10^th Sunday in Ordinary Time
June 6, 2010
I Kings 17:8-24; Luke 7:11-17

 

What to Expect at a Funeral

            A funeral took place in this room on Thursday.  Several of you were here.  It was an intimate affair, without a hint of pomp and circumstance.  No grand procession.  No thunderous chords from the organ.  Just a battered old upright piano with one sticky key that refused to play.  Michael attempted “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” and by the time he was finished, some of us were deeply desiring that missing “D.”

            Of course, it didn’t matter.  The saint we were commending to God was Bob Schubert, and Bob was not one for pomp and circumstance.  A few days ago, before he went home to die, we discussed the fact that the sanctuary would be under reconstruction and his funeral would need to take place here, in the Westminster Room.  That didn’t seem to bother Bob.  In fact, it reminded his family of the days when Bob and Connie helped to start a new church up in New Jersey.  As with every church that starts out worshipping in the hall, there were fond memories of moving furniture.

            So after the benediction, having sung “For All the Saints Who From Their Labors Rest” with the intermittent aid of the D above middle C, we folded up the chairs, brought out the food, and carried on with the ritual.  Bob had told us to keep his funeral “Presbyterian,” and for this congregation, that means food.  The organ is optional.  The shortbread is not.

            I am struck by the contrast between the funeral that took place last Thursday and the one that takes place in today’s Gospel lection.  There are no joyful strains of “For All the Saints” in this story.  Just the wailing of mourners and the beating of funeral drums. 

            The saint who has died in this story is not full of years, but young.  He is the only son of a widow, and as such is his mother’s social security, health insurance, and retirement plan all rolled into one. Widowhood in those days was not the same at it is today. Back then, a male heir was a widow’s only safety net.  When this funeral is over, this widow’s best hope will be that a male relative will take pity on her.  Otherwise, she will very likely be out on the street with no income, no inheritance, and no protection.

            I can imagine, that of all the wailing women who accompany this funeral bier, her wails are the loudest.  She is mourning not only the loss of her son, but also the loss of hope.

            As the funeral procession is heading out the gate of this little town called Nain, it runs into another procession on its way into town.  At the head of this parade is Jesus, with a long train of disciples and fans in his wake.  As Luke tells it, both parades stop in their tracks.

            There was a protocol for this kind of thing.  If a funeral procession should run into a wedding procession, the rule was, the funeral had to yield the right of way to the wedding.  Life must go on.  The dead had to wait for the living.  On that principle, I suppose the procession led by Jesus, God’s living Word, should take precedence over the funeral. 

            One word seems to have kept this from happening.  In Greek the word is splanchnizomai, and it means, more or less, “to be seized by compassion.”  Literally, it means “to be moved in your innards.”  We might say “to feel in your guts.”  “When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her . . .” says Luke.  Jesus looks on this widow and really does feel her pain.

            Luke uses this word in only two other stories.  He uses it when the Samaritan sees the stripped and beaten man by the roadside, and when the father of the prodigal first catches sight of his son coming far down the road. Splanchnizomai – We don’t have a word quite like it in English.  It stops both processions.

            Jesus looks on this widow, feeling the tug of her pain in his own gut, and says to her, “Do not weep.”  It’s an absurd thing to say – almost as absurd as the things people say to mourners today.  Things such as:

            Don’t cry; he’s in a better place.

            Don’t be sad.  God needed another angel in heaven.

            Get a grip.  You’re young.  You can have another baby.

            At this moment, Jesus seems to be saying precisely the wrong thing, as you and I are prone to do, because we want so badly do something helpful. 

But Jesus is the only person in this story who has any right to say such a thing to this widow, for he is about to be the reason why she should stop weeping.

            In defiance of the laws of ritual purity, Jesus reaches out and touches the funeral bier.  Can you hear the intake of breath from the people in both processions?  “Look what he’s doing.  He’s touching the corpse.”

            Then Jesus says to the man on his way to the grave, “Young man, I say to you, rise!”  The man sits up and begins to speak.  Then, says Luke, “Jesus gave him to his mother.”   The wording is not accidental.  It recalls the story we just read from the book of I Kings, when the prophet Elijah does much the same thing for the widow of Zarephath.  He restores her son to life, carries him downstairs, and gives him to her. 

            I think Luke wants us to look at this story from two directions.  Looking back, he wants us to remember that story of Elijah, and how the widow’s trust in God’s word was justified by the miracle of life restored in the midst of a famine.  And, looking forward, Luke wants us to see an empty tomb and the road to Emmaus, and the risen Christ blessing and breaking bread. 

            In the story at hand, the people in both processions are scared out of their wits by this turn of events.  The folks in the funeral procession think they are on their way to the graveyard to bury a dead man.  The folks following Jesus think they are on their way to a prayer meeting.  I doubt either group was expecting this.  No wonder “Fear seized all of them.”  Nobody expects to see resurrection at a funeral.

            You and I, on the other hand, have a different expectation, don’t we?  When we go to a funeral, we expect Jesus to be there, and we expect resurrection. 

            We might or might not be looking for a dead body.  Funeral practices are changing.  Gone are the days when the church was surrounded by a graveyard and the assembly really could walk in procession from the church to the grave. More and more in this culture, we do not see a casket at a funeral. 

            The good thing about having a body present is that it serves as the concrete reminder that we are corporeal beings, the unity of soul and body.  Without a body present, we can find ourselves thinking like ancient Greeks, who believed that the body was the prison house of the immortal soul.  We Christians, on the other hand, honor the body, because ours is an imbodied faith. 

            Tom Long, a theologian I respect, makes a good case for having the casket present at funerals.  He’d like to recapture the days when the Christian assembly accompanied the saint to the grave, singing all the way.

            I fear that Tom underestimates the practical challenges to recovering this tradition, not to mention the considerable expense involved.   In this town, a funeral with a casket costs in the neighborhood of four thousand dollars.  A direct cremation costs about a thousand.  The old ways are sound theology, but can be unsound stewardship.

            Tom is certainly right, however, when he observes that Plato trumps Jesus at most American funerals – even the Christian ones. 

            We might not look for a body at our funerals, but we do look for resurrection.  We say as much in the Creed, “We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”

            That’s what Christians do when we come to funerals.  We do the same when we come to worship on the Lord’s Day. We look for the resurrection of the dead.  Not right away.  Perhaps not in our lifetimes, as was the hope of the first Christians.  But some day, in God’s good time, “when the earth shall be full of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.”  Some day, when God is good and ready, there will be resurrection.

            If you ask me for the details, I cannot supply them.  There are plenty of images from scripture to prompt our own imaginations.  A table spread with good things.  A house with many rooms.  A gathering of people from east and west, from north and south.  A city with no need of security systems or a police force.  All of these point toward the resurrection life, but of course, none of them is a literal description. 

            I can’t tell you exactly how we will live in communion with one another and the Triune God, but I can tell you this: it will involve a body, not some disconnected soul floating about in the ether.  (If you really want to know, I am hoping that Mexican food is also involved, but I have no scriptural evidence for this.   It’s just that I cannot imagine heaven without Mexican food.)

            We look for the resurrection because we know how Jesus looks on us.  With compassion.  With a pain in his gut for us.  With the memory of his own death and his own resurrection.  In this gospel story, Jesus gives life back to the young man and living hope back to the widow.   In so doing he points us back to the God who brings life out of death and forward to the God who raised his own son from the grave. 

           The same is in store for all the saints of God, the saints who gather to sing songs and say prayers and give thanks to God in the face of death.  The saints who expect shortbread.  The saints who expect to see Jesus, not Plato. The saints who look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. 

           

 

 

           

           

 

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