Giving Us Back to Each Other

Giving Us Back to Each Other--September 27, 2016

"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." [Luke 7:11-15]

In the middle of things, God gives us back to each other. 

That is what resurrection is all about.  And that is, in a very real sense, the great instance of "starting over" there could be--the raising of the dead. In the middle of things, God gives us back to each other.

I say, "in the middle," because, of course, the whole point of resurrection is that death does not get the last word.  The whole idea is that death does not have, ultimately, the power to silence the voices of young men gunned down in city streets, or the sounds of children who have been decimated by hunger, or the singing of grandmothers and grandfathers who have lullabied their grandbabies to sleep.  Death thinks it has the power to claim and silence all of those--but the defiant protest of resurrection says that death does not get the last word.  And thus, when God raises us up to new life, we are not at the end of things, but the middle.  Really, it is a whole new beginning of things, if we are going to weigh notions like "eternity" against the span of decades we call a lifetime.  But because this life matters, and because we cannot ignore or waste or disregard the beauty, the potential, and the stakes of this life, let's call it the middle.  Resurrection is the great moment in the middle of things when God gives us back to each other.

And that last bit is vitally important, too, come to think of it.  Resurrection, to be quite frank, is not just a individualistic affair.  I don't belong just to myself--I belong to other people.  Maybe you could say that one of the critical realizations of the Christian faith is the point at which you stop trying to belong to yourself and when you seek to be completely given away.  That means that resurrection is not merely a matter of saying, "Yippee for me--I get to go live in heaven after I die," but more, "I will be restored back into connection with the people who have loved me." Resurrection is a plural hope--it is a "we" thing, rather than merely an "I" thing, because our hope is that at the last, God will give us back to each other.  I will not be complete until you are restored to the circle.  When you are parted from me, some part of me is missing, too.  It may well be true that distance makes the heart grow fonder, but distance also feels like losing someone, and with them, some piece of yourself.  As John Donne so beautifully put it, "Every man's [sic] death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind...."

And so, when Luke talks about this sudden miracle in which Jesus raises a young man from the dead, his depiction of the moment is not framed simply in terms of the individual.  Luke doesn't say, "That lucky rascal got a second try at his twenties!"  but rather, "Jesus gave him to his mother."  We belong to each other, and we all belong to God.  And so the great Start-Over around which the whole Christian faith centers is not merely my own self-help scheme or some list of neat ways to feel refreshed in middle age.  The great Start-Over is resurrection, and the real hope of resurrection is the way we will be given back to one another, so that the missing pieces in each of our hearts will be made whole again.

That means, too, that resurrection means vindication for those young men killed in the street, and comfort for the mothers who lost their babies, and justice for those who laid down their lives and had them snatched away by the brutal and the powerful.  Resurrection means solace for those whose hearts have been pulled apart at the seams to say long goodbyes to parents and grandparents through the slow sadness of sickness, as well as those who have been shocked at the sudden goodbye of losing someone they expected to have in their lives for a long time to come.  Every death is a separation, and in the end, the Christian hope is that God will give us all back to each other.

Perhaps I don't always realize how the loss of others, removed by hundred of miles, or oceans, or years of history, makes me incomplete, and I think that I don't need to worry about the violence "over there."  But the witness of the Old and New Testaments is that we human beings belong to one another, and the whole mosaic isn't complete until all the pieces are in the picture.  That includes you.  That includes me.  That means includes the faces and names that weigh heavy on our hearts on this day.  And it means the names and faces we have forgotten or ignored--the faces shown up on the screen during the news, the faces of countless homeless families and veterans, the faces of refugees leaving the terror of their own governments trying to kill them, the faces of the sick and the ashamed, the faces of the proud and puffed up.  It includes the faces of people we like, the faces of people we love, the faces of people we have never met, and the faces of those we do not like at all. 

Somehow in the great power of God, the miracle of resurrection will not only give us back to each other, but will transform the still-as-yet broken and jagged pieces of me into something beautiful, so that even the most hateful, greedy, or selfish (like, say, Zaccaheus or Saul of Tarsus, maybe?) can be transformed and we can see how we are made whole when God gives us back those who we have lost--but who were never lost to God, and never slipped from God's fingers, not even for a second.

In the middle of things, God gives us back to each other.  Today, while we wait for that Great Start-Over, what if we lived like that were true... and that each face you see today is somehow a part of what makes you and me complete?

Lord Jesus, give us resurrection hope today--hope for every mother's son, hope for every friend we grieve, hope for strangers not yet met, hope for the great day of being given back to one another in your love.