Sunday nights at 9 pm (8pm central) have been a cherished, magical time in my home for a long time. It began in college, as we gathered to watch Six Feet Under and the Sopranos, and continued with Carnival, Big Love, and most recently True Blood. I am talking of course, of my dates with HBO on Sunday nights. The people around me have changed over the years, beloved series have come and gone, but I'm still there. In April, HBO debuted a new series called Treme that focused on New Orleans as it recovers from Hurricane Katrina. I was drawn to the series because of my love for New Orleans. Having grown up in Houston, New Orleans was a frequent destination - only a little over 5 hours - and trust me in Texas 5 hours is nothing! The thing that has kept me interested in Treme is how delicately and carefully the writers have woven music into each episode. In fact, the series gets its name from the Treme/Lafitte neighborhood, an important center of African-American and Creole culture and music. At the heart of New Orleans and her people, across gender, racial, and social lines, music is the driving, connecting force.
First and second line parades are a perfect example. The first line of any parade are the people - the band or the group - who actually have a permit to march. The second line - a nola tradition, are the friends, the onlookers, the bystanders who join in and follow the parade dancing and singing as it makes it route. Treme has delightfully depicted many of these parades, including the funeral processions. A jazz funeral begins its solemn procession at the church, playing hymns like "Just a Closer Walk with Thee"-no improvisation, no frills. Nothing but sadness blown to the slow beat of a muted snare drum. Once the procession arrives at the cemetery, after the final words are spoken and the body is lowered into the ground, the mood shifts. Brightly festooned umbrellas burst open, the snare drummer removes his mute, and the funeral procession heads back into town to the raucous strains of "When the Saints Go Marching In" and "I'll Fly Away". Folks who heard the somber hymns earlier in the day wait for the procession's return...because they know a celebration's coming...and no one wants to miss the funeral celebration.
Jesus and his disciples stumble upon the solemn beginning of a funeral procession in our scripture today, and when they leave it, the entire atmosphere has changed. True, there probally weren't trumpets, trombones and dancers, but there was amazement and joy.
Luke 7:11-17
11Soon afterwards he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. 12As he approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow; and with her was a large crowd from the town. 13When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, “Do not weep.” 14Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, rise!”15The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. 16Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying, “A great prophet has risen among us!” and “God has looked favorably on his people!” 17This word about him spread throughout Judea and all the surrounding country.
As you may have noticed, our Old Testament and New Testament scriptures this morning are strikingly similar. Both stories involve a widow whose only son has died. Elijah cries out to the Lord, and Jesus has compassion. Elijah stretches himself upon the child, and Jesus touches the bier. "The life of the child came into him again" and "The dead man sat up and began to speak". Both Elijah and Jesus "gave him to his mother" –– the wording is exactly the same[1]. The mother said to Elijah, "Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is true" and the crowd said of Jesus, "A great prophet has risen among us".
The Gospel of Luke is replete with healing miracles. A woman battles through a crowd to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment. Just before today's story, a centurion sends word through his friends that his servant is ill. "Just give the word," the man says, "and I know he'll be healed." Jesus praises these people and attributes their healing to their faith. But the woman in today's story? She 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.
Not one word about gratitude or praise. Just a mother's tears before the raising and a son's unrecorded speech after it. As we journey through both stories, each step takes us further and further into the sadness and desperation of the women we encounter. Elijah appears out of the wilderness and confronts a widow who is preparing herself and her son for their seemingly inevitable death. She trust him, shares of her scarcity, only to find her son, her only son, getting sicker and sicker, unto death. Jesus and his disciples seemingly stumble upon a funeral procession as they enter the town of Nain. There is a man dead, a young man, an only son, and the only son of a widow. It seems like the bad news keeps piling on.
These young men, whose lives have been cut tragically short have left behind someone who depended upon them completely. It is a simple fact that in the ancient world, women depended upon their husbands – and their sons – to provide for them, especially as they got older. So our women today are mourning not only for their sons, but also for themselves. They are essentially homeless, with no one to count on. The funeral procession in Luke might well be for both individuals, son and mother.
Seeing this Jesus and Elijah are moved. The Greek word[2] is literally translated ‘To be moved to the depths of one’s heart[3].’ It is used only twice in Luke, once when the good Samaritan sees the stripped and beaten man and when the prodigal father sees his lost son far down the road.[4] It is a word that describes the deepest kind of emotion we can have for one another. The Reverend William Sloane Coffin said, after the death of his own son, “God’s is the first heart to break when we face our suffering[5].” We see that in our stories today.
After raising the widow’s son the people immediately recognize Jesus’ authority, as the widow in 1st Kings recognized Elijah's. This authority is most clearly demonstrated in compassion. Compassion is the essence of Jesus’ messianic identity. But it doesn't just stop there. Elijah doesn't flinch at the anger and frustration the widow threw his way, doesn't just recognize her pain, but pleads to God from within it. Jesus doesn't just take the widow’s needs seriously, he makes her pain his own. Jesus combined compassion and power. In our world these things are often kept in separate containers for fear of contaminating one another.
Compassion is something we talk about aspiring to and in our better moments we indeed do. We speak of it as gentle, sympathetic, comforting, soft, possibly even naive. Power is something we think of as smart, as forceful, effective and the bad times calculating or greedy. Power in our world is almost always “power over” as much as “power to” or “power for”. Many people feel they have to temper their compassion to make good decisions. Generations of young boys and girls have been taught to hold their compassion in check if they want to succeed. It was thought, and in many places still is, that women can't be effective leaders because they would let compassion cloud sound judgement - as if compassion were a trait limited to a specific gender.
We have been conditioned by society that power and compassion do not seem to belong in the same paragraph forget going hand in hand. You can see it when, in our language, we speak of having compassion ON someone, removing ourselves, separating from those suffering. But Jesus has compassion FOR the widow. It is a compassion that leads directly to action.
The compassion that Jesus demonstrates is not about boundaries and rational detachment. Walter Brueggeman says such compassion is a radical threat to the numbness maintained by the dominant order, and says that it’s not “triumphant indignation” that will “undermine the world of competence and competition,” but “passion and compassion[6]”. The stories of Elijah and Jesus suggest that radical change requires passion and compassion for everyone, especially our political and personal and religious adversaries. God's compassion isn't formulaic or predictable or tidy or even rational—yet it is perhaps the only thing that can save us.
Here we are, in June, and if you look at the front of your bulletins you'll see we've started the church season known as Ordinary Season. We commonly call it our low season, because it occurs most often during the summer and because it seems there's just not much going on. Yet in truth, that’s a misnomer. We've been through the expectations of Advent, through the lows of Lent and Holy Week, through the mountain top of the Easter season and have been blown by the spirit through Pentecost and Trinity Sunday. I think we can learn a thing or two from the second line parades. The spirit hasn't stopped blowing. The story isn’t over – the celebration has just begun! We can't walk out of the church, can't walk away from the empty tomb filled with the spirit shuffling our feet, isolated and with our heads down. We’ve seen the intermingling of power and compassion. We know there is something more than this and we're called to point the world toward it. God has led the first line, bursting into our lives with joy and chaos, blowing a bright horn and banging a drum, jarring us from our reverie and assuring us that the bonds that once held us are broken. God is marching past, calling us each to join in, to celebrate, to invite others along the journey, to demonstrate the amazing story of God's love for us in tangible ways.
The Gospel claims that wherever compassion and power come together for the sake of the vulnerable and suffering in this world miracles can occur. For every moment of suffering, every individual in pain, God’s heart breaks and so should ours. God’s brand of compassion and power should inform every moment of our lives, from the minuscule to the magnificent. We are called to feel and we are called to act. We can do no other.
For both widows, there is a resurrection that reclaims the future, their future. It’s a mere shadow of the moment where the power of death and pain is defeated once and for all. We are called to live into that hope, to share God's compassion, to live as prophets of the promises to come. Thanks be to God.
[3] Sakae Kubo, A Readers Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, (Michigan: Zondervan, 1975) 59.
[4] Gregory Anderson Love, “Luke 7:11-17 Theological Perspective”, Feasting on the Word Year C Vol 3, ed David L Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press 2010) 118.
[5] Rev. William Solane Coffin’s sermon at Riverside Church in New York has been republished with permission on 03/05/04 at http://www.pbs.org/now/society/eulogy.html.
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