Text: Luke 7:11-17
In the name of + Jesus. Amen.
When our Lord “went to a town called Nain,” He encountered a funeral procession. The deceased was lying in a kind of open casket called a “bier” and he was being carried to the grave. His mother was burying her only son, and she was a widow. Death took a heavy toll on her, leaving her all alone in this world.
Our Lord “had compassion on her” and said to her, “Do not weep.”
Notice that our Lord didn’t comfort her by saying that her son “was in a better place,” or that he was “in heaven with his father.” He didn’t console her with her memories, or with the fact that “he lives on in our hearts.” He didn’t try to convince her that “heaven needed another angel” or any other such unchristian nonsense. He didn’t tell her to look for stray pennies or cardinals, or that her son’s ghost was now soaring in the sky, or watching the weekly football game from the “best seats in the house.”
No indeed. Jesus ordered the lifeless corpse to “arise.” And then the unthinkable happened. The body sucked air into its formerly lifeless lungs, and the boy’s spirit returned. He “sat up and began to speak and Jesus gave him to his mother.”
This was a resurrection.
And this is what the Christian faith is all about, dear brothers and sisters. We said it again in the Nicene Creed: “I believe in… the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.” And between the words “life” and “everlasting,” we make the sign of the cross as a reminder that this is a promise given to us through Holy Baptism and won for us by the blood of our dear Lord shed upon the cross. His death gives us life: not some kind of ghostly existence, but a bodily resurrection. Like the one Jesus had on Easter Sunday.
Pagans believe in things like ridding oneself of the body and living as a spirit. How sad that some Christians seem to think this is what our faith teaches, as if “It’s a Wonderful Life” were based on the Bible, or the old cartoons showing a person dying and then spouting wings and a halo were something taught by Jesus.
We have the promise of something far better. Yes, dying and going to heaven will be wonderful, because we will be in the nearer presence of our Lord and of our loved ones who continue to wait for the return of Christ. But what is yet to come is what we Christians truly await: “the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.” Jesus goes to prepare a place for us. There will be a new heaven and a new earth. We will eat and drink and enjoy the physical existence of our loved ones, without aging, without aches and pains, without disease and infirmity, and without death.
The graves will be opened, and the dead in Christ will rise. We will be judged not based on our own sins and imperfections, but by our Lord’s righteousness. Our bones will be knit together, flesh and sinews will appear, and our breath will return – like Ezekiel’s army of dry bones, like the child whom Elijah raised from the dead by means of his prayers, and like the young man that our Lord raised from the dead by simply ordering it to happen.
How sad that many Christians do not understand or even know this, thinking that the Christian life is about trying to be good so that your spirit goes to heaven and not hell – instead of confessing what Scripture and the Creeds confess: a physical bodily resurrection based on the blood of Christ and the grace given to us when we were baptized, received by us through faith. For just like these two resurrections in our readings, dear friends, the breath, that is to say, the spirit will be blown back into our flesh, and we will rise!
St. Paul blesses the Ephesian Christians with the prayer that God “may grant you to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in your inner being.” In the Creed, we refer to the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Most Holy Trinity, as “the Lord and giver of life.” St. Paul also expresses the hope and the promise that we Christians “be filled with all the fullness of God.”
For considering the Word of God promised by the Father through the prophets, spoken by the Son (who is the Word Made Flesh), and breathed into us by the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life – how is it even possible for our bodies not to rise – even as we see in the historical examples of these two widows’ sons?
Our Lord did not rise spiritually, but bodily. Our Lord doesn’t come to us spiritually in the Sacrament of the Altar, but bodily. Our Lord did not make vague promises about the spirit of the widow’s son, but rather commanded the body to rise, and reunited this family broken by cruel death, which Jesus defeated and defanged.
We are not Pagans. We do not learn our theology from movies or cartoons. We do not comfort those who weep on account of death the way the unbelievers do. Who cares about memories? Who cares about floating around over the fifty yard line? Who cares about myths about humans turning into angels? When our loved ones die, we want them back: in the flesh. When we face our own mortality, we want assurance that we will be restored to our bodily existence.
And we have that promise, dear friends!
That is why Jesus died, and why He rose. That is why our Lord raised the widow’s son, the daughter of the synagogue ruler, and His friend Lazarus bodily from the dead. He gave the widow back her son, He told the parents of the girl to give her something to eat, and He comforted Lazarus’s sister Martha who already confessed, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day,” to which our Lord replied, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me, though he die, yet he shall live, and everyone who lives and believes in Me shall never die.”
And our Lord asked Martha, “Do you believe this?” And in the face of death, we confess the Creed with the church, and we confess our faith with St. Martha, saying, “Yes, Lord; I believe that You are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.” We Christians live in full expectation that our Lord will awaken our loved ones and all of us from the slumber of death no differently than how we are awakened by the sun in the morning, our bodies refreshed, and the will of God calling us to rise and face a new day by His grace.
Teach me to live that I may dread
The grave as little as my
bed.
Teach me to die that so I
may
Rise glorious at the awe-filled
day.
Amen.
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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