath them. Let me assure you that God is not like that. God is willing and able to shoulder the blame and allow us to vent all our anger and anguish direct at God. When the son of the widow in Zarephath died, Elijah accused God of killing him and angrily demanded to know what God was playing at, and there is not the slightest hint in the story that God took offence or was angry or turned away from Elijah. In the book of Job, Job makes lots of angry accusations against God for allowing undeserved suffering, and at the end, God says that Job is the only one who has spoken rightly of God. God is always ready to share our pain, to wear the responsibility for it, and to love us no matter what.

Where does prayer fit into all this? What is the point of asking God to keep people safe and make people well if God doesn’t have the power to control things? Does our faith and our prayer actually make any difference at all? Well, the simple answer is ‘we don’t know’, but I probably need to elaborate on that a little. Even if it is true that God does not have the power to control everything and dictate every outcome, that does not mean that God does not have the power to influence anything or to act within situations in ways that might not be total control but which might tip the scales in the right direction.

Tonight’s gospel story is actually a challenge to anyone who says that praying with enough faith is the single key to ensuring God’s response. You see, this story follows straight on from the one we heard last week where the centurion prayed to Jesus with such perfect faith and his prayer was answered. But in this next story, the only faith expressed is by Jesus himself. Neither the widow nor anybody else asks him to do anything at all. Whatever it was that enabled Jesus to act with such power in this instance, it was not dependent on anyone else’s faith or prayer. He just did it.

But that does’t mean our faith and prayer is irrelevant. Jesus clearly taught his followers to pray, and to persist in prayer even when there seems to be no response, and so in line with last week’s message about recognising Jesus’s authority and doing what he says, whether we understand it or not, that is reason enough to keep praying. But we can also trust that Jesus does not instruct us to do things that are meaningless and futile. We don’t need to know how it works to trust that our prayer participates in the Spirit’s quest to overcome evil and suffering and expand the reach of love and mercy and wellbeing. Even if it were nothing else, and I’m sure it is more but even if it was nothing else than that changing the world begins with changing us, and praying changes us, then that would be enough reason to know that prayer accomplishes important things. I’m sure there is more than that, but the more remains largely in the realm of the mysterious ways of the spirit. But that shouldn’t surprise us because isn’t it the same with our communication with one another? We seldom understand why we can’t get through to someone one day, and another day something that is said changes everything. God is not a divine vending machine, but a living being who we will have even more trouble figuring out than all the other living beings we try to relate to and communicate with.

There are lots of things we do on faith and hope but very little understanding. Once when one of my dogs was very sick, the vet said to me, “You could give her this medication. There is good anecdotal evidence that it often works, but we have absolutely no scientific understanding of why.” Did I give it to her? Of course I did. And you can think of prayer for others much like that. It doesn’t do any harm. It is too much of a mystery for us to be able to explain why it ever does good, but it seems that it sometimes does. And so the only time that it would ever be best not to keep praying is when God has already told you that he wants you to be the answer to the prayer and he’s telling you to get off your knees and go and get on with it. We prayed and Greta still died. Does that mean that she didn’t benefit from our prayers? No, it doesn’t. And even less does it mean our prayers were of no value at all to anyone.

I don’t know that I’ve answered too many questions or said anything terribly helpful here. When you’re grieving the death of a baby, nothing really makes any sense anyway, and most of what I’ve said is just speculative theory that doesn’t go anywhere near answering our agonised cries of ‘why?’ But here at this table, speculative theory ends and a new reality begins. Here Jesus meets us in our brokenness, and when there is nothing to say and no answers that mean anything, he reaches out and touches us with the touch of life. Don’t worry too much about theological answers. Instead, here at this table, prayerfully imagine yourself as the bereaved widow at the city gate of Nain, or even as the young man on the bier being carried out to his grave. Hear the breaking of hearts in the breaking of bread, and the splash of tears in the pouring of wine and water. And then allow Jesus to reach out, even when public opinion and religious sensibilities say that he shouldn’t, to touch you and lift you up to something new. Even in the face of very real death, and even when God doesn’t answer the prayers we most want answered or give us the life we most wanted to receive, God is with us, meeting us in our grief, touching the untouchable, gathering our brokenness into his wholeness, and binding up our hearts with love that keeps on being raised to new life.

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