A Message of Compassion and Power

In this heartfelt sermon, Fr. Geoff explores the story of the widow of Nain, drawing lessons on passion, power, and praise. He challenges listeners with insights from church fathers and a modern connection to today's youth, emphasizing the importance of being in 'the way' of Christ.

Transcript

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today we have the story of the widow of Nain. It comes up every year. We're very familiar with the story, but there's lots we can learn from the story. So, let's have a look at it. At the beginning, we’re reading from Luke chapter 7. And at the beginning of this chapter, Jesus heals a centurion's servant. Remember that story? But he didn't actually go into the house. He didn't need to. He just said, "Your servant will be healed." And he was healed from a distance.

From there on, he starts walking through the countryside. And we're told in the gospel today that a great crowd went with him. So people were following him around because they'd seen miracles happen. They'd heard his speaking, his teachings which they loved. So they're hanging on every word and watching his every action. It was a very exciting time for people.

This huge crowd following Jesus was going to a town called Nain. It's about seven kilometers or seven miles, I think, south of Nazareth. There’s a little church there today that still commemorates this event. As they were coming to the town, another group of people came out of the town, but this was a procession, a funeral procession, and they were carrying a young man who had died.

So we had two processions, one going one way, one going the other way. And they met. At the head of one was a widow, and at the head of the other was Jesus, the author of life.

We all know the story, but there's some things to learn here. I'm going to give you three points to take away with you today: passion, the power, and the praise. The passion refers to the widow. We're told that she's a widow, and that's pretty hard in those days. There was no safety net to sort of help people in those days. No government help. You're on your own unless you had a son or sons. She had a son, but this was her only son, and he died.

So, she was in big trouble. She was facing a life of poverty, absolute poverty, unless people stepped in to help her. So, Jesus, when he saw her, he, we're told, had compassion on her. And I think, I don't know, it doesn't tell us this, but I wouldn't be surprised if he imagined a short time in the future, maybe three years ahead, when he thought of his own mother, who by then was a widow and by then was taking her own son from the cross to his grave.

He realized how hard it was for that woman and how hard it would be for his mother. So he had compassion on this woman. So that was the passion.

He said to her something extraordinary. He would have failed his clinical pastoral education course. He said, "Don't cry." I mean, hang on. If you just heard the situation, he would have known that she was a widow. He would have known that this was her only son. And he says to her, "Don't cry." Yes, I would have been failed if I'd done that when I was doing my clinical pastoral education. You don't do that.

People, when they're facing this kind of grief, they need to cry. It's a God-given gift, and it's a release. God's given it to us, and we allow it to—let it go. But in his case, he said, "Don't weep."

Well, if it had been anybody else, he would have failed. But because he was God, because he was the creator of life and the author of life, then he could say that because he knew what was going to happen next. But then we come to the power. So that was the passion. Now we have the power. It says something very interesting in this gospel reading. I don't know if you noticed it. It's a little detail. It says he touched the bier or he touched the coffin.

Do you remember in the miracle I just mentioned with the centurion's servant, he didn't even need to go into the house. He didn't even need to see the person. But in this case, he touched the coffin.

The fathers, the church fathers, say this is a very significant action. It’s the same action. Can you put the icon up for the people on the line to see this? I'm going to put something online for the people who are watching. But I just want to draw your attention to this icon here. When you look at the icon of stars, what part of that tells us that God loves us?

Anybody know? Anybody thought of that? Because they're nice icons, but this is the one. Jesus here is kissing his mother. He's touching his mother. And this shows us—this is a symbol the fathers tell us that God loves us. He's touching his mother in that it's called the kissing icon. It's a very famous icon.

In this case, Jesus touches the bier, and he's saying something very profound. He's saying that he loves this widow and he loves this boy and he loves the world. Really, it's an action, a physical action there, demonstrating his love.

Then we're told that the bier's bearers stood still. They stopped. Jesus said, "Young man, I say to you, "Arise, get up." That's a strange thing to say to a dead body at a funeral. I've never done it, and I'm not planning on doing it. But Jesus did it.

This young man, again more details. He sat up. It tells us something else as well. He began to speak, and the fathers tell us this is also very important. I've been reading some saints' books at the moment about saints, and often when the martyrs are being tortured and having a very bad time and then God intervenes and he heals them or he delivers them or helps them to endure, the people who are doing the torturing think that it's sorcery.

God didn't want, or Jesus didn't want people to think that he was a sorcerer because that would have been one of the accusations. So the boy sits up, and he starts to speak. He's not under drugs. He's not anything like that. He's normal. He's risen from the dead. This is amazing. This is a miracle. Can you imagine the crowd at that moment? I think at first there would have been a shocked silence, and then the whole place would have erupted with shouting and joyfulness. But also it says that a great fear fell upon them.

Fear seized them all. Who is this person? What is this? What's going on? So we have—we've had the passion, the power. Thank you. And now the praise. So fear seized them all, and they glorified God saying a great prophet has risen among us.

It's an amazing story, and there's some lovely things in there. The question now is what does this all mean for us today? And I've got three points I want to just share with you today to take away from this for ourselves.

The church fathers interpret this young dead man in today's gospel story as a symbol of the human soul in a state of spiritual death due to sin. Specifically, St. Theofan the Recluse taught that the raising of the son of the widow of Nain symbolizes the spiritual condition of a person who has become negligent about sin in their lives.

That happens. I see that often with the young men, they just become negligent about what's happening in their lives. They don't struggle.

What happens then is that they can be carried away from their relationship with God into a place of death.

This is the way they realize this, and the church fathers saw this event, this story, as a call to repentance. So, it's a call to all of us to examine ourselves, make sure that we are right with God, and to repent of any sins that we have in our lives.

Also, I couldn't help thinking as I was preparing this, I kept thinking—this isn't from the church fathers. This is just from me from the newspapers. I couldn't, I kept thinking of Gen Z. Do you all know who Gen Z is? They're the Zoomers, the people who are born usually between 1997 and 2012. They grew up with mobile phones, computers, emails. They're on the internet every day. These are the guys.

I kind of thought this is the Zoomers on this thing because they've been fed a whole lot of rubbish over their lives, unfortunately, right from the start, and they're taking in quite a lot of rubbish. But I think Jesus is meeting them, and he is asking them to stand up, and they are. There's more young people, young men especially, going back to church these days than there's ever been. All around the world, not just in Australia, in Europe, in America, everywhere.

Something is happening. I think Jesus has stopped the bier the way where it's going, and he's getting people to stand up. I was buying some salad the other day in a shop, and this young man behind the counter said to me, "Are you religious?" I mean, I'm wearing my everything.

I said, "What makes you ask that?" He said, "I just thought you might be." So then he said, "I don't know what you think about this, but Jesus appeared to me." I said, "Oh really, tell me about it." So he’d been in a terrible—he was having terrible problems, and he didn't know how to cope, and he didn't know how to get help, but Jesus appeared to him and helped him enormously just like that. It's extraordinary.

Then my next question was, "That is wonderful. So where are you going to church now?" "Church," he said.

I mean, these, they don't know anything. So I invited him to come to me, and I just checked. He's not here. I don't think he is this morning. He was very grateful and everything, but he hasn't been. And I've been back to the shop a few times. He said to me, he said, "The trouble is we get extra pay on Sunday mornings."

So he's kind of locked into this, you know, wanting to get the money. And that takes me to my next point. The second point comes from this. When our Lord touched the bier, we're told that the bearers stood still.

And if we don't stand still in the Christian life, we may not hear the Lord's command to get up, whatever that means, different for different ones of us. So if we don't stand still, the Lord will not transform us. It will not change us. We must stand still.

How do we stand still? Well, if we were in a Russian church, you'd all be standing still now, but we're sitting still. And this is part of it. Coming to church on Sundays, being in the presence of God, just being still in the presence of God. Then you've got morning prayers, evening prayers, and other feast days and things like that. Being obedient, listening to God. We use the mnemonic cafes here, you know, confession, almsgiving, fasting, Eucharist, scriptures, help me with the other ones, scriptures, saints, and there's another one, sorry. And there's also, there's only guided by prayer, but there are three S's: scriptures, saints, service. Thank you. Thank you. Good. That's it. All right.

So, we use that mnemonic to guide us in all the things we should be doing. If we're doing those things, then we'll be standing still in a way, listening to Christ, giving him a chance to talk to us, to say arise, come back to life with a capital L, not walking in death or towards death.

Then third, and lastly, why was this man from Nain raised from the dead? Well, basically because he was in the way of Christ. What is the way? It's the gospel. We learn what our Lord in the gospel, we learn what our Lord teaches us. And primarily, he taught us love. He came to love. Remember the icon? He taught us to love God with all our hearts, all our minds, all our souls, all our strength, and our neighbors as ourselves. That's the way of Christ.

He's given us an apparatus to do that in, if you like, some equipment, and the equipment is the church. This is the body where we must be joined. We must be joined to this church or else we're not in the way. If we're not in the church, we're not in the way.

This young man, Jesus has appeared to him, but he's not yet in the way, unfortunately. But I see him occasionally, so we keep talking. We'll see how we go with that.

All right. And the last thing I want to say in relation here, the woman of Nain, she did not live an extraordinary life. She lived an ordinary life. We don't know anything more about her apart from that Jesus met her that day on the way out of Nain and healed her son. But she was in the way of Christ, and it changed her life for the better.

We don't know anything more about him, what happened to him after this story, but I'm sure that he had a lot to think about and it would have changed his life. How do we experience this power in our lives that Jesus revealed in this particular event? I think there's a key in the epistle today.

St. Paul, and this is the last thing I'm going to say, St. Paul, remember, he said that he had a thorn in the flesh. He had this amazing experience where he was caught up into the third heaven, into paradise, and he can't tell people what the experience was. He's not allowed to tell what happened.

And what would happen if that happened to us? I think I wouldn't be able to get through the door. I'd have such a head, you know, now God has done this for me. So God gave him a thorn in the flesh. Now we don't know what it was. Some people think it was a problem with his eye, a physical problem. Other people think it might be hardhearted Christian leaders. I think it could be anything. Just the difficult people he was dealing with.

But this was the way that God kept him humble. And this is the way that God kept him weak. He says at the end of the reading, I need to turn over back to my reading, sorry.

"My grace is sufficient for you." This is God saying to Paul, "For my power is made perfect in weakness." So he kept him weak. He gave him a great experience. He gave him that assurance that God was with him and he had a plan for his life. But then he gave him this weakness to keep him close to God and so that he was able to draw on God's power.

Some of us are struggling with weaknesses. I know most of you don't have any weaknesses, but I have a few. And it keeps me going to God, keeps me praying, it keeps me coming to church to keep me going.

So we need to do this if we want to experience God's power as well as God's love. May God help us to remember the woman of Nain, the passion she had, the power Jesus expressed there, and then the praise for what he'd done and who he is. May God help us. Amen.

Now to God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit be ascended to all, majesty, dominion, and praise now and forever to the ages of ages. Amen.