2^nd After Pentecost Year C

Wake Up and Sell the Coffin

Luke 7:11-17

June 10^th 2007 

    This week I saw some dying or dead people walking around. No kidding, I really did! Some were pushing shopping carts around Wal-Mart. Some were eating “Whoppers” at Burger King. Some were driving down Granville St. Others were sitting in their living room gazing absently at the television. Some were staring at their notes in a quiet classroom. Some were trying to look busy in their cubicle at work. I saw some dying or dead men in smooth Italian suits going into an expensive restaurant. A dead, curvaceous model, briefly animated by a few sniffs of cocaine, was parading her attributes for the cameras. Another dead man, a politician, was avidly reading the latest opinion polls as he bustled towards his office.

    There you have it. I really have seen dying and dead people walking. It's not that rare. It is, indeed, so common that thousands of men and women think of it is normal. Men, women and children going through the routines of life, hardly giving a thought to the present moment, oblivious to the small joys in life; consumed by work, worry and family, bored, seething with hidden anger and resentment, breathing but not alive, hearts beating but lacking any passion; going through their days without any larger purpose.

    I am of course, speaking about death the way the Bible speaks. I am using the biblical perspective rather than that used by doctors in the ER, or grave diggers and undertakers. The Bible uses the words “death” and dead in two ways. Sometimes these two meanings are separate, sometimes they overlap. First, the Bible certainly does at times use the word death in the same way as do morticians and doctors. Physical death. The heart stops beating, the breath is stilled, rigour mortis and decay are on the way. The bible does not shy away from our own mortality. Both heroes and scoundrels; the good and the bad have limited days on the earth. Even Jesus, the very Son of God, experiences the cruel, lonely darkness of death. The bible does not shirk from the one truth we know. One day we will all die.

   But the Bible also uses the word death to describe spiritual rigour mortis. The essential nature of spiritual death is that we become hardened and cut off from God. Human beings can become insensitive and finally unresponsive to the fundamental spiritual dimension of existence; cut off from LIFE written with capital letters. Alienated from God and from our own precious destiny; rebels against all that is truly loving and lovely. Petty mutineers who become completely self-centred rather than God centred. To be a godless person is to be already dead. In a profound sense godless equals dead. “Dead in your trespasses and sins,” says Saint Paul.

    In the Bible death is separation from the Source of our being. It is the result of allowing the “image of God” to decay. It can be an infection from others, but often it is self inflicted. This death comes from spiritual malnutrition or even spiritual self strangulation. This death, not the physical one, is the ultimate disaster. Compared with this, physical death is major, but not the crucial event.

   In 1968 little know film director George Romero produced and directed a low budget movie called Night of the Living Dead. It was zombie film, with hoards of the living dead terrorizing the world. The movie was strongly criticized at the time of its release for its graphic content, but three decades later, the Library of Congress entered it into the United States National Film Registry with other films deemed "historically, culturally or aesthetically important." It is so thoroughly laden with critiques of late-1960s American society that one historian described the film as "subversive” on many levels." In not so subtle ways, it reminded movie goers that many of their contemporaries were living their lives as if they were zombies. Valueless, materialistic and selfish, the 1960's were populated by the living dead.

   Recently zombie movies have been making a comeback. The critique is the same. All around us are the living dead. Men, women, and even children are living for nothing deeper than making money, satisfying physical needs, and being entertained.

Screen zombies may be far fetched, but there is nothing far fetched about spiritual zombies. Tragically these are not just a film gimmick to put the shivers into adolescent film goers. The living dead walk the earth. We know them. They are family, colleagues, neighbours and those next to us in the pew. We may even be among their number.

    In the New Testament, physical death is certainly real. But it is not the worst thing that can happen. It is spiritual death that is to be really feared. In the Gospel reading, we heard the story of the corpse of a young man, the only son of a widow, that was being carried off for burial.  The compassionate soul of Jesus was deeply moved. He told the widow to stop weeping. Then he stepped up to the bier, touched it and said: “Young man, I say to you rise up.” The youth sat up, and began to speak.

    Luke intended us to see Jesus literally waking a man who was physically dead. At the word of Jesus, the dead would live again. Jesus is the Word that wakes the dead. But let us also remember the deeper level of the biblical narrative. The death to be most feared is that of the spirit.  The Gospel of John especially dwells on this theme. To believe in Jesus, is to already pass from death to eternal life. Jesus meets us on our way to the cemetery, has pity on us and says: “Young man/old man, young woman/old woman, I say to you: Rise up!”

    DH Laurence, that rebellious spirit, once wrote:

      “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

       But it is a much more fearful thing to fall out of them.”

   To be out of the hands of God, to choose a way of life which is separation, is to choose spiritual decay and death.

      “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

       But it is a much more fearful thing to fall out of them.”

   Jesus of Nazareth, that living Word of God, still comes to us wherever we are, touches the bier on which we find ourselves being carried along by our culture and speaks to directly us: “Young man, young woman, I say to you rise up.”

   While we are dead in our trespasses and sins Christ Jesus comes our way to resuscitate the dying and to wake the dead. In our weakness and weariness he comes to wake the dead. If we become puffed up, confusing self importance with life, he comes. He comes to us when we sink into resentments, bitterness, or apathy. In our pride, our twenty first century technological inspired hubris, he comes to us. In our post-modern flirting with a life devoid of firm ethical values, he comes to us. He hates to see death claim us. He comes to all those biers and coffins which we foolishly have decorated, and pretended to be “the good life,” and says to us: “Young man, old man, young woman, old woman rise up.”

   Finally notice too that the widow in the story doesn't ask Jesus to raise her son. She doesn't fall on her knees and beg for her son's life. All she does is cry. She cries and Jesus is moved. The gospel writer says he has compassion. I looked up that word in my Greek Bible. The word is splagchnon. It refers to one's innermost self or feelings. The deepest place within us. Jesus was moved deep in his own entrails He was moved in the very the pit of the stomach. Death makes Jesus sick. He can't stand to be around it. In the deepest part of himself he wants only life.     
  The widow's son is not raised for any other reason than Jesus' compassion. This is not a story of the mother's faith. There is nothing here about gratitude. Only death and Jesus' compassion. When Jesus is around death he just has to heal it, to resurrect it, to banish it.

This story is about grace-pure, unadulterated, undiluted, unbidden, unearned, un-asked-for grace. This raising doesn't happen because of a mother's faith or her son's worthiness. It happens because Jesus has compassion for her. Period. The mother didn't have to act faithfully. The son didn't have to live gratefully. It could be that both mother and son were faithful and grateful, that this event changed their lives forever. But the point of this story is not the mother and her son. The point of this story is Jesus' compassion.

The point is that when grace comes into our lives, it requires nothing of us but a choice: to receive it or not. The point is always that when Jesus encounters the living dead; when he sees that we are alive but have no life; when he sees us living without purpose and joy, he wants only to reach out to us and shout, “Hey you. Dead guy. Get up and sell your coffin. You won't need it now. You are alive, now go live like it.”

There really is only one message in all of scripture. Choose life instead of death. Friends come alive in Christ.