Audio recording Sermon manuscript: Probably none of you have seen someone resurrected from the dead. Sometimes you hear unusual stories about people’s hearts stopping for a period of time, and then they are revived. I’ve never heard of someone being revived after they are placed into the morgue or in a coffin. That’s what happened one day, though, on the outskirts of a town called Nain. A sad scene was unfolding there. A young man had died. He was his mother’s only child. She was a widow. A lonely future was in store for her. But Jesus saw her miserable plight and had compassion on her. He was going to help her in an unheard of way. Just as we are unfamiliar with any resuscitation of someone long dead, so it was then too. Jesus used the authority that he had as God’s Son. He restarted the young man’s heart so that it began to pump life-giving blood again. He healed all those cells and tissues that had been damaged or destroyed by natural processes of death and decomposition. The gray sunken cheeks of the dead turned pink and lively. The boy sat up in the coffin and began to speak. Jesus gave him back to his mother. Luke does not tell us anything about the mother’s reaction. That had to be quite something. The death of a child is so painful. We can hardly bear it. It would be cruel to prolong that pain by hoping for a resurrection in this life. Only a tiny handful of people have been resurrected in this life such as we hear about in this case and a few others from the Bible. So she had to have been beyond surprised. I’m kind of amazed that she didn’t have a heart attack and die. It must have been so shocking. We like shocking and unusual things. They are able to hold our interest. Many people at Jesus’s time liked to see the unusual things he did. The people at Nain enjoyed seeing the man raised to life. The people who were fed with the five loaves and two fishes followed him around, waiting for him to do another miracle. The Pharisees were always wanting Jesus to do signs to confirm his teachings, which they found strange. Herod was glad to see Jesus on the day Jesus died because he was hoping to see him do something unusual. But people are fickle. If they are not constantly entertained with new and interesting things they go in search of other things to do. This is what seems to have happened also with Jesus. After Jesus ascended into heaven, but before Pentecost, the believers gathered together. It says in Acts that there were about 120 of them. 120! Where were the 5,000 from the feeding of the 5,000? Where were the 4,000 from the feeding of the 4,000? Where were the people from Nain? Where were the crowds who were singing Hosanna not too many weeks before that on Palm Sunday? People are fickle. So it is to this day. Grander things than what took place at Nain happen in the midst of this congregation, but few believe it. Few appreciate it. The young man who was raised from the dead was resurrected physically and temporarily. He went back to being the young man that he was before. In that way it is similar to those Emergency Room resuscitations. He was returned to the life that he had been living. I say that there are grander things that take place among us. The cure that Jesus works among us is deeper and gets down to the very foundations. There is a death and a resurrection that already happens in our midst with Baptism. Paul says, “Do you not know that when you were baptized, you were baptized into the death of Christ?” He flatly states in another place: “You have died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.” This death, however, is not just any ordinary death. It is the saving, atoning death of Jesus—that is the death that we have died in with our baptism. Jesus’s death is the death that brought an end to death. And, again, as Paul says, if we have been united with him in his death, then we are certainly united with him for the resurrection. Here with baptism we are not just dealing with superficial, physi