IN THE FACE OF HOPELESSNESS

10th Sunday in Ordinary Time

            An old man lived in the center of a desolate and hopeless city.  The man walked outside of his house and onto the streets and yelled, “Love, peace, righteousness!”  The next day he would do the same thing—he would leave his house, walk onto the street and yell at the top of his lungs, “Love, peace, righteousness!”  He would do this every day, rain or shine, like clockwork.  One day the man’s next-door neighbor, who was tired of the daily yelling, went out on the street and confronted him.  He said, “Hey, man, are you crazy?  What the heck do you think you are doing?  Every day you come out of your house and yell, ‘Love, peace, righteousness!’  Fool, don’t you know nobody is listening to you?  This city is full of hate and crime and hopelessness; there is no love of neighbor and there is no peace and righteousness to be found, so give it a rest and save your breath!  Don’t you know that you can’t change the world?”  The old man said, “You’re right, my yelling and shouting, ‘Love, peace, righteousness’ may not change the world, but one thing it will do is to stop the world from changing me.”  That’s what this old man did in the face of hopelessness.  How do you handle hopelessness?

            You talk about hopelessness, being a widow in first-century Palestine was hopeless.  Being a widow without a son was utter hopelessness.  In a day before “safety nets,” a widow was one of the most vulnerable persons in society.  She had no property of her own.  She had no inheritance.  If a woman’s husband died, she would have to look upon members of her family to support her.  If the woman had a son, the son would be her means of support.  In our gospel reading, we meet a woman who has already lost her husband.  Immediately we learn that she has now also lost her son.  The loss of one’s spouse alone is almost more than one can bear.  The personal, emotional cost is indescribably great.  Life changes when one’s constant companion is irrevocably out of the picture.  That personal contact and support are forever gone.  The loneliness is heartbreaking.  It is immobilizing.  It is cruel.  What greater pain can one feel in life than that of the death of a spouse?  Nothing, unless it is combined with the death of a child.  Our emotional structure seemly is not wired to give up to death our children.  And yet, it happens with great regularity.  The child brought into the Emergency Department of Children’s Medical Center of Dallas.  He had been struck by a DART light rail train.  He was crossing the tracks without looking.  The train hit him.  In the family room is the grieving family.  A mother now has to bury her son.  In first-century Palestine, the woman who has no husband and has no son is in a desperate situation.  Aside from the unbearable emotional pain she feels, such a woman is without any certain means of support.  She might have to beg in order to have something to eat.  Without family, she might have no regular, safe place to lay her head at night.  A widow without a son is the very picture of desperation.  She is the image of hopelessness.

            You’ve got to wonder.  Does God care?  It is not hard to see this woman in our mind’s eye, for she appears on our TV screens and on the pages of our newspapers.  We see the image of sheer hopelessness when we see unbridled cruelty, including the slaughter of populations in African villages.  We see entire groups of refugees forced from their homes by such inhumanity visited upon innocent people.  We witness the plight of thousands of people who have nowhere to go, people who have lost everything, people who have violently been forced to leave all they have behind in search of simple safety.  Their eyes transmit their inability to feel anything anymore.  They appear to have become emotionally numb, a kindness the emotional system offers to oneself when one more second of pain would bring about a total breakdown.  We look into those eyes and we must turn away, for our empathetic pain would be too much for us to bear.  We protect ourselves.  We turn our eyes away.  But we want to know.  We need to know.  In the face of such hopelessness, can a word of hope be uttered?  Is there any good news that can be spoken to such sheer despair?  Does God care?

            Luke wants to answer that question.  Our gospel writer wants to make it clear that God does care about the hopeless.  Luke wants you to see Jesus.  He wants you to see a snapshot of Jesus’ ministry of compassion.  So here’s the moment that is preserved for us.  Jesus comes upon a town called Nain.  The town’s gate would see people constantly coming in and going out.  That would not be remarkable.  But a funeral procession making its way out of the gate would cause one to notice.  There would be the stretcher or basket upon which the body was carried.  There would be a clamor, for public grieving was demonstrative in that culture.  And Luke wants us to see that the one who is dead is the widow’s only son.  Does God care?  Jesus makes his way toward the procession.  Jesus immediately turns his attention directly to the distraught widow.  Jesus speaks to her.  He is filled with compassion for her.  Those who were with Jesus saw it on his face time and time again.  You’ve seen it on the faces of those angels in the Alzheimer’s unit in the retirement community.  You’ve seen the expression of compassion on the countenances of nurses who bring comfort to the dying in their last days of life.  You see that same expression of compassion on the grim faces of firefighters as they risk their own lives to rescue people they don’t know from burning or crumbled buildings.  Jesus has compassion for this desperate woman.  “Don’t cry,” he lovingly tells her.  He puts his hand on the stretcher in an authoritative manner, as of to say to the entire procession, “Stop.”  His gesture has its desired effect.  The funeral procession comes to a halt.  “Young man,” Jesus barks at the corpse on the stretcher, “Young man, I say to you, rise!”  The young man sits up on the stretcher, like one who awakens during a thunderstorm.  He begins to speak.  Clearly he has come back to life.  But before we leave this scene, Luke wants us to see something significant.  Jesus gives the young man back to his mother.  He restores to the hopeless woman the son who had meant so much to her.  Jesus restores the relationship, and he restores the woman’s hope for support, no small thing in itself.  Does God care?  Luke says, “Look at the compassion of Jesus.”

            Yes, but does God care?  Luke answers that through the voice of the gathered crowd.  Like a chorus in a Greek play, the crowd delivers its lines.  “A great prophet has risen among us!” the crowd shouts.  Yes, but does God care?  The decisive line immediately follows:  “God has looked favorably on his people!”  There it is!  In Jesus’ ministry of compassion, “God has looked favorably on his people!”  His ministry of compassion is not the gesture of a good man working on his own, like that old man in the story, shouting out to an uncaring world, “Love, peace, righteousness!”  No.  In Jesus’ ministry of compassion, “God has looked favorably on his people!”  His ministry of compassion is an expression of the very grace of God.  And where else have we heard Luke tell us that “God has looked favorably on his people”?  At the beginning of Luke’s gospel story.  There, as Mary receives the news that she will be the mother of the Son of God, she sings, “My soul magnifies the Lord, . . . for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.”  There, as the angel announces the birth of the Savior to unlikely recipients, the shepherds, “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people:  to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”  God’s favor was announced again when Jesus unrolled the scroll in the Nazareth synagogue and read, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he 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.”  Then he sat down, the posture of teaching, and he said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  God’s own grace in Jesus became manifest that day when Jesus told the paralyzed man, “Friend, your sins are forgiven you.”  When the religious experts objected that Jesus had dared to declare the man’s sins were forgiven, he said, “Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven you,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and walk’?  But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—now turning to the paralyzed man—“I say to you, stand up and take your bed and go to your home.”  There the crowd also declared the meaning of Jesus’ actions.  They “glorified God.”  Why?  Because Jesus’ actions are not those of one caring man alone.  In Jesus’ ministry of compassion is delivered the very grace of God.  Does God care?  Yes!  And God acts compassionately in Jesus Christ.

            If all of this is true, then we should be a people who have hope in the face of hopelessness.  For us, there should be no such thing as a hopeless situation.  We should be the community that seeks a pattern of God’s grace invading human life to provide life amidst the many “deaths” we face.  The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was felt as far away as Dallas.  You can imagine how things were for St. Paul Presbyterian Church in Houston.  Evacuees from that storm began arriving in that southwest Houston church.  They did what they could, but, at first, the needs seemed overwhelming and the congregation so unable to meet those needs.  It was almost if an audible cry came out from that congregation, saying, “We can’t!”   But God’s life-giving power and God’s grace provided God’s answer, “No, you can’t; but together, we can!”  The people of St. Paul Church were empowered by God to respond to the need:  funds for motel bills, offering hot suppers at night, the offering of clothing and Bibles and personal items.  They helped their new neighbors find jobs.  It was later said of St. Paul Church that they “offered the love and grace of Christ in very real and practical ways to strangers who quickly became friends.”  In the face of hopelessness, God motivated and empowered a community of faith.  As God acted in his Son, Jesus Christ, to bring his own compassion to the world, God also acts through those who have responded to God’s grace.  We should be looking for patterns of divine activity like this for two reasons:  First, that we might be lifted up from our hopelessness to an abiding trust in God’s grace.  Second, that we might ourselves become instruments of God’s compassion to the world.