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Good morning. Sunday was Father’s Day, but today, Tuesday, with rather less of a profile, is International Widows’ Day. It was so designated by the United Nations 10 years ago, as a day of action to address the poverty and injustice faced by millions of widows and their dependents in many countries of the world. Had the writers of the Bible had the idea of Internationally Designated Days, widows would certainly have made the cut. The stranger, the fatherless and widow are a regular trio of those needing and deserving special protection in the Old Testament, and in the New Testament, Jesus pronounces a woe on those who ‘devour widows’ houses’. But the most poignant mention of a widow is, I think, in the story of the raising of the son of the widow of Nain. Jesus is entering the city – and as he is going in, a funeral party is coming out. The dead man, we are told, is ‘the only son of his mother’. And the interesting thing is that Jesus, it is said, had ‘compassion on her’. He raises the young man – and gives him back to his mother. But the dead man is not the subject of the story – he has what you might call a walk on – or perhaps a sit up – part. When Augustine preached on this text he was intrigued by the detail that Christ met the funeral party at the gate of the city. A gate marks a boundary or a threshold, and the gate of a city, particularly two thousand years ago, marked a very significant boundary. Inside the city there was the safety and peace of society; outside the city, beyond the walls, there is the graveyard of course, but also bandits, wolves, and wilderness. The widow, without a son, at the city gate, was about to cross this boundary – and symbolically to become an outsider. Jesus turns the burial party round. We have all experienced some involuntary social distancing and isolation over the last three months – and some of us, in especially fortunate circumstances, can even be heard chirping to one another about what aspects of lockdown we have enjoyed. But it is surely worth recalling that widowhood is still for many, as it was in the days of the Bible, an enforced exile from the security, comfort and community of regular social life, and that the social isolation that many widows experience is not a temporary blip, but can be an end of life sentence. We are all looking for silver linings right now, in the midst of a rather big and very black cloud – so could it just be that the more general, albeit we hope temporary experience of social isolation, will render us all more sensitive to the more enduring state of isolation which others suffer? If so, we may be use on our own account a wonderful verse from the book of Job : ‘The blessing of him that was without hope came upon me, and I caused the widows’ heart to sing.’