“In the midst of life”
The Fourth Sunday in
Lent
30 March 2014
Saint Mark’s
Episcopal Church
Santa Clara,
California
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 130
Romans 8:6-11
St. John 11:1-45
INI
In the midst of life
There was a television show that I used to live for – I
looked forward in advance of its screening every Sunday evening. I didn’t latch on to it right away – I
had to catch up for a season. It
was provocative, engaging, and apparently fodder for this sermon. It always began with a death. Someone in the midst of life, expecting
tomorrow was somehow caught in the maws of death, and the remainder of the show
pondered on the aftermath. The
name of the television show was “Six Feet Under”, and followed the fortunes and
misfortunes of a family that ran a mortuary. The death featured in the first moments of the program
always rippled into the lives of the main characters, who lived in their own
dance with death. A father who had
died earlier constantly breaks into the present time to comment on their
trials.
Two of our readings this morning, three actually, if we look
at the themes of the psalm, deal with death in the midst of life. Ezekiel treats us to a vision of the
Valley of Dry Bones, and we walk, slowly, with Jesus to Bethany to encounter
the death of his friend, Lazarus.
We shall turn to these readings in a moment. Let us first remind ourselves about death and life.
When I was growing up, even as I matured as a young adult,
death was something off in the future – something to be awaited, not something
with which I needed to be concerned.
Death was at the end of things, and certainly not at the beginning of
the show. I learned a rude and
difficult lesson later in my life.
In my 30s and 40s as I served as a priest at St. Francis Church in San
Francisco, I saw a good third of my parish succumb to AIDS. This was not unusual. Other parishes had the same experience
with even more dire numbers. As I
think about it, the effect of breast cancer and cancer in general in our time,
all of us have had to come to terms with death earlier than we thought.
I am reminded in these things of a good Luther hymn. Let me read it to you:
In the midst of earthly life
Snares of death surround us;
Who shall help us in the strife
Lest the Foe confound us?
Thou only, Lord, Thou only!
We mourn that we have greatly erred,
That our sins Thy wrath have stirred.
Holy and righteous God!
Holy and mighty God!
Holy and all merciful Savior!
Eternal Lord God!
Save us lest we perish
In the bitter pangs of death.
Have mercy, O Lord!
This world that Luther describes in this hymn lays out for
us the theological and liturgical scene that we will enter next Sunday as we
move from Palms to Tomb. And like
the psalmist, we are called to watch:
“My very being waits for the Lord,
more than one who
watches for the morning.”
Death and what to
make of it.
Our culture and time doesn’t like death. We attempt to avoid it at great cost to
ourselves. Unlike the writers of
the Hebrew Scriptures and those in the medieval period who were immersed in
images of death, we try to blunt their effect. No, I know about all those zombie moves, and the horrors of
so many video games. They are
however not honest. They don’t
talk to us about our own death, they divert our attention by looking at the
threat of death, or the death of others.
They don’t make us think and ponder our own end.
Ezekiel is a good example of the opposite. In the ancient near east, death was
just an invading army away. His
vision of the valley of dry bones is a remembrance of the fallen dead so common
in the many wars in Mesopotamia and the Levant. Dry bones would be seen lying in the wasteland – a grim
memorial to the fallen soldiers of whatever army. In this striking scene, God calls upon Ezekiel to see an
exercise of God’s life engendering word.
“Prophesy to these bones,” God
asks of the prophet. What is
prophesy but words, but breath, but the Spirit of God put upon the
prophet. Breath, spirit, word –
these are all called to revivify the dried, desiccated bones. For the bones are Israel, forsaken and
forgetful of God. After the armies
of Assyria and Babylon have run over them nothing is left. God proposes to blow new life into
them.
Baptism into the death
of Jesus Christ
I was invited to a Greek Orthodox baptism once. The young girl, Helen – I shall never
forget her name, came to the font naked.
She was slathered in the chrism oil until she shone in the light of the
church. And then, she was plunged into
the font – deep into the waters – three times – Father – Son – Holy
Spirit. She came out sputtering,
sudsed with water and oil, gleaming and alive. Baptism was a real risk for her but she survived. Could you drown in our font? I suppose so, but it would take some
doing.
The lectionary unpacks all the symbols we will need to use
during Holy Week. It is here that
we must remember that we are “buried with Christ in baptism.” So how do we do this remembering? Who shall we emulate? Jesus waits (like the disciples will
wait) even when he hears the news of his ailing friend, Lazarus. There is the anxious and observing
audience: Pharisees who are wondering what this will all come to, Mary and
Martha who have their own expectations, and the Disciples who again attempt to
dissuade Jesus from going to do what he needs to do. Finally, there is the confrontation with death – made
certain by the smell of rotting flesh, “Lord
there is already a stench for he has been dead for days.” Interesting, one day beyond
three. Really dead. To this death Jesus shouts, “Lazarus
come out!” And this is the victory
that will cap our Holy Week.
So which person shall you be? Shall you be the Pharisee who is not quite convinced and a
little doubtful? Shall you be a
disciple who is afraid of the consequences of following Jesus even to
death? Shall you be Mary or Martha
who gently chide the absent Jesus?
Shall you be Jesus, who when faced with the reality of his friends
death, merely weeps?
Or, shall we all, each of us, each and every one of us, be
Lazarus, and with ears silenced by our own dying hear the words of Jesus,
“Lazarus, come out!” And might we even be those who are bidden by Jesus to go
to Lazarus and “unbind him, and let him go?” Which shall we be?
As we walk through Holy Week we will find the answer.
SDG
