Saturday, June 04, 2016
Pentecost 3, Year C, Proper 5, June 5, 2916
Sermon for The Third
Sunday After Pentecost
Year C, Proper 5 ~ June
5, 2016
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
You brought me up, O Lord, from the dead; *
you restored my life as I was going down to the grave.
you restored my life as I was going down to the grave.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided
Trinity
What
could be more heartbreaking than the loss of a child? The Prophet of God foreshadows the Son of God
in raising the widow’s son from the dead. The prophetic story is even more poignant,
perhaps, since Elijah had already saved the widow and her small son from
starvation, only to let him succumb to disease.
Whenever
I read this story, I find myself rooting for Elijah and God: thanking God for
keeping the jar full of grain until it rains. But then the child dies of
something else anyway.
“Is
God toying with me?” The woman wonders. And so do I. I have to agree that she
has a point. If God cares about our suffering, why doesn’t He act? And Elijah
wonders, too, and so he takes the little corpse aside and prays very hard, and
God revives the boy. And Jesus revives the dead son of the widow of Nain.
But
both of these lucky revivees will one day die again, like Lazarus. Maybe that’s
the point of the double miracle of the Elijah story. Where will God be when the
widows’ children die the next time? Where was God when all the other children
died? Where is God when anybody dies? Do we want God to revive them all? Is
this life the ultimate good? Jesus says He comes to give life and give it more abundantly. That must mean
something beyond the raising of Lazarus and the widows’ children.
It
has been said that the whole spiritual life is preparation for death. The
inevitability of death brings those who contemplate it to a certain seriousness
about ultimate reality, of which we might otherwise remain oblivious. In this sense death is an ally: Sister Death, as St. Francis sang. Even
as we celebrate its destruction in the New Creation of the only-Begotten Son,
we do so in recognition that the victory is won precisely in His Death – indeed in the most awful kind of death.
Still, the widows’ grief – their pitiful, helpless
grief – is brought to our attention almost ruthlessly. Elijah and Jesus share
it. Elijah prays to God; Jesus, the Godman, does not pray, but Himself commands
the corpse to arise. The Holy Ones do not want the widows to suffer. That has
to be part of the meaning. Yet the other part is that suffering, grief, and
death are unavoidable. They can be overcome and ultimately destroyed, but they
cannot be avoided.
Our grief is the cost of our love. Where
there is no love there is no grief. The reverse is not so, since in the Kingdom
every tear is wiped away, sorrow and sighing shall be no more, only everlasting
joy.
But
the awful crucible of grief and suffering comes first. Some say that without
it, we could not know joy, that the more deeply we are wounded by sorrow the
more joy we can contain. Maybe so. Maybe so. I would not say so to a grieving
person, but I dare to say so now, in hopes that we may remember it when it
comes time to suffer.
Victory over death and suffering comes in
passing through it. I suppose God could have prevented the deaths of the
widows’ sons. Can we really say that would have been preferable to what
happened? In the end God will raise us
all and abolish suffering and grief. Does that mean it would have been better
not to suffer at all? I leave you with the question.
The
great Baron Friedrich von Hügel, of such immense influence on Anglicanism in
the last Century, said this of our Divine Savior:
…with Him, and alone with Him and those who still learn and live from and by Him, there is the union of the clearest, keenest sense of all the mysterious depth and breadth and length and height of human sadness, suffering, and sin, and, in spite of this and through this and at the end of this, a note of conquest and of triumphant joy. …but the soul is allowed to sob itself out; and all this its pain gets fully faced and willed, gets taken up into the conscious life. Suffering thus becomes the highest form of action, a divinely potent means of satisfaction, recovery, and enlargement for the soul, the soul with its mysteriously great consciousness of pettiness and sin, and its immense capacity for joy in self–giving.
We must do what we can to eradicate suffering
and fight to alleviate it. That is one way to destroy it. The other way is to accept
it as indispensable in our ascent to God and eternal joy. The divinely potent means of satisfaction,
recovery, and enlargement for the soul.
Our model in this is He Who “went not up to joy but first He suffered
pain, and entered not into glory before He was crucified.” Or, as the mystics
say, our ascent to God requires two wings whose names are Love and Suffering.
WE WORSHIP YOUR CROSS, O LORD,
AND WE GLORIFY YOUR HOLY
RESURRECTION.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
