Sermon for Widows and Widowers
"Left All Alone", a sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity - St. Luke 7.11-17; 1 Timothy 5.5-6
This sermon was given to the saints in Christ at Concordia Lutheran Church, Greenwood, Indiana on September 24, 2023.
+ In the Name of Jesus +
Today we hear of our Lord Jesus, walking on away from the Sea of Galilee, after saving the Centurion’s servant boy from certain death merely at His Word – and witnessing the Centurion’s great faith in Jesus’ Word. A great crowd of disciples and other followers of Jesus follow along and they come to the city of Nain, and there outside the city wall and gate they encounter a funeral procession marching out to the nearby cemetery. The Nain pallbearers carry out the deceased one and only son of a woman who was already a widow. Which means she has no one to care for her in the future. Jesus walks right up to the death march, stops it, lays His hand on the bier, says to the woman “Weep no more” and raises the boy from the dead at His Word. Young man I say to you, arise. And He gave the son back to his mother.
Everyone present experienced the fear and awe that comes upon you when you realize you are in the presence of a holy, and living God – truly this is a great prophet, truly God is visiting His people. Word spreads around Judea and Galilee – Jesus is the Messianic prophet come to bring on the Kingdom of God, the promised Seed to overcome the fall into sin, who at His Word will turn all weeping over sin and death and the power of the devil into laughter and rejoicing in the light of God’s glorious presence.
Yet, we still see sons and husbands and fathers dying. We still see wives dying too young and mothers leaving behind young children. There is a family I know in Texas right now where cancer is about to take away a faithful wife and mother of five small children. God grant us to learn today of what our Lord Jesus does for the dead and the dying and those who are left all alone in the aftermath to pick up the pieces.
Would you please turn with me to your bulletin and read with me the verse printed for you from the “Table of Duties” of Luther’s Small Catechism, from the first epistle to St. Timothy?
She who is truly a widow, left all alone, has set her hope on God and continues in supplications and prayers night and day, but she who is self-indulgent is dead even while she lives. [1 Tim. 5.5-6]
Dr. Martin Luther writes that the one who is “truly a widow” and is “left all alone” is one who has no kin for whom she can care. “She is simply by herself.” She has no husband to provide for her and defend her, and thus no husband or children for her to nourish and support. She also has no parents to care for her, no parents for her to devote herself to caring for, no aunts, and no uncles needing care. All alone. No one to care for, and no one to care for her.
The apostle Paul says that the one “truly a widow”, one “left all alone” has set her confident expectation in God in the past, and still continues to do so, but now has that added weight of being left all alone.
The true widow, left all alone, has no other place to turn. In the first centuries immediately after the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, there were no skilled nursing homes, no assisted living apartments, no social security, no retirement savings or pension plans. The widow left all alone by the sting of death had to turn to God for there is no one else. St. Paul then points out that “she who is self-indulgent” is “dead” even while she lives – there was no room in such a widow’s life for fulfilling one’s own desires – she was going to be hoping for God to move neighbors who were not necessarily related to her to help her out of their meager resources, a life of begging and leaning on friends who do not have much themselves.
That’s what death does. It is obviously a change for the person who dies to this life, and brings a sea-change to the survivors. Death is not meant to be a thing to be comfortable with. It is the most pressing reminder of God’s holy wrath over the sin which resides in our flesh, inherited from our first parents. Knowing that does not make dealing with death easy.
The letter to the Hebrews says we are those “who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage.” (Hebrews 2.15) Dwellers in the land of the shadow of death. When young people die, or when anyone dies unexpectedly, or before we are ready for it to happen, we especially feel the impossible weight and power of the dominion of death. We pray for a holy, peaceful death, and not an evil one, for ourselves, for those around us. Death either way is an enemy. It is not natural. It is not what God intends for His creation.
In Psalm 68, David declares, “In his holy dwelling, God is a father for the fatherless and a judge who defends widows.” Today’s Old Testament and Gospel readings both back David up on this. In days of old, up to modern times, war was a near constant companion, and famine and plague were never far off. All three sorts of calamity had a tendency to create both orphans and widows, and often they did it at exactly the same time. Famine or pestilence had come along to rob both the widow at Zarepheth and the widow at Nain of their husband and their son.
Today, I offer to you, that we see people left truly all alone with and without death. Fathers leave mothers and abandon their spouse and children, or vice versa. That’s similar to having a death in one’s family. Or when a spouse dies, or perhaps an elderly loved one dies, the children and other relatives and friends all have their own life, and the widowed one left all alone has his or her own life, and we all attempt to keep going down our chosen paths hoping everyone will be okay.
We have a cultural preoccupation in these post-modern times with being independent and shunning interdependence with community, family, and fellow Christians. It is the dead fruit of the dead tree of living a self-indulgent life. Everyone retreats today to their corner of the world, to their home, to their phone and electronic devices, able to enjoy their chosen pursuits without ever having to interact personally with others. We think a person is “okay” if they are chiming in on Facebook, or perhaps we get a text message or email response, or maybe for we Christian hold-outs, that we see them in their spot in the pew on Sunday.
There is a “left all alone-ness” that is easy to feel today, even when in the midst of a crowd of people. If you’ve ever ridden a New York subway or a Chicago El train, or if you’ve ridden alone on the airplane with everyone staring at phones or devices and ear buds firmly in place, you get just a glimpse of an enforced loneliness.
More than that, in the face of death, or just the cruel effects and corruption of sin upon us, it is easy to feel alone, cut off from God and neighbor, even perhaps while you sit right here in this pew. If you experience being left all alone, seek help and allow yourself to be helped in your need. We should be looking out for those around us, recognize those who are or may be feeling all alone, and step forward as a beacon of hope in this dark world where those we love may struggle to see light and life around them. Perhaps we just need to do simple things like put down our screens and enforced busyness and just take time to engage in conversation with those we are given to, and simply lend the ear and listen to someone.
So now how about you? Are you “truly a widow, left all alone” – maybe not literally, but maybe feeling alone? Without anyone to turn to some days except God on high? What does God do for the widows and fatherless, the destitute, the lonely and forlorn? What has God done to relieve your “left all alone-ness” in this temporal life, such as it may be?
Jesus confronted this crushing weight of being alone in a world full of people and did not shy away from it. First, we remember that our Lord raised from the dead not just the widow’s son at Nain, but also his cousin Lazarus and Jairus’ daughter. All three deaths caused our Lord to feel this alone-ness in His inmost being. He was “deeply moved in spirit and troubled” at the grave of His cousin Lazarus, He wept openly. He had deep compassion – moved literally “from his guts” when He saw the widow at Nain marching with her only son to the cemetery. He let forth an angry retort against those mourning and playing the death flutes for Jairus’ daughter and drove them out of the house – be still, this child is not dead, but only sleeping. In the days of Elijah His prophet, He took through His prophet the stinging rebuke of the widow at Zarepheth, turned the other cheek, and heard the prayers of His holy prophet to raise the boy back to life.
Our Lord is not just empathetic however, not just willing to acknowledge the problem, and not just leaving it to the point of feeling it inside. His feelings, His love, leads Him to act. He steps forward for our sake into our world and touches the casket, stops the death march, steals the widow’s tears away from her, commands with the voice of creation and breathes His Spirit into the dead bones to bring them back alive and sit up, and He gives Nain’s son back to his mother, gives Jairus back his daughter, gives Lazarus back to Mary and Martha, gave the widow her little boy from Elijah’s prayers.
And yet He did not stop there. Our God and Lord took upon Himself our humanity and felt upon Himself our every crushing load, including that He would be left all alone in the face of death and hell and an evil and cruel death. Even as He died hanging on the cross bearing the wrath of God for our sin in our place, He cried out “my God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” Yet he also acted from His cross to give His mother to John, acted to give John to His mother – that they would not face the times ahead all alone.
And yet He did not stop there. Our Lord tasted for Himself the pangs of death. He commended Himself to His Father, in earnest supplications and prayers day and night on His cross, finished the defeat of sin, death, and Satan, and went down alone into His three-day tomb. There He has robbed the grave of its sting. Robbed it of its victory.
When Jesus arose, He could no longer die, death had no more dominion over Him. He possesses a glorified body, the first-fruits of the new humanity and the new world to come. The first to rise from the dead. And so we are never alone, He is with us always, even to the very end of the age.
One day, God grant it soon, the whole world will be born anew on the great and awesome day of the Lord, the trumpet shall sound, the voice of the arch-angel will cry forth, the dead in Christ will arise at the command of Jesus, and heavenly Jerusalem, a new heaven and a new earth, will descend and be our everlasting home. There will be no more death, no more being left all alone, there will be a eternally living family there beyond all imagination, gathered around the one, true, and living God.
So we say that Jesus has practiced what He preached through His apostle St. James:
Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. (James 1.27; ESV)
God grant us to turn to our neighbors in their great need, the widowed, the fatherless, those left all alone in any way, and following our Lord, reach out to them with His gifts of love and mercy and hope.
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit +