191006 Sermon on Luke 7:11-17 (Trinity 16) October 6, 2019 We are confronted with two tremendous facts in our Gospel reading today. The first thing that we can see is that a young man is dead. This is a dreadful fact. When it happens among us, we do whatever we can to shy away from it. We don’t want to look at the body until some makeup has been put upon it. We don’t want to say that the young man is really dead, but that the young man will live on in our hearts and memories. Much of the funeral industry’s profits are built upon the desire to not have to consider the fact of someone being finally and totally dead. The products they sell are meant to further the delusion that the person will live on somehow.This is unnecessary. We don’t have to pretend that a person continues living in some contrived sense of the word, for there is another fact that is presented to us in our reading. Jesus says, “Young man, I say to you arise,” and that is what happens. He sits up in that coffin that the pallbearers are carrying, gets out, and goes to his mother. The other great fact besides the boy being dead is that the boy is alive, because Jesus made him alive by speaking a word.These two great facts are at the heart of our religion. Isn’t it true that the two greatest days that have ever been are Good Friday and Easter? Two great facts are presented to us on these days. On Good Friday Jesus is dead. There’s no doubt about this fact. The disciples did not miss the significance of this fact. They scattered in despair. They thought that he was the Christ. They thought that he would be the king. How can he be the king when he is dead? The factuality of his death made such an impression on them that they were very slow to believe that he was actually risen from the dead. When the women reported what they had seen and heard at his tomb, the rest thought that they were indulging in wishful thinking. It seems as though hardly any of them believed until they actually saw Jesus. Their hearts were hard and slow to believe. It wasn’t really until Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was poured out upon them, that the disciples began to boldly testify to these two great facts as the salvation God has extended towards us.Nobody is saved through the death and resurrection of the young man who lived in Nain. Nobody is saved by the death and resurrection of the boy whom God raised through the prophet Elijah. Even these two boys weren’t ultimately saved by their own resurrection, for that was a resurrection to this life only, not an eternal life. And so we can see that two great facts of Jesus’s death and resurrection are different from these others that we hear about in the Scriptures. I’d like to consider today how there are at least three different ways that Jesus’s death and life are different from the others. First of all, Jesus is the Son of God incarnate. He has no earthly father, but was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary. According to his human nature he is the seed of the woman, a son of King David, from the tribe of Judah. According to his divine nature he is the eternally begotten Son from the Father. There was never a time that he didn’t exist. He is God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made. Therefore, it was not just a man who died on Good Friday. It was the one person of Jesus Christ—true God and true man—who died. The Good Friday hymn, “O Darkest Woe” has a stark and shocking line that speaks to what has taken place: “O sorrow dread, our God is dead, upon the cross extended.” “Our God is dead.” Let that sink in. No matter how deeply you think you have taken it in, you have not even begun to take it in. How can it be possible? And yet, it is a fact. Whether you believe it is possible or not won’t change what has actually taken place. The first way that Jesus’s death and resurrection are different than the others that we hear about in the Scriptures is t