“THE LIVING ONE LIVES IN YOU”
Saint Luke 7. 11-17
Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity: 19 September Anno Domini 2010
Jay Watson, pastor
There's a part of you right now…the sinful inner self…that can take this morning's Gospel reading, and manage to turn EVEN IT into a misapplication of the WORD.
The resurrection of the Widow of Nain's son is not about miracles of temporal, temporary, physical healing. The power which Jesus showed is not a harbinger of some special bodily recovery that you're going to experience in the next several years, or months, or tomorrow.
That momentous event which occurred outside the city of Nain is all about WHO Jesus is! That collision of the differing parades (one of Death and one of Life) is about WHAT Jesus did for all of you. It all happened, yes. It was preached upon, taught to the early Christian community, and ultimately recorded by Luke and preserved by the Church for your edification and survival. This individual story gives you GOD in the Flesh; straight from the pages of Scripture into your inner New Creation. This reality buoys you up and fortifies you to the end, where, by FAITH, you believe in the RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD AND THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME!
That young man got what was coming to him. He was in/on the funeral bier (the open air casket) the "old fashioned way," HE EARNED IT. Paul writes: "the wages of sin is death."
You have your body decay, grow old, and stop working the way it did when you were young, because you are a sinner. Note, I did not say you get decrepit and die because you commit "a" sin or a series of sins, I repeat Paul's language: the "wages of SIN is death." It's a condition not a symptom that kills. You at the core are fallen. Your "Old Adam" inner beast is daily beset by the world, the corrupt flesh, and the Devil.
Everything that you "do" (because it's "you" a fallen rebel) you do as a complete human being. A complete human being is sinful and unclean. All that you do, work for, accomplish, plan, manipulate, design, bring to fruition EARNS YOU DEATH. Period. Sure, your bad actions, thoughts, and words deserve death. You have no problem with that. BUT, your "you" deserves death as well. Period.
Man as man, you as you, are a reject, a retard, a mistake.
The "world," i.e. "mammon," you tend to make peace with. You either pretend that you are immune from its allure, or you give just enough of it away (maybe even to Christ's Bride) that you assuage your guilt… temporarily. Or, even worse, your sinful nature doesn't even attempt to "fight the fight" of Faith, but simply "joins" the World and only wears the outward veneer of disciple.
The fallen "flesh," i.e. the daily symptomatic emanations from the core's rot, are like stinking odors that waft out/off of you through your thoughts, syllables, and activities. You "Pharisee it" away. You use your own daily breaking of the 8th Commandment to justify your constant illegal trespassing of the other nine.
The Devil? You fall constant prey to his camouflage. He is not in the "horns," the red, the pointy teeth, the horns or the tail! He is not in the outward, manifest, clearly visible abominations that you might encounter. Satan comes to you subtly like a serpent, like a wolf dressed as a tender, friendly, smiling and sweet talking lamb. Every time you justify one step away from God's law with some rationale you've met the Devil, and He is you; or at least he's "got you" just like he got Mother Eve. BUT THEN THERE'S DEATH; that death character!
Ah… that's the one "player" in this whole sad and tragic melodrama that can't be easily dismissed, ignored, or reasoned away. When one is young, the specter of death can be looked "away from"… for a moment. But from young adulthood on, Mr. Death is like the 400 pound gorilla, or the 2-ton Elephant in the living room corner. You can "pretend" he isn't there, but you know he is… you do truly see him constantly out of the corner of your eye. You sense the hot fetid breath on the nape of the neck.
You know what Death does. Death breaks things the final time. Death can't be fixed by band aids, penicillin, antibiotics, surgery, herbs, or bed rest. That bony, skeletal, minion of the dragon haunts, taunts, and affronts you. He's maybe taken one of your children, or a beloved brother or sister. He's cut down your grandparents and Mother and Father with that scythe of sin's consequences. You hear the grinding of the bones, you hear the demoniacs' slander and condemnation, and you smell the fear… your own fear. Sweat-flop!
"You shall die" the Lord told Adam. "From dust thou wert taken and to dust shalt thou return" the Lord proclaimed to your Father and his offspring.
But you're not just a sinful, fallen, and doomed creature.
You are, IN CHRIST, a new creation. You have a NEW + NAME!
And as a co-heir with Christ, you know death is not the final victor. But sadly, sometimes you're too theoretical, dry, and intellectual about all of that. And no, I'm not counseling Pentecostal enthusiasm as an antidote-that's like chasing a slug of rat-poison with a tumbler full of strychnine. NO! What I am suggesting is that, yes, your SAINT, knows and accepts: theologically, systematically, and rationally, all that Ecclesiastes says about death. You "understand" that at the point that the Grim Reaper severs you savagely with your final pay check, YES your body goes to the ground BUT your spirit goes to be with the Lord. Yes. You believe that the Savior will keep your mortal remains safe in a chamber of His making. But… but, that Saint cannot free itself fully (not this side of the grave) from the Sinner who clutches and claws at the heart, the reins, the bowels of your emotions. Even the Christian can be, and is, from time to time, absolutely terrified of death. You are brought to your metaphorical knees, and you cry with a raw-ness born of blackness at the thought of losing a spouse, child, loved one, and YOURSELF! Death is corruption complete. Without the meeting of this morning's opposite's parades, opposing marches, death means Satan wins! Death is putrefication perfect and that the "prince of the air" has triumphed by spoiling your fresh newly born bodies which "turn" in color, texture, and flexibility so, so fast. Without the Lord walking up to the Widow of Nain's dead son and confronting him, death means Satan wins. But Christ confronted! He stopped, He worked, and He touched.
Holy Scripture records that Jesus cried two times. The Lord wept when His dear friend Lazarus had died… had DIED. Jesus cried when He saw firsthand what that terrible, terrible DEATH had done to Mary of Bethany. The Lord also wept when He rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. He wept over the city of His people for He knew what their rejection of His Person and Work would mean. He foresaw the death of their city, their Temple, their society, and their very bodies. The reality of death was so strong that the Lord's human emotions wept over the results and the sadness of the Devil's able assistant.
But, this was not how God meant it. And this was not the way God was going to let it remain. Yes, there would be a temporary physical decay and a passing deathly repose in the ground. But Satan was not going to win. Satan did not triumph. The snake and his skeleton pal only bruised the Paschal Lamb's heel. On the cross, your God/Man cried again, He wept in pain and anguish over all the death and despair and loneliness and hurt that has ever been, and that ever will be.
But weeping, writes the Psalmist, lasts only for the "night," only for the moment, and rejoicing comes again in the day, on the morrow, at dawn, at Easter-eternity. You are baptized! You are IN the New Testament!
Saints, brothers and sisters of the LIVING ONE! Jesus showcases a "dress rehearsal" if you will on that day in Nain. Jesus walks up to death and takes it away from the corpse. There in Nain, Christ only touched the dead flesh of another, taking the rigor mortis away, restoring the beating of a heart, the inflation of the lungs, and the flowing of the blood. In a few months, the Lord would let His own flesh be ripped and torn, would let His own lungs be slowly asphyxiated with blood, spit, phlegm, and sin, and would let His own heart be silenced and then pierced through with the spear-point of your sin. As the Savior was not afraid to ceremonially make Himself unclean for the day, by touching a dead man's casket, and a dead man, so too the Lord willingly let His own immaculate and sinless body be touched by Satan, by Satan's allies, and by Death itself: rudely, crudely and brutally.
So yes, your sinful self does get apprehensive and scared periodically when Death makes a visual reminder that it waits not just for the other guy, not just for your loved ones, but for you! But you fear not like the heathen. You grieve not over lost loved ones like a pagan because you've been filled by Christ, by the Spirit, by the Father, and like Paul you believe in the Second Coming and the new glorified bodies to be revealed. Your New Adam your New Eve, like Paul, can even wish at times to be free from this ragged old tent and to be with the Lord.
Today's truth of Nain is today's truth of Shawnee, of Augsburg, of all of you.
Jesus isn't "about" life and living, JESUS is LIFE and LIVING. One doesn't receive the gift of faith, which IS JESUS CHRIST CRUCIFIED, RAISED, and REIGNING, to only wind up "happy" for awhile, but then dead and rotted some day. Christ is not a narcotic BUT a NEW YOU! But you WERE already dead in sin. You WERE already slain with Christ when you died the only death that matters- - at the font, baptized into + Jesus' death, so that even as He is risen from the dead, you too are raised in and with Him, and soon, by Him.
You ARE now in Jesus. Where He is so there too are you. What He has, so do you as his siblings, born of the Spirit and having the same Abba Father.
This text is a trailer, a preview, of a grand 3-D Technicolor, surround-sound one-time gala presentation of the final show which is coming. Jesus raised the young man for a time. He raises you forever. So this Lord's Day it's no dry and lecture-like "information" to give "brain-assent" to. But likewise this First Day of the rest of your life is no tingly-feely self-manufactured rush of feelings. This is a real parade of Peace with a really present Prince Who carries you on His shoulder with His arms; gives you the choicest seat and the best view; gives you Himself in all ways He deems best. Come now and receive with your mouths the food of immortality the drink of eternity. Receive the forgiveness of sins and LIFE itself.
In the Name of The Father and + of The Son and of The Holy Ghost