Sermon: Resurrection Power

The Rev. Bryn Smallwood-Garcia
Congregational Church of Brookfield (UCC)
June 10, 2007

Second Sunday after Pentecost

Resurrection Power

Luke 7:11-17 (1 Kings 17:8-24)

Prayer:   “May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts and minds here together be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.”

Pentecost has always been a hard act for a preacher to follow.  Because it’s after the flames of Pentecost anoint the crowd gathered in Jerusalem 50 days after the first Easter that Peter converts 3,000 people with one sermon.  How do you follow that?  There are 33 Sundays after Pentecost, stretching all the way to Thanksgiving and the end of the church year, and they are often just called “ordinary time.”  Christmas is past; Easter is past; and the only big church holiday along the way is the day after Halloween, All Saints Day, which provides one flash of Easter white in this long green season.  On All Saints Sunday we’ll again read from our Book of Remembrance, and then move on.

 The truth is, I think, ordinary time gets in the way of our remembrance of Easters past.  Ordinary daily tasks, and ordinary opportunities to do ordinary things lull our senses into forgetting God’ gift of resurrection power.  Especially now, as vacation season begins.  We swim. We garden. We lie around. Bright red Pentecost flames cool to the humid and soothing lawn green of ordinary time as we drift into summer.

So here we are, on this second Sunday of Pentecost, with visions of the church picnic dancing in our heads, and the Gospel of Luke springs upon us this very moving story – Jesus raises back to life the son of the widow of Nain.  But no one was astonished, right?  Anyone who’s put in a few hours on Christian pews can name other stories of resurrection.  Our Wednesday Bible study just read about Lazarus in John 11, and it was inspiring, of course, but no one was surprised when we read that Jesus’s friend came out of his tomb after being sealed inside for four days. It’s as if ages ago, only back in Bible times, these amazing and miraculous things happened.  But never today.  Today it’s all going to school, commuting to work, and maybe sports and mowing grass on Saturday.  Oh, and church on Sunday, for those of us who are still old-fashioned enough to attend.

Don’t think it wasn’t the same for good religious folks back in Jesus’s day.  Followers of Jesus no doubt believed their times were different from Bible times.  They probably thought they lived in the worst age of all history, under Roman occupation. They celebrated each year the Passover, as we do Easter, but they had been lulled into thinking God wasn’t intervening in human history anymore.  Moses was not parting the Red Sea and leading the way to freedom.  Pharoah was still on the throne, only now his name was Caesar.  They were not expecting God’s resurrection power to change the world forever.  Or if they were, they were expecting a political messiah who would call down God’s power, overthrow the tyrant, and make things right, once and for all. 

And yet, they might have known better.  They had a resurrection story in their own scriptures, one a young Jewish boy like Jesus might have heard from his mother at bedtime.  It’s the Hebrew Scripture lesson from our lectionary today: 1 Kings 17, where Elijah raises the son of the widow of Zarephath.  The great prophet Elijah had the courage to stand up and call God’s judgment upon evil King Ahab.  But no angel armies descended to lead a war of Biblical proportion.  Instead, Elijah had to run for his life, as Jesus did on more than one occasion when he spoke truth to power.  Then Elijah almost dies in a drought-stricken wilderness.  Miraculously ravens feed him, and then he arrives in Zarephath just as the poor widow there is fixing one last meal for her and her son – they expect to die from the famine.  But with Elijah, the man anointed and sent from God, comes another small miracle – the meal and oil somehow last until God sends rain to restore the parched land.  But just when you’d expect a happy ending, instead this good woman’s only son falls sick and dies.  It’s awful!  So Elijah fairly YELLS at God, “O Lord, my God, have you brought calamity even against the widow with whom I am staying, by killing her son?”  Then he tries a kind of ancient CPR, pressing his body onto the dead child three times, crying out, “O Lord, my God, let this child’s life come into him again!”  And the boy lives.

But here’s the thing.  Even though God’s resurrection power had worked this miracle through Elijah years before Jesus came on the scene.  Even though Jesus had done more than one miracle in Luke – cast out a legion of demons, healed multitudes of sick people, converted a greedy tax collector, and helped the disciples catch enough fish to sink a boat.  Even though when Jesus began preaching in Nazareth, he actually CITED this story of Elijah raising the boy in Zarephath to compare his ministry to Elijah’s.  With all this, we have to wonder – how was it that when Jesus raised the son of the widow of Nain, no one was expecting a miracle?  Luke says, “Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying, ‘A great prophet has risen among us!’” It took an awful lot, I’m thinking, to get people to actually consider that Jesus just might be a messiah of God, a prophet like Elijah, a man anointed to proclaim and practice God’s resurrection power.

Like well-meaning religious people throughout history, we can forget the great things God can do – especially in our own most terrible of times. Each Sunday we worship in remembrance, and celebration, of resurrection power that defeated the grave.  But sometimes we forget that not only did Jesus rise from the dead, Jesus also raises US from death. When we go to church, we need to do more than learn Bible history and practice our faith.  We need to name and claim resurrection power for ourselves.

People have a hard time believing in resurrection today.  Yes, there are medical miracles, but we usually take them for granted.  Just in the last month, two of my dad’s close friends have had heart attacks that might have killed them not long ago, but the miracle of angioplasty brought them back from the brink of death.  My own daughter’s ruptured appendix not only could have killed her 50 years ago, before modern antibiotics – it could have killed her this winter.  But I have to admit that I haven’t spent all spring on my knees thanking God for the miracle of her resurrection, because like you, I live in a world that would explain her healing away.  We forget that only through the grace of God were we blessed with health insurance and a nearby hospital, where she could get good medical care promptly. It’s a shame that we so often fail to thank God and see the glory of creation still shining through miraculous innovations in medicine and science. 

But even worse, I think, is our failure to see or accept the resurrection power that can bring us back from spiritual death.  My son Jacob turned me on to a movie called Shawn of the Dead.  It’s a parody of the old Dawn of the Dead, so it’s full of brain-eating zombies – an army of dead people brought back to life.  I loved this one phone call the title character Shawn made to his mother.  He and his friends have been jolted out of their boring suburban life into a desperate struggle for survival against a zombie plague.  He dials home:  “Mum, are you all right?  Are there Zombies outside?”  “Yes, dear, there are just few out there on the lawn, I believe.”  “But did anyone get bitten?”  “Well, they are a bit bitey, I think.”  It’s so brilliant as a black comedy, because it reveals an underlying tragedy that afflicts our world today.  How many of us have friends or family members who we could call right now, and like Shawn with his mum, we might not be able to tell whether they are truly alive, or whether their soul has been claimed by the legion of the undead?  That’s how dead many of us are, as we stumble through life. 

The death of the soul is perhaps the greatest and most insidious tragedy of modern life.  Too many of us are running our lives in a state of virtual numbness, on a kind of “autopilot” where we rush from one thing to another in a blur of overscheduled madness.  We don’t have time to slow down enough to connect with and appreciate the people we love, or give God thanks for the abundance of blessings that fill our time.

Many of us got this opportunity to slow down and reconnect with something bigger than ourselves at the Brookfield Relay for Life Friday night, didn’t we?  Part of it felt a little like prom night at the high school – this rock ‘n’ roll party atmosphere.  But on the silent lap around the track by candlelight, and the quiet walking in the middle of the night and early morning, it was a prayer vigil, a moving witness to the triumph of hope – the word spelled out in luminarias on the hillside.  Who could help but notice the sheer power of love – the witness people made, with their donations and their physical energy, to the power of love to heal, to strengthen, to connect, even to resurrect? 

At the very end, on one of the last morning laps, I connected with one older man who said he was a cancer survivor and began thanking me for doing the walk.  I was embarrassed because, as I told him, I actually had had to go home and rest my bad back for most of the night.  Well, that made him even happier, because he confessed he had needed to do the same thing.  He told me how he had lived for more than 5 years in fear of a recurrence, but Friday night had somehow healed him.  He said he realized that up until then, he had been walking completely alone.  He knew about the Relay for Life, but he’d never wanted to do it.  He never wanted to walk a survivor lap, because he said he didn’t want people to label him with “the Big C.”  But then, he told me, he realized how often, walking alone, mowing grass, he’d wave at some friend driving by, who didn’t even know he had been sick, and think, “This is so weird.  I had cancer, and here I am mowing the grass as if nothing was different, and nobody knows.”  And then he whispered to me, with tears welling up in his eyes, “But I walked with the survivors last night, and everything changed.  We were supposed to be dead, but there we were, all together.  We were alive.”

That, people of faith, is a miracle of resurrection.  My new friend at the track saw it.  He told his story and named the miracle, and it set him free to new joy and new life.  This summer, go for a few more long slow walks with your friends.  Notice the miracles of life around you.  Let your life slow down to a pace where you can name and claim miracles and let true joy into your soul again.  Look for and name how God is even today still working with amazing grace to restore you to the fullness of life promised to all who call upon the Lord’s name. In long green season of ordinary time, you can breathe deeply of God’s creation and claim the God’s gift of resurrection power for yourself.

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.