New Life

Trinity 1                                                                 Luke 17:11-17

Proper 5

Our Gospel lesson is a wonderful story and testimony to the power of God, as was the miracle story we heard about Elijah and the widow of Zarephath.  But once you enjoy the stories, you are left wondering if there is anything to carry with you, unless you are the kind of person who thinks that the stories mean we should all go around trying to raise the dead.  Not many Christians in the history of the Church have been able to do that. But as I thought and prayed over it, a couple of things seemed to emerge that made the story of Jesus and the Widow of Nain more than just an historical curiosity, but rather a parable of how God works.

First of all, Jesus walks into a situation that looks hopeless.  Most of us would agree that death is fairly permanent and irreversible.  The situation is hopeless, nothing can be done.  There is no help but to weep over the hardness of life and then try to move on.  But Jesus had a different way of looking at things.  He knew that nothing was impossible for God and that if God found someone who was willing to be His agent, He could accomplish some impossible things.

Second, Jesus was very aware of the context, the circumstances.  He saw the widow and knew that her only hope to be saved from abject poverty was being carried out of the city to be buried.  Here as elsewhere he saw people with compassion and understood them with mercy.  He could not help all the widows in the whole world, but he could help this one.  In this case mercy and compassion and an awareness of the will of the Father resulted in dramatic action to repair and restore a hopeless situation. 

And third, Jesus was always teaching about the nature of His Father and the reality of the Kingdom of God.  In his compassion toward the widow, he shows us the heart of God.  That is how God deals with each of us: he sees us with compassion and understands us with mercy. In his merciful action toward her, he also shows us the kind of community that he creates amongst his followers—it is a community where people are seen with compassion and known with mercy.  In such a place new life is always possible. 

The implications of these three points are immense, it seems to me.  First, let us consider our hopeless situations.  There are many of them which come to our attention every day: Afghanistan, Iraq, third world poverty, South American narco-traffic, American poverty in the midst of affluence, and ecological destruction.  Perhaps I am generalizing too widely and ought to confine myself to more individual situations, like that of the Widow of Nain.  Well then, how about a hopeless marriage, the drug-addicted person, a loving relationship that has turned abusive, a single mother trying to raise four kids on $8 per hour, a poor family unable to survive because both salaries are garnished for past bills, or a middle-aged professional laid off from 20 years of work and unable to locate a new job?  These and other situations like them abound—I hear about them almost every day.  Of course, we may say: there is some personal responsibility here, mistakes have been made and have to be paid for.  Of course, mistakes have been made.  Sins have been committed, too.  Few of us are exempt from mistakes and sins.  However, many of us have some kind of safety net to prevent us from having to pay too dearly for our mistakes.  Many others do not.  In so many of these cases the conventional wisdom is that the situation is hopeless: nothing can be done.  Death has occurred and we might as well just bury the corpse.  But are these situations hopeless truly?  Even for one who knows that God can do the impossible?

Which leads us to the second point: sometimes a person with a heart of mercy and compassion can see into an impossible situation and envision how the mercy of God could work if given half a chance.  Just as Jesus was able to understand other people mercifully, so can his followers.  We can see through the mistakes and sins to the person as he or she is in the sight of God and help that person to awaken to his or her identity in God, laying aside mistaken and sinful ways.  This is likely to be a messy undertaking, done by fits and starts—just as it is by fits and starts that we learn to overcome our own sins.  But for individuals and communities who can understand their suffering neighbors mercifully, many miraculous things can happen.  If widows’ sons are not brought back to life, the widows themselves can be helped and cared for.  Addicted persons can be shown how to leave their addictions behind.  Marriages can be healed and relationships restored.  Not always, since those whom we seek to help have their own freedom within which to respond.  But if we show Jesus’ own heart of compassion and mercy, we are likely to find those whose hearts become open to intervention through our own compassion.  The impossible is overcome; God works a miracle again, even if it is not the kind of miracle that will get advertised on TV. 

And third, the Church’s deepest wisdom is that wherever Jesus is, there is life.  No situation is truly hopeless where people have hearts open to Christ and are willing to be obedient to Him.  Jesus is the source of life and those who are in Him live because of Him and have a share in the life-giving Spirit.  This is true of individual people and it is true of Christian communities.  Sometimes our Christian communities wear down and become discouraged.  Things have not gone as we had hoped, and the way forward is unclear.  We might start to doubt that Jesus is really among us.  But of course, that is not true.  The risen Christ has promised to be with us and meets with us on a regular basis, in word and sacrament.  We can recover our confidence in Him.  One way we do that is to look around to see the good things we have been given and thank Him for them.  We can pay more attention to Him and look for Jesus intentionally.  We soon will realize that He is here and has something to give us: new life.

The other thing that may be helpful is something that your vestry and I have begun with Canon Silla of our diocese: a process of planning for our future.  It has taken us a long time to get going, but now we have begun.  We have begun with the first step of looking for the presence of Christ in the things that are going well. Now we are organizing a task force to study what is going well and to discern how Jesus himself is leading us to strengthen them.  In a fairly short period of time the vestry will consider the recommendations of this task force and then commend to you some objectives which we can accomplish over the next six months to a year and a way in which we can evaluate what we have done. 

We may already believe that the Kingdom of God is really present amongst us, but now we are going to take some specific steps to give expression to that faith and trust that the life-giving power of the Father will enliven us as we seek more intentionally to be a witness to the Kingdom in this place.  That is why we ask for your prayers in this process.  We not only want to find areas to strengthen, but we want to find the things that Jesus Himself wants strengthened.  We want to discover His will for our common life, knowing that when we do, we shall, as our mission statement puts it, find the place where we live transformed and transfigured in God. 

The reality is that in Jesus there is new life.  He is always with his Church.  He is here.  All we need to fulfill his will for us as individuals and as a parish is here too!