Series: August 2022
Speaker: Rob McClellan
Today's Sermon
"Risky Love"
Luke 7:11-17
11 Soon afterwards he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. 12As 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. 13When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, ‘Do not weep.’ 14Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, ‘Young man, I say to you, rise!’ 15The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. 16Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying, ‘A great prophet has risen among us!’ and ‘God has looked favourably on his people!’ 17This word about him spread throughout Judea and all the surrounding country.
Risky Love
A few quotes for you:
“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.”[1]
“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”[2]
“If we only had eyes to see and ears to hear and wits to understand, we would know that the Kingdom of God in the sense of holiness, goodness, beauty is as close as breathing and is crying out to be born both within ourselves and within the world; we would know that the Kingdom of God is what we all of us hunger for above all other things even when we don't know its name or realize that it's what we're starving to death for. The Kingdom of God is where our best dreams come from and our truest prayers. We glimpse it at those moments when we find ourselves being better than we are and wiser than we know. We catch sight of it when at some moment of crisis a strength seems to come to us that is greater than our own strength. The Kingdom of God is where we belong. It is home, and whether we realize it or not, I think we are all of us homesick for it.”[3]
These are the words of Frederick Buechner. An ordained Presbyterian minister, Buechner was known by many through the 40 books he authored. On August 15, at the age of 96, Frederick Buechner died. Since then, many who were touched by his work have been sharing stories – a colleague of mine was once invited to a dinner in North Carolina and when he walked in, much to his surprise, one of the other dinner guests was Buechner, unassuming and kind. On and on they go. Here are a few more quotes:
“Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all.”[4]
One of his more well-known quotes is about vocation, about which he said the following:
“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”[5]
“Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”[6]
Buechner was great on doubt; that’s what connected for so many people. He made room for it. He even found beauty in it, faith without certainty.
“If we are to believe he is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without proof. And of course that is the only way it could be. If it could be somehow proved, then we would have no choice but to believe. We would lose our freedom not to believe. And in the very moment that we lost that freedom, we would cease to be human beings. Our love of God would have been forced upon us, and love that is forced is of course not love at all. Love must be freely given. Love must live in the freedom not to love; it must take risks. Love must be prepared to suffer even as Jesus on the Cross suffered, and part of that suffering is doubt.”[7]
Love must take risks.
Buechner wrote a series of three short memoirs, and I have been looking over them again. He wasn’t a cradle Presbyterian or even Christian. People get that wrong sometimes, assume all who make religion their vocation are born into it, when in fact many times it’s those who feel inexplicably drawn to this mystery as they enter adulthood. He found himself at Union Seminary in New York in its heyday, when some of the most powerful religious thinkers on the planet were there, Martin Buber, the Jewish Philosopher; dynamic teacher Old Testament scholar James Muilenburg; Reinhold Niebuhr, who had the ear of a president; and Paul Tillich the great theologian who helped redefine God and spoke memorably of us getting glimpses of God, “here and there, now and then.”
As Buechner recounted sitting in those lecture halls, you can feel the fire ignite in his belly. You start to feel it ignite in your own. When faith comes alive, you want to make it live in the world, this gritty, redemptive work of the living Christ. Nowhere was off limits for this Jesus, and thus his followers, and one feels inspired to live into the call of the prophets, announce the kingdom of heaven at hand, heal the sick, and even raise the dead.
This is precisely what we find Jesus doing in this story from Luke. Jesus finds himself approaching the gate of a town – note how many interesting episodes occur in threshold spaces by the way, at gates, in doorways, on the road. They’re carrying a dead man, a mother’s only son. I never noticed that detail until I read a paper Taylor Lewis Guthrie Hartman wrote on the passage. She’s a pastor in Georgia. How old was the dead one? Does the only-childness amplify her pain? I have an only child.
Hartman is good at getting you to feel the grittiness of the sacred story and of our own sacred stories. Reflecting on this passage, she thought back to an episode of NPR’s “StoryCorps” about a woman named Ruth Coker Burks. Burks happened to be visiting a friend in the hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was some time ago, when we were in the early throes of the AIDS epidemic, and that hospital happened to be caring for Arkansas’ first known AIDS patient. We have to remember how scared people were at the time. For whatever reason, Burks walked into this stranger’s room. He was alone, she reported, and he kept asking for his mother. Burks went to the nurse’s station to inquire, and they responded, “Honey, his mama’s not coming. He’s been here six weeks. Nobody’s coming.” She returned to his room where she stayed for the next 13 hours when until drew his last breath. Presumably because of the stigma of that disease and who first contracted it, the family of that man who would not visit him would not take his body, so Burks took it and she buried his remains in her own family’s cemetery. Burks went on to care for over 1000 AIDS patients, burying over 40 next to her own family when similar situations arose.[8]
That’s the grittiness of the gospel. Those are the risks the followers of Jesus take for love. I don’t mean the medical risk, which turns out not to have been great, but the social, societal risks. This is the work of Jesus. It’s easy to miss it in Jesus raising this only child because we get caught up in the resuscitation, but there’s something that Jesus did which is just as important for us as his followers, and is similar to the risk of Burks. Does anybody know what it was? He touched the bier. He touched the platform on which the dead man rested. That’s not just included as a bit of ancient stage directions in the drama. Touching the bier would have made Jesus ritually unclean. In a culture of purity laws as an embodiment of faithful living, this was a violation. Jesus transgresses this boundary for love. “Young man, I say to you, rise!” They called him a prophet, I gather because he raised a man from the dead, not because he risked becoming impure for the cause of love and healing, though I think that may be the lesson for us.
I titled this sermon “Risky Love” because risking for love is what Jesus demonstrates time and again, not meaningless risks. We’ve seen plenty of risky behavior of the past couple years, but many of these were selfish in nature. We’re talking about meaningful risks, risks for the sake of others. Hartman challenges us by asking what it would look like for the church to make this its calling card, its vocation rather than doubling down on what’s safe and satisfies the greatest numbers. She points us to what is also one of my favorite lines from the theological foundations section of the Presbyterian Book of Order that reads, “The church is to be a community of faith, entrusting itself to God alone, even at the risk of losing its life.”[9] Risking for love of neighbor, that seemed to be Jesus’ vocation.
We don’t know what became of that only child who was raised by Jesus. We do know one thing, though. Eventually he died. That’s an odd thing to point out, you might think, a buzzkill at this point in the sermon, but it’s an important part of the story. Sometimes our faith grabs hold of us, and we think we can take on the world, save everything and everyone from whatever threatens them, that we are unshakeable, on fire you might say. Then, something comes along and shatters that view, or to stick with the metaphor, douses the flame. If we have built the whole construct upon our ability to conquer, to overcome whatever is in our way, or the way of goodness, when something emerges that counters that narrative, the whole house crumbles, goes up in smoke. In that sense, it can be easy to have your candle put out if you’d never considered the prospect of wind.
The gift of Buechner’s faith is that it wasn’t all fire in the belly. Sometimes it was a cold wind that threatened the flame. Part of his seminary fieldwork was to work at an employment clinic in East Harlem. He struggled through imposter syndrome working in that context, managed to place a few people in meaningful jobs, including a man also named Fred. Fred was a recovering alcoholic who was not short on intellect. He had studied Greek, but life had been rough on him. Frederick Buechner got Fred a job as a night watchman at Union seminary. Time went by and the two lost touch until they saw one another on the windy street corner of 120thand Broadway one day. They met eyes, Fred having to hold his hat to his head lest it blow away. Buechner said he knew, though he wasn’t sure how, that it would be the last time he’d see Fred, and it was.
It was an incomplete story. Did he raise Fred from the dead? Did Fred go on to have a successful and happy life? Did he return to drinking and lose everything? Did he do a little winning and a little losing? We don’t get the satisfaction of knowing how our actions play out, whether or not our gamble for love pays off, whether the risk yields results. What we have is the invitation to pair our gladness with the world’s hunger, the invitation to risk something about us for someone else, and in doing so we get glimpses and right or wrong. For us that has to be enough unless we are to set ourselves up for disappointment and despair.
Buechner describes the moment: “I can see him standing there as in some way he is standing there still, and as I also am standing there still. He is alone and making the best of it with his thin, church-rummage overcoat flapping around his legs. His one free hand is raised in the air to wave good-bye. It was the last time.” Then Buechner, in reflection, turns to one of those professors that lit the spark within him. “‘Here and there in the world and now and then in ourselves,’ Tillich said, ‘is a New Creation.’ This side of glory, maybe that is the best we can hope for.”[10]
Here and there, now and then. It’s worth the risk. Amen.
[1]Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith
[2]Frederick Buechner, Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation
[3]Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry
[4]Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry
[5]Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC
[6]https://www.frederickbuechner.com/quote-of-the-day/2016/10/26/doubt
[7]Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat
[8]"Caring For AIDS Patients, 'When No One Else Would'", NPR.
[10]Frederick Buechner, Now and Then