Sunday, April 6, 2014

Sermon on the Fifth Sunday in Lent, 6 April 2014

“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

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