I was asked to preach on June 5, 2016, at St. Olaf Lutheran Church in Rubicon, Wisconsin. They have a tradition of asking someone who has recently graduated from something to preach on graduation weekend. I’ve been connected with people from St. Olaf through TEC, so I was asked to preach.
The texts for this sermon are Luke 7:11-17 and Galatians 1:11-24. I also preached an edited version of this sermon two weeks later on June 19 at Lena UMC, filling in as a supply preacher while Pastor Brian was on vacation.
How many of you have a life plan? I watched the movie Marley & Me last week, and a running thread in the movie is that one of the main characters, Jenny, has this life list. She’s got this plan all written out for her life, with steps like getting a job, getting married, buying a car, getting a pet, having kids, etc.
Maybe some of you have a list like that. Part of what we’re doing this morning is celebrating the milestone of graduation, as some of you move into a new life stage and mark off something on your list.
Personally, I don’t have any formal life plan written down, but I do feel like I’m moving along through life steps, especially right now.
For those of you who don’t know me, the really quick version of my life story is that I’m from Fond du Lac, where I graduated high school in 2008. From there, I went to Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, graduated in 2012, got married to my wife Christin a few weeks later, then we immediately moved to Dubuque so I could start seminary.
In seminary, I worked for a summer as an intern hospital chaplain, I did a yearlong internship in a congregation, and three weeks ago today, I graduated from Wartburg Seminary with a master of divinity degree. Literally right now, I’m waiting to hear from a congregation who are voting in the next few hours on whether or not to call me to serve as their pastor.
So I feel like I’m moving along a life checklist pretty quickly right now. Our graduates might feel something similar.
But what about when your life plan gets interrupted, or doesn’t go where you expect? What about when God has a different plan, or calls you to do something other than what you expect?
One of the themes that jumps out to me from today’s readings is interruption. These are stories about God interrupting people’s lives.
In the Gospel reading, Jesus does one of the rudest things I can think of: He interrupts a funeral.
The situation is a sad one, but it’s a normal part of life. Someone has died, so there’s a crowd ushering him and his mother outside the city to the cemetery so he can be buried. This particular situation is especially sad, because, as we’re told in verse 12, the dead man was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow.
That’s important, because as a widow in that culture, she’s in a rough spot. As a woman, her options for earning an income are limited, and she’s supposed to rely on her husband for support. With her husband dead, well, there’s no life insurance or survivor’s benefits, so she’s reliant on her son for support, and now he has died. Whatever plan she had for her life is over.
But Jesus sees her, and he has compassion, and we get the awkward situation Luke describes.
There’s a large crowd of people following Jesus into the city, and there’s a large crowd coming out of the city for the funeral procession.
I was in Minneapolis last year for a funeral for my aunt who had died, and it was this huge funeral with like 800 people. After the service, we went in a procession of cars to the cemetery. I’m not from a big city, so I was surprised to see that the funeral home provided multiple people on motorcycles just to control traffic and clear the route for us. It was a logistical issue I’d never thought about.
When I hear this story, I picture that procession. You don’t want anything to interrupt a funeral procession. So I imagine this large crowd, stepping out of the way, off the road to let the mourners through, but then Jesus gets in the way of the procession.
What happens when Jesus and a funeral procession collide?
What happens when life interrupts death?
In a way, we’re used to death interrupting life. News bulletins of disasters interrupt fun tv shows; it’s never the other way around. I mean, the only sure things are death and taxes, right?
Death always gets the last word…except when Jesus steps in. Jesus interrupts the funeral, and he brings life out of this situation of death.
Notice that the widow doesn’t ask for Jesus’ help. Jesus just sees her, and he inserts himself into her suffering, into her hopelessness, and he does something about it.
That’s a picture of the entire story of our faith as Christians. We don’t believe in a God up there somewhere who looks down at us and just leaves us alone; we believe in God who sees us, who sees our suffering and our need, and who has compassion.
God takes on flesh, becomes one of us, comes and joins us. Jesus comes to us, and by the cross and in the Easter resurrection, he brings life out of death for us.
We’re here this morning to worship the One who brings life out of death. Our lives have been interrupted by God, the one who’s in the business of life.
So much of our worship is all about this. Look at the Kyrie song we sang, about God renewing us with saving power and creating in us new hearts, washing away our sin by grace and making us whole, giving us new life. Or look at the confession, about God making us alive with Christ when we were dead in our sins.
In this story, I love the image of the crowd following Jesus intersecting, colliding with the funeral crowd, because what’s another word for a crowd following Jesus? The church. You and me.
So as followers of Jesus, how are we intersecting death? How are we proclaiming life to people who need to hear it? My particular call is to be a pastor and to talk about this for a living, but you don’t need to be a pastor to see and talk about God working in the world and in your life. Most of the people in that crowd were normal folks, like you and me. They weren’t CEO’s, or political leaders; they were farmers and townspeople following Jesus.
I believe God is calling you to speak life wherever you are. Whether you’re retired, whether you’re a kid, or even if you’ve never been in this building before, you can be part of this crowd following Jesus, interrupting the story of death. Just listen to Paul’s story.
In the reading from Galatians, Paul is introducing himself to the Christians in Galatia, presenting himself as a trustworthy witness to the gospel. He tells a quick version of his life story, about how he worked to destroy the church, but then how his entire life was changed by a revelation from Jesus.
He went from being an enemy of the church to immediately going to tell people about Jesus. Talk about having your life plan interrupted! That’s about as dramatic as it gets. If God can work through Paul, God can work through anyone.
And when Paul’s life is changed, he immediately starts telling about it. He doesn’t wait to have it all figured out, he just starts telling people about what happened to him. That’s an appropriate reaction when your life is interrupted by God.
The crowd at the funeral reacts the same way. When their funeral gets interrupted, when they see the miracle of Jesus interrupting the woman’s grieving, and giving her son new life, they glorify God. Glorifying God is what we’re doing here in worship this morning, celebrating the new life God’s given to us.
Then we read in the next verse, verse 17, that the word about Jesus spread throughout Judea and all the surrounding country. For the word about Jesus to have spread means those who saw did more than give thanks: They talked about it. They talked about what God was up to.
They talked about what they’d seen. And they didn’t just do it in church on Sunday morning. They talked about it at work, at school, to their families. We ought to do the same.
For those of you graduating, you’re going to be starting jobs, or going on to more school. How can you find opportunities there to interrupt other people’s lives in a way that brings life?
As you continue through your next life steps, will you make an effort to notice people in need, and have compassion for them, like Jesus does for this grieving woman?
Now, in my four years of seminary training, I must have missed a class, because I don’t know how to raise someone from the dead. I’m guessing none of you here do either, but you can find ways to be God’s interruption in other people’s lives.
You can find ways to bring hope to people who need it.
Jesus sees the people we so often overlook, whether it’s a widowed mother at a funeral, a wee little man in a sycamore tree, a guy left for dead in a ditch, a co-worker, a neighbor struggling to get by, or someone sitting in the pew next to you.
Will you look for those who need an interruption from God?
And will you be alert for how God is interrupting your plans?
Because the promise of the Gospel, the promise of the God who came to be with us, is that whether you’re graduating and starting a new phase of life, whether you’re getting ready for retirement or summer vacation, whatever step is next on your life list, God is at work in your life,
God is at work in those around you, and every day is a new chance to see that.
Amen.