LIFE OUT OF DEATH

10th June 2007 : Pentecost 2 : Year C
1 Kings 17:8-24 : Galatians 1:11-24 : Luke 7:11-17

The late comedian Dave Allen, as those of us who remember him and/or enjoyed his humour will recall, liked to send up the Church and anything or anyone else that took themselves a little too seriously. Thankfully, it’s one of the healthiest spiritual activities available to us because if we can’t laugh at ourselves and our strange and idiosyncratic ways then we’ve drifted far from the possibility of transformation through Jesus: we take on an aspect of certainty that precludes faith and God’s ability to influence us in whole and healthy ways.

But that’s another sermon. Cut back to Dave Allen and his penchant for, among many other things, funeral sketches. I remember one in which two funeral processions are on their way to the graveyard. When they become aware of each other’s presence they begin a Keystone Cops-like descent into slapstick absurdity as they fight to get to the cemetery ahead of their rival. Dave Allen was poking fun at the Irish superstition that if two people are buried on the same day, only the first gets into heaven: the second one has to wait till the next day …

I was reminded of that sketch when I began perusing the gospel. No, we don’t have competing funeral processions. Just the one. But one was enough to ring in the associations. And I can see the point of the website, Girardian reflections on the lectionary, which asserts that Jesus crashes headlong into the funeral procession.

I hope the point will become clearer before too long because although Jesus doesn’t literally come into physical contact with the procession what he stands for, what he’s about, certainly does.

It’s one of those points that seem quite obscure until someone mentions it or explains it – and then it becomes so obvious you wonder why on earth you couldn’t see it in the first place. At least, that’s how it was for me.

The “crash” is between death and life. Life, AKA Jesus, collides with death – the funeral procession of a man whom the town clearly held in some regard, given the large crowd. It’s quite possibly a loud and noisy event, with wailing women and percussive noise-makers giving death a centrality and importance in human culture and thinking that is totally at odds with the view of the Living God.

Well might the people mourn, especially the mother. She’s a widow, therefore reliant on her only son to provide her with sustenance. This was social security in Jesus’ time – and even now in many countries of the world. Without her son the widow may have had to resort to begging on the streets in order to live. She was a woman with very bleak prospects indeed.

Enter Jesus and we know the rest – the only son of God brings back to life the only son of the widow of Nain. Death and life clash with each other and life wins.

Happily the story – unique to Luke – echoes the story of the prophet Elijah and the widow of Zarephath. Unlike the uber-cool Jesus who simply issues a command to rise, Elijah engages in one of those weird roundabout exercises that result in more questions than answers.

But the result is the same. The sons live and the widows get to enjoy life in a new way, a way that the Living God now infuses with energy and hope.

These parallel stories are not, of course, mere happenstance. It’s not as though our intrepid lectioneers chose the gospel for today and then came across Elijah and the widow of Zarephath by accident. Chances are Luke has modelled his story – found only in his gospel – on the passage from the First book of Kings. He’s already done something similar with Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel and the Magnificat in his infancy narrative.

What it suggests in both cases is that what Jesus does in his own gospel days is not so much unique as the full and proper outworking of the Living God’s desires that have existed for all time and will continue to exist for the rest of it.

In other words, God offers us life. God will not allow us to descend into the closed-off world of death and the creepy boredom of the shadowland, Sheol, where no one can praise God’s name.

And for us as we enter the period after the Easter season with these Sundays after Pentecost, it’s a reminder that life emerging from death is NOT just a groovy jaunt reserved for the Son of God, but is available and promised to all of us, any time, anywhere.

Life clashing with death and being victorious is the ultimate meaning of the good news.

But as Paul’s letter to the community of faith in Galatia reminds us, we can and should see the same dynamic at metaphorical levels also. For Paul, he was in the dead-end business of persecuting the infant Church. Every indication is that he yearned to eradicate the new Jewish sect that had sprung up from the chaos of Jesus’ execution.

Paul was himself a purveyor of death and violence, a complete Hebrew scriptures dude who clearly believed that he was doing God’s work in persecuting the Church. The same Living God turned that around by introducing Paul to Jesus, the peaceful purveyor of life, and so Saul the persecutor became Paul the preacher, and the rest is pretty much as they say …

But the point remains the same: out of death the Living God creates or recreates life. God offers that life to us as a free gift, available with every proclamation of belief and act of faith. I suspect the only reason we don’t get steak knives and fries with that is because the gift of life is probably pretty much secure at the top of the tree.

What, then, are the situations of death we find ourselves battling in the Parish of the Holy Spirit, Westfield? I suspect those situations are plentiful. But the question – as we know - really isn’t how many death-dealing and violent places we find ourselves in but whether we have enough faith to accept God’s gift of life.

Our readings today make clear the movement of the Living God in world history and ours. What do we need to do in order to accept the gift of life so that we in our turn can share it with those round about us who so desperately need it?