Sermon Luke 7:11-17 Interfering with Death <\/p>\n
By The Rev. Charles Hoffacker<\/p>\n
It’s been said This holds true It holds true of Jesus, It holds true for us, Consider today’s gospel. But his crowd soon runs into a different one: Perhaps the worst tragedy that can happen Jesus sizes up the situation in a moment. Jesus tells the woman to stop crying. The people gathered about him The body on the bier starts to move. The bystanders are awestruck. These onlookers recognize a prophet Our reading from Galatians For on that occasion Guess what? Insofar as we interfere with death, We can interfere with death David Goetz offers help here Goetz identifies a series of toxins The first toxin he identifies is Another toxin is Still another toxin is Goetz invites us Here this contemporary author, We all face opportunities How awesome it is 1 David L. Goetz, Death by Suburb: How to Keep the Suburbs from Killing Your Soul.<\/em>HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.<\/p>\n Copyright 2010 Charles Hoffacker. Used by permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sermon Luke 7:11-17 Interfering with Death By The Rev. Charles Hoffacker It’s been said that in the biblical tradition the function of a prophet is to interfere. Specifically, the prophet interferes with the powers of death. This holds true of the Old Testament prophet Elijah, as we see from the pair of stories about him … Continue reading “Luke 7:11-17 Interfering with Death (Hoffacker) – Bible study”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2921\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
that in the biblical tradition
the function of a prophet
is to interfere.<\/strong>
Specifically, the prophet interferes
with the powers of death.<\/p>\n
of the Old Testament prophet Elijah,
as we see from the pair of stories about him
that comprise today’s first reading.<\/p>\n
who is a prophet and far more than a prophet.
His victory at Easter
puts death to flight forever.<\/p>\n
for as Christians
we are a prophetic people,
a resurrection people,
whose job it is
to interfere with death,
to reveal it, in theologian James Alison’s phrase,
as “a bark without a bite.”<\/p>\n
Jesus is visiting Nain,
a small town located off the main road
and some ten miles
from his hometown of Nazareth.
Jesus is surrounded by a teeming crowd of people;
he’s the celebrity of the moment there.<\/p>\n
a funeral procession.
The chief mourner is a woman
past the prime of life.
No man accompanies her:
neither husband nor son nor grandson.
The body lying on the bier
is that of a young man, too young for death.
She is a widow, going out to bury
her only son.<\/p>\n
is for a parent to bury a child.
But in that place and time,
for a widow to lose her only son
is not only tragic,
but an economic and social catastrophe.
A woman there and then derives her identity
from some man in her life:
father, husband, child.
Because her only son now lies dead,
this widow has become an non-entity.<\/p>\n
Today’s gospel asserts
that “he had compassion for her.”
Compassion as the Bible understands it
and as Jesus feels it that day
is something that happens on the gut level.
He takes into himself
the affliction of this woman.
He makes it his own,
he feels it.
This becomes his basis for action.<\/p>\n
By itself, this remark sounds insensitive.
But then he approaches the bier
as it is carried toward the city gate.
He touches the bier.
Not knowing what else to do,
those carrying the bier stop in their tracks.
Jesus addresses the corpse.
“Young man, I say to you,
rise!”<\/p>\n
stand still.
They do not speak.
They barely breathe.
“What is going on here?”
they ask themselves.
“Who does he think he is?”<\/p>\n
The young man sits up,
utterly astonished at where he is,
but no more surprised
than the crowd surrounding him.
Jesus guides the confused young man
to his sobbing mother.<\/p>\n
Suddenly everybody’s shouting;
nobody’s listening.
“A great prophet has appeared among us!”
“God has shown favor to his people!”<\/p>\n
when they see one.
They know that the function of prophets
is to interfere with death.
The death interfered with that day in Nain
is the untimely demise of a young man,
but also the blotting out of his mother
in a world that has no place for her.
Death goes down to a double defeat that day.<\/p>\n
is St. Paul’s own account
of his conversion to Christ.
He admits that he was
a violent persecutor of the church
when Jesus confronted him–
this Christ once dead and now alive,
more than a prophet
yet doing what prophets do:
interfering with death.<\/p>\n
Jesus interferes with the death
that holds Paul captive,
the death that makes him
an enemy of the Gospel.
Paul is then as dead
as the young man in Nain had been,
but Jesus summons him back to life.
And the message Paul proclaims
from that day on
itself amounts to interference
with all the forms that death takes.<\/p>\n
Christians today are called to this task.
We are here as the Church
to interfere with death,
to call its bluff.
Insofar as we do this,
people will be shocked
as much as people were that day in Nain
when the young man got off the bier,
as much as those who knew Paul as a killer of Christians
found hard to accept
how he went around advocating the faith
he once tried to destroy.<\/p>\n
people will be shocked.
After all, death organizes the world.
It’s something you count on.
Show death to be unnecessary
and so much else is up for grabs.
Resurrection in all its variety
makes us reassess
whatever we take for granted.<\/p>\n
when it threatens other people.
And you know what?
We can interfere with death
when we are the target.
We can demonstrate toward ourselves
the same compassion we show to others.<\/p>\n
in his book Death by Suburb,<\/em>
which is subtitled
How to Keep the Suburbs from Killing Your Soul. 1<\/em>
His suggestions actually apply
to all of us,
whether we live in a suburb, a city,
a small town, or the countryside.<\/p>\n
and then indicates for each one
a practice to counteract it.
What he does
is repackage some practices
of traditional Christian spirituality
in a contemporary container.<\/p>\n
I am in control of my own life.<\/strong>
The practice to counteract this
is the prayer of silence
where we are not in charge,
but where we experience what this author terms
“the thicker life.”<\/p>\n
I am what I do and what I own.<\/strong>
To counteract this one,
Goetz suggests what he calls
the journey through the self,
where we live for something more
than ego satisfaction.<\/p>\n
I want my neighbor’s life.<\/strong>
The author proposes instead
friendship with people who have
no “immortality symbols,”
his name for possessions or achievements
that promise what they cannot provide.<\/p>\n
to interfere with death.
We can do this as death threatens others.
We can interfere as well
when death threatens us,<\/strong>
even when it does so
through attitudes and habits
that are socially acceptable
and even socially imposed.<\/p>\n
himself a suburbanite,
points us back to wisdom
found in the Christian tradition
and the Hebrew prophets
which Jesus puts into action
when he calls a young man from Nain
back to life.<\/p>\n
to interfere with death,
to act as prophetic people,
people of the resurrection
willing to demonstrate
that death is,
again in James Alison’s phrase,
“an empty shell.”<\/p>\n
that any of us can be a prophet,
interfering with death insistently
in service to the Lord of life.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n