Community Church Sermons
Year C
June 6, 2010
Pentecost 2
Graduation Day
Psalm 146
Luke 7:11-17
Rev. Martin C. Singley, III
Today is Graduation Day at the Community Church. Actually, it’s Graduate RECOGNITION Sunday when we celebrate with those who are graduating – from Graduate School, or College, or High School, or Technical School, or Junior High School, or Middle School, or Elementary School, or Nursery School, or Pre-School…! It seems we graduate people from all kinds of programs nowadays! I saw a piece on the news the other day where the kids from the Humpty Dumpty Nursery School – complete with mortarboards made out of red construction paper - were marching to the tune of Pomp and Circumstance up to the stage to receive their diplomas.
Everybody graduates these days!
But that got me to thinking about the world of religion. It seems to me that religious people tend NOT to graduate. The Church and other religious institutions appear to have a very high drop-out rate and a whole lot of people who just stop learning and growing.
I was watching a religious TV program some years ago where the special guest was described as a world-renowned Bible scholar. One of the very first things this world-renowned Bible scholar said was, “If the King James Bible was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.”
Well, you and I may chuckle at the obvious ignorance of that comment. But the truth of the matter is that the Church is overflowing with ridiculous thoughts and old, outdated ideas. And you and I – religious people that we are - so fiercely hold onto some of these things! I love the song, “Gimme That Old Time Religion.” What a great song! The old time religion was good enough for Grandma and it was good enough for Grandpa and, obviously, it’s good enough for me!
Only it’s not. The old time religion of my Grandma Johnson was a decidedly Swedish-centered religion. You married only other Swedish people. You hired only Swedish people to work in your Swedish shop. The religion of my Grandmother had some very strict doctrines about how to relate with people who were NOT Swedish – like the commandment THOU SHALT NEVER hang out with Italians. That one made it difficult for me and my best friend - Dennis ASTRELLA. And I won’t even try to tell you what my dear sainted Swedish Grandmother Johnson believed about black people.
She was a truly beautiful, loving and wonderful Christian woman, mind you, but Dagny Otelia Wennerstrom Johnson never graduated into the larger world of God’s creation. Like many of us, she had dropped out at an early age and was locked in a time-warp where we try to navigate through today’s world using yesterday’s maps. Only people don’t use maps nowadays. We use GPS!
Graduation Day.
Maybe we people of faith need to join with those we honor today and start the study and do the work we need to graduate from the past and step into the present and future of God’s amazing and beautiful world.
Our Gospel story from Luke is a graduation story of sorts.
It starts off with Jesus on the move. Jesus is always going somewhere. “Let’s go over to the other side of the lake,” Jesus once said. So he and the disciples got into a boat and sailed away. “Let’s go climb that mountain,” he said to Peter and James and John on another occasion. And so they did! One of the first things Jesus taught his followers is that faith is not a destination. Faith is a journey. It’s always on the move – because life is always changing – the world is constantly changing - and you and I have to learn to move with it. Once, Jesus said to a wannabe disciple, “If you really want to follow me, you’re gonna have to understand that foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but I have no place to lay my head.” Jesus wanted that young person to know that to be a follower of Christ you can’t settle in, think you’ve arrived, and stop growing. Our faith is not static. It is always on the move. Change may be a dirty word among some church people – certainly no one here at the Community Church – but for others, change is not joyfully received! But accepting and learning to adjust to change is a pre-requisite for graduating into being a disciple of Jesus Christ.
So Jesus is on the move, and where he is going to is a little village called Nain, about twenty miles from Capernaum. But that’s only the geographic destination. The deeper story is that Jesus is going to Nain in search of a woman – a very poor widow – who has not only lost her husband, but now has lost her son.
There are some of us here today who have lost children. They say there is no deeper pain than what comes when a parent loses a child – no matter the age. And this particular woman is especially bereaved because in the loss of both her son and husband, she has no one left to provide for her in that male-centered economy of the day.
So Jesus heads to the village of Nain, to find this widow whose son has died. And lo and behold, just as Jesus enters the village, here comes the funeral procession!
One of our church members once told me about a time in his life when everything seemed to be falling apart – with his family, his job, his health, his life. It was one of those dark nights of the soul when you feel completely alone and even God seems nowhere to be found. He told me that, late one night, he went out onto the back porch and looked up into the sky. It was full of stars and he could make out some of the constellations. It was beautiful! And as he gazed heavenward, he caught a sense of eternity. He somehow knew in that experience that all creation, all of life, flows from God and that he, too, was a part of God’s creation. And in that moment, he felt a breath of wind against his cheek like the kind you feel when someone comes near. But there was no one there. And the wind was not blowing. He believes it was the Lord. And while that encounter with Christ did not make things instantly better – his circumstances did not change - HE was made stronger to face the challenges before him.
God comes to us in many ways, and always at just the right moment. Jesus enters the village. Here comes the funeral procession. Jesus comes face-to-face with the widow of Nain.
The Bible says that when Jesus saw this poor grieving woman, his heart went out to her. What a description! His heart went out to her! And out of compassion, Jesus did the unimaginable. Jesus raised the son to life and gave him back to his mother.
Don’t try to reason this out. You can’t. Sometimes in life there are mysteries that elude our present ability to understand. Maybe someday we’ll have all the answers to all our questions. But not right now. What we CAN gain from this story, however, is a wonderful discovery and understanding about Jesus. In the Bible, there are only three stories of Jesus raising people from the dead. One was Lazarus, his dear friend and the brother of Mary and Martha. A second was the daughter of Jairus, the leader of a synagogue. And the third story is this one: the raising back to life of the widow’s son.
In each of these three very different stories, the Gospelwriters make a common observation about Jesus. They all say that when the Lord encountered those who were grieving the loss of their loved one, he had compassion on them, or – as this story puts it – “his heart went out to her.”
The true measure of a person’s religion – is what happens with our heart when we encounter hurting people.
When I was much younger, I understood faith to be primarily a matter of getting my heart right with God. No more spitting, smoking, swearing, lying, cheating, stealing and thinking lustful thoughts about Maryann Sullivan my grammar school sweetheart. Well, she was MY sweetheart, but I wasn’t hers. I had to put away doubt, and start believing without question in important things like premillenial, pretribulation, dispensational eschatology. To be a person of faith meant I had to accept everything in the Bible as being literally true. To be a person of faith meant to clean up my act and only believe.
I no longer believe that, although cleaning up your act is a good and God-honoring thing, and belief is crucial to faith. But from Jesus I learn that faith is not so much a matter of getting MY heart right with God as it is getting my heart right with OTHERS. “His heart went out to her.”
And this makes so much sense to me now because for a long, long time I observed about myself and other religious people that what we think of as “getting OUR hearts right with God” oftentimes prevents us from “giving our hearts to others.”
So Fred Phelps and members of the Westboro Baptist Church show up at the funerals of slain American soldiers with signs that say, “God Hates Fags” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.” Trying to be “righteous”, they lose the ability to be compassionate toward those who’ve lost loved ones in the war.
Now if Jesus had in mind the need to “be right with God” he never would have spoken to a woman in public, let alone touched the stretcher upon which the body of her dead son rested. That was against the rules of his religion. But Jesus ALWAYS let compassion take precedence over righteousness. Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners. He violated the Sabbath law to perform good works. He hung around with all the wrong people. And, in fact, Jesus redefined righteousness this way: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. In other words, getting your heart right with God means giving your heart out to others.
His heart went out to her, the story says, and so he did what he could do for her. What a marvelous testimony to what faith looks like in real life!
And – somehow, in a way we’ll never understand – the young man came to life! His mother wept tears of joy. And the entire village of Nain was awestruck! They’d never seen anything like this before!
And that’s where the story ends – with people scratching their heads. Although we might say that this is really where the story BEGINS! Because in that wonderful encounter with this life-giving, compassionate Jesus the people of Nain realize that what they thought they knew about God, about themselves and about life itself was not enough! Wow! We’ve never seen anything like this!
And so they had to go back to school! They had to be willing to start learning again.
A few months ago, one of the people who attends my Bible Class on Sunday morning came up to me and said, “You know, this has been such a great experience for me! The last time I studied the Bible was when I was 12-years old in the Pastor’s Confirmation Class. So here I am at 60-something-years-old and discovering that my faith is really built on the understandings of a little kid. Now I realize I know a lot less about God and Jesus than I thought I did. And it is so rewarding – and so much fun - to start learning again!”
The people of Nain had to go back to school and graduate into Christian discipleship.
Maybe you do, too.