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Goodness, I’m sitting there, thinking, you guys look a year older! I’ve changed, too. My family and I are deeply grateful for your many expressions of love and good humor that have sustained us. Before I started the chemo and radiation therapies, my hair was about like it is now. Then, of course, I went to no hair at all, and as it grew back it was a light gray, almost white color. And now, it’s back to this. One of you discretely asked me recently if I was coloring my hair, to which I say, “Frank, only my hairdresser knows for sure!”

I like to that think God also has a sense of humor. Several weeks ago, after I’d received the blessing of my oncologist and speech therapist to try out my voice today, when I turned to the gospel lectionary text, lo and behold, what should I find but this story of resurrection experienced by a widow’s son.

She and her procession of mourners are passing outside the city of Nain to bury her dead son, carrying his body on a bier, much as we might follow the hearse transporting a loved one to the cemetery. Hygiene considerations and maintenance of ritual purity compelled Jews and people of other ancient cultures to bury their dead outside the city. The biblical context was one with high mortality rates and average life expectancy of perhaps 35-40 years. Thus, this burial procession was a fairly ordinary event. An only son, a widowed mother, and, to borrow our contemporary therapeutic language, a large support group, from the town.

It’s not surprising that this burial procession meets Jesus and Jesus’s entourage at the gate of the city. The gate, in Jewish culture, was the place where the Torah was often read and informally discussed, where people’s lives intersected, where informal business was transacted . . . the site of the ancient equivalent of our modern-day “church parking lot” decisions and discussions.

Jesus draws near to the gate of the city and to this burial procession and, once again, as we have learned to expect, turns the ordinary into something quite extraordinary. He stops the procession, comforts the widow, touches the bier, and tells the dead man to arise. The text says: “And the dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.”

Immediately, when I read this text several weeks ago, it struck me that this was my story, too, what I will always remember as my October Easter. A few days more than a year ago, when I underwent an unsuccessful attempt to surgically remove the tumor that had paralyzed my voice and threatened my life, I thought it was going to be a Good Friday October rather than an October Easter. When I came to from the anasthesia, the first eyes I caught were those of my sister-in-law, and since I am a very intuitive person, I immediately concluded, from her look: “Do I have weeks? Do I have months?” And she, I later learned, was only mirroring the discouraging report and distressed demeanor of my thoracic surgeon.

Since clergy can be a notorious lot for needing therapeutic help with our own particular messiah complex or other psycho-therapeutic disorders, I don’t mean irreverently to push the Good Friday/Easter analogy too far. As any clergy spouse can attest, we are far from Christ figures ourselves! (Bill Shenk is over there saying, “Speak for yourself!” but Betty and Marge and Jerry and Melanie and all other clergy spouses know the truth!)

But over this year since last October, especially during the long stretches of winter solitude and silence, my mind did often wrestle with the divine irony of someone whose vocational livelihood is so intimately tied to the title, “Minister of Word and Sacrament” being struck with this particular disease. It was not just that I couldn’t speak, but even more distressing to me was the fact that the desire to read and ponder words, which had always been the meat and drink of my life, and even the desire to put pen to paper – all that desire seemed utterly to vanish.

I pushed to return this Sunday because I like symmetry and cycles, and I like being able to return six years to the day after I preached the first time here on World Communion Sunday, 2001, and so near to the anniversary of my ordination in 1984 (extra special to have the surprise of friends from the first church I served here today), because I guess we all seek some form of order when we feel that we are in the belly of the whale where chaos has threatened to overwhelm or defeat us.

When I sat down with Bill and Pat to figure out how we’d now divvy up pastoral responsibilities, I shared with them my sense that this was a kairos moment in the life of this congregation. There are two Greek words in the New Testament for time: chronos from which we get the word chronology, meaning clock time or ordinary time; but then there is the word kairos with its derivatives of crisis, meaning crisis as opportunity to respond in a special way to a special opportunity. Without meaning to be melodramatic, I pushed to come back because the building program, which lies on the near horizon, should, after you all have done to carry me and my family since last October, should really seem like the proverbial “piece of cake.” We all know that that journey toward an improved and accessible and welcoming facility will not be without its own unique headaches, but I, for one, feel that a primary reason Jesus has touched my bier and returned to me the gift of speech is to lead us through this phase of the life of this congregation. We had best get on with the task at hand.

Not only did this young man lying on the bier sit up and speak, but then Jesus, the text says, gave him back to his mother. If I were an interpreter of scripture a millennium ago, it’s likely that I’d have looked for the allegory in the passage, meaning what larger meaning was hidden behind particular words. Take the word, “Mother,” for instance. This interpreter would have understood her as representing more than a mere biological relationship; instead, the mother would have stood for the Church, the Mother Church, from whose womb disciples are born in order to grow into the likeness of Christ.

As I have read myself back into this scripture, I rather like that interpretation. The text says, “and Jesus gave him to his mother.” For me, I feel I have been given back to my mother, the Church, which is this congregation, but which is much more, even more than even other congregations in Kingston or in this Presbytery, more even than those congregations in North Carolina and Virginia and Massachusetts and Kenya and other places nearby and faraway who have walked this journey with me.

I mostly felt unable to practice any of the classic Christian spiritual disciplines of prayer and scripture reading and meditation; I see now how amid severe illness one almost has to become self-centered and focus all resources inward to make it through each day. But what never left me was a profound sense of the ineffable and mystical presence of the body, of the mysterious divine presence, always supporting and surrounding and sustaining me. I certainly had my moments of fear and doubt, but I never lost the sense that I was being held in the arms of mother Church.

And so, the text says, “The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God! Amen!