SERMON Sons and Mothers

Pentecost 2 C Lectionary 10 (2007): 1 Kings 17:17-24; Psalm 30; Galatians 1:11-24; Luke 7:11-17

This morning we hear about sons dying and their mothers.

We know more about that scenario than we care to these days. News reports of young men killed in war leaving grieving mothers have become so frequent and familiar that they are no longer news. But it is not only young adult men killed in battle. Three weeks ago a young aspiring bank teller names Tramaine Gibson was gunned down in a robbery on the south side. Who can forget the photographs of his anguished mother? Or the photograph in today's Tribune of the still grieving mothers of two of the 28 Chicago school children killed during the past school year? Children killed in cross fire or drive by shootings.

When I was thirteen, my uncle tripped and fell at the hospital when he was making rounds. He hit his head in the fall and was unconscious. I remember working on the Luther League newspaper at church the next day when the pastor called me into his office to say that my uncle had died. He was 42, and my father's younger brother, born less than a year before his own father was killed when a new furnace in the basement exploded. After my grandfather's death, my grandmother had changed my uncle's name from Edward to Walter, his father's name. And my Uncle Walter had lived up to that name. He had been everything a mother could want. A brilliant student who went to Harvard Medical School on a scholarship and had the highest scores on all the national boards taken the year he graduated (something that had never been done before). He was an accomplished pianist, a fine orthopedist, and the father of four very young girls.

I left the church that afternoon and walked home with a friend. My mother was returning from Wisconsin where she was visiting her parents. Neither she nor my father had arrived home, but my grandmother had. She had flown in from Rochester, Minnesota, and we found her alone in the house, physically ill, literally beside herself with grief. It is something I will never forget. My friend and I took care of her as best we could, but there really was nothing we could do to ease her inconsolable grief.

And when I hear about the sons that die this morning, I think of that day and of my uncle and my grandmother. These sons were only children, not unlike the favorite son my uncle was. In the midst of a terrible famine, Elijah has just miraculously fed the only son and his mother. When the son becomes ill and dies, the mother is distraught. "What have you against me, O man of God?" she cries out. "You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance, and to cause the death of my son!" The son that Jesus encounters is already dead. The body has been anointed and wrapped and is being carried to the funeral. Because first century Jews were buried as soon after death as possible (something that is still true today for most Jews), the son has died recently. The mother is weeping. I think of Tramaine Gibson's mother weeping. Uncontrollably weeping. I think of my grandmother.

Now both of these accounts have miraculously happy endings. Elijah takes the son to his room and implores God three times to bring him back to life, and God does. Jesus has compassion on the widow, touches the bier, and says "Young man, I say to you, rise!" and the young man does.

But why? Why does God listen to Elijah? And why the young man respond to Jesus' words?

The two accounts do parallel each other, and when the witnesses to the young man's resuscitation say of Jesus, "A great prophet has risen among us!" they echo the mother's words of Elijah, "Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the LORD in your mouth is truth." Jesus, like Elijah, is a prophet. Luke alone tells this story. Luke alone makes this explicit. But, important as that is, is that all?

It's not because it was not only the sons who were dead.

Jesus in Luke's gospel has earlier observed, "there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon." A widow whose son would soon die. Jesus stopped the bier and resuscitated the young man "because he had compassion on [the widow]." That compassion was not just a kind of feeling sorry because the widow was weeping.

The word for "widow" in Hebrew carries the meaning of one who is silent, unable to speak. There's a reason for that. The testimony of women was not accepted by Jewish courts in the first century. Widows were not included under the Hebrew laws of inheritance. They were exploited and oppressed. Unless they had surviving sons, they could not go to court. They could not assert their rights. They had and could get nothing. Because widows were so extremely vulnerable, the Torah demands that observant Jews care for widows as well as for orphans and sojourners (two other vulnerable classes of individuals). And Jesus in Luke's gospel makes it clear that he is about doing exactly that as well. "'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,'" he announces in his hometown synagogue,

"because [the Lord] has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." (Luke 4:18-19)

And that's what's happening here. Both Elijah's widow of Zarephath and Jesus' widow of Nain had lost standing as persons in their societies when their sons died. They had become invisible women. They had become, like their sons, dead. In restoring life to the dead sons, Jesus and Elijah were restoring life to their mothers as well. Social justice in action!

All of which is great for those women, but what about the mothers of the dead soldiers? And Tramaine Gibson's mother? Their sons are not going to be resuscitated, at least not in this life. The mothers of the Chicago school children have lost children who will never have children of their own. What about widows like my grandmother whose dead son with his father's name only added to the deep pain of being widowed at the age 20?

Social justice is of course the solution -- the solution and our responsibility. But it is not an answer for those who sons and daughters have already died because war and crime and gangs and accidents.

When I think of this, I think of another mother and son. The mother and son so beautifully (perhaps too beautifully) portrayed in Michelangelo's Pieta. That son also was a casualty of violence and an unjust system. But a different kind of casualty. When the crowd this morning says of Jesus, "A great prophet has risen among us!" they anticipate the difference: A great prophet has risen. But we can go beyond that. The prophet not has not only risen. The prophet is risen. Christ will come again. A difference that makes all the difference,

In the book, Life with My Son: A Mother's Journey Through Death, Grieving and Healing, Carlene K. Spruell sums up the difference when she writes:

A mother's heart should never have to grieve over the death of her child. Yet it happens all the time. I have gone through the traumatic experience of the illness and death of my adult son, but God gives me strength and comfort to continue with my life, taking it one day at a time. As I grieve for my son, time has healed the intensity of my pain. I rejoice because of the promises of God; that he goes with me into each new day. God's hand remains upon my family to this day. My family is in the exact place that God wants us to be, and tomorrow God will still be with us. The God of life has given me strength to walk through the darkest days and fills my future with hope.

And, for that presence and that hope, we give God thanks.

Amen

June 10, 2007

Ruth E. VanDemark pastor

Wicker Park Lutheran Church