Reverend Ian Doescher

The Third Sunday of Pentecost

The first thing you notice, when you hear today’s passages from 1 Kings and the gospel of Luke, is how similar these stories of Elijah and Jesus are.  Two widows, two dead sons, two prophets, and two incredible miracles.  “Some time later the son of the woman who owned the house became ill.  He grew worse and worse, and finally stopped breathing. She said to Elijah, ‘What do you have against me, man of God?  Did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son?’”  “Jesus went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went along with him.  As he approached the town gate, a dead person was being carried out—the only son of his mother, and she was a widow.  And a large crowd from the town was with her.”  “‘Give me your son,’ Elijah replied.  He took him from her arms, carried him to the upper room where he was staying, and laid him on his bed.”   “When the Lord saw her, his heart went out to her and he said, ‘Don't cry.’  Then he went up and touched the coffin, and those carrying it stood still.”  “Then [Elijah] cried out to the Lord, ‘O Lord my God, have you brought tragedy also upon this widow I am staying with, by causing her son to die?’ Then he stretched himself out on the boy three times and cried to the Lord, ‘O Lord my God, let this boy's life return to him!’”  “[Jesus] said, ‘Young man, I say to you, get up!’”  “The Lord heard Elijah's cry, and the boy's life returned to him, and he lived. Elijah picked up the child and carried him down from the room into the house.  He gave him to his mother and said, ‘Look, your son is alive!’”  “The dead man sat up and began to talk, and Jesus gave him back to his mother.  They were all filled with awe and praised God.”  “Then the woman said to Elijah, ‘Now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the Lord from your mouth is the truth.’”  “‘A great prophet has appeared among us,’ they said. ‘God has come to help his people.’ This news about Jesus spread throughout Judea and the surrounding country.”

So clearly, there are some great similarities between Elijah’s healing of the widow’s son and Jesus’ healing of the other widow’s son.  The stories are look-alikes of each other.  This morning, I want to say one thing about their similarities, one thing about their differences, and one thing about finding the gospel in them.

First, their similarities.  I hope it’s clear from the way I just juxtaposed the two passages just how similar they are.  Not only are the characters the same—a widow, her son and a prophet—but even some of the details are the same.  Both cry out—Elijah imploring God to help and Jesus calling on his own authority, ordering the young boy to get up.  In both stories, Elijah and Jesus are described as giving the child back to his mother—giving, as though what they are doing is not only a miracle but also an act of generosity.  And finally, in both cases, the miracle is a confirmation to those looking on that God is truly among them, that the prophet who has worked the miracle is from God and is doing God’s work in the world.  So, the similarities are almost endless in these stories, and this is not by accident.  We have to remember that Jesus is seen as the ancestor of Moses, the ancestor of Elijah.  He is the long-awaited fulfillment of God’s promises to once again bring a prophet into the midst of the people of Israel.  He is the Messiah who will come to show power like Elijah’s, and power yet greater.  It’s one thing to proclaim this in words—it is one thing, for example, for John the Baptist to proclaim, “Behold, the lamb of God!”—but it is even more convincing to see Jesus actually performing the same miracles Elijah did.  In the context of the first century, no one who was familiar with Israel’s history could hear this story of Jesus and not immediately think of Elijah.  Jesus’ healing of the widow of Nain’s son is one more confirmation that Jesus is the Messiah.

Next, I want to say something about a difference between the two stories.  Both stories are stories of Elijah and Jesus doing what we might today call pastoral care.  In fact, Elijah and Jesus have a very different model of pastoral care than most pastors do today.  Elijah has a history with the woman whose son he raises—just before the story of raising her son, he helps her out of poverty by making the oil in her house flow well so she will be economically self-sufficient.  And then, when her son dies, she demands of him, “What do you have against me, man of God? Did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son?”  If we think of Elijah as this woman’s pastor of sorts, he is in knee-deep with her.  Similarly, Jesus shows up in the town of Nain and immediately helps this unknown boy.  Both Elijah and Jesus are taking care of these people’s needs without any questions asked.  This is definitely not the model of pastoral care that most pastors are taught these days.  We’re not taught to try and solve people’s problems… in fact, just the opposite.  We’re taught to be sympathetic to people’s problems, but not to try to do anything to solve them.  My spouse Jennifer and I watch a British television comedy/drama called “Ballykissangel,” about an English Catholic priest serving a parish in a small town in Ireland.  The priest, Father Clifford, is always solving his parishioner’s problems.  Someone will tell Father Clifford about the problem they’re having with another person, and he will say, “Do you want me to talk to them for you?”  And meanwhile, Jennifer and I are yelling back at the TV, both of us modern clergy, “No, don’t do that!  Don’t offer to fix their problems for them!”  But Father Clifford seems to have adopted the model of Elijah and Jesus, swooping in and taking care of people’s problems.  But the difference in the two stories, the difference I want to highlight, is that Elijah had a relationship with the widow and her son, he had a history with them, while Jesus had no relationship with the window of Nain or her son.  They were merely strangers to Jesus on whom he had compassion.  This is an important difference in these stories, but I think both are worth our consideration.  Both are helpful models of how we go about the work of caring for each other.  Elijah’s story, healing the son of the woman he has come to know well, reminds us that we are called to take care of those closest to us, to tend to their needs.  Calvary Presbyterian Church does this so well.  I talked to Art Martin this past week, and he told me about the members of this congregation who have brought him meals.  I know some of you have been out to see Stephen Bradley now that he is no longer in the confines of an Intensive Care Unit.  I didn’t have to ask anyone to do those things, people here just do it, you take care of the people you’re in relationship with just like Elijah.  Jesus’ model of pastoral care is a bit different, and his healing of the widow of Nain’s son calls us to act likewise and care for those we don’t have a relationship with, care for those who are essentially strangers to us.  Jesus shows up in a town and heals the first ailing—in fact, dead—person he finds.  He doesn’t wait to form relationships or get to know people before he does his work.  He cares for strangers, and this too is an important model of caring for others.  So in one key difference between the stories from 1 Kings and the gospel of Luke, Elijah and Jesus show us equally valid models of caring for other people.

Finally, I want to talk about finding the gospel in these passages.  Though the similarities of these stories speak to the importance of Jesus as an ancestor of Elijah, and though the differences between the two miracles show two important models of caring, I have to confess that I have a hard time finding good news in these stories of the dead raised to life.  In fact, I have a hard time finding good news in all the resurrection stories of the Bible.  Not so much Jesus’ resurrection—there is plenty of good news there because if we believe he is God incarnate, his resurrection is something to be expected, something that somehow seems transcendent.  However, it’s the resurrection of normal people—the two widows’ sons, or Lazarus, or Jairus’ daughter—it’s those stories I have a harder time with, because really, what is the good news for us in those stories?  Is it that God has power over life and death, or that Jesus has defeated death?  Is it that we can proclaim, as the apostle Paul did, “O death, where is thy sting?”  Maybe that’s good news, except that we do watch our friends and loved ones die.  Maybe we find hope in these stories of physical resurrection, except that no one in recent times has made a dead person live again.  People do die, and it is tragic and painful and sad and leaves us alone with our grief.  So I was pondering these thoughts this week, wondering how I was going to talk about the good news of Elijah and Jesus doing something we can’t possibly accomplish on our own.  And then, in the midst of my thinking, I was also entering some names for the Red Cross Blood Drive at Calvary on June 16th.  You see, the Red Cross has entered the digital age in full force, such that now anyone who sponsors a drive can sign up all of their donors online.  So I was going in and writing in a couple of names—not a lot, because we’re still low on donors for the moment.  But I went online and I typed in the website of the Red Cross—www.givelife.org.  Givelife.org.  It struck me as I was typing it in, give life—this has been the Red Cross motto for decades.  Their website is givelife.org, their toll-free number is 1-800-GIVE-LIFE.  And it struck me as I read this that maybe we do know something about miracles in our modern day.  Maybe we do know something about what it means to give life.  My spouse Jennifer described a miracle the other day as something we can’t accomplish by ourselves, something that requires intervention from something beyond the natural process of human life.  This is my main point of disagreement with Christians around the world—some of whom in Oregon have made news in the past year—who believe in faith healing, who believe in praying alone as a source of intervention for the benefit of someone’s health.  I wonder if these Christians have a broad enough understanding of what a miracle is.  The widows in the stories from 1 Kings and the gospel of Luke didn’t just pray—they had their prophets, their miracle workers.  When we are sick and in the hospital and our bodies are broken, we can do more than pray, we can call on our Red Cross and our doctors and nurses to do far more than the human body can accomplish on its own.  Art Martin and Stephen Bradley are just two members of this congregation who, in the last month, have benefited from other people’s blood donations.  The Red Cross’ motto isn’t just a clever marketing ploy—donations of blood really do save life.  God has given us medical science and wisdom such that humans can do things never before even imagined.  My dad, about a month ago, had a small tumor in his brain removed via gamma knife surgery.  Brain surgery, and it was an outpatient procedure.  He was home that night, and back to work two days later.  If these sorts of things don’t count for modern miracles, I don’t know what does.  Maybe they’re not literally instances of bringing the dead back to life, but they are ways of giving life, ways that we—like the widows—call on the powers around us to restore life.

In ten days, Calvary will host the Red Cross blood drive.  Please, if you are able to donate blood, consider donating a pint.  Come see me, and I’ll set you up with a time.  If you can’t donate, think about volunteering to help out.  This will be a wonderful event in the life of this church, a time when we get to be the look-alikes to Elijah and Jesus.  A time when we, like them, get to give life.  Amen.