Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 10, 2007

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I suppose we’ve all heard the saying “live is uncertain—eat dessert first.” It’s meant as I joke, I suppose, an excuse to eat our dessert before we’ve finished our Brussels sprouts. I’m actually quite happy to have an excuse to eat my dessert before I’ve finished my Brussels sprouts because I don’t particularly care for Brussels sprouts. We laugh when we hear it in this silly saying, but over these past few weeks I’ve had driven home to me in particularly powerful and painful ways the truth of the saying’s thesis, that life is uncertain. It seems I’ve been encountering a lot of death and life diminishing events lately that have hit people suddenly and unexpectedly. The week before last a young woman was killed in Sultan, where I live, when the car she was in crossed a private, uncontrolled crossing and was hit by a train. Closer to home, I learned on Friday that my son Matt’s friend Paul and his partner, who had recently committed their lives to each other in what our society still refuses to call a marriage because both of the people are men, had gone to Las Vegas to celebrate their honeymoon. As they walked along the Strip a drunk driver drove up onto the sidewalk at high speed and killed John’s partner, who died in John’s arms. In this family of faith, the Tuck’s grandson recently suffered a head wound in Iraq that has forever changed and diminished his life, and in my short time here several of you have suffered the death of people you have loved so dearly; and in at least one case that loss was very sudden and unexpected.

And then, of course, as most of you know, there’s my twin brother Pete who without any warning symptoms that there might be a problem suffered a severe stoke that has left one side of his body paralyzed and his life forever changed an diminished. At first we thought he wasn’t going to survive, although it now appears that he will. When we thought he wouldn’t Jane and I went to Eugene, and I told my father that his other son was dying. Maybe some of you have had to do something like that. When we have to do it, we do it; but I pray that none of us will ever have to do it again. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. Much of the time we can go through life more or less unaware of life’s uncertainty; but events like these, of which there have been so many in my life recently, drive home to us just how fragile and vulnerable human life really is. And we wish it weren’t so. We wish there were some way to bring our suddenly afflicted loved ones back, to bring them back to life or back to wholeness of body and mind. And we know there isn’t. We know that when a person dies that person is truly gone from this world and from our lives forever. At least, I’m convinced that that is true. I have never experienced anyone coming back to life after he was well and truly dead. When a loved one dies or becomes incapacitated, our task is not to bring the person back to life or to health. Our task is to grieve and to learn to live with our loved one’s death or diminishment, to see our lives differently because they have been forever changed by the loss of the one we love, either in whole to death or in part to disability.

All of which is to introduce the fact that I was totally at a loss as to what to preach on this week when I read the lectionary selections for today. Right there in those Scripture readings were two stories about prophets bringing people back to life after they were dead. My first reaction to those stories was: I don’t believe that, and there’s no way I’m preaching on that. That doesn’t happen. The dead are not brought back to life, and these stories that say it has happened mean nothing to me. I was quite prepared simply to dismiss them, to write them off as ancient literary devices having no important meaning for us.

But then the thought occurred to me: Maybe the fact that you’re resisting these stories so much is precisely why you should preach on them. People who claim to know about such things tell us preachers that sometimes that’s the case. As I pondered that possibility, I said to myself: You’re reacting to those stories like a Biblical literalist! Since when were you a Biblical literalist?! You keep trying to teach people that the truth and the power in Bible stories has nothing to do with whether they really happened or not. Their truth and their power is in their meaning for us today, not in whether they actually relate something that happened to someone else a long time ago in a place far away. So stop thinking like a literalist! Instead ask: What, if anything, is the meaning that these stories of Elijah and Jesus restoring dead people to life have for us here today? I thought about that question a good deal this past week as Jane and I were in Eugene offering my father some support in this difficult time for our family. Here, for what it’s worth, is what I came up with.

These stories, like all Bible stories that continue to have profound meaning for us today, are sacred stories about our relationship with God. They are powerful not so much because of the story they tell as because that story says something eternal about how God relates to people and to the whole of creation. It seems to me that these little resurrection stories say much the same thing about how God relates to us as does the big Resurrection story of Easter. These stories say, in a way that touches in the depths of our spirits, that God desires life and not death for all of God’s people. The ancients didn’t write theological treatises about that truth as some of us post-modern types are wont to do. Instead they told stories. Those stories, like all stories, speak of particular people at a particular time and place; but these stories, unlike merely secular stories, speak of universals not particularities. They speak a truth that is eternal not temporal. They say that God wants life and not death for all people, not just for the particular people who are returned to life in the story.

God desires for all of us life and not death. I believe that with my entire being. Yet all of us die. Our loved ones die. Some day we will too, and we never know when that day will be. It could be on our way home from church this afternoon. Life is that uncertain. So we have to ask the question: If God doesn’t want death for us, how does God deal with the fact that all of God’s children die? Where, in other words, is God in the uncertainty of life?

Let me suggest that God deals with the uncertainty of human life in two ways. The first is by being present with us in all that uncertainty. God does not cause sudden catastrophes in the lives of God’s people; but when those catastrophes occur, God is right there with us, walking every step with us, holding us always in God’s unfailing arms of grace. For me, those aren’t just pretty words that I often speak during our prayers of the people. Over the last month or so, whenever I’ve felt overwhelmed by grief for the loss my brother has so suddenly and so unexpectedly suffered, the image of Christ on the cross will appear to me almost as in a vision. And I say to myself: Oh, right. You understand this grief we all feel—my brother of course most of all—because you’ve been there yourself. You’ve gone through this, and worse. Because you have, we know that you do not reject us when tragedy strikes. You do not abandon us. You walk into the tragedy with us. You suffer it with us. You uphold us in it. You stand in unfailing solidarity with us in whatever comes our way; and because you do, we can bear whatever we must bear. Christ crucified is God’s eternal demonstration that what happens to us does not happen to us alone, but also to God. And that makes all the difference.

God’s second response is to bring new life out of the tragedies that all humans experience. Because God is in those tragedies with us, God gives us the possibility of newness even when everything seems hopeless. When in our tragedies we trust in God, possibilities open before us. I know that they do in this life because I have experienced them. I wouldn’t be up here today talking to you if I hadn’t. Because I know that God brings possibility out of tragedy in this life, I can trust that God will bring the possibility of new life even out of death, the deaths of my loved ones and one day my own death. God can even show us the possibility of joy in difficult times. I experienced joy in the midst of a difficult time in my life last night at the Faith Choices Jazz Walk that we participated in. That fantastic experienced reminded me that life isn’t just tragedy. It is also music and laughter, crying for joy not pain and caring for others even in times when we need some caring for ourselves. God can even create the possibility of joy in the midst of pain. And that’s a miracle of new life if I ever heard of one.

So while our lives are uncertain and we all experience tragedy and mortality, we can know that with God tragedy and death are never the last word. In the end, that’s what those Bible stories about people being brought back to life mean to me. When our loved ones die, they aren’t brought back to physical life in this world; and we won’t be either. We know that. But we also know that God does raise us from death. Not literally perhaps, but then we say around here that we don’t take the Bible literally. God raises us from death because God is present with us in our deaths—our big final death and all the little ones we experience along the way. God raises us from death because God is always creating the possibility of new life—in this life and beyond this life. And that, my friends, is the best news there ever was or ever could be. Thanks and praise be to God. Amen.