The widows of Nain and Zarephath teach us how God sees us, how God listens for us, and how God reaches out to us in our unique experiences of loss and grief.

Vicar Anna Helgen
   The Third Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 10 C
   Texts: Luke 7:11-17; 1 Kings 17:17-24; Psalm 30

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you and peace, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today we meet two unnamed women—two widows, in fact—one of Nain and one of Zarephath. We hear two stories of death and pain, as these widows mourn the unexpected loss of their sons. We witness how two different communities support and care for these women amidst their grief. And we see how God enters their experiences, how God reaches out and offers healing and wholeness.

As widows, these women already live on the fringes of society. With no male relative to support them, they likely have worked hard to put food on the table and to survive. And now they are faced with the devastating reality of the death of a child. On top of an already challenging existence as widows, they now carry with them a particularly difficult form of grief, grief of a parent who loses and buries a child. This is deep grief. Grief that can be steeped in anger, guilt, and depression. It is grief that isolates.

Perhaps you or someone you know has experienced this kind of loss before and know what it’s like to feel this pain. Or maybe not. But loss and grief are universal experiences of our life together—as universal as stubbing your toe or getting a paper cut. Together we can learn something from these stories, how these women respond to their unique experience of loss, and how God enters their pain.

Let’s start with the widow of Nain. It’s the day of her son’s funeral and she is crying, as is to be expected. Her son is dead and there is nothing that can be done about it, or so she thinks. A large crowd from the community is with her, and I imagine that they surround her with their presence. Perhaps they don’t say much—what could you say anyway?—but their presence speaks more than words.

Lo and behold, Jesus and his disciples show up, and upon seeing this woman, Jesus has compassion for her. He sees her and instantly knows the pain she feels. He acknowledges her despair and says, “Do not weep.” In a miraculous effort, Jesus commands the dead man to rise up, and he does. And then Jesus returns him to his mother. The crowd cheers, the mother and son are reunited, and news about Jesus begins to travel all throughout the country.

And then we have one of my favorite Bible characters, the widow of Zarephath. Poverty-stricken and with death right around the corner, she meets Elijah, a man of God, who provides food for her. And now, with one crisis behind her, she confronts another: the illness and death of her son. And she is angry! Angry at God. Angry at Elijah. She blames Elijah and wonders what he must have against her to cause the death of her son.

The widow’s lament is mirrored by Elijah, who takes the son upstairs to be alone so he can vent his anger and frustration to God. It’s not often that we get to witness such an honest response to death. Elijah pleads with God on behalf of the widow, and God listens to him. God doesn’t just hear, but God listens. God actively participates in this prayer. And through another miraculous act, the life of the boy returns, and Elijah returns him to his mother.

We know what it’s like to be these widows. To be filled to the brim with grief, to stand silently in our tears, to shout at God in anger. Taken together, these stories explore the full spectrum of our human response to grief. Loss triggers a complex set of emotions that can leave us feeling like a wrung-out washcloth or like an elephant is pressing up against our chest. It can be hard to trust ourselves as we grieve, because one day we might be feeling just fine, and the next day we’re in a puddle of tears as something triggers the memory of a loved one who died years ago.

The challenge of these stories is that we don’t often get the kind of miraculous healing that these women and their sons receive. It’s not everyday that a dead person is brought back to life. But these specific stories are included in our Bible because they show us how far God is willing to go to meet us in our painful experience. The grief of a parent who loses a child is deep, and even there, God is with us, bringing healing, hope, and new life.

And that leads us to the gift of these stories. They remind us that through it all, God is with us. God sees us, listens for us, and reaches out to touch us in our deepest pain. God is not afraid of our mess—not our tears, not our rage, not our depression, not our silence, not our guilt or shame, not any of it. God has seen it all and knows it all. And God is ready to embrace us, to stand with us, to listen for our cries. God is intentional about relationships and will continue to search us out even when we have given up, even when we have lost hope.

God doesn’t act alone, however, because the community plays an important role in this healing process, too. The crowd surrounds the widow of Nain as she grieves, and their unwavering presence is a sign of God’s presence, of God’s constant and unconditional love. Like God, this community is not afraid to show their emotions. Their willingness to stand with this widow in her grief and mourn together as a community teaches us what God’s love looks like in the world.

And then there is Elijah, a much smaller community than this crowd, but a community nonetheless. Loss can be so isolating, and it can make us feel alone, like no one understands us. But Elijah gets this, and he echoes the lament and anger of the widow of Zarephath. He validates her feelings by naming her truth. Like God, he willingly shares her anger so she knows she’s not alone.

I often wonder what life was like for these widows after their sons were returned to them. Certainly there was much rejoicing! But I imagine that the experience changed them. Because loss always changes us and we are never the same. But through whatever we face in this life, God’s promise for us is true: “Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning!”  
 
We live in that time between dusk and dawn, in that “space between sorrow that feels [like] it will last a lifetime and God’s promise of joy in the morning.”[i] And, in time, we too, like the widows, will find new life. It might not look like we’d expect and it might take longer than we’d prefer, but God will take us somewhere new. The sun will rise. The morning will come.

May you find hope in God’s promise of healing, joy, and peace. When the sorrow is too much to bear, may you trust that this community will stand by your side. And through it all, may you know deeply that God sees you, that God listens for you, and that God reaches out for you.

Amen.

[i] Verlee A. Copeland, Feasting on the Word: Year C, Volume 3 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 97.

We’re not in control of the things that really matter, and that’s freeing to realize, and life-giving to trust our lives into the hands of the God who can bring life even in the midst of death.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
   The Second Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 9 C
   Texts: Luke 7:1-10; Galatians 1:1-12

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

Have you noticed that the dearer something is to us, the closer to our heart, the more important, the less we have power to control it?

Some of us never thought we could control anything. Life feels beyond control. Others of us spend years trying to control everything, as if we could make life go how we wanted. Lots of us are somewhere in between.

But for all of us, the most important things, the things that matter, are beyond our control. How people think of us. Whether those we love get sick or die, stay healthy and happy. How our life goes, what other people do to us. Evil that happens near us or around the world. We can’t control any of this.

The path of faith Jesus invites us to walk begins with this recognition. When we realize it’s Christ’s path, not ours, that we don’t have the map, and we trust that the Risen One will lead and guide us safely as we journey. When we realize it all begins by letting go of our false need to be in charge. The freedom we find in that path is exhilarating. But letting go isn’t easy.

Our friendly local centurion understood this, remarkably.

This was an officer with authority. He’d risen through the ranks to command 100 soldiers. When he told them to move, they moved. When he told them to jump, they said, “how high?” This centurion was in control.

Except there was this one thing he was powerless over. His beloved servant was sick and dying. He couldn’t command him to live, to get better. He had no authority over this.

Because he was apparently a good man, even though he was an officer of the occupying forces, he’d made friendships with the Jewish locals, had been generous with them. Through them, he heard of their teacher who had the power to heal. A power he did not have.

He remarkably even understood that this healer was outside his authority. He could have sent two soldiers and commanded Jesus to come. Instead, he let go of all his control. He wasn’t in charge. He didn’t even assume he was worthy of such a gift. He let go, against all his training and his office, and asked for help.

In Galatia, some Christians, including Paul, apparently didn’t understand this.

We’ll be hearing from this letter for the next few weeks, Paul’s view of the situation. As best we can tell about the other side, there were Christians, likely from Jerusalem, who had gotten wind of what Paul was doing in what is now northern Turkey. They heard he was welcoming non-Jews into the faith, baptizing Gentiles, teaching them of Christ, without requiring that they follow Jewish law, eat kosher, be circumcised.

So they came up there to try and control the situation. They couldn’t conceive of being in Christ without being Jewish, as Christ Jesus himself was. Their whole lives were shaped by their Jewish faith. The Messiah was a Jewish idea, after all.

These Christians, good people, deeply confused the Galatians, who had trusted Paul when he first came to them. They also, as we heard today and will hear again, deeply frustrated Paul, who also couldn’t control this situation. He was unable to return at that time and fix things, so he wrote this letter trying to bring it all under control.

Both Paul and these traveling Christians didn’t remember that no one can control the Spirit.

What is most marvelous to us, however, is that the Triune God also understood what the centurion did.

The whole plan of salvation in Christ comes from God realizing that the most important things cannot be controlled. Having all the power in the universe is of little help if your creatures choose not to love you or love each other. You could force them to do it, but then it wouldn’t be love.

The coming of the Triune God into our lives is a massive release of control. Being born as a vulnerable baby, living completely at the mercy of other human beings, the Son of God began to teach, to call people to a life of love of God and love of neighbor. What God hopes for from all God’s children.

But even when we rejected this message so much that we threatened to kill the very person of God bearing our body, God would not reassert control. The cross is the ultimate letting go, relinquishing of power and authority. If we won’t choose to love God with all we have, and won’t choose to love our neighbor as ourselves, God will not force us to do it.

The centurion models for us that God’s way of letting go is our way to life.

The first step to finding true life is admitting we can’t control, we’re powerless over the most important things in our lives. Jesus spent years trying to get this across in parables, in healing, in teaching, and his followers still didn’t understand what was happening when he was hanging on a cross.

In the light of the resurrection, they began to grasp what this Roman centurion had figured out long before: the path of faith is one where we let go of all our need to be in authority over our lives, over the world, over others, and open ourselves up to trusting God with our life.

This isn’t easy. For much of our life as we grow into adulthood we are trying to assert control over our lives, our environment, other people. We try to make life work the way we want it to. True wisdom comes from realizing the grace in letting God lead us in this path of letting go, this path to abundant life.

It is the path to life because life is found in love, and love cannot be forced.

All the problems that plague us and our world can be solved by love, but not by forcing others, trying to control them. The injustice that runs through our society, where whole classes and races of people are stuck in systems that oppress them, can be changed to justice, but not by us forcing our will on the situation. When we stop trying to tell others how they should protest, how they should try to work for change, and open ourselves to hearing their story and standing with them, God will lead us and this society to justice.

The problems that we face in our lives, worrying whether others love us, fearing the illness or death of loved ones, struggles to find happiness, frustration with life that doesn’t work the way we want, whatever problems we face can be solved in the love of God. But there is nothing we can do to force them to change, to make life the way we think it should be.

When we find the centurion’s wisdom, we let go and simply ask God for help, for healing. Not because we think we’re worthy, but because we trust in the goodness of God. Even in the face of death, something we never have control over, we trust in God’s power to destroy death forever.

When we finally see that our sense of power and control is just an illusion, we find the abundant life the love of the Triune God is making in us and in the world.

We are able to trust the path of Christ we are invited to walk, not because we control the path or its outcome, but because we are led by the only One we trust for life and grace. We learn the joy of choosing to live in love, even losing our own needs and ego, because we find life on this path.

Jesus was astonished by the faith of this centurion. Probably because he kept running into people like us, who were afraid to trust, to let go.

Why don’t we surprise Christ this once and do the unexpected? We might even surprise ourselves with how freeing life can be down that path.

In the name of Jesus. Amen

Christ’s promise is that the Holy Spirit will continue to lead us into truth, to new things about the Triune God and about us, to new callings. This need not frighten us; it’s the good news that the Trinity still moves in our lives and is with us on the path.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
   The feast of the Holy Trinity, year C
   
text: John 16:12-15
Jesus said to the disciples, 12 “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. 13 When the Spirit of truth comes, she will guide you into all the truth; for she will not speak on her own, but will speak whatever she hears, and she will declare to you the things that are to come. 14 She will glorify me, because she will take what is mine and declare it to you. 15 All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that she will take what is mine and declare it to you.”

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.

When the Spirit of truth comes, she will guide you into all the truth.”

These are frightening words to ponder. So for most of the Church’s life, we’ve refused to ponder them. For 1,700 years the Church has been more interested in codifying the “truth,” weeding out heresy, punishing those who heard the Spirit’s call differently, rather than considering the possibility that the Triune God might have new things to say, things God is waiting for us to be ready for.

These are frightening words to ponder even at the basic level of our love for the Scriptures, God’s written Word. It’s far easier to think the Bible is the end of God’s speech to us, rather than the beginning. But if Christ is, in fact, the Living Word of God, and promises today, in fact, to continue to teach and lead us through the guidance of the Holy Spirit beyond what is written in the Bible, it’s a whole new world ahead.

Christ promises here that as we grow as the people of God, we will be drawn ever deeper into the life of the Triune God, and will learn new things.

“I still have many things to say to you; when the Spirit of truth comes, she will guide you.”

There will come a time when the Holy Spirit herself will lead the Church to realize that arbitrarily assigning a male pronoun to the Holy Spirit, simply because the Church was born in a patriarchal culture, is just that, arbitrary. She will remind us that “Spirit” in Hebrew is feminine, and in Greek, a neuter noun. So there is no particular reason to translate every pronoun for the Spirit as “he” instead of “she.” Except that our forebears usually didn’t imagine God in feminine ways. Nor often do we: many of us wouldn’t have noticed had the Gospel reading included eight male pronouns for the Spirit instead of eight female pronouns.

The Spirit of truth today reminds us how often in the Scriptures she is named as the One who gives us birth, in the waters of baptism, in the life of prayer. That she is the One who births in us gifts, fruits, and draws them into the light of the world like a midwife. Today the Holy Spirit of God reminds the Church, “I am your Mother, the Giver of Life.”

“I still have many things to say to you; when the Spirit of truth comes, she will guide you.”

There will come a time when the Spirit of truth will lead the Church to understand that when Jesus called the First Person of the Trinity “Father,” it was to show us the intimacy the Triune God wishes to have with us. To know our Creator as “Daddy,” “Abba,” so we understood we were loved deeply, not distant from our Creator.

At this time she will also remind us that the Son of God was born into a patriarchal culture, and perhaps knew this new Church couldn’t bear to envision more of God. And in fact, the Church proved we weren’t ready, calling the whole Trinity “Father” to this day, as if God’s wholeness is male.

But perhaps now, as Christ foretold, the Church is ready to bear a deeper, more profound truth, taught us by the Spirit of truth. That the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, whose name we celebrate today, is both beyond all gender and encompassing all gender, that the fullness of humanity, from female to male, is made in the image of God.

The Spirit of truth reveals the truth about the Trinity is so profoundly beyond us we must not limit God to our own categories, but also that the truth about the Trinity is that we, all of us, created in the image of this one, true God, can see ourselves in our God when God comes to us.

“I still have many things to say to you; when the Spirit of truth comes, she will guide you.”

There will come a time, a time which for many began over forty years ago, when the Spirit of truth will lead the Church to understand that all God’s children, women and men, are called to serve in the world, to all vocations for which they have gifts. She will teach us that, though ordained ministry is only one of many vocations for the people of God, both women and men are called to lead as pastors, bishops, deacons, even if for nearly two millennia the Church didn’t believe this. She will teach us that we need to draw from all kinds of God’s children for our leaders.

This time we know is now, for our two bishops, in Minneapolis, and for the churchwide ELCA, are women, and our vicar is a woman, and gifted women and men are leading the Church into new life and new grace in the Spirit, because now we are hearing from the full spectrum of God’s children in our preaching and teaching and leading.

“I still have many things to say to you; when the Spirit of truth comes, she will guide you.”

There will come a time, a time we rejoice is now, when the Spirit of truth will lead the Church to understand that our gender is not the key issue in whether we can love someone and commit our lives to that person, but it is the love we have received in Christ that we then offer to another in marriage that truly matters.

So the Spirit will lead the Church to understand that, even if for hundreds of years we weren’t ready for this as Church, now is that time, and that in marriage between two people, whoever they are, God’s blessing and love for this world can live and thrive and be revealed in the lives of those two people.

“I still have many things to say to you; when the Spirit of truth comes, she will guide you.”

There will come a time when the Spirit of truth will come to each one of us, when she thinks we’re ready, and invite us to deeper life in the life of the Triune God. She will show us that even if we first came to God hoping for what God would do for us, needing something, seeking something, we would be drawn deeper into the love of God we found and be changed. We would come seeking God for ourselves, and leave bearing God for others.

In that time the Spirit of truth will help each of us see the barriers we put up, our mental blocks and blind spots, our tendencies, our sins, all things in us that make us believe we’re the center of our life. She will help us take them down, move them aside, wash them away, until we see at the center of life only the Triune God, the life into which we are drawn, and we seek to draw others along with us into that life.

“I still have many things to say to you; when the Spirit of truth comes, she will guide you.”

There will come a time, a time we pray deeply is now, when the Spirit of truth will lead each of us, will lead the Church, to understand that peace in Christ is for all or it is for none. That the justice of God is for all or it is for none. She will persistently remind us that God needs each one of us to bring about such peace in the world, to bring about such justice. That she has given us God’s power to bear this healing to the world.

In that time the Spirit will plead with the Church, will plead with each of us, to stop always being late to the great battles for human dignity, to stop being last to stand with those who are being crushed, to begin to be first to move, first to cry out, first to stand hand in hand with all God’s children who are in pain and suffering.

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.

When the Spirit of truth comes, she will guide you into all the truth.”

These aren’t frightening words. These are thrilling, hope-filled words. The Triune God walks with us, dances with the Church, and continues to teach and lead and guide. Just exactly what we need as the path gets harder ahead.

And we needn’t worry how to tell if the Spirit of truth is speaking or if it is another. We already know from the written Word of God that if we hear a word saying the Triune God does not love all, or a word saying we are not called to love all, it is not of our Mother the Spirit who bore us into the world in love.

So, there’s even more to come. More things than maybe we can bear today. But when we’re ready – or maybe when our grandchildren or great-grandchildren are ready – the Spirit of truth will, as always, speak up.

Let’s open our hearts and ears to listen with joy and hope, longing for God’s new creation.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen