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            Nine days ago today, in this church, we celebrated with deep sorrow the funeral of Bernice Welch.  Bernice passed away in the 91st  year of her life.  The dead man in today’s gospel (Luke 7:11-17) had been cut off in the bloom of youth, but it was not just his untimely death which prompted Jesus’ compassionate intervention.  His mother was a widow, and he was her only son.  In the society in which she lived she would have been left completely helpless without male protection. 
            This miracle parallels the one performed by the prophet Elijah in the First Book of Kings (17:17-24).  There too the only son of a widow is raised to life.  The words of the narrator, “he delivered him to his mother,” are identical in both accounts (Luke 7:15; 1 Kings 17:23). 
            In Paul’s famous chapter on the resurrection in the First Letter to the Corinthians, he declares that “the last enemy is death” (15:26).  Christians believe that with the coming of Christ death has lost its sting.  To be sure, the miracle in today’s gospel is exceptional: Jesus came into the world not to do away with death (the young man will die again one day) or even to explain it, but to fill it with his presence. 
            After Christ’s own death and resurrection, the words of the 23rd psalm take on new meaning: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me” (v.4). 
            The Latin Requiem Mass has the words vita mutatur, non tollitur (“life is changed, it is not taken away”).  What sort of life awaits us beyond the grave each one of us will discover in due course.  But while we are living here below, we see death as part of our present life. 
            In language taken from the racetrack, Paul triumphantly declares, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7).  So for all its sadness Bernice’s funeral nine days ago was a celebration of her life. 
            The funeral liturgy of the Orthodox Church includes an anthem which has been adopted by our Book of Alternative Services:

Thou only art immortal, O Creator and Maker of all, and we are mortal, formed of the earth.  For so Thou didst ordain, saying Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.”  We all go down to the dust, yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

September 7, 2008

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