We were bouncing around in the back of a pickup truck going through the high deserts of southern Mexico. It was hot. I was getting carsick. There was a cab on the back of the pickup that had only small windows for ventilation. Dust poured in from the dirt road we were travelling on out of the city of Ahuatapec.
There were about 8 of us packed in there. Fortunately, most of them were children. Down the way was an elderly man, one of the viejitos of the church, with a kindly face and a snaggle-tooth smile. When we finally got to the park where we were headed he would introduce me to elotes – ears of freshly roasted corn on a stick slathered with mayonnaise, lime and hot chili powder. He tried to buy me one from the elotero with his cart, but I with all the stomach issues my group was having on this weeklong visit I didn’t want to risk it.
Pastor Teo was bouncing along across the truck bed from me. He was a round little man who somehow managed to maintain a sense of reserve and dignity even when he was being bounced in the air by a rut in the road. I don’t think Pastor Teo knew what to make of me. I didn’t behave like the Methodist ministers he knew in Mexico. I had come to help build a church for this congregation in the desert that had been meeting in homes for forty years. And I didn’t know what I was doing. I’m not a construction guy. Other members of our team had those skills. But I could dig a ditch, so that’s what I did most of the week we were there. I put on a bandana, bought a one dollar cowboy hat at the local store, and jumped in the ditch we were digging for the exterior wall.
Evidently ministers in Mexico don’t dig ditches. Or wear bandanas. Or cowboy hats. Or stop behind the counter of local stores to watch episodes of Mexican soap operas with the store owners. (It was Rosa Salvaje with Veronica Castro – I had to watch!)
Somehow we made a connection, though, Pastor Teo and I. He would find excuses to get me out of the ditch and take me to see what his life was like. One day he drove me to another village about 8 miles away to see his parsonage. He had a beat-up VW Beetle that had two speeds – rough idle and pedal to the metal. I sat in the passenger seat with my knees up to my chin while he would race along the dirt road until he came to a lurching stop at the precipice of some giant pothole, which he would then carefully work his way around before flooring it again.
His parsonage was a 2-room house for himself, his wife and daughter. A corrugated tin roof. Bright blue walls. A plastic bucket for a sink. An outhouse beyond the little courtyard out back. Two small beds in the main room. An old black typewriter on the kitchen table where he wrote his sermons. A picture of Jesus on the wall. I’m sure he was telling me important things as we walked around and he gave me little religious pamphlets, but my Spanish wasn’t that good and all I could think was how incredibly huge my parsonage back in Virginia was. Pastor Teo and I might have both responded to the same call from God, but we lived in very different worlds.
He was still trying to teach me things even as we were bouncing around in that pickup bed. Coming out of town we passed the cemetery. Mexican cemeteries are different from Virginia cemeteries. They are social places where people will go. On the Day of the Dead – November 2 – right after All Saints Day in the Christian calendar – Mexican families will go to visit the graves of loved ones carrying food – figurines of skulls or animals made of sugar, favorite dishes of the ones who have died, bottles of tequila. They will clean the graves and bring flowers to decorate. Some will even write poems to be read there. It is a way of saying, “We do not forget those who have died. We will continue in life. We will have a fiesta right in the place where it seems that death has won. Our dead are not lost to us.”
Pastor Teo pointed out at the graves as we went past. He was not so optimistic about how well the dead would be remembered. “You see those?” he said. “Those are the olvidados – the forgotten ones.” Then he looked at me and said, “Don’t let us be olvidados to you.” He was challenging me to think of our mission trip as more than a week out of time. He was reminding me that we had worked together. We had eaten together. We had endured a bone-jarring ride in a pick-up together. We were on a journey together now.
Being a Christian means that we have a complicated relationship to death. It comes to all of us. Sometimes at the end of a long and fruitful life when we are able to see our children’s children, but more often when we are not ready for it and when many things seem incomplete and unfinished. It’s at these times that our faith walks on in darkness. We cry out for an answer. We look to Jesus who walked through death – defeated it – suckerpunched it just when it looked like it was finally going to win the game for good. He’s the only one who ever did it – who got out of this world alive – and he told us we could, too.
Jesus walks through a village near his hometown of Nazareth in Galilee. It’s early days in his public ministry. He has called disciples. He is attracting crowds. They cause a stir when they come into town.
On this day Jesus’ band comes in and there’s another procession underway. Pallbearers are bringing out the body of a young man. And as Luke fills in the details we get a picture of how horrible this funeral is going to be. It’s not just a young man, it’s the son of a woman who is a widow. And he’s not just her child, he’s her only-begotten son. (Funny how that language shows up throughout Jesus’ story, isn’t it?)
We don’t even know the woman, but we’re ready to cry with her. Just like we want to cry with Jairus, the synagogue leader, in Luke chapter 8, who falls at Jesus’ feet to have him come save his 12-year-old daughter – his only-begotten daughter. Just like we want to cry with the man in Luke chapter 9 who comes to ask Jesus to help his tormented son – his only-begotten son. Just like we want to cry with our neighbors down the street who have a daughter – an only-begotten daughter who leaves her child with her parents so that she can get high. Just like we want to cry with our sister when her son – her only-begotten son is arrested and sent across the bay.
We don’t know this woman but we know death when we smell it. And for this woman – to lose her only son was not just a personal grief but a loss of security. Who would provide for her now in a culture where having a man in the family was considered crucial for survival?
Jesus has his own parade but he sees the dead man’s body and the stalwart men carrying it. He sees the woman at the head of a long line of mourners and he has compassion for her, like the Samaritan man in Luke chapter 10 who sees a beaten-up Jew on the side of the road and stops to help. Like the father in Luke chapter 15 who sees his prodigal son from a long way off and runs to embrace him.
Jesus goes to her. He tells her not to weep. He goes to the dead man and touches his coffin. The pallbearers stiffen. Jewish law had strict prohibitions about approaching dead bodies. They were unclean. So the pallbearers stiffen, but ‘the stiff’ hears Jesus’ command spoken in his dead ear. “Young man, I’m telling you, get up!”
Of course, he does. He gets up and starts talking. I’d love to know what he was talking about. Was he praising God? Was he talking about some mysterious bright light that was drawing him toward it? Or did he just pick up in midstream, talking about the things that you and I occupy our days with? Who we saw downtown and what we’re going to eat tonight?
Whatever it was, Jesus gives him to his mother. The crowd is fearful because they haven’t seen anything like it. But they know this – it is a sign that God had not forgotten the people of God.
A great story. But we wonder what it has to do with us. Actually, I think we’re afraid that it DOES have to do with us. Because raising the dead is one of the things Jesus tells his disciples to do. When he’s sending out the twelve to preach the good news in Matthew chapter 10 he tells them to heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons, give generously, and, oh, yes, raise the dead!
We immediately get hung up on ‘how.’ We think that, if it had happened often in Christian history, we would have seen it. And there is that painful, heartbreaking impulse that comes at the moment of a loved one’s death when we wonder – if I just pray the right way…if I just say the right words...if I just feel it a little bit more…if I could show just a little superhuman devotion and faith…then maybe I could bring her back…maybe God would raise him up.
But what is asked of us is nothing superhuman. What God calls us to is nothing more than to be human with each other. How do we heal the sick? We hold their hands, we offer the sign of oil, we take them food, we pray, we listen, we just are there with our fragile human bodies being present in the pain. How do we feed the hungry? We unload boxes, we laugh as we bump into one another putting cans of sliced peaches and green peas into paper bags, we cook spaghetti, we sit at a table and eat and we just are there with our own hunger and our own bodies dependent on food.
How do we raise the dead? We sit by the chair and the bedside of the dying and tell stories of life, we share memories, we change bedsheets, we cut toenails, we smile even when we don’t feel like it, we cry when we need to and laugh when we have to, we eat, we listen, we wait, we get angry, we pray, we get up in the middle of the night to walk the one God loves to the bathroom, we go back to bed and an hour later we get up again, we handle bills and insurance claims, we get exhausted and testy and irritable, and we go back again and again because it is what we can do. We just are there with our own fragile human bodies being present to the suffering of the one we love and that God loves. And when death comes we visit graves and we remember. We remember that God is life and that Christ walks before us…walks with us into that life.
Sara Miles, in her book Jesus Freak: Feeding, Healing, Raising the Dead, says that when she decided to follow Jesus in her middle years, raising the dead did not seem like a thing it was possible for humans to do. But as she became more deeply involved in the lives of the people she met at the food pantry she started in her San Francisco church she realized that it was not a matter of doing the impossible. Like Peter trying to walk on water she said the “miracle was really just his ordinary, flawed, human willingness to be in the storm, to be scared, and to try to follow Jesus anyway….The lesson isn’t that if we had more faith we could walk on water of that God will reward our great faith with supernatural powers and send the storms of life away. It’s that, as long as we love each other, we aren’t alone. ‘It’s me,’ Jesus says. ‘Don’t be afraid.’”[i] Even when we’re facing death – don’t be afraid.
We went to Mexico. We dug a ditch. We built a wall. We traveled in trucks by dusty graveyards. I was treated as a guest in a 2-room parsonage. We sat down to meals with families who welcomed us in not knowing us from Adam. We ate things we had never seen before and they tasted like heaven. There was a red plastic dish with hot peppers sitting by a basket of warm corn tortillas and a flowered clay bowl full of black beans. There was a little girl who came running up to me as we were getting into the car to leave. She put a green dog with its stuffing coming out of it into my hands to give to my children. I remember these things. No olvido. Christ was alive in that place. Christ is still alive. We just were there. That’s how the dead came to life.
Jesus invites us into the world’s suffering – not to overcome it with superhuman powers – but to be fully human in it. Whose table will you sit at this week? Whose hand will you hold? How will you be present in the places the world calls God-forsaken? We will eat at this table. We will praise this God who is making all things new. And then we’ll leave to go and raise the dead. It’s just what we do. Thanks be to God.
Luke 7:11-17
A little later he came into a town called Nain along with his disciples and a great crowd. As he came near the town gates, look, a dead man was being carried out, the only son of his mother who was herself a widow. A considerable crowd from the city was with her.
When he saw her, the Lord had compassion on her and said to her, "Don't weep."
He came forward and touched the coffin. The pallbearers stood firm. He said, "Young man, I am telling you, get up!"
The dead man sat up and started to speak and he gave him to his mother.
Fear seized them all and they gave glory to God saying, "A great prophet has been raised up among us and God has looked after God's people." This word about him spread throughout Judea and all the neighboring countryside.
[i] Sara Miles, Jesus Freak: Feeding, Healing, Raising the Dead, [Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, 2010], ebook location 1872-1881
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