And he came and touched the bier, the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, arise.”

Howard Hageman, my mentor and pastor and teacher, often described his first summer student ministry assignment as a seminarian by saying that he was at the Church for a week when the minister left on vacation, the next day the phone rang and it was a funeral director telling him of a death that he would be conducting the funeral for. Howard would pause, as only he could, and then say “No one ever told me that Christians die!” And then he would go on to teach us what to do when our first call came from a funeral director.

But his words, “Christians die” have always been close to the surface of my working vocabulary, reminding me that each of us and all of us will have loved ones die, reminding me that for all of our faithful prayers for those on our prayer list, still Christians die.

And I mention this morning because we are dealing with two resurrection stories, the child of the widow of Zarephath, with whom Elijah resided and the adult son of the widow of Nain whom Jesus encountered.

I have always, as a pastor, been nervous around resurrection stories, excluding the resurrection of Christ himself, which is in a different category, a category that I delight in proclaiming.

But these other stories, including the most famous one, that of Lazarus, have always made me wary. I have seen too many prayers offered for life extensions for the people we love, I have offered them myself and yet, even in cases where our prayers were affirmed for a season, we have always ended with a funeral service.

I said it so many years ago in a sermon, Lazarus died after his resurrection, so did both of these young men in the morning lessons. Christians die. All of our healings, all of the miracles that we read of, all of the miracles of medicine, all of these things that we have seen or experienced, all of the healings of this world, are temporary. Christians die.

I can’t explain why extra time is granted to one and not to another, it is on my list of questions to ask when I have left this world for the next, but this week I noticed that there is one thing is missing in all of these various resurrection stories.

But before I get to the missing thing, let’s visit the stories.

First the son of the widow of Nain.

Luke gives us, as he often does, some specific and tender details.

Jesus and his disciples and, by now, a large crowd, are coming into the town of Nain – a place that is not mentioned anywhere else in the Bible – and they meet a funeral procession. As they pause, we can assume, they hear the details from the mourners: a widow’s only son has died and a large crowd from the town walks with her, sharing in her sorrow.

Jesus is filled with compassion and says to the woman, “Do not weep”. Now, this is a shameful thing to do, to talk to a strange woman in public, a woman he had never met. Yet Jesus did those shameful things, often, with those on the fringes of power and society: women, lepers, foreigners, children, tax-collectors, Samaritans. He was consistently reaching out, guided by his

compassion more than the rules of etiquette. A life of faith always leads us to the needs of others.

Then he touches the bier, the frame upon which the corpse rests, stopping the procession – another shameful action, the dead were unclean and you kept your distance. Yet Jesus didn’t and he doesn’t, he is there with us when our loved ones died, touching everything shamelessly, and as a result, it is as we touch death that we begin to experience life. A life of faith always leads us to an appreciation for life itself, when we encounter death.

And then he speaks “Young man, I say to you, arise.” Didn’t he know the lessons of the world, that death was final and real? Of course he did, but Jesus never let what the world teaches be the last word. A life of faith always leads us to presume and anticipate God’s sunlight in the middle of our darkest nights.

Now, here’s the one thing that I noticed that is missing in these resurrection stories. Three times I have used the word faith in these last three paragraphs, and yet, in the scripture, do you find the word faith?

No.

Jesus does not respond to the faith of the Widow of Nain; nor, in the OT, does Elijah respond to the faith of the Widow of Zaraphath. In fact the Widow of Zaraphath displays far more anger, with Elijah and God, then anything else.

In both cases the dead are raised only by the grace of God.

No prayers.

No faith.

No bribes of great gifts of money.

No arguments that God has been unfair.

But somewhere, in their sorrow, God works.

These are the things that are out of our control, these are the flashes of grace that allow us to mourn the deaths that we experience, trusting that God will reunite us. For some the reunion comes first in this world, when the temporary healings are given, for all it will come in the next when the permanent love is fully ours.

At Chris Heitkamp’s ordination exam there was a brief flurry between me and another minister, an old seminary friend. Where I use the word reality, he wanted to use the word grace. And what occurred to me was that for me, the words are interchangeable: the only reality that I really know is Grace: the love of God given freely, unconditionally, depending not upon my faith or my eloquence or my actions but depending entirely upon God’s un-earnable, undeserved and irresistible love.

That is reality.

If you think, like the widow of Nain, that you are a marginalized person because of your gender or perhaps because of your income or vocation or family status or sexual orientation or appearance or age or health or any other thing that you feel separates you from God and other people, here is reality: Jesus has compassion upon you.

If you think, like those who watched Jesus touch the bier and speak to a corpse, that there are things about you that are unclean: your failure to keep your promises, your greed, your obsession with yourself, your prejudices, your fears, your doubts, your anger with God, your secret sins that kill you to all that is good in the world, here is reality: Jesus will touch you and command you to rise from the death that you live in and begin to live with a quality and quantity of life that you have never known before, a quality that is abundant and a quantity that is eternal.

Reality is Grace and Grace is Reality. You don’t get it because you pray or sing or serve or give or love or laugh or forgive or any of the other things that God has created us and called us to do and be.

Reality is Grace and Grace is Reality. Because you get it, you are then free to respond and the only way to respond is to pray and sing and serve and give and love and laugh and forgive and all of the other things that God has created us and called us to do and be.

Reality is Grace and Grace is Reality.

It means that yes, our healings are all temporary but it also means that God’s love is permanent.

It means that you can’t shake that love when you don’t want to be quite as Christian as God wants you to be, nor can you demand it when you want God to bless you in specific and selfish ways.

God’s love is Grace.

God’s love is Reality.

God’s love lifts us up, not only at the end of this life to the next life, but out of the hundreds and thousands of little deaths – the sins and disappointments and failures of our lives - and places us – in this world – into relationships so that we can provide Grace and Reality to others who mourn, to others who have been discarded by life, to others who are dead to the beauty of God’s created and deeply loved world .

“I say to you, arise.”

Oh, and one more thing one more of those intimate details that Luke is so sensitive to, and it is there in verse 15: the dead man sat up and began to speak. And Jesus gave him to his mother.

Don’t you wonder what he said?

He, who had been dead and now was alive, don’t you wonder what he said?

Luke is silent.

But I have always been fond of playwright Eugene O’Neil’s take on Lazarus. He wrote a play entitled Lazarus Laughed, and in it the resurrected Lazarus hears the news of Christ’s death on the cross and greets it with a low, musical laughter, for he knows, as Coach John Wooden knew, that there is no death, he knows that the Reality is Grace, abounding Grace, abundant Grace, eternal Grace, sealed by God’s eternal laughter.

Take the healings – of the body, the mind, the soul and the heart – when they come to you and to those you love, but never forget that they are temporary, while the laughing and permanent love of God – all of that which we call grace - is the ultimate reality of this world and the next.

And he came and touched the bier, the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, arise.”