Third Sunday after Pentecost (5C), June 9, 2013; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of compassion, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

In the last three months, I have flown on a lot of airplanes, so I heard the admonishment approximately 20 times about using caution when opening the overhead bins because contents might have shifted during the flight. In spite of all the warnings and my caution, I did cause a bag full of duty free items to rain down on a sleeping passenger in the middle of one overnight flight. Fortunately, she wasn’t hurt, and fortunately the stuff that fell on her actually belonged to her. I haven’t been able to shake thinking of the metaphor for shifting contents in overhead bins during our spiritual journeys, and how startling the shifts can be!

Some of you have heard me complain about times when the lectionary seems to prop up the Gospel with a story from the Hebrew Bible – and I want to say that today’s pairing of 1 Kings and Luke is not evidence of that. In this case, it’s the writer of the Gospel of Luke intentionally telling a story about Jesus designed to make all of his hearers say, “ah! That reminds us of Elijah healing the widow’s son!” The lectionary pairing today provides us with an historic assist – to help us remember what Luke’s hearers would have known right away – healing the widow’s son.

And if you had heard the Gospel of Luke being read all in one sitting, like Luke’s original audience would have, you would have fresh in your mind the part about Jesus’ inaugural preaching at the synagogue in Nazareth. That’s when he declared the jubilee – the release from debts, and reminded the folks that through Elijah, God had brought healing outside of Israel to foreigners. He cited the widow’s son at Zarephath in his first sermon. Jesus was reminding people inside of Israel that Divine intervention extended outside, beyond the borders, beyond the edges, even when people on the inside needed relief themselves. What happened next, according to Luke, was the people who heard Jesus got so mad that they ran Jesus out of town and tried to kill him.

After he escaped the rage of the people in his hometown, Jesus has been to Capernaum and cast out some demons and done some healing. He presided over an enormous catch of fish, a considerable catch of fishermen whom he has turned into followers, then more healing, some scandalous dining practices with reprobates, and he has delivered his great Sermon on the Plain. Just before our Gospel reading from today, Jesus healed the slave of a Roman military officer, a centurion stationed in Capernaum, which was last week’s Gospel lesson.

In Luke’s story, Jesus’ identity is being publically established in this chapter. It seems worth noting that, despite everything that has gone before in Luke’s narrative, the chorus of heavenly hosts at Jesus’ birth, the presentation in the Temple, the scene of Jesus’ remarkable teaching in the temple as a youth, his baptism when the heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in a bodily form like a dove, and a voice from heaven declared his belovedness – note well, in spite of all of that, Jesus’ identity has not been publically established, according to Luke. In this chapter, with stories unique to this Gospel, the writer of Luke is building the case that Jesus is greater than the greatest prophet, Elijah.

Luke’s hearers would know that story of Elijah and they would be able to tell the similarities and the differences. Elijah’s restoration of the life of the widow’s son takes place in the privacy of the widow’s home. Jesus’ restoration of the life of the widow’s son takes place in public – at the city gate in front of crowds of mourners, of his followers, and of bystanders. In Elijah’s story, it’s the widow’s minor son. In Jesus’ story, it’s the widow’s only son (or “one-of-a-kind” or unique son) and he’s a man. Elijah’s response to the death of the widow’s son is embarrassment that God would let something like this happen on Elijah’s watch and anger that he (Elijah) will be blamed. (Reasonable!) Jesus’ response to the death of the widow’s son is simply deep compassion for the woman. Rather than prayers and prostrations, Luke’s Jesus simply says to the man, “Get up. Rise up!”

But lest we imagine that these are personal interventions without much larger implications, Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann writes that, “the miracles of raising the dead [are] not to be taken as isolated miracles, nor simply as dazzling acts of transcendence. They are rather engagement with the powers of death who seek to rob the vulnerable of life and well-being.” Brueggemann points out that in the larger context of the Elijah story, King Ahab, who has responsibility for the people of Israel, is an agent of death who cannot take care of the environment, so that famine results. King Ahab’s lack of faithfulness to God and to the people has resulted in environmental catastrophe. In the bigger story told in 1 Kings, Brueggemann again: “Elijah challenges the way in which social power is organized; he unleashes an alternative possibility in the world. The narrative intends us to be dazzled, not by a religious oddity, but by the redefinition of daily reality of life around us in God’s creation.”¹ This part of the story is a piece in a much larger story about abundance in what seems to be scarcity.

These stories of Elijah and Jesus are there to put anyone with ears to hear on notice that possibilities of abundance are always present, even if they are not always obvious and that, while we are invited to participate, the possibilities are not under our control. We are not in charge. There is another difference between the stories of the widows’ sons: the restoration of life in Zarephath is outside of Israel, and the restoration of life in Nain is inside of Israel. God’s restorative power has been returned to Israel according to Luke. I think that this story is evidence that something had shifted in Jesus. Some contents had shifted in his overhead bin – perhaps due to the turbulence in Nazareth! Maybe Jesus has learned, going the long way from Nazareth to Nain, about how maybe the jubilee was for everyone outside and inside of Israel.

The polis or city of Nain was a day’s journey from Capernaum. Nain is from the Hebrew for charming, pleasant, delightful. Today it is a small Arab village in lower Galilee. I didn’t get there on this last trip, but I visited it in 2007. There is a church there rebuilt by the Fransciscans in the 19th century, who have abandoned the town since the Israelis “de-populated” the region in 1948. A Muslim Arab family has taken on caring for the church building and opening it for infrequent visitors as a labor of love. Nain is today, as it was in Jesus’ time, off of the beaten path. The present day church is built on the site where a medieval church had stood, which was built on a site that was probably the house of the widow of this story. My guess is that it was an early house church whose reputation was known to Luke’s hearers. Many house-churches in the early days of Christianity were headed by women. There doesn’t seem to be archaeological evidence that the city of Nain was ever of any great importance, but I imagine that the house-church led by the widow of Nain must have been important enough for Luke to set this story there.

You know, people often ask me what I think about the miracle stories in the Bible and what I think about miracles in general. And my response usually begins with the title of a book written by one of my former rectors: “Just because it didn’t happen,”² (doesn’t mean it isn’t true). And my response usually includes the famous quotation from Albert Einstein who said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” I do choose to lean into living my life as though everything is a miracle, and though, I often doubt that something happened the way it is described (whether the one doing the describing is a scripture writer or a family member or friend), I usually trust that just because something didn’t happen doesn’t mean it isn’t true. I always feel a little sad when I think about Thomas Jefferson’s attempt to excise whatever he didn’t consider rational from the Gospels. If I excised everything not entirely rational from my own life story, it would be a very short story, and well, I wouldn’t be in this pulpit. If I disregarded what is unbelievable, I would not be a priest. I would not be your rector.

So I do think that “just because it didn’t happen, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” And I do believe in living life as though everything is a miracle. And I think there might be still more than that to the story. I want to go deeper – and I want to take you with me! You know, the word miracle comes from the Latin word “miraculum” which means strange thing. Surely you believe in strange things! If you did not believe in strange things, you would not be at Emmanuel Church! So let’s start with that definition and stipulate that we do believe in miracles – at least for a little bit.

And then I invite you to take this leap with me – it’s really not a big leap. Christian Wertenbaker, Senior Editor for Parabola magazine, writes that one defining condition of a miracle is the unlikely restoration of order from disorder.³ With that definition, a miracle doesn’t have to bend or break the laws of nature or science, it simply has to be an improbable re-establishment of harmony or right-relationship or an implausible repair of disarray or disease.

With that definition in mind, I see these stories of Elijah and Jesus, the widows and their sons, and even Paul’s conversion, as miracles which involve the restoration of life, yes, but also the restoration of family, the restoration of community, of economic stability, the restoration of the Torah commandment to provide for the well-being of widows. With that definition in mind, I hope that you see the possibility of miracles all around us. I also hope that you will look for new ways to carry our faith, that is, our trust in the power of Love, into the public square, to the city gates, with this understanding of the possibility of miracles to remind people who have been put down to get up – stand up – rise up, being mindful that contents may have shifted during your journey.

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