Rise

(Image: Rise, Jan Richardson/The Painted Prayerbook)

The University Church in Yale

Sermon

June 9, 2013

Today we dive back into the gospel of Luke

right where we left off last week,

continuing a narrative journey we will follow all summer

as we settle into “ordinary time,”

the weeks between Pentecost and Advent.

Last week we watched as Jesus set out on his adult ministry,

healing the beloved slave of a centurion

in plain sight of bystanders.

This week,

we rejoin the crowd following Jesus as he moves on,

passing by the town of Nain,

where Jesus performs another miracle:

raising the deceased son of a widow

and reuniting the two of them.

Talking about biblical miracles

is akin to cooking with a very sharp knife:

powerful in a sure and steady hand,

but sharp and painful if mishandled.

It tends to be difficult to talk about miracles

because people have very different opinions about them.

Most of us here today are accustomed to living in a world

where the dead stay dead,

the sick stay sick unless they receive appropriate treatment,

the poor stay poor,

and injustices have a troubling way

of becoming embedded in our customs and laws.

So we tiptoe around the miracles of Jesus,

trying to make room for them in belief systems

often based on empiricism and reasoning.

Some people seek detailed scientific explanations of biblical miracles,

combing the archaeological record for anything that might support them.

Others dismiss miracles

as symbolic stories without any basis in reality.

Still others are convinced that they occurred

exactly as the Bible narrates.

The truth, I think, lies somewhere in between.

As Jesus shows us today,

the heart of miracles is not their supernatural nature:

it is the compelling alteration of the fabric of the ordinary,

the way they become vehicles of good news

for those who need it most.

Real miracles are not made obsolete by the intervening millennia –

instead, they remain immediate, authentic, and revolutionary.

Take, for example, the story of Jesus and the widow at Nain,

walking to the cemetery with the body of her only son.

While the widow's grief tugs at our hearts,

it can be all too easy to react to her situation with a sense of distance.

Women of the ancient world who lost their male partners and their adult sons

effectively lost all resources to support themselves.

When the men in their lives died,

these women died as well:

a social death, without the ties of family, without a financial safety net.

Widowed, childless women were condemned

to spiral downward into poverty, illness, abuse, and an early death,

already abandoned by their society.

These issues seem distant,

but they are immediate.

If you have ever had an experience with a medical crisis, credit card debt, or unemployment,

you know that even people who are clothed and housed and fed

live on a knife's edge:

at any point in our lives,

just one crisis

can catapult us into deep poverty, homelessness, and hopelessness.

Just as in the ancient Near East,

plenty of socially-sanctioned vulnerabilities are present in our own society,

affecting both women AND men:

women lack equality in society and the workplace,

consistently earning less than men for the same labor;

higher education is difficult to access without incurring lifelong debt;

one spouse frequently depends on the other

for household income and health insurance;

aging parents increasingly rely on their adult children for emotional and financial support.

When one or two of the key supports are removed

from our delicately balanced lives,

we suddenly realize that the widow at Nain is quite common in this world,

and she is closer to us than we ever thought possible.

Today, she is still in desperate need of a miracle.

The widow walks among us.

She is the middle-aged woman

stunned at falling from a middle-class life into homelessness in a matter of months

as her savings evaporated and she lost her house to foreclosure.

"I don't know what to do," she says.

"I have nothing. I haven't even learned how to be homeless yet."

Her spare clothing and books,

which were her last remaining scraps of dignity,

were stolen when she left them unattended in the local shelter.

The widow weeps among us.

She is the man sobbing at the hospital bedside of his wife,

who is barely alive following her sudden cardiac arrest.

He is disabled and unable to work.

She had worked bagging groceries,

providing minimal insurance coverage and income for the two of them.

They have no children; their families are estranged.

The man weeps ceaselessly,

knowing that his wife will not recover

and that the medical bills will devastate him.

He fears losing his home;

he will even be unable to care for their beloved cat,

whose photo he kisses like an icon.

These scenes are repeated daily.

The widow of Nain is traveling the bleak road

from the center of town to the cemetery

every day,

knowing she has little reason to return home again.

Maybe you have known her;

maybe you have been her.

Or maybe you are one of the many who have become immune to her presence

simply because she is so common.

Here in New Haven, for example,

we confront poverty on a daily basis.

Your trip from home to work or class or lab

might take you through blighted neighborhoods,

which gradually become invisible as you learn to dismiss them as "sketchy."

You might walk along the New Haven Green in the morning,

simply accepting that some of the people lying on the benches

have spent the night there.

You might have learned to keep your face as immovable as granite

as you walk right by panhandlers,

pretending they are invisible.

And when once your heart cracked a little bit every time you saw need,

you now begin to assume

that welfare and food stamps will take care of the need,

and you protect yourself from the emotional assault of witnessing suffering:

otherwise, your heart would shatter.

This is a significant characteristic of a condition called compassion fatigue.

Caregivers like nurses, doctors, social workers, and yes, ministers are prone to it --

particularly if they work with people grappling with trauma, death, poverty, and suffering.

It prevents them from being able to empathize with their clients and patients

and is thus highly dangerous.

You could say that we live in a compassion-fatigued society,

which is not so different from first-century Palestine:

we know that the systemic injustice in our culture causes profound human suffering,

but we assume we can never win the struggle for justice.

We continue to walk past panhandlers, victims of mental illness, and people on their way to homeless shelters:

there's nothing we can do.

My housemate returned to New Haven from Brazil last week

and shared an image of her trip

that has stayed with me for the past several days.

As her tour bus drove into the city of Rio,

it passed mile after mile of favelas,

the extensive slums surrounding many Brazilian cities. 

"I knew people lived like that in other parts of the world," she said to me,

"but I never really understood that kind of poverty."

Even so, most of the other Americans on the bus

carried on talking and laughing,

numb to the thousands of shacks surrounding the highway.

This, then, is why we desperately need Jesus to work a miracle in our lives:

we have developed compassion fatigue,

and countless human beings are suffering as a result.

When Jesus comes walking toward Nain in the gospel of Luke,

he has already accumulated a considerable crowd.

They wonder if he is Elijah returned;

they wonder if he is the person whose coming John the Baptist foretold.

Who knows what the people in the crowd might have thought when they encountered the funeral procession,

one woman with much of the town following a shrouded body to the cemetery?

Perhaps they ignored her and were focused on Jesus,

waiting to see what sort of sign this unusual man would perform next.

It was probably a shock, then,

when Jesus stopped,

said, Rise,

and sent the dead man home with his mother.

Three miracles happened that day;

there were three resurrections.

The first and most apparent was the widow's son, victim of an untimely death.

The second was the widow, victim of a social system that would condemn her to total poverty.

And the third, I think -- only suggested in Luke's gospel -- was the resurrection of the crowd.

Luke notes that Jesus is moved with compassion

to intervene in the hopeless funeral procession.

Though compassion fatigue may have blunted the feelings of the crowd,

Jesus's action had broken the scaly shell around their hearts,

demonstrating in the strongest terms that it was no longer enough

to accept that some people are fated to suffer

through no fault of their own.

The real recipients of the Good News were the impoverished.

What might this look like today?

The first two resurrections are clear enough:

the recovery of a loved one gravely ill, employment secured, the rent paid, disaster averted.

But the third resurrection,

the whole reason for the very public nature of the miracle:

this one is ours,

the death of our complacency

and the resurrection of our compassion.

The resurrection of our compassion

means BELIEVING that the good news is truly extended to all people,

even the ones we have learned to ignore.

It means risking heartbreak and despair

in order to be as open and vulnerable as Christ:

able to truly see the suffering we confront on a daily basis

and to respond to it.

It means we cannot accept poverty and need as givens,

just as Jesus refused to accept the widow's likely fate

after the death of her only son.

The resurrection of a dead body on its way to burial is remarkable and meaningful, to be certain.

But by this single miracle in first-century Palestine,

Jesus extends new life to all of us in the most essential and ordinary of ways,

a miracle that renews itself for us daily.

Christ looks into our hardened hearts,

and he says, Rise.

He sees the raw wounds of humiliation, the loss of dignity that many experience in poverty,

and he says, Rise.

He beholds the fragility of our good intentions,

and he says, Rise.

He knows the poor all over the world,

from New Haven to the favelas, for who they are --

beloved children of God --

and he says, Rise.

And he looks upon each of us in this room today,

and he says to all of us and each of us,

Rise.

A M E N