A Sermon
Presented by Rev. Merlin T. Batt
Intentional Interim Pastor
St. Matthew’s United Church of Christ
Maiden, North Carolina
Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
June 10, 2007
Scripture Lessons: I Kings 17:8-24; Luke 7:11-17
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Come with me on an imaginative journey with Jesus as he enters a town six miles southeast of his hometown Nazareth, and about twenty-five miles southwest of Capernaum, where Jesus’ Galilean ministry headquarters was located. The town Jesus we are entering is called Nain. You and I are among a crowd of people accompanying Jesus on the journey. As we approach the city gate, we see a common sight in those days, a funeral procession slowly making its way out the gate of the walled town toward a nearby hill in which a small cave has been dug. It appears that everybody in town is part of the sad procession.
Since we are from another culture and time, we need to know a few things about death and dying in that part of the world where and when Jesus lived. The death rate in Jesus’ day was no different than ours – 100% of all people born eventually died. But most everything else about death and dying in those days was quite different than that to which you and I are accustomed.
First of all, people typically died at home. There was no hiding the fact of death as there is now: no hospitals for the sick, no nursing homes for the aged, and no hospices for the terminally ill. Dying people were cared for, not by specialists in an institution for the sick and dying, but by family members at home
When death came, the body of the deceased was not hurried off to a mortuary to be handled by professionals, but was kept in the home and prepared for burial, typically by the women. They lovingly washed the corpse, anointed it with perfume, and wrapped it in linen cloth. Embalming the body was strictly out of the question. That was common among idol-worshiping pagans.
So it was important for the family to bury the body on the very same day as death came, except in the case when death happened in the evening and forced the burial to be held the next day. All funeral arrangements were made by the grieving family. No professionals were there to step in and maintain a margin of insulation around the grief-stricken family.
When all the preparations were complete, the corpse was laid on a stretcher of sorts and carried from the home through the dirt streets toward and out the city gate. Of course, no burials were allowed within the walls of the town. It was a matter of Jewish purity laws that required separation from anything that had died.
Further, there were no small, private funerals in those days. Everybody in town participated in one way or another. You see, death in a small Middle-Eastern community touched everyone. And for every funeral procession, the town provided professional mourners and wailers whose job it was to make plenty of noise, so that friends and relatives of the deceased could cry their hearts out without the embarrassment of making a scene all by themselves. Actually, it was a much kinder way of doing things than the clinical, detached solemnity of a modern funeral.
Oh, one more thing…the dead were not buried in the ground in Palestine during Jesus’ day. So you can clear your mind of the familiar modern scene of a temporary tent erected in a cemetery, like ours, over an open grave. Instead, the body was laid on a rock shelf in a small cave dug into a nearby hillside.
Then, a year or so after a burial, the family would re-enter the burial cave, gather the now-exposed bones of the deceased, and place them with care and devotion in a bone box called an ossuary, which contained the remains of other family members, thus clearing the main shelf for the body of the next family member.
This is the scene unfolding before our eyes, as with Jesus and his disciples we enter the town of Nain. It’s a hot day in Galilee. Choking, blinding dust from a thousand shuffling feet fills the air. The brilliant sunlight sparkles on the tears streaming down everyone’s cheeks. It doesn’t take us long to learn that the body being carried out the gate on the stretcher is that of a young man, the only son of a widow in town. His body is slowly making its way to the family burial cave where his father, the widow’s husband, was previously buried, his bones now safely stored in the family ossuary.
She’s alone now, her husband and her only son deceased. Not only has her immediate family died, but so has her only protection and means of financial support. This widow’s future in a man’s world is grim indeed. Jesus is aware of all this even more keenly than we. It’s obvious in his face contorted by emotion, his eyes moist with tears. We watch carefully, breathlessly, as Jesus approaches the grief-stricken widow walking behind the stretcher bearing her only son’s body. He speaks to her, “Do not weep.”
It seems a very strange, even a harsh thing to say to a mother at the funeral of her son. If there is any right time to weep, then this is surely it, for not only has death intruded upon and disrupted life, but nature has been violated. It’s not meant to be this way. Grown children bury their aged parents, not parents their children. “Do not weep”? But Jesus’ words are meant to imply, not that weeping is somehow wrong, but that in this case there is no cause for weeping, because the young man will yet live.
We watch as Jesus draws near to the stretcher bearing the young man’s body. Everybody there knows it’s a serious violation of Jewish law to come into contact with the dead, and even with the stretcher carrying the dead, but Jesus does not hesitate to reach out and touch. As he does so, we hear him say to the corpse these unimaginable words, “Young man, I say to you, rise!”
We hear a gasp from those who are close enough to hear Jesus command the dead man to get up. It was odd enough for Jesus to order the grieving mother not to weep, but now he is speaking to a corpse. Words are for the living, not for the dead! But Jesus’ words are not ordinary human words. Through Jesus’ words, God speaks. The same voice that, according to Genesis, spoke a lifeless void into creation, now speaks to the lifeless body of the young man. And the result is the same! The generation of life! “The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.” Funeral cancelled for lack of a dead body!
We watch amazed as the whole funeral procession goes wild with astonishment, delight, and disbelief. Like everybody else in Nain, we don’t know which one to look at: the no-longer-dead young man, his amazed and ecstatic mother, or Jesus who has done with a simple word of command what the great prophet Elijah had done centuries earlier for another widow and her dead son, but Elijah’s deed accompanied by fervent prayer and complicated ritual. Our minds are reeling as the awareness begins to dawn on us that in this Jesus, God has come near to us to save and rescue.
Now that you have been exercising your imagination to enter personally into this story from the past, I invite you to continue imagining, not only now but later when you can be alone. Imagine your way forward into a future moment, a moment you are dreading the most in this coming week or, maybe in the months ahead. Maybe it’s something you know is going to happen – the emptying of your nest as a child goes off to college or gets married, leaving the secure setting of home for a new environment, a change in job, a move to another house, a scheduled surgery, the death of a loved one who is seriously ill. Or maybe it’s something you fear: an accident, a life-threatening illness, a tragedy involving those you love…Feel the fear, the sorrow, the frustration, the bitterness and anger….
Now, with your imagination watch as Jesus enters the scene, comes into the middle of the situation you most dread. Let him approach. Listen for what he says to you. Allow him to touch you as he will. Be alert to what he commands…He may not say what you expect him to say, nor do what you want him to do. But if he is present with you, that is what you most need. You see, with Christ in the middle of it all with you, you will be able to come through! With Christ in the middle, you will come through!
