In this regard, I am put in mind of the fellow who prayed over and over to win the lottery and never won a dime? When he finally got altogether exasperated with God and said so, a James Earl Jones voice boomed, "Why don't you try buying a ticket?" How many of us are unhappy with our life, but haven't "bought a ticket" yet?

In our Gospel reading today, we find, I believe, that question asked. First, though, let me set the scene. The story is set in a city called Nain, a word which in the days of Jesus meant "pleasant." Nain is situated on a hillside in northern Israel. If location, location, location is the main thing in the value of a place, it is a walled town with a great view not only of the Sea of Galilee, but of several verdant hills nearby.

Now perhaps late in the afternoon death mets life. As is often the case, there are many details that we are not told. We don't know how old this young man was, we don't know his cause of death, we don't know how much effort had been put forth to try and keep him alive.

What we do know is that the dead man was the only son of his mother, a widow. She had already lost her husband, and now her only child, her son, was gone as well. In that time, to be in her circumstances was terrible. As a widow she depended on her children to care for her. There was no welfare or social security. The child that she had brought into this world was gone.

All the funeral preparations had been made. His hair would have been cut, his body washed and anointed with the burial perfume, he would have been wrapped in a burial shroud, placed in an open casket, but his face would not have been covered. The mother would have torn her upper garment. She would have eaten very little.

Now it is time for the funeral procession. Scripture tells us that there was a large crowd. Isn't that always the case when it's a young person? The mother walked just ahead of the casket, shrieking, crying many tears. This was not a time of people having stiff upper lips, stoically accepting the inevitable, like Jackie Kennedy who fulfilled the expectations of the majority culture of the United States by showing everyone how strong she could be. It was a time when raw emotion, even if it was at times somewhat forced, was expected.

Behind the casket come all the other mourners, also wailing loudly, making the customary sounds of grief. In all probability there would have been flutes playing and cymbals crashing.

Here we see the first contrast. Jesus was walking from the other direction. He, too, was followed by a large crowd. Note the difference: they were very probably laughing and rejoicing, reveling in life. She was leading a procession to the place of death. Jesus leads the procession to life, and life eternal. The songs of the funeral procession are of mourning; the songs of Jesus and his companions are of praise, rejoicing, and victory. It is sobering to think that we, during our life, are in one or the other of these processions.

At the gate of the city, the two processions collide: death and life. Jesus approaches the woman; his heart goes out to her. He sees the need and he responds to it. His reaction is genuine, not just words, but true heart-felt action. The Gospel lesson says that he had compassion for her. Compassion is not just feeling sorry for someone else, it is also doing something about their situation. Jesus said to the woman, weep not. This same voice that would still the storm, that would cast out demons, that would heal the sick, now speaks softly to the woman, don't cry. And she immediately stops. I think if we listen, we hear the voice of Jesus in our times of distress, he says, its alright, it will be OK, don't cry, I am in control.

Then, Jesus moved to the casket. The pallbearers stop. He does not touch the dead man, just the bier. He speaks, "young man, get up". Immediately the young man sets up in the casket and begins to speak. The author of life has confronted death. Life has won out. Jesus gives the young man back to his mother.

We are struck by what we think is an amazing miracle, the dead coming back to life. We think of death as the total end of life, a whole new state of being. Jesus' contemporaries, on the other hand, viewed death as a kind of major sickness. When you were dead you were just a whole lot sicker! Since they had no doubt that God could cure illness, it seemed logical to them that God could "cure" death just as God could cure a fever.

Maybe it is worth reflecting in this context that, as Bishop Curry pointed out in his sermon in Bremerton last week, none of us are entitled to life. We have life because God wills us to have life. Our parents may have thought that it was they who gave us life, but that is not true - all life comes from God; all life is God's property in a manner of speaking. What we do with this gift is up to us, but none of us are ipso facto entitled to life.

The question, however, that haunts me about this passage is: what did this young man do with the rest of his life, the life that was given back to him? Did his experience of death change him? Did he treasure his mother more? Did he realize how precious life is and vow to use it wisely? Or did he squander the gift, so relieved to be back that he spent his life in one big party?

All of us have read stories about people who had what we call "near death" experiences. Many of these experiences radically transform those who have them. Many seek to have what they consider a more "meaningful" life.

There are, however, countless examples of death during life. Men and women home from war, living with consequences of the battlefield and its horrors. People just out of prison trying to adjust to the "straight" life. People recovering from addictions or abuse reliving the nightmare of their lives and hoping to enter the dream of God. And there are people who, like the Apostle Paul in our reading from Acts today, encounter events so awesome that their whole life changes.

Paul, the son of wealthy a tradesman, a Roman citizen, known to, and trusted by, the religious and political elite of his country, who suddenly threw all of this away in order to walk thousands of miles in the sun, rain, heat and cold, fair weather and storms, on land, at sea, rarely praised, sometimes warmly welcomed, but just as often denounced or shunned, beaten, stoned, given up for dead, with a "thorn in the flesh" that constantly kept him from being too proud, but always rejoicing, saying "It is not I that live, but God who lives in me." "In God I live and move and have my being."

What do we do with the life that God gives us, the life to which we are not entitled? Victor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor wrote this in his book, Man's Search for Meaning:

"We who have lived in concentration camps can remember[those] who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances"

Victor Frankl was not a religious man. His book is a testament of refusing to be brutalized by vicious circumstances, that the most important factor in surviving terrible circumstances is having a purpose and a goal.

Even more pertinent to the question at hand, however, is another story from the same war, this one of Allied POWs in a prison camp in Burma. The story is both shocking and yet miraculous. The storyteller is Ernest Gordon, a captain in a Scots regiment, who fought with the British in Malaysia during WWII and was wounded in battle. Ernest and his buddies were captured and sent to build the infamous railroad and bridge on the River Kwai.

The Japanese prison guards were quite cruel. We can think Abu Ghraib prison on steroids. It seemed like the camp administration had as its goal the total dehumanizing of their prisoners. Everything was done that could be done to reduce the men to the state of pure animal existence.

Lest, however, we want to single out these guards for especial scorn, however, we should remember the famous experiment conducted with American college students. The students were randomly divided into prison guards and prisoners and allowed to role-play the situation. The result was that very quickly the students chosen to be the guards began to be very cruel to those chosen whose role was to be the prisoners. The abuse with which the guards began to treat their prisoners became so abusive so quickly that the experiment had to be stopped. The moral is, of course, that power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.

To get back to the story, however, Captain Gordon relates that the daily grind was extraordinary. Each day they were forced to build a railroad through low-lying swampland. If a prisoner appeared to lag, a guard would beat him to death or decapitate him. Many more men simply dropped dead from exhaustion, malnutrition, and disease. Ultimately, 80,000 prisoners were died.

Malaria, diphtheria, typhoid, beriberi, and jungle ulcer took its toll on Captain Gordon. Ernest, a big man, at 6'3" tall, lost so much weight that at his lowest point, he weighed no more than 100 pounds. Placed in the "death ward" - a building to which all prisoners who had no hope of survival were moved -- he was nursed to health by another soldier, "Dusty" Miller, by massage, and a gentle cleaning with a rag that Dusty boiled every day. In addition he fed Ernest an occasional stolen banana or egg he obtained by barter from the local villagers out the fence around the camp.

"Dusty" Miller was a simple man, a gardener from London, whose only wish was to get back to England to continue growing working flowers with his dad. One day Dusty fainted; people who knew him reported that Dusty had not been eating. A doctor, who was one of the prisoners, believed him to be close to death. The reason was that almost all of his meager rations were going to Ernest. In the end, "Dusty" did, indeed, die. But his death was not to be without meaning.

Despite the fact that the treatment of the prisoners in the camp was unbelievable, and that hope was all but gone, the result of "Dusty's" quiet heroism sparked a revival of humanity in the camp. Despite the dog-eat-dog state into which the camp had fallen, kindness, consideration and a desire to help others began to flourish. The sick began to be taken care of instead of being left to die. Prisoners began to clean up their huts and take an interest in personal hygiene. The result was that Ernest and the others eventually found what motivated "Dusty" to survive against all: purpose and a goal, but most of all, faith in God. Dusty had been firm in his trust in God, even while apologizing for not having the education and intellectual prowess to debate religious questions with any skill. Perhaps he knew the answer to such questions was beyond the intellect.

Incidences of great sacrifice began to happen. Once, after a work detail, a Japanese guard believed a shovel missing. He told the men that unless someone stepped forward to accept responsibility, all the men would be killed. A soldier stepped up and stood at attention. The guard beat him to death. Later it was discovered the missing shovel was the result of a mistaken inventory count by the guard. The prisoners had left the procession of death and joined the procession of life. They allied themselves with the One who alone if the Lord and Master of life.

When the camp was liberated by the Allies at the end of the war, the Allied soldiers were furious at the scenes of horror that they witnessed. Most of the survivors were nothing but skin and bones, walking skeletons. The Allied soldiers wanted to kill all of the prison guards for their terrible violation of the rights of the POWs. At this point, though, the prisoners shielded the cowering prison guards with their pathetically weak bodies. The religious revival that had been sparked by the sacrificial death of "Dusty" left them refusing to allow this bloody revenge to happen. Many of the survivors of the camp went on to spend their lives working to build up their fellow humans rather than to tear them down. Among them, Ernest survived to become a Presbyterian pastor, and eventually the Dean of the Chapel at Princeton University. His story is told in a book, To End All Wars, and a DVD of the same name, which was released in 2001.

I go back to my original question, what did the young man do with the rest of the life given back to him?

In a larger sense this bit of the Gospel of Luke and stories such as the heroism of "Dusty" Miller in the camp on the Kwai -- where it only took one man's allegiance to the Lord of life to change a whole camp -- challenge us to ask what each of us are doing with the life that God has given us, the life to which we are not entitled. What purpose shapes our life and makes us survive the nightmares that life sometimes puts us into? Which procession have we joined?

I offer a poem by Ann Weems, a contemporary Christian. She wrote:

I see your pain
and want to banish it.
I see your tears
and want to dry them.

I am the one God sends to sit beside you,
until the stars come out
and the angels dry your tears
and your heart is back in place.

That is what Christ wants us to do. That is what he speaks to us, his disciples, to do. Let us resolve to help banish the pain, dry the tears and sit beside the person -- until their heart is back in place.

This is the same voice that stilled the sea, healed the sick, and raised the dead man to life. Listening to that voice we shall truly be sons and daughters of our Father who is in Heaven.

God accepts us as we are, but fervently hopes that we will not stay that way!