The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
June 10, 2007

Proper 5 – C
1 Kings 17:17-24
Galatians 1:11-24
Luke 7:11-17

When it comes to popular culture, my sons tell me that I am antediluvian, a dinosaur that has somehow managed to survive. It amuses them, for instance, that until this week I was under the impression that Paris Hilton was a hotel in France.

But I’m catching on. I’ve been reading the newspaper, another relic of the Mesozoic Era, and this week I discovered that Paris Hilton is a the very model of the modern human being who insists on her rights.

You know the story. Late last week, or over the past weekend, Ms. Hilton spent three whole days in jail, a tiny fraction of the 45-day sentence she had received for violating her probation in an alcohol-related reckless driving case. Earlier this week, with the help of three expensive lawyers, she wheedled her way out of the county jail so that she could serve the rest of her sentence in the comfort of her home in Hollywood Hills. Then on Friday, after the uproar, when she was ordered back to complete her sentence as the guest of the county, she whined her way back to jail, insisting to the court and to the world that it wasn’t fair. “It’s not right!” she sobbed.

It’s not my intent this morning to pile on and add to the woes of the unfortunate of Hollywood Hills. That would be ungracious. But I do hope to let my sons know that I’m catching up on popular culture and to show them that I’m willing to use it to make a point now and then. And the point is that dinosaurs were aware of some facts of life that we modern folk have a habit of forgetting.

Now I wouldn’t presume to advise Ms. Hilton regarding her plea in the Los Angeles Superior Court. Fairness plays an appropriate role in a court of human law. But in the court of public opinion I’m not so sure that fairness is what Paris Hilton really wants to insist on. Nor in the court of life itself, because, you see, as all dinosaurs know and as Ms. Hilton should know, the truth is that life is not fair.

Life is not fair because fairness is a function of rights and entitlements, and life is a gift, not a right or an entitlement. That is the point of the story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath, and of the story of Jesus and the widow of Nain. Life is the gift of a gracious and compassionate God.

It was not fair that the woman of Zarephath, a widow, lost her son, whom she loved and upon whom she depended for her own life as well. For a widow in ancient Israel was among the anawim, one of the desperately poor, one of those without resources for life itself. There was nothing fair about it.

And it was not fair that the widow of Nain lost her son, whom she loved and upon whom she relied for her own sustenance. But it was a fact, the Scriptures tell us, a fact that moved Elijah and Jesus and the Lord God himself to compassion and to healing. As one commentator put it, ”[Jesus] could walk on water, but he could not walk away from the tears in the eyes of the widow from Nain.”

“As Jesus approached the gate of the town,” Luke says, ”he met a funeral. The dead man was the only son of his widowed mother, and many of the townspeople were there with her. When Jesus saw her, his heart went out to her, and he said, ’Do not weep.’ He stepped forward and laid his hand on the coffin, and the men who were carrying the coffin stopped. Then he spoke: ‘Young man, I tell you to get up.’ The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus restored him to his mother.”

What are we to make of this? What are we to make of this story that comes to us this morning not from The Los Angeles Times, but from the Holy Scriptures, this report not about popular culture, but about the divine economy? This is what I make of it: It is a story about the facts of life and death, a sign the Scriptures give us of the way God shows compassion for his people. That’s what Luke and the people who were there at the time said: “Everyone was filled with awe and praised God. ‘A great prophet has arisen among us,’ the people said. ‘God has shown his care for his people.’”

God’s restoring of the life of the son of the widow of Zarephath; Jesus’ raising to life of the son of the widow of Nain, and therefore his raising of the man’s mother as well; Jesus’ later raising of Lazarus; God’s raising of Jesus himself: all these are signposts in the Bible of the way it is with God in the world – that life and healing are gifts of a gracious God who is moved by compassion and by a great desire God has that life prevail over death.

But there’s nothing fair about it. Fairness is a function of rights and entitlement, and we modern folk, we Americans in particular, have forgotten the facts of life. We like to talk as if we have a right to life, and not only to life, but to life on our own terms. But it’s simply not true, of course; there is no right to life. For in the beginning there was only God. And then, in the beginning, out of nothing, it was God who created the heavens and the earth. In the beginning, it was God who took the soil of the earth he had created, and breathed his moist breath into it, and created the man and the woman. This is the “bottom line” fact of life. And the fact is that the manner in which God created us is that “the span of our life is three score years and ten, perhaps in strength even eighty, yet the sum of them is but labor and sorrow, for they pass away quickly, and we are gone.” And what this means to me is that life is gift, pure and simple.

This is truth, is it not? It is, to be sure, a truth we don’t like to hold in the front of our minds, so for much of our lives we slide the fact of our mortality into the backs of our minds, hoping it will go away. We try to avoid the truth. The pharaohs had their pyramids, and we have our hospitals and health care plans and exercycles and jogging. But the fact is that not even Hillary’s or Obama’s health care plan can change the fact of death. As far as avoiding death is concerned, every pyramid and hospital and health care plan we have is, in the end, 100% ineffective. The fact is that we did nothing to bring ourselves into this world, and when it comes to avoiding our departure from it, we are as helpless as we were the day before we were conceived. Regarding the possibility of life on our own, “we are without one plea, but that Christ’s blood was shed for me.” We would just as soon forget this truth, or deny it, but the Scriptures will not let us. The Scriptures insists that we remember.

Do not become arrogant in your thinking, the dinosaurs of the Scriptures remind us. Remember that it is God who has given you the gifts of life and freedom and all that you have. Remember that “it is the Lord your God who is bringing you into a good land, a land not only of milk and honey, but of wheat and barley and grape vines and fig trees and olive oil and pomegranates.” Be careful to remember that all this, like life itself, is gift. “Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God, the one who gives all these things. Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down in Hollywood Hills or Broadmoor, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase, and all you have is multiplied, then, if you forget, your heart will become proud, and you will begin to think you did all this for yourselves, that it is all yours by right, rather than a gift from God. And if you forget – if you forget that life is gift – life will not go well for you,” Moses warned.

Still, we don’t have to hear it from Scripture to know the facts. Our mortality is all too present. Everywhere we turn, it seems, there is the reality of death. Death in Iraq and Afghanistan, death in Darfur. And closer to home, a friend has a fatal accident, a loved one is diagnosed with a terminal illness.

Life is gift, pure and simple, and we are, in the end, as helpless as the widows in this morning’s stories and their sons in their coffins, and the basic question of life is, ”What are we to do with this truth, how are we to handle it?” Do we whine about life’s unfairness, or do we turn to the Giver of life and accept the healing and the life he offers, and give thanks and live?

Forty years ago, John Claypool was reminded of the truth of life as gift in a most painful way. He lost not his son, but his daughter. When Laura Lue was only eight years old she was diagnosed with leukemia, and in the agonizing months that followed, Claypool, a young Baptist pastor at the time, delivered four sermons, later published under the title Tracks of a Fellow Struggler, that reflect his spiritual journey as he struggled with the fact of his daughter’s illness and her eventual death.

Claypool loved his daughter. She was only eight years old. “What is right or fair about an eight-year-old having cancer?” he asked God. “Who are you, God, that you allow such a sentence to be handed down upon innocence? It isn’t fair.”

The pat answers of the creed were simply no help to him, Claypool says, and for a time he was tempted down the road toward depression and despair. Claypool was distraught. He wanted his daughter, but she died. And what finally saved him from despair, what literally gave him new life again, what provided him with the life and energy to walk free and not be bound by the chains of despair, were three truths he gradually came to accept and appreciate.

One was the realization that there is nothing fair about life at all, that life is a gift, not a right, together with the corresponding awareness that the only appropriate response to a gift is gratitude and thankfulness. A second was the realization that despair is presumptuous, an act of impotent arrogance. And the third was the memory that God himself has walked the way of grief, the way of a love-filled life, and that he walks it with us still.

The first help came to him when he recalled an event from childhood. “When World War II started,” he said, “my family did not have a washing machine. With gas rationed and the laundry several miles away, keeping our clothes clean became an intensely practical problem. One of my father’s younger business associates was drafted and his wife prepared to go with him, and we offered to let them store their furniture in our basement. Quite unexpectedly, they suggested that we use their washing machine while they were gone. ‘It would be better for it to be running,’ they said, ’than sitting up rusting.’ So this is what we did, and it helped us a great deal.

“Since I used to help with the washing, across the years I developed quite an affectionate relation for that old green Bendix. But eventually the war ended and our friends returned, and in the meantime I had forgotten how the machine had come to be in our basement in the first place. When they came and took it, I was terribly upset, and I said so quite openly.

“But my mother, being the wise woman she is, sat me down and put things in perspective. She said, ’Wait a minute, son. You must remember, that machine never belonged to us in the first place. That we ever got to use it at all was a gift. So, instead of being mad at its being taken away, let’s use this occasion to be grateful that we ever had it at all.’”

“In the beginning, out of nothing,” Claypool remembered. In the beginning, out of nothing, God created the world. And out of nothing, God created John Claypool himself, and his daughter Laura Lue, and the widow of Nain and her son, and you and me. You must remember, John, he imagined his mother saying, that our lives never belonged to us in the first place. That we ever get to live them at all is a gift. So instead of being bitter about Laura Lue’s being taken away, let’s use this occasion to be grateful that we ever got to enjoy her smile and her love at all.

So even though the gift of his daughter was for only nine years – she died eighteen months after her diagnosis – Laura Lue was nonetheless a gift, Claypool came to realize. She was a gift of life and a gift of love. And with that awareness, God began to restore John Claypool to the blessed state of gratitude.

Oh, he missed his daughter, as any father would. In the years that followed there were plenty of tears for Laura Lue, but they were tears of grief now tempered with thankfulness. For what if God had never breathed life into Laura Lue in the first place, he wondered? What then? Would it have been better not to have known and loved her at all? To believe that, Claypool finally realized, would be to believe that death is better than life.

The second realization that brought healing and life to Claypool came, he said, in the form of another gift, a gift from an old rabbi who was a survivor of the unspeakable unfairness of Auschwitz. This was in the 1960s, in the days of water cannons and German Shepherd police dogs with vicious teeth and the bombing of little girls in churches, and the white clergy of Louisville, Kentucky, young John Claypool among them, asked for a meeting with the black clergy of the city. They hoped to address the questions of unfairness and injustice in their city that were being raised by Martin Luther King, and they very much wanted to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

The rabbi invited them to meet in the city’s synagogue, and as the meeting progressed it became apparent to Claypool that they were getting nowhere, that there simply was no trust reaching across the table between black and white. As he was leaving the meeting after the meeting broke up, Claypool’s discouragement showed all over his face, and the rabbi called to him and said, ”Claypool, could I have a word with you in my office?” (Claypool told me that it felt at the time as if he were being stopped in the high school hallway and being told to report to the principal’s office.)

“You looked awfully grim in there, John,” the rabbi offered when they were alone. And Claypool says that his youthful despair just poured out: “I am more than discouraged,” Claypool told him. “It’s obvious that there is no hope, no hope at all. Our black brothers simply don’t trust us, so little, if anything, can be accomplished.”

The rabbi, the old man who in his youth had walked the halls of Auschwitz, listened patiently. And when the right time came, he offered these gentle words of encouragement and hope to Claypool, who grieved for both his city and his daughter: “Young man,” he said, “remember that despair is always presumptuous, because it is saying something about the future you have no right to say, for the simple reason that you haven’t been there yet.”

To Claypool it was as if Jesus himself stood before him and, with his hand on the coffin of despondency he was wrapped in, said, ”Young man, I tell you to get up.” For like the son of the widow of Nain, Claypool was restored to life.

Finally, a third realization contributed, over time, to Claypool’s rescue. It was simply this: that Claypool became increasingly aware of the truth of what he himself was preaching week in and week out – that God is One who is himself acquainted with suffering and grief, that the Giver of life is not One who observes our grief from some distant throne, but One who walks the way of grief and suffering with us. Having watched his own Son weep with the the widow of Nain, and weep for his dead friend Lazarus, and later himself die a cruel and premature death on a cross, God is one who weeps with those who weep.

So Claypool, finally, was comforted, strengthened, and healed by these three facts of life:

He was strengthened and healed by the truth that life is gift, not a right, by the truth that in the beginning, God breathes his living breath into the dry soil of his own creation and makes life a reality in the first place.

He was strengthened and healed by remembering that God’s own Son has walked this way before us, and continues to walk it with us.

And he was strengthened and healed by the gift of the old rabbi, who reminded him that despair is presumptuous. Despair, refusing to hope, always presumes that God cannot or will not do in the future what he did in the past. Despair presumes that even though God gave us life in the past, he either cannot or will not do so in the future.

Restored to gratitude for the gift of life and love that was his, Claypool was brought back to hope and to the living of it in life.

Jesus’ restoring of the son to the Widow of Nain is a sign of what God does wherever God meets death. Wherever God meets death, even here this morning, death is defeated, and life restored.

There’s nothing fair about it. It’s all a gift.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.