Expect Much of God

Text: Luke 7:11-17 Other texts: 1 Kings 17:17-24 June 10, 2006

Bishop Dr. Munib Younan is the bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Jordan and the Holy Lands. He spoke this past Friday to the assembly of the New England Synod, a once-a-year gathering of lay people and clergy. He was the keynote speaker. The churches that he shepherds are some of the very few Christian churches left in Palestine and Jerusalem.

In his speech, Bishop Younan said that “the power of faith is the driving force of justice.” Such a statement implies that God is an active participant in the affairs of the world and of human endeavors. Such a statement implies that God expects much of us and that we are instruments of God’s mercy. But it also implies that we are right to expect much of God, and that we expect with certainty that God can and—we hope—will, intervene in history. As scripture tells us God has done in the past.

You might have seen that the first lesson and the Gospel reading tell essentially the same story. Or rather two stories with the same plot, character, and outcome. This is probably not a coincidence. The stories are alike in many ways. In both, a widow has lost her only son. In both, a godly person—Elijah in the first, Jesus in the second—is moved and his heart goes out to the mother. In both, that person touches the dead son. In both, the son is revived. In both, the son is given back to his mother. Those who heard or read the story about Jesus would certainly have known and recognized the story about Elijah, and the power of the first story would have lent both power and credence to the second. They would have said, “Ah ha! This man Jesus reminds me a lot of the great prophet Elijah. He is like the prophets of old.” That being a good thing.

We who are always aware of the resurrection of Jesus should not be too distracted by the resuscitation of the dead in this story. The raising of the dead is not exactly the point of either story. The stories are healing stories, though healing of a sort of extreme kind. But the people of Jesus’ time would not have seen a ton of difference between raising someone from the dead and healing someone who could not walk or enabling a blind person to see.

Cases like this demonstrated most of all that the healer—Elijah or Jesus—was an authentic prophet of God. Which is how each story concludes. “I know you are a man of God” says the widow to Elijah. “A great prophet has risen among us,” the crowd says of Jesus. Raising someone from the dead is not seen as a sign of divinity, it is a sign of prophecy.

A prophet speaks for God. A prophet acts with the power of God. It is not the prophet who does the work, but God. It is God who does the raising. The extreme nature of the healing (that is, reviving someone who is already dead) confirms the authenticity of the prophet. But it is God’s power at work. For the people who first heard these stories, it would be obvious that God could do such things. Not only in a theoretical or theological way, that God has the potential, but in a practical and everyday way. That God has the interest in doing so. That God does do things like this. It would go without saying that God has the power. People would have been interested to see in what way that power works.

But the question for many now in our time is not how it works but whether it works. Stories like the ones we are talking about make people wonder what the trick was. What the explanation was, what was really happening. Though it still might be obvious that God can do such things, it goes without saying, almost, that God would not. Times have changed over the past two thousand years.

We seem invested in the notion that God is a hands-off kind of god—except in a way I’ll talk about in a minute. I wonder whether we have an interest in keeping God at arm’s length. Sort of a kindly rich uncle whom we like and for whom we are grateful, but who doesn’t really mess with important family affairs. Maybe we prefer the world to be predictable (which it is not when God interferes with things, especially things like physics and biology). Maybe we protect ourselves from the potential of being disappointed in God. Maybe we are afraid of the intimacy that God provokes when we let God get too close. Maybe we are ashamed of ourselves and think that we are not worthy of God’s attention. I don’t know. But it seems that we prefer a God who is less than actively involved in the day to day events of our lives. When we do this, we make God more like a chaplain, someone who comforts us in times of trouble and, as they say in counseling jargon, is a quiet presence.

That is not how people thought who saw God’s presence in Elijah and Jesus.

What is clear from the stories in the Bible, including the ones we are talking about today, is that God likes people. This is demonstrably so. That is, God demonstrates that in what happens. And when God acts, it is because God is really interested in people in a major way. When Jesus sees the widow whose son has just died, he has compassion for her, it says in our translation of the Bible. But other Bibles get it better. It was heartbreaking, says one. Heart-wrenching. The word in Greek means his gut was all twisted around.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, the song goes, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost and now am found. If you ask people who have hit bottom, the very bottom, and raised up by God, God is much more than a quiet presence. God is an active and powerful and truthful friend, boss, and mentor. They were down and God pulled them up. No question.

Our fear, our sometimes stunted imaginations, and our poor sense of humor can keep God out except in an ethereal way. But if so, the power of faith is muffled and the future of justice is darkened. We seem to allow that God may expect much of us. We need to be willing to expect much of God. If we desire to move forward in any frame of mind other than wishful thinking or despair, we need to be willing to expect God to act in the present.

We harm ourselves and the world if we put stories like the ones we heard today in the relics section of our minds. Probably this will not be the last time someone raises a child from the dead. We need to allow ourselves to think that that is so. To have that be our posture. For as shocking as it sounds, God is still working.