A Church That Cannot Stand Alone

Well, good morning again, my fellow encouragers. I want you to notice something about the words we prayed together just a few minutes ago, before I read a line of Scripture at all. Because the Collect put a hard sentence in our mouths this morning, and I don’t think we always hear it land. We prayed that the Church cannot continue in safety without thy succour. We said that about ourselves. We said it about this room, about these pews, about the people sitting next to you. And the lesson of our gospel this morning gives that word flesh and blood, so I want us to take the Collect first, and then let the widow of Nain show us what it means.

You know, that word continual matters more than we tend to think. Thy continual pity. Not occasional pity. Not emergency pity we reach for when the giving falls off or the roof starts to leak. Continual. The Prayer Book isn’t teaching us that dependence on God is something the Church slides into when times get hard. It’s teaching us that dependence is the permanent condition of a redeemed people. We are kept. We are kept this morning the same way we were kept a hundred Sundays ago, and it isn’t a crisis measure. It’s simply what it means to be the Church.

And listen to how the Collect binds two words together. Cleanse and defend. We don’t get to pick one. The Church is never pure of herself, and she’s never safe of herself. Cleanse her, because left alone she grows soiled. Defend her, because left alone she comes apart. The Articles of Religion have always been honest about that. They confess that even the visible Church errs, that our best works have their share of infirmity, that we live by grace and not by our own good standing. So the Collect isn’t handing us an assignment to try harder and shore ourselves up. It’s teaching us to confess what’s already true. Grace holds us up. Grace all the way down.

Now hear what Paul does with that same posture in the Epistle. He doesn’t pray that the Ephesians would find it somewhere in themselves. Let me say that again, because it’s the whole thing. He doesn’t pray that they’d dig deep and locate the strength. He bows his knees unto the Father, and he prays that they’d be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man. A power that works in us, and comes from outside us. That’s the corporate posture this parish is being taught, week after ordinary week. Our strength was never our numbers or our history or our resolve. Our strength is Christ dwelling in your hearts by faith, and beloved, notice the order of it. That indwelling comes first. It comes long before it ever bears any fruit we can point to.

And then Paul prays for the strangest thing. He prays that they’d know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge. Do you hear the contradiction sitting inside that sentence? Know the love that can’t be known. We’re not asked to comprehend it, to get our arms around it, to measure the breadth, and length, and depth, and height of it and file it away. We’re asked to be filled with all the fulness of God. Filled is something done to you. And then the doxology, the one Paul can’t help but let loose, that God is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think. Count it true. Reckon it. The measure was never our numbers.

So come with me to the gate of a city called Nain. Because here is what a power that works in us looks like when it walks on two feet into somebody’s worst day.

The widow of Nain doesn’t ask Christ for a thing. She’s past asking. She’s burying her only son, and Luke tells us she’s already a widow, which means this boy carried on his back, all at once, and every last thread of her security in this world. She has no words left. And here is the tenderness of it. Christ acts unbidden. When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her. The word Luke reaches for is the deep one, the kind of compassion that moves a man in the gut and puts him into motion. Mercy in Luke is never a mood. It does something. He doesn’t wait to be flagged down. He sees a woman who has stopped asking, and he moves toward her.

And then he does what the law forbids. He came and touched the bier. By every rule of ritual purity, that touch should have made him unclean. It doesn’t. Let me say that again. Holiness meets death, and death loses. Life goes the other direction. Young man, I say unto thee, Arise. And the dead boy sits up and begins to speak, and Luke gives us the line I can hardly read without stopping. And he delivered him to his mother. The crowd cries out that a great prophet is risen up among us, and that’s true, and it isn’t nearly enough. The One who commands the dead to stand up is more than a prophet, and the Gospel means us to see it. This is the very succour the Collect confessed we cannot live without, and here it is, walking through the gate of a town, giving a woman back her whole life when she had stopped daring to hope for it.

Now let me tell you what I know of this word succour, because I’ve watched it happen here. St. Barnabas was standing on two legs of a three-legged stool when I arrived. They had just lost their priest, who died suddenly. They were concerned about whether they would ever become a parish or remain a chapel for a select few. Since then, by the grace of God, we have grown in number to become a Parish, no longer a mission, of the Diocese of Mid-America, REC. We have completed a new Parish Hall because God moved a generous person to donate significantly. So the fear was there that this little church would fold, but now that fear has been erased by the succour of God.

You know what that means, don’t you. The security of a parish was never measured by the roll or the roof. It’s measured by the grace that keeps her. And so this morning we refuse two lies. We refuse the despair that whispers this little church can’t last, that we’re too small and too grey and too tired. And we refuse the other lie too, the one that comes dressed up nicer, the triumphalism that looks at a new hall and a growing roll and forgets who kept us. Both lies leave God out. Both of them think it’s all resting on us.

And that said, we can’t become complacent in our prayers. Hear me. The God who has cleansed us and defended us so far is the very same God we keep asking. Continual pity means continual asking. We don’t graduate out of the Collect. We come back to it, week after ordinary week, and we say it again, because it was always true and it’s true still.

This is where the sermon comes to rest, here at this table. Isaiah told the rescued people that with joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation, and this is the well. This is the cup. The widow received her son back with empty hands, asking nothing, and was given everything, and that’s precisely how you’re about to come to this rail.

So come. If Christ stopped the bier at Nain, then he can come near the gate of your grief this morning, whatever you carried in through that door. If the Church cannot continue in safety without his succour, then come and be kept. Come and be cleansed. Come and be defended by the only power that has ever held this parish together, the power that worketh in us. Come the way that widow received her son, empty-handed and given everything.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.