In his poem “To A Waterfowl,” 19th century poet William Cullen Bryant wonders how this single bird knows to find its way in flight across large distances. So much on which to land, who teaches the bird to know where to go? In typical Romantic poetic vision, Bryant offers the following:
There is a power whose care
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast, --
The desert and illimitable air, --
Lone wandering, but not lost.
This solitary animal wending its way across this vast expanse of sky looking down on water and land is a picture perfect image of the divine in nature, of nature unfolding and revealing God to God’s creation. Last week, my family did what my older daughter likes to call “Beach Church,” a trip to Crystal Cove, where the two girls looked for shells and stones amidst the crash of the waves of the Pacific, the pungent smell of seaweed washed ashore, the cry of gulls as some power’s care teaches their way along the pathless coast. At Beach Church, as in Bryant’s poem, it is easy to marvel at God’s handiwork, at the blessing of the created world, the miracle of this symbiotic relationship of this biome. A visit to the ocean restores the soul, because it is easy to imagine God’s finger carving out this part of the world, for all its exquisite beauty.
But then there are those places where it is very very difficult, impossible sometimes, to find God and God’s power at work. You and I have been there at some point in our lives and I suspect that you and I will be at those moments again. Luke writes about these places in this morning’s Gospel lesson, this time the place being the village of Nain where the world has collapsed for a woman. A widow, her only son now dead, is alone in the world, and she and others are preparing to say their final goodbyes. What could possibly be worse for this widow than this? No saccharine words of comfort can help; “our deepest condolences,” or even worse, “God’s called him home” can only intensify her sense of loss and misery. There are few things worse in the human story than for a parent to have to bury a child, and it doesn’t matter how old your son or daughter is, because when it happens it is as if the very fabric of existence is torn. It is hard, impossible perhaps, to see God’s handiwork in this scene. We are very far from Beach Church. And just as it is easy to find God in the immensity of the world’s beauty, it is equally difficult to find God in the diversity of experience that leads us to despair. When the minds and bodies of our loved ones break down, when we are at our wit’s end, when our own bodies betray us, when our toil and suffering seem to be all for nothing to the point where we simply are too exhausted and drained to care anymore: when, not if, but when we are at the razor’s edge of the intolerable, we yearn for God’s comfort and yet it doesn’t seem to come, we look for solace, just a cool towel, but refreshment doesn’t arrive, there doesn’t seem at all to be some divine plan or purpose, no power guiding. But just the terrible sense that there might not be light at the end of the tunnel, no final line that gives our suffering meaning. This morning’s Gospel points to a woman whose loss is unbearable, a loss that points to the one thing that you and I struggle with everyday, because it lurks around every corner of our lives: the haunting sense of hopelessness and the meaninglessness of life’s circumstances.
It is in this scene of abject despair that Jesus sees the woman. The Greek word that is translated as compassion in our translation is more literally rendered as “his innards were disturbed” or his “womb was moved.” Something in Jesus was profoundly moved by this scene of woman losing her son. Another translation of this verse puts Jesus’ response as raw as possible: “his heart broke.” Jesus’ heart broke because he knew that for this widow her son was her entire family, that she is now terribly alone in this world that no longer looks beautiful at all but terribly cruel. Jesus’ heart broke because he also knew that a widow in 1st century Palestine, without the support of husband or son, would be cast to the very margins of social life, without any recourse to sustain herself economically. Jesus’ heart broke because even if he could do something for this woman to heal her deepest wound, her heart broken by grief, his own heart breaking open to comfort hers, there are thousands and thousands of mothers for whom help won’t come. Even as he raises this son back and gives him back to his mother, there are still so many other widows who will still bury their sons and daughters, and fend alone in their world. Jesus’ heart breaks because O God, there are so many broken hearts, broken spirits, that leave us breathless, exhausted, wondering, where God is your power?
I don’t claim to know the full mystery of what unfolded next, but I do know this: first, Jesus touches the funeral bier that carries the young man’s body, and in doing so Jesus makes himself ritually unclean. Jesus does not recoil from the dirty elements of human existence but soils himself with the parts of our lives that are just messy, ugly, that seem to bear no mark of the divine and the beautiful. Jesus is with you and me in our most soiled moments. Second, Jesus gives this man back to his mother. Somehow, in this miracle, what she has lost, she has regained, what was taken away from her has been in some miraculous way given back to her. Somehow, something happened where this woman’s despair was assuaged, her heart healed, her life in some way restored. And I think the key to her son being given back to her is in part how her community responds: something happened and changed in this village of Nain, perhaps the people decided that they’d had enough of leaving poor widows alone and decided instead to bear burdens together, to be with her so that somehow, in some way, her son was given back to her. Maybe that’s what God’s power of healing looks like. Maybe God doesn’t come from above to fix it all. Maybe God understands that some things can’t be fixed, and that God comes to us, broken hearted bleeding with our broken hearts, and along the way our shared brokenness takes healing and restoration in a new way. Poet Christian Wiman puts it this way: “I think it may be the case that God calls some people to unbelief in order that faith can take new forms.” Wiman also speaks of God’s power and presence in this grittier way in a poem titled “Every Riven Thing”:
God goes, belonging to every riven thing he's made
sing his being simply by being
the thing it is:
stone and tree and sky,
man who sees and sings and wonders why
God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he's made,
means a storm of peace.
Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
trying to will himself into a stillness where
God goes belonging. To every riven thing he's made
there is given one shade
shaped exactly to the thing itself:
under the tree a darker tree;
under the man the only man to see
God goes belonging to every riven thing. He's made
the things that bring him near,
made the mind that makes him go.
A part of what man knows,
apart from what man knows,
God goes belonging to every riven thing he's made.
Sisters and brothers, we are far from Beach Church and William Cullen Bryant, and we are far from that church where God fixes up the messy parts of our life for us, a prosperity theology. We are called to be a Gospel people in a broken world, to have our faith take new form when life breaks us down. God calls us to a more gritty, difficult faith where we sit with and dwell in the messiest, ugliest parts of our lives and work together to bring restoration to mothers who lose their sons, to bring liberation to widows and the orphans and the poor and marginalized into the center of God’s table, and where we gather with no guarantee but the guarantee that Jesus’ heart breaks when ours do, and that somehow the miracle is that that is just enough that we in and as a community find reason and purpose to be together, wounded but healed, to gather around this table to be nourished enough to restore ourselves and those around us in God’s fragile world. And in those places where God seems so very far apart, let us commit ourselves to giving sons and daughters back to their mothers, faith back to all of our broken hearts, and God back to every part of God’s creation.
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