Sermon: Trinity 16 - 2018

16 September 2018

Text: Luke 7:11-17

In the name of + Jesus.  Amen.

Why are you a Christian?  

Father Duddleswell, the lovable character from the BBC TV show: “Bless Me, Father” once quipped, “‘Why’ is an ugly Protestant word.”  I’m inclined to agree with him if the “why?” is directed at God.  For unless God reveals something to us, it must remain a mystery.  But we do well to ask “Why?” when it comes to ourselves.

So, dear brothers and sisters, why are you Christians?  Why are you here today?  Why do you belong to this, or some other church?  

If the answer is because we’re trying to please our parents or honor our ethnic heritage, or because we like the parishioners or we like the pastor, or we like the music, or we want to learn how to become better people, or we want to train our children to be virtuous, or it just seems like the right social thing to do in our community – those are all wrong answers.

The key to why we are here and why we are Christians is in our Gospel reading.  We are dying.  We are surrounded by death.  We are stalked by death.  Our life on this side of the grave will end.  We are all suffering from a terminal disease, and we are immersed in it, like fish swimming around in the sea.  

In our Gospel reading, our Lord Jesus Christ, who has broken into our dying world, stumbles upon, of all things, a funeral.  And tragically, the dead man’s mother has outlived him.  He was her only son.  Moreover, she is a widow.  She has outlived her husband.  Death is everywhere.  The entire town, it seems, is mourning.  

This is why we are here, dear friends.

For we all confessed together that we are “poor, miserable sinners.”  We know from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans that “the wages of sin is death.”  We know what happened in the Garden of Eden.  We call it to mind each Ash Wednesday, “Remember, O man….”  And we are reminded of our own mortality every time we go to a funeral – like the funeral that Jesus attended at Nain.

For what happens at this funeral is also why Jesus is here, dear friends.  He came into our sinful world to exchange our sin for His righteousness.  He came to our dying world to die in our place, so that we might live.  He came to shed His blood in order to share His blood with us.  He came to receive what we deserve, and give us what we don’t.  

In short, Jesus came to raise us from the dead!

And in light of this, how silly are all other reasons people may give for being Christians and for coming to church.  We are Christians, dear friends, because we have been received by Christ through baptism.  We have been cleansed and born again, born that the old, sinful, mortal Adam may die, and in his place, a new man might arise.  Not merely a “better” or “nicer”  person” but rather an immortal and transformed person, who bears the unblemished image and likeness of God, thanks to our Lord Jesus Christ, who has compassion on us in our mortal state.

For what does our Lord do concerning this widow whose only son had died?  First, he has “compassion on her.”  He invites her to cease her weeping.  For he is taking away the cause of her mourning.  He stops the funeral, literally.  He halts the pallbearers.  He interrupts the usual march to the grave.  He disrupts this unnatural order of death that we are so warped as to believe is normal and natural.  Jesus touches the coffin, which is itself an unnatural use of wood.  And then the most natural thing in the world happens: in response to the touch and the command of Jesus, who says, “I say to you, arise,” the “dead man sat up and began to speak.”  For that is what death does in the presence of Christ: it ceases to exist, being crowded out by life upon the will and Word of God in the flesh.  And what else can we do but testify and confess what the Lord has done for us?

This is why we are here, dear friends.  For death cannot abide the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ, whose own death destroyed death, and whose resurrection points the way to our own resurrection.  Jesus will, in due time, likewise touch our lifeless bodies and command them to arise.  For he conquered death while himself died on another unnatural use of wood: the cross.  

The people who witnessed this most wondrous and glorious and joyful miracle announced “God has visited His people.”  And this visitation is no social call.  Rather it is the coming of the Lord to conquer death, and to offer eternal forgiveness, life, and salvation to all.  And by grace, we receive this glorious gift through faith, that is, by believing in His promise, by trusting in His name, by receiving His compassion and mercy, and by being raised from the dead to die no more.

This is indeed why we are here!  And this is why Jesus is here!  He came as the only son of a mother who seems to have become a widow herself.  

Jesus has come into the world to abolish widowhood and to end the suffering caused by the death of loved ones.  For Jesus destroys the underlying cause of death: sin.  He has come not to condemn, but to save.

Jesus has come to restore the perfection of the Garden of Eden, where mothers were never to bury their sons, and where children were never to bury their parents, where wood was never to be fashioned into a cross or a coffin, and where nobody would even know what a funeral is.

Jesus comes to say, “I say to you, arise,” even as He Himself rose from the grave, and was reunited to His mother and to all whom He has come to save.  

And this is what it means that God has visited His people.  It is why He is here, dear friends.  And is why we are here, dear brothers and sisters.  

Remember these words of Jesus, for you will hear them at your own glorious resurrection: “I say to you, arise.”  Amen.

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.