PENTECOST 313 1 Kings 17 /

If there is one thing that defines the actions of the God of , it is surely the theme of rescue. From the Exodus onward, our picture is of a God who sets things right, who uses his power (that power we like to call ‘almighty’ – complete, irresistible) to set people free from what oppresses them. Our Psalm says it all: he gives justice to those who are oppressed, and food to those who hunger. The LORD sets the prisoners free; the LORD opens the eyes of the blind; the LORD lifts up those who are bowed down. That’s Israel’s story – we once were lost, but now we’re found, because God set us free. Well, slavery and imprisonment are surely oppression, but there are many other kinds of oppression. The ultimate tyrant, after all, is death, the creator of universal oppression, the tyranny from which nobody is exempt. The stories we hear today show that God’s power triumphs over even that kind of tyranny.

In a way this is a perfect thing to be reflecting on, so close to the beginning of ‘ordinary time’. Easter is over, and it’s Easter that sets the tone for these stories. The mean to say, ‘this is how God is, on the side of life, not death, powerful to quell evil and death, always bringing right out of wrong, life out of death’. What a good place to help us get oriented to this new season of the church year, the half of the year devoted to how we appropriate the great deeds of God on our behalf, how we live out the new life we have given in Christ.

We can start by taking the stories at face value. The situations are dire: in the story, Israel is in a drought (this one actually takes place before the one we heard last week, when Elijah’s prayers cause God to send rain on the land after 3 years without). There’s not much food for anybody; and there’s not any for people like this widow, one of the poorest of the poor. She’s making her last meal as the story opens. So miracle number 1 is the food provided for her either on Elijah’s behalf directly, or indirectly in response to her generosity toward him. God approves of that kind of generosity, the message is; God will reward it. And when the drought is over, the widow has a son she can rely on – until she doesn’t; but God takes care of that too – that’s miracle number 2… As in the Exodus, as in so many other stories of the , we see the disasters of life coming down on someone who doesn’t deserve them, and God stepping in to undo the damage, to rescue the situation, to make things the way they should be.

Luke’s story is an echo of this one – another widow, another son, another terrible loss set right by God. What I’d like to conclude from these stories – what some people do conclude – is that this is what God always does, and what we can expect too if we just have faith. I’ve heard this kind of ‘faith’ used as a kind of bludgeon against people – if terrible things happen to you, you just must not have had the right kind of faith…..

I can’t think that this is a good way to understand these stories. I confess to being troubled by them. It’s not that they aren't wonderful stories – I’m troubled because they are so very wonderful, so much what we would like to see. Is there ever anyone who has been on the way to a funeral who wouldn’t like to see it cancelled? Is there anyone who has ever lost a child whose first and most constantly overwhelming thought is not, ‘Give them back!’? The stories fulfill our deepest wishes about the triumph of life over death, and that’s why I can’t just take them as nice stories from the past. They challenge me, they confront me: if God can raise people from the dead, why is there still death? If these sons are given back to the mothers who love them, why not other sons and daughters – why not my loved ones? Why not me?

To come down from Easter, from Pentecost, from the high and lofty mystery of the most holy Trinity, to the hardest, most agonizing questions of everyday life, is a little hard to take – but that’s what the Bible, and the church, are supposed to be for, isn't it? – to help us confront the hardest questions, the most dire situations, the mysteries of our life, not just God’s. We end up, it seems, thrown back to that word – mystery. God has made himself known in the scriptures, in these stories of life being brought out of death – that’s what God wants us to know, evidently, about who he is – and also, not quite so evidently, about who we are supposed to be, we who are, made in God’s own image. We can see some of that at work in Luke’s story.

In that story we find the dead boy and the grieving mother, but we also find 2 ‘large crowds’ – one is following the funeral procession; one is following Jesus. One is going the way of the world in which we are born, we live, we die, and that’s all there is to it. We’re all terminal – and as long as that is so, we might as well be in as much of our journey toward the grave as we can be, together. But coming toward us in the opposite direction is another procession, the crowd of people who are behind the Lord of life. And they are not quite like the people on their trip to the grave. The funeral procession is making a lot of noise, weeping and wailing, doing its mourning rituals, trying to keep death at bay. The group behind Jesus is rather quiet – they are doing a lot of listening instead of making noise themselves, trying to hear what the Lord is telling them to do next instead of hoping to keep themselves out of trouble; and they aren’t trying to keep death at bay: in fact, they’ve been told that their job is to go straight toward death without any kind of protection at all, because death isn't something to be afraid of any more. It’s just another episode, just another moment in the progress of a life lived in God, just a sort of breaking-point between life in this world and life in the presence of God. The crowd heading for the funeral is acknowledging the sovereignty of death; the crowd behind Jesus is acknowledging the sovereignty of God and the life God offers to those willing to lay down their own lives for the sake of his Kingdom.

So what are we to infer from all this? Dead boys are raised up and given back to their mothers, and this is God’s doing. But boys and girls, children and grownups, are dying every day, in the most awful circumstances, from things that the most elementary kind of justice would prevent – from starvation in a world of plenty, from being displaced because of war and terror in a world that could be at peace, from simply being born in the wrong place at the wrong time – and God doesn’t undo those deaths. Why not? I take my own answer to that question from the reaction of the funeral crowd. When they see the boy given back to his mother, they don’t say, ‘How nice, how kind, how happy for him and for her….’. They say, ‘A great has risen among us’ and ‘God has looked favorably on his people.’ They take this resurrection not as some kind of personal event, but as a sign of God’s presence among them, a sign of what God is up to in the world, and wants us to be up to. Whatever that is, it’s not going to be something that cancels out the contract God made with us in creation – it is we, and not God, who are supposed to be arranging affairs in this world, which was given to us to tend and keep. It is we and not God who are in charge of many of the processes that bring untimely death to our fellow creatures – the pollution of the natural world, the vicious compromises of politics that decide who will live and who will die based on how we allocate our resources, the decision that war is a solution to problems that should have been worked out in a hundred other ways, the horrible oppressions of racism, sexism, classism, death meted out to you just because of who you are… God doesn’t make those decisions, and God isn’t responsible for the deaths they cause. Nor is God responsible for the deaths of all those full of years who simply wear out these bodies of ours, which aren't designed to last forever - life isn’t designed to last forever in the form in which we know it now.

But God’s will in those matters is clear. It’s not right that mothers – or fathers or children – should be left without sustenance, requiring a miracle to get fed. It’s not right that children should die without a chance to grow up. And because God has left the world in our care, it’s not right that we should not care that these things happen. If we want to be part of the crowd behind Jesus, instead of just the crowd on its way to the grave, we too have to stop and take in the situation, and have compassion, and find some way to say to those who suffer, ‘Do not weep’. We’re not going to cancel out death – only God can do that, and God has done it in Jesus – but we are invited, we are commanded, to do what we can to wipe out the death we bring into the world by our greed, our carelessness, our apathy, our prejudices, our ideologies; and turn the world toward the justice God demands of us. If we do that, if we turn our resources toward life and not death, toward justice and not oppression, if we try to fulfill our holy calling in God’s sight, then even death will appear to us in a different aspect, because we are working on God’s side of the equation: for a world in which his promise of life is for all – abundance and peace here and now, the fullness of communion with God beyond death.