The Second Death - A Sermon for Pentecost 2C

The scriptures for this sermon are as follows:

1 Kings 17:8-24
Psalm 30
Galatians 1:11-24
Luke 7:11-17

These can all be read online by clicking here.

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The woman found me in the evening under a stand of trees outside the village.
I have never liked her,
and I would have tried to hide if I had seen her coming.
She is probably to blame for all her sons vices.
She’s kept him in her grips over the years, never letting him go.
Maybe  she was afraid to be alone after her husband died,
but that’s no excuse to stifle a person,
to clamp down on them so hard they are never free.

I was looking away over the valley,
watching the sun set in all its glory.
To be able to see;
sight is a wonderful thing -
just to see such things as a sunset, or a flower, or a tree;
anything, that is, but the old widow looking for me.

As I said, I didn’t see her coming, so I couldn’t hide.
The first I knew of her presence was her irritating voice,
“Joshua?,”  She asked, “Is that you Joshua?”
Of course she knew it was me.
“I’ve been looking in all the bars for you,” she said.
It was typical of her to say “all the bars” when there was only two in the entire village of Nain.
She always wanted credit for trouble she hadn’t really taken.
I was annoyed and couldn’t help but show it.
“You might have saved yourself the trouble,” I said,
“You should have known I wouldn’t be in a bar on a fine evening like this.”

But then the old widow became quite humble.
She could be smooth enough when she wanted something,
but this was different.
“It’s for my poor boy,” she said.
That meant he was sick.
When he was well, she might call him lots of things, but never “my poor son.”

“He’s dying,”  she said, “and God knows what I’m going to do without him.”

“Well, I don’t see how I can help,” I said.
You see, I was more than a little angry.
He had come close to dying once before,
and his mother had done everything but bury him.
I thought it was the same sort of dying this time,
the sort one gets over.
I had seen him about a week ago on his way to see the young girl at the farm on the hill,
and later that night I had helped him sneak back into his own home.

“He’s been asking for you,” she said, interrupting my thoughts.
“Well, if he’s as sick as you say he is,”  I said,
“it would be better for him to ask for a doctor.”

“Doctor’s there,” she answered, “but he can’t do anything.
For God’s sake come; he seems scared.”
What can I say, I followed her,
knowing all too well that if I didn’t she wouldn’t leave me in peace anyway.
She thought I was responsible for the way he turned out,
for his sins and faults,
and Benjamin had a lot of faults, a lot of sins.

I had an uneasy feeling  as soon as I entered their home.
It was natural for the house to be quiet,
they never had any real visitors besides me anyway.
But this was too quiet,
and I didn’t like the sound of the doctor’s feet, as he came downstairs to meet us.
His face got all pious looking when he saw us,
“He’s conscious,”  the doctor said, “but he’s dying.
There’s nothing I can do.
If you want him to die in peace, you’d better let Joshua up to see him right away.
Benjamin’s scared about something,
and he keep’s asking for Joshua.”

The doctor was right.
I could tell as soon as I entered my friend’s room.
He was propped up on a pillow, and he was looking at the door,
waiting for me.
His eyes were bright and frightened,
and his hair lay across his forehead in moist, sticky stripes.
The twinkle he had once had in his eyes was gone,
and he looked as though he would not be much longer on this earth.

I thought I’d try cheering him up,
so I made a few jokes about how being in bed kept him from his carousing and partying,
but he didn’t laugh.
Instead, he told me to sit down, and he began to talk softly and quickly.
“I dying,” he said, “and I want to ask you something.
That doctor’s just no good,
and besides he’d think I was crazy.
But I am scared.
I need some reassurance.
I need to talk to someone with some common sense.
And then he slipped farther down in his bed.

“I’ve only been really sick once before,” he said,
“and that was before you moved here.
I wasn’t much more than a boy then.
People tell me that I was supposed to be dead.
They were even carrying me out to the cemetery, when a man - a teacher or doctor or someone - stopped them just in time.”

I had heard of cases like that before,
and since I had no idea why he was telling me this now, I said,
“look, you don’t need to be afraid.
You aren’t going to die.
Quit talking like that.
Why, I’d bet the clothes on my back that you’ve got plenty of years in front of you,
plenty of parties,
plenty of women too,”  I added to make him smile.

“Can’t you cut that out?” he said,
“Why,” he went on, “if I live, I’ll give all that up - the wine, women and parties.  I’d give it all up just to live.”

I tried not to smile at that, but it wasn’t easy to keep a straight face.
There’s always something a bit funny about a dying person’s morals.
A man or woman in trouble will make all kinds of promises they’ll never keep.
“Well,” I said, “there’s still no reason to be frightened.”

Oh, it’s not that,”  he said, “You see when I came around the other time,
when everyone including me thought I had been dead.
You should have seen the mourners and weepers gathered round me then.
But the other time it wasn’t like sleep at all.
It wasn’t like rest in peace.
No, there was someone there with me who knew everything,
everything I had ever done,
every person I had ever cheated,
every woman I ever lied to.
They even knew about the money, the couple of denari, I had stolen from my mother.
This someone even knew the thoughts I’d had.
A man can’t help what he thinks, can he?”

“It sounds to me like you had a nightmare,” I said.
“Yes, it must of been a dream,”  he continued.
People dream like that when they’re sick.
But, you know what, I saw what would happen to me,
what I had coming to me, and it wasn’t good.
And, you know me, I can’t stand pain.
I mean, I wanted to faint and I couldn’t,
because I was dead.”
“Dead in your dream, you mean,” I said.
His fear made me nervous.
“You just dreamt you were dead.”

“Yes,”  he said, “It had to of been a dream, right?
After all, I woke up.
But the funny thing was that when I woke up I felt really good.
I was well and strong - not sick at all.
I got up and stood.
I looked around and just down the road, kicking up the dust,
was a small crowd going off with a man,
the man who had stopped them from burying me.”
He must of been a doctor.”

“Well?” I said.

“Well, suppose it was true. Suppose I had been dead.
I believed it then, you know, and so did my mother.
I changed my whole life for a while;
I went straight for a couple of years.
I thought it might be a sort of second chance.
But after awhile things got all fogged up somehow. . . .
It didn’t seem possible that such a thing could happen.
It’s not possible.
Of course it’s not possible.
You know it isn’t, don’t you?”  he asked, hoping that I would agree with him.

“Why no,”  I said.  “Miracles of that sort don’t happen nowadays.
Perhaps they did once with the old prophets like Elijah, but not anymore.
And anyway, they aren’t likely to happen to you, of all people.
Besides, nothing ever happens in Nain.”
But Benjamin wasn’t convinced.
“It would be so dreadful,” he said, “if it had been true,
and I had to go through all that again.
You don’t know what awful things were going to happen to me in that dream.
And they would be worse now.
I’ve done so many other things since then.
I don’t think I could handle it.

“Of course it was a dream,”  I said, and I squeezed his hand.
He was really beginning to scare me now,
and in a way I began to wish he would die quickly,
so that I could get away from him.
“Why,” I said, “if there had been a man going around working miracles like that,
we would have heard of him,
we would have heard of other people being cured or raised from the dead.
We would have heard of him even in this god-forsaken place.

“There were others,” he said, “But the stories only went around among the poor,
and they’ll believe anything, won’t they?
There were lots of diseased and crippled they said he cured.
And there was one guy who’d been born blind,
and this man, who used to be a carpenter,
came up and touched his eyelids and sight came to him.
Those were old wives’ tales, weren’t they?”
he asked me, stammering with fear,
and then lying suddenly very still and quiet.

I began to say, “Of course, they were all lies,”
but I stopped, because there was no need.
He was dead.  All I could do was to go downstairs and tell his mother to come up and close his eyes.
I wouldn’t have touched them for all the money in the world.
I knew too, that what he had said was the truth.
It had happened to me.
Oh, it had been a long time since I’d thought of that day,
ages and ages ago,
when I felt a cold touch like spittle on my eyelids,
and on opening my eyes had seen a man like a tree surrounded by other trees walking away.

Unlike the vast majority of my sermons,
today’s is based not only upon the gospel,
but also on a short story by Graham Greene called “The Second Death.”
A story about a man who died twice.
It is a hypothetical story - we don’t know if anything like it ever happened.
The Bible after all does not tell us what happened to most of the people that Jesus touched and healed.
And what Greene does in his story,
and what I have done here is to imagine what might have happened to the young man that Jesus raises from the dead in Luke 7.
What would such a man think, who had once faced death,
and now would have to face it all over again.

But while the Bible is largely silent about the lives of people after their healing,
it is quite clear about one thing:
One thing that the scripture tells us again and again is this:
Jesus Christ came into this world to give us new life.
And given this truth, I’d like for us to consider this simple question:
What is the use of being given a new life,
if it is simply more of the same old life we used to have?

All of our scripture lessons this morning focus on the life-giving and renewing power of God.
There was Elijah and the widow’s son in Kings.
There was Jesus and the widow’s son in Luke.
Even the background for Galatians is the life-giving power of Jesus to turn Paul’s life around.
In fact, in countless other passages in the New Testament we read about the life-giving mission of Jesus Christ.
Jesus once said that the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven, and gives life to the world. 
I am the bread of life, he proclaimed.
And Jesus also said, “I have come that you may have life, and have it more abundantly.”

Paul echoed Jesus’ message.
He wrote:
Set your mind on the things that are above,
not on the things that are on the earth.
For, if you are a Christian, you have died,
and your life is hid with Christ in God.
And when Christ, who is our life, appears,
then you also will appear with him in glory.

Later on in II Corinthians 4: 8-11, Paul would add:
We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed;
perplexed, but not driven to despair;
persecuted, but not forsaken;
struck down, but not destroyed;
always we carry in our bodies the death of Jesus,
so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in us.
For while we live we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake,
so that the life of Jesus may be seen in our mortal flesh.
So, while death is at work in us, we also have life.

And Paul knew what he was talking about.
He had been given a second chance by this Jesus Christ.
In Galatians Paul recounts his conversion on the road to Damascus.
Saul, he was called then, had his life totally changed by an encounter with the living Christ.
Saul became Paul
The Christian-killer became the greatest Apostle.
The sinner became a saint.
Paul, who once said, that we must consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Jesus Christ,
did not waste the new life, the second chance, given to him.

How about us?
As I have said,
Jesus came into this world to give new life.
What good is the new life we are given if it is simply more of the same old life?

Our lives in Christ must be more than our lives before Christ.
Pray with me that this may be so.

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