Resurrecting Hope in a Small Town

A Sermon Preached at Mt. Bethel UMC on June 6

Luke 7:11-17
Soon afterwards he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. As 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. When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, "Do not weep." Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, "Young man, I say to you rise!" The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying, "A great prophet has risen among us!" and "God has looked favorably on his people!" This word about him spread throughout Judea and all the surrounding country.

So let’s just get it out there. I know you are thinking it, so I’m just going to say it. It’s the question that’s on everyone’s minds: “How’d it come to be that there’s a full-blooded YANKEE preaching in Bahama, NC?” Now I want to put everyone’s fears at ease. I’m not going to try to infect you with any of my “Yankee-ness.” I’ll try to be mindful and use “y’all” so that you can understand me despite my accent. More importantly, today I’m going to preach only what Y’ALL have taught me in my few weeks at Mt. Bethel. No foreign imports today, this is 100% certified Bahama, NC.

Now, if there is one thing I’ve learned from life here in Bahama, it’s the importance of a good story. It seems that around here there is a story for everything. You can’t show someone the sanctuary without mentioning the pastor who ran out late one Saturday night because he thought the church was haunted. You can’t drive by a house in the whole town without hearing who lives there, who used to live there, how long the family has lived there, and the 3 best stories about them. Every piece of this church has a story and every spot in this town brings to our minds certain people and events that will be forever tied together. If you want to know what Mt. Bethel UMC is about, you can’t find out through a list of ideas, values, or abstract principles, you have to know its story.

So why is it that when it comes to Christianity, we don’t always know quite what to do with stories? Perhaps it’s because of the way that stories sometime seem to be dissociated from “facts” or “truth.” Last week when I was getting my oil changed I saw a bumper sticker on another car in the parking lot. It said, “Never Let the Truth Get in the Way of a Good Story.” Perhaps this points to our hesitancy to ground our Christian convictions in stories. Story seems flexible, it seems unreliable—we want FACTS. We want LISTS.

To illustrate: When someone asks us what “The Gospel” is, what do we say? “Jesus Christ, the son of God, fully divine, fully human, died on the cross and rose again to atone for our sins so that we can have peace with God.” Yet, when the earliest Christians had to answer that question, they didn’t respond with a list of the facts like that one. Instead, they told a story. After all, our passage today comes from The Gospel according to Luke. It is not The Gospel according to Luke (plus a 22 chapter prequel about Jesus’ life.) To Luke, the story of Jesus’ life could not be separated from his death and resurrection. To be saved is not just to come under the saving power of the cross—though it certainly entails that. To be saved is to become a part of the people who tell the story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection in a way that makes it our own story. In the Gospel stories, we have our own bumper sticker. Rather than “Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story,” our bumper sticker reads, “Want to hear the truth? Let me tell you a story.”

Christianity is so much more than a set of facts, beliefs, rules, or principles that you can comfortably insert as a part of your daily life. Christianity is about making the story itself your life. We are reading the Gospel stories correctly when we understand that to believe in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection means to recast our understanding of the world in the light of a new world. We open the Bible thinking we will consume a story about Jesus, but instead we find that it is this story that consumes and transforms us.

So how should we approach Luke 7:11-17, if we believe that the story should transform our own views of the world? All of this sounds good enough, but where does this hit home when we pick up our Bibles and read? What does it look like to see in Jesus’ story a new world that is instructive for how we view our own realities?

First, when this story becomes our story, we realize that pain, suffering, grief, and death are real. Make no mistake about it, when Jesus shows up with his disciples and a large crowd, he encounters a very unhappy scene: Luke says, “A man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow.” Jesus encounters a scene of grief and mourning, a funeral procession going out to bury the recently deceased son of a now childless widow. This scene is a bit far removed from how we tend to speak of death in the modern world. Oftentimes we seem to expect that a life “well lived” results in a conflict free, pain free existence. Yet, if that’s true, I can’t think of anyone, including Jesus, who would have “lived well.” Perhaps we need to adjust those expectations and acknowledge that we live in a society that wants to escape suffering and death. The popularity of health foods, workout programs, and plastic surgery points to a story in which we can get younger, faster, stronger, and smarter—a story in which we can beat death. Yet, if we are going to allow this story to consume and transform our understanding of the world, we must be a people who tell a different story. My friends, one of the few things that every single person here today has in common with one another is that, barring the early return of Jesus, we are all going to die. We cannot escape it. Try as we might to live in denial, death will have the last laugh—or perhaps I should say the second-to-last laugh, because the story of Luke 7 is not over yet.

The second way this story transforms us is by teaching us that death and suffering do not get the last word. Jesus sees death and the pain it brings. He does not ignore it; he does not run away from it. Jesus knows death is real—just look at the cross. But Jesus does not leave it at that. Luke writes, “He came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, ‘Young man, I say to you rise!’ The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.” I want us to notice something: If the widow’s son hadn’t died, Jesus’ raising him from the dead wouldn’t have been that much of an accomplishment. The death had to be real for the healing to be real. If we ignore death, pain, and suffering in our talk of salvation, what are we even being saved from? The truth is that death is real, but Resurrection is more real. When we allow this story to consume and transform our own views of the world, we become a people committed to the hope of a new world, a new life, that is more than just the world of frustration, pain, and death that we are continually forced to deal with as we watch the news, talk to our friends and neighbors, and live our lives. As Christians, we need to be a people capable of sustaining hope for our community and world. We do this, not by ignoring death, but by believing in the one who came face to face with the full brunt of death, and rose victorious, shattering death’s power to control our lives. Our life together at Mt. Bethel is not something we do to pass the time until we can escape to heaven. Our life together at Mt. Bethel is what we do to show each other and the world a preview of the victory over death that is still yet to fully come. This isn’t just any victory though. The third way this story transforms our lives is by showing the particular way in which this victory is accomplished.

The creation of new life by Jesus in Luke 7 happens for a most peculiar audience. Luke tells us that this episode takes place in a town called Nain. Now I’m not sure its even fair to call Nain a town. At best, Nain is an unincorporated township. We know that Nain was located six miles outside of Nazareth, and Nazareth was no bustling metropolis itself. Nazareth was a small town—people criticized Jesus’ birth in Nazareth as a town so small it was unfit for a Messiah. Now, you know you live in the country when your town is only locatable in relation to a place that is already known as being rather insignificant. This place makes Nazareth look like New York City. And yet, Jesus chooses to go here. Jesus’ defeat of death does not happen in the Coliseum at Rome or in the Temple at Jerusalem.

Furthermore, Jesus does not go and find the Caesar in Rome and raise his child, or even the chief priest of the temple in Jerusalem and raise his child. Jesus raises a poor widow’s son. In the male-dominated world of 1st century Palestine, women had very little power apart from their husbands. If you had no husband, then you relied on your male sons to represent your family. This woman has lost both. Given the culture of the time, she is a model for being socially on the outside and in a position of total weakness. Jesus shows up in this small, small, small town and brings new life to a person who is not “important” in the grand scheme of kingdoms and empires. Yet that is exactly the point. When we learn to make this story our own story, we see that what is “significant” or “important” gets turned upside down. This story transforms us by teaching that this new life in Jesus comes to small towns and “unimportant” people. It is not enough to be people who can talk honestly about death, or who can hope honestly in the life of resurrection. We must do these things in ways and places that the world might otherwise deem “insignificant.” This is a very unusual story to tell to our world, which is dominated by power, fame, wealth, and celebrity culture. This story teaches us that new life comes through weakness in the places where we would least expect it. Let’s learn to be people who can tell this story: (1) death is real, (2) resurrection is more real, and (3) resurrection comes to unexpected groups of people at unexpected times.

I have two closing messages for us from this story.

The first is for those who we have honored for graduation today. Many of you may have heard or are about to hear grandiose graduation speeches, encouraging you as you take the next step in life. Perhaps they sound a little bit like this: “You are the future! Through you we can beat death and change the world, your progress cannot be stopped. Go out with a bang! Do something important with your life: Move to New York City, change the world, start a multi-national corporation.” These speeches are telling a story about what really matters in life. But I’m not so sure it’s the true story. I would give you an alternate message about what really matters in life, taken from Luke 7: “Death and weakness and pain are real, and as you go out into the world, you will most certainly encounter them. But there is also real hope for new life in Christ. Your success as a graduate is not so much determined by what you can do for yourself with your education, though that is important. Your success as a graduate is measured by how well your education enables you to live peacefully and patiently as members of the ongoing adventure called the church of Jesus Christ. Doing this may lead you to New York City; it may lead you to a Nobel Peace Prize. But it may also take the shape of living faithfully to the story of Jesus in a way that will not win you any awards or bring you fame and fortune.” My encouragement for the graduates, and in a way for all of us, is that you evaluate the success of your lives, not by the story that society tells you about wealth, fame, or power, but by your steadfast commitment to live faithfully in the hope of new life in Jesus Christ that shows up to the most unexpected people at the most unexpected times.

My second closing message is for all of us here at Mt. Bethel.

We at Mt. Bethel are not a Mega-Church, we do not have a Starbucks built into our sanctuary, we can’t “change the world” in the way that many people think of this category—we cannot cure cancer here, we aren’t going to be able to send millions of dollars to impoverished countries in Africa, we will not be building a church that seats 10,000 members—anytime in the next few weeks at least. Yet, if we let this story teach us what it means to be a people capable of receiving Jesus’ miracles, we find out that we don’t need those things in order to be a place where Jesus shows up and gives people new life. Regardless of who our pastor is, regardless of how weak we worry we may become, regardless of our fear of change and the unknown, this congregation can be a place where Jesus’ surprising salvation shows up and brings new life. God can use us to be people who carry on the work of Jesus by naming death and suffering for the realities that they are and being present with those experiencing real pain, suffering, and death without running away. God can use us to be a people who tell the story of Jesus’ resurrecting power that brings a new life which is more than just fire insurance for our souls—we can testify to a life that overcomes death and resurrects us into a community of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. And, perhaps most importantly at a time like this, we can do these things by being a church family committed to God and each other. I think we see a great example of this in the ministry of Bryan. Bryan is a great pastor, not because he is an all-star preacher or a master-church-growth specialist. Bryan is a good pastor because through his life and ministry we catch sight of this new life in Christ that overcomes our weakness and brings REAL world-changing life to small towns like Bahama. We would dishonor Bryan if we make his ministry into an idol or a lucky charm and fail to see that everything he has taught us has been preparing us to be a people who can take up his ministry ourselves.

If we decide to take the risk of letting the story of Jesus consume our lives and transform the very way we think about all of life, then we should expect adversity, frustration, pain, even death to confront us as a church. But when this happens we should not act as people who have no hope. We should expect that Jesus’ resurrection will defeat this frustration, weakness or death and bring new life. This new life may not come with fanfare, it may not shake the foundations of society, but if we have learned anything today it’s that the new life that Jesus brings does not need to happen in the biggest city or be noticed by the rulers of the world. Indeed Jesus’ new life is most real when it shows up at the most unexpected times in small towns like Bahama, NC. May we be a people capable of telling this story to each other and to our community in the coming weeks, months, and years. Amen.

Thanks to everyone who was praying for me! It went really well!
There is also video of me preaching it:
Part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGd0KHE8PdI
Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8f_Pa7Jde6Y
Part 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrnPKoorxvI