Some time ago, a strange classified ad appeared in the newspaper of one of our cities. It began: "Tombstone for sale," and continued, "Didn’t die; don’t need it." The details that followed in the ad caused a reporter to investigate and to interview Art Kranz, the man who had taken the advertisement in the classified section of the paper. Kranz told him that the tombstone had been in his living room for several months, but it was not his; it had been ordered by his sister after she was told that she was terminally ill with cancer and would soon die. An orderly person, she determined to make all final arrangements for her burial while she was alive and able. She purchased a cemetery plot, made all the necessary plans for her funeral with a funeral director, and even ordered her tombstone. But she didn’t die; she recovered, and she decided that she didn’t want to keep the tombstone. So she asked her brother, who had a pickup truck, to move and sell it. He stored it in his living room, then moved it to his front porch and ran the ad, "Tombstone for sale," in the hope of finding a buyer for it.

That wasn’t the situation when Jesus entered the city of Nain. It was strictly by coincidence that the two processions met at the city gate, and Jesus and his followers should have stood aside respectfully and allowed the funeral cortege to pass through the gate and move on to the cemetery. But this was a different type of coincidence than most of those we encounter on our roadways. Just the other night, four high school seniors were driving to their high school to attend a concert; all were good scholars and fine athletes. They were young men whom their parents and their community could be proud of. Two high school girls were coming from the opposite direction; they, too, were excellent scholars and persons with tremendous promise. Their parents and the community could be proud of them, too. For an as yet unexplained reason, the young woman driving the one car lost control and crossed over into the opposite lane; her car crashed head-on into the vehicle carrying the four young men. The high school girls were uninjured, and two of the four high school boys didn’t have a scratch on them. But the first car to come along faced a scene of utter hopelessness and desolation; nothing could be done for the other two young men - they were dead - so they attempted to comfort the others as best they could. All they could do was stay there until another car came by and the people in it were sent to get assistance. Not a day goes by in our country that such accidents do not happen, and there is "weeping and gnashing of teeth" by those who only can mourn.

But this time it was different; Jesus intervened and stopped the funeral procession before it could pass out of the city and complete the journey to the cemetery. What goes on here? Who does this man think he is to interrupt a funeral procession? Well, the mourners and the widow soon found out what was going on as Christ spoke to the widow and said, "Do not weep." She had every reason in the world to cry for her son, her only son; he must have been her comfort and her hope in life, but now he was dead. Why should she stop weeping for this son she loved so dearly. No one could take his place in her affections and life; no one could bring her comfort, but this man has the audacity to say to one who was presumably a stranger, "Do not weep." If a person can’t weep at the funeral of an only son, when can one weep for another and for oneself?

John Kirtland, Jr., published a story about his best friend Mike titled, "Whatever Dreams Mike Had Faded, as did Mine." He and Mike grew up together in vastly different circumstances. Mike’s family lived in a "tiny, old, rundown house up on the hill, about a block from us." Mike’s father was a disabled World War II veteran who was never able to hold a job. Kirtland says, "In some respects, Mike was the All-American boy. He was well-built, good-looking, polite and a good student. But, then again, he was poor." The two boys started to drift apart in their senior year of high school; they parted at the end of summer as John went off to college and Mike enlisted in the army. Five years went by before they saw each other; Mike was in a wheel-chair, paralyzed from the waist down after being wounded during his second tour of duty in Vietnam. John says, "He was bitter. He cried a lot. He wouldn’t talk much about what he had seen in Vietnam, but he cried that everyone was guilty - the lowest private to the highest general, and every civilian who slept peaceably in his bed at night and let the war continue for one more day ... As I looked at my friend in the wheelchair, I could only ask: ‘Why? What for?’ "

Kirtland learned the details of the story of how his friend was so severely wounded; only he and one other soldier survived an ambush, part of a senseless mission staged by a "glory-seeking colonel" for a visiting news team that wanted to see some action. Mike’s mother, who told the story, also related to John that Mike’s wife had left him and was going to seek a divorce. John said goodbye and left, intending to return, but within days Mike was dead, shot through the mouth with his own GI-issue handgun. John wrote:

The funeral was a few days later; there weren’t many mourners. In a note written shortly before he shot himself, Mike had specified that he did not want his coffin draped with the American flag. He got his wish. As I turned away from the open grave, I suddenly felt overcome by an incredible weariness and I realized that I no longer had a dream that had not been beaten and shattered. I was tired of fighting, and I realized that the past just goes on and on ... I wept.2

And there was no one to say, or who wanted to say, "Do not weep," as Jesus said to the woman whose son had died for an unknown reason but with many of the same results.

But this time - for once - things were really different; Jesus gave the widow and the mourners reason to cease crying and wailing for the dead man. At least he must have taken them by surprise when he put his hand upon the funeral bier and spoke to the dead man. People weep over the dead - before and after they are buried - but, outside of seances and dreams, dead persons are seldom addressed or spoken to. The man must have something wrong with him, mustn’t he? Either he is a bit simple-minded or he has delusions of grandeur. Who does he think he is - God? - to speak to a dead man, and to make matters worse, to say, "Young man, I say to you, arise." Sane people, no matter how deep their faith in God, just don’t do and say things like that, do they? But Jesus did, and that’s where we discover one of the differences between Christ and ourselves.

Jesus actually believed what he said about God and his power and his love; you and I are not always so certain that God loves us or, if he does love us, whether he can do anything about the predicaments that we find ourselves in in this life. You and I ask ourselves, "Was Jesus really serious when he said, ‘Whatsoever you ask the Father in my name, believing, he will give it to you’?" He was utterly convinced that the Father hears prayer, cares about us, and always answers the prayers of his people. That’s why he could face the cross and the tomb, isn’t it? That’s why he had hope when all hope seemed to be running out for him and for all people. For Jesus, God had a plan for the recovery and renewal of all people on earth, and his mission was - he believed and staked his life on this - to initiate that plan to bring in the fullness of the kingdom of God.

If Alvin Toffler, author of The Third Wave, is right, we need that kind of hope more than ever. In the face of economic chaos all over the world, Toffler insists that we are going through something more drastic than recession and temporary hardship. He believes that we are suffering the "birth pains of a new civilization." Arthur Coxe’s verse sounds so contemporary:

We are living, we are dwelling, in a grand and awful time,
In an age on ages telling to be living is sublime.
Hark! the waking up of nations; God and Magog to the fray.
Hark! what soundeth? ‘Tis creation groaning for its latter day.

Hope in God helps us to make sense out of the senseless turn of events in our time, in all time, because hope enables us to endure and to press on in the face of present and impending tragedies, doesn’t it? When life confuses us and confounds us, when it seems to make no sense at all, the God who started it all and created all living things, lets us get a glimpse of his glory and power and hope is born in us again.

But that doesn’t explain every tragedy that happens to us, does it? Last year, photographs of John Tobias embracing his brother, Paul, whom he had not seen for twenty-seven years, were printed in newspapers across the country. The two brothers met at the airport at Fort Worth on Thanksgiving evening; John’s joy radiates from his face in the pictures. It is almost a parallel to the story Jesus told about a father and two sons, "My son was dead but is alive again." Tobias had started searching for members of his long-separated family when he discovered that he had terminal cancer: "Until you get the kind of sickness like I got, you don’t appreciate a lot of things ... You get a new perspective, start appreciating stuff more. This thing is draining me little by little." John seems to have gained a new lease on life when he was reunited with his brother - the photo reveals - as his son, Steven, looked on. But suddenly the reunion was shattered when the twelve-year-old son collapsed and died. Awful as Steven’s death was, John’s son-in-law said, "Maybe somehow the rest of the family will hear about this, and they will all come together. Maybe this is the way God meant it to be." At least they could still hope and trust in God and dare to go on living out their lives.

Hope doesn’t silence our cries of "Why, what for?" does it, but it allows us to question, seek for answers, and attempt to make some sense out of the inconsistencies and mysteries of life. And it isn’t always a case of the good dying young, is it? In February of 1982, Dr. Solomon Garb, sixty-one, died - ironically - of cancer. Dr. Garb had devoted most of his professional life to cancer research only to die from the disease he sought to understand and to cure. When stricken with stomach cancer in 1980, he volunteered to undergo "untested surgical procedures and treatment with experimental drugs." On December 15, 1981, "his sacrifice received congressional recognition ... in the form of a resolution passed by both houses (of Congress)." He should have had many more years of research, and if he had he might even have discovered a cure for certain kinds of cancer. But he died. Why? What for?

Christ’s chance meeting with the funeral procession at the city gate of Nain won’t give us answers to those questions or ones like them, but he answered forever the questions we have about God’s love and concern for us when suffering and death come upon us. "He had compassion on her," says Luke, and that was why he stopped the funeral procession, told the widow to stop weeping, and commanded the young man to arise from the dead. Best of all, the young man did sit up, began to speak, and Jesus "gave him back to his mother." God is present when death stalks us and our loved ones, however they may die - and it gives us comfort just to know that God understands and cares about our pain and anguish in life, especially in the face of death. We may dare to live and look death in the eye - if not with defiance, certainly with assurance and comfort and hope.

Wouldn’t you like to know the rest of the story? What happened after son and mother were reunited? What sort of life did they have after that encounter with Christ? They certainly had something to talk about, and one wonders if they became evangelists, telling the good news about Jesus the Christ to anyone who would listen. And I suppose some people laughed, as the philosophers laughed at Paul on Mars Hill when he told them about the resurrection of Jesus, but this wouldn’t have silenced them a bit, would it? Human nature prompts us to tell the whole world when something as monumental as this has happened to us, doesn’t it?

Ide Ward was going on 120 years of age when he died early in 1982; a doctor said he died "just of old age," but George Will of the Washington Post called his long life a "triumph of the spirit."3 Will says, "Aging, like a lot of other common things (life, love, memory, the existence of the universe, the infield fly rule), remains a mystery. But many gerontologists believe that, absent disease or imprudent living, an individual ages according to his or her genetically controlled ‘clock.’ A scientist says that, ideally, we should live fairly healthily and then go ‘poof’ rather than go into slow decline or a nursing home." Will says that "longevity is a triumph of the spirit" and not just of physiology; Ward "was picking up steam - and stumps and things - when he was past 70, heading for two score and nine more." And writes Will, "Such longevity can be, in a way, terrible, because it almost invariably involves the burial of many friends, relatives, children (Ward lost three sons during the First World War) and grandchildren. But such longevity can offer perspective on those who experience it, and those who think about it."

There is no way of knowing how long the young man lived after Jesus raised him from the dead, but he must have looked at life and death from a different point of view than before. Perhaps he lived long enough to bury his mother, but both of them would have faced her death differently than before Christ came along. And God has placed us alongside them through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, "the first-fruits of those who have died." We say, "God has visited his people" in Jesus; he has "raised a saviour" among us - and through him death has been defeated forever. God is still in heaven and all really is well in the world. Amen.