WIth or Without You

Kings 17: 8-24

Luke 7: 11-17

These incredibly similar stories of two widows, two sons brought back from the grave, and two miracle workers both have happy endings. And that’s what makes them such dangerous texts if we use them to pull God into our stories

instead of letting God pull us into the depth and width of the divine story.

Loosing a child is a mother’s worst nightmare. Man of us have come close to that edge, or gone over. I can remember with a melting in my bones, the afternoon our oldest lay limp in my arms, the little chest heaving for every thin breathe of air.  It only takes a moment’s imagination to be back at the side of friends whose children were gone in the flash of a moment, a knife, a car’s bumper, a gun.

What do we do with these miracle stories that raise our hopes? What do we make of them when we know the child doesn’t always get up off the bed?

Was it something we did or didn’t do?

The Sidonite woman cries out to Elijah, "What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance, and to cause the death of my son!"

Do you think it was her fault?

         ….a sin tax to be paid?

         ….failure to protect her child?

Our children’s vulnerability cuts through every illusion we have that wealth, knowledge, good behavior, ritual or any other human power is in control of life itself.

        

When Jesus met that grieving mother,

she was surrounded by neighbors caught up in mourning.

I think of some of the things we hear at funerals or read on social media in the face of loss.

         “Only the good die young.”

         “God took her to be an angel.”

         “Its all part of God’s plan.”

Friends, as much as we feel compelled to explain the pain, these are not words of comfort.  They are bad theology (god-talk).

The singer sings:

With or without you

With or without you

I can't live with or without you.

How do we live with a God who would leave only the “bad” living on earth, who would pluck a cherished child out of a family to populate heaven’s chorus, who would plan such profound grief? 

But how can we live without God our creator, redeemer and sustainer when words strip comfort away?

Years ago we watched a beautiful young woman in our church in Hampton Virginia battle cancer. Over the month and years of treatment, remission, in moments of normalcy, as prosthesis replaced her nose, as she fell in love, introduced her beloved to Jesus, and married, she shared her powerful encounters with Christ.

They were so powerful couldn’t believe it when she died. If anyone should have had a miracle, it was she!

God turns these stories around.

These widows’ stories are not life giving because they promise the longed for happy ending is within our grasp.  If they contained the whole of God’s message, too many of us would be left wrestling with how to live with or without the God we long for.

These stories are life giving because God turns them around and face life in a way we didn’t see coming.

God becomes the parent losing the child.

God doesn’t just relieve our grief.

God doesn’t just accompany us in our unrelieved grief. God becomes the parent who loses a child.

God walks right into the fragility of our lives and does not jump back out of our story when loss looms.

God walks right through the death of God’s son and out the other side to life beyond our imagining.

I won’t pretend to understand the Resurrection.  (If anyone ever tries to explain this extraordinary mystery to you, take it with a grain of salt!).

The singer makes as much sense of it as I can hold.

And you give yourself away

And you give yourself away

And you give, and you give

And you give yourself away.

With or without you

I can't live with or without you.

Our stories are too small, each alone or even all together, to contain God’s story.  But the God who gives and receives life makes us sacred characters in a story much richer than our own introductions and conclusions. In it, we are called, "beloved."  And perhaps in the end that’s all we really need to know or say.

 

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