March 9, 2008
(The Fifth Sunday in Lent)
The Life of Death
by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer
Ezekiel 37:1-14 • Psalm 130
• Romans 8:6-11 • John
11:1-45
(From
The Lectionary Page)
It took a moment to establish that the phone was actually ringing. Not a dream, despite the late hour. Caller I.D. prepared me for the voice that began with, “This is Colleen at Riverside Care,” and ended with the words, “Your father died a few moments ago.”
And so I did as a daughter what I have done for many parishioners these last fifteen years when a phone call has come in the middle of the night. I pulled on some clothes, grabbed my bag containing my oil stock, stole and Prayer Book, got in the car, and drove off to meet death.
One of the privileges of the priesthood is to be with people as death approaches, or – in the case of my father – when death has happened. I've been there many times. Sometimes it's peaceful. Sometimes it's not. In any case, I've been a priest for fifteen years and I'm still not used to it. Talked with a friend who's been a priest for forty years and he says he isn't either. Maybe it's different for funeral home directors or emergency personnel. Maybe the sheer volume inures you to it. For most of us, though, death unsettles us. It is something we go out of our way to avoid – our own, for sure, but other peoples' as well. Anthropologists and biologists tell us that such avoidance is both a cultural and evolutionary trait that is designed to perpetuate the species. Disease often accompanies death, by avoiding the dead we stay healthier, and live to pass the structures on to our children. Certainly ancient cultures wasted no time in dealing with their dead – either by burning, burying, or embalming the bodies. Places of death – tombs, catacombs, cemeteries – were places to be avoided. Don't go there. Walk away and live your life as best you can and try not to think about what awaits. Ezekiel, a devout Jew, must have been horrified by his vision of the valley of dry bones. To be in a place of death was to be tainted by it, to be rendered ritually unclean, to be in a place where God was not.
And yet Jesus purposely put himself in that ambivalent place when he stood outside of the tomb of his friend Lazarus who had been dead four days. It’s a curious detail in John’s gospel, by the way. Scriptural scholars reminds that many first century Jews believed that the soul of the person hovered nearby its body for three days following death, and on the fourth day went to the place of the dead. By all conventional wisdom of the age, Lazarus was well and truly dead.
And Jesus could have prevented it. He had cured many others who had been at the point of death; that Lazarus was his friend makes Jesus’s delay all that more baffling. We, of course, are in the Gospel of John – a gospel that is divided into two parts – the Book of Signs and the Book of Glory. The Book of Signs details a series of miracles that Jesus performs, beginning with the transformation of water into wine at the wedding in Cana of Galilee, continuing through the blind man whose sight was restored in last week’s gospel passage, and culminating with the raising of Lazarus. In each case, Jesus performs a mighty act in order to reveal something fundamental about God. Those with eyes to see and ears to hear understand. Those who are spiritually blind or deaf or lame do not understand. Jesus acts, people react either with faith or disbelief, Jesus teaches. It’s a recurring pattern throughout the first eleven chapters of John.
And what is Jesus reveals is that God is a God of abundant blessing, whose will is health and wholeness for all people, who seeks to include and restore those whom we thoughtless humans exclude and marginalize. God is a God who is in the business of bringing new life from death. God is a God of enduring transformation, if you’ll pardon that paradox.
Here’s the hard part: for transformation, new life, new blessing, resurrection to happen, death has to happen first. And let me tell you something, we don't deal with death very well – be that death literal or metaphorical. A loved one dies, a marriage fails, a job goes sour, the big game ends in defeat, health problems mean you can no longer do what you once did, a friendship explodes, a child fails to live up to potential, you name it, we don't want to talk about it. Death may well be a feature of all of life, but we resolutely turn away, given half the chance. It isn't that we are callous. Our imaginations are all too active. Any diminishment near us hits a little too close to home. As one of my favorite preachers put it some years ago, We may believe with all our hearts that Jesus has power to raise the dead, only we don't want him practicing on us if it means we have to die first. In my heart of hearts, I want a God who will cut my losses and cushion my failures, a God who will grant me a life free from pain. I want God who will delete it from the human experience and find another way to operate. [Barbara Brown Taylor, “Can These Bones Live?” Christian Century, March, 1996.]
The God whom Jesus revealed steadfastly in his miracles, in his teachings, and ultimately in his death on the cross, is a God who refuses to do it our way. The God whom Jesus reveals refuses to prevent our deaths either literal or metaphorical. The God whom Jesus reveals insists instead on walking with us from death to everlasting life. What we have is a God who takes the dry bones and rotting flesh of failure and pain and loss in our lives and breathes newness back into us. What we have is a God for whom death is never the final word.
In the name of this God. Amen.
In the Valley of Dry Bones
by The Rev. Bryan England,
Deacon
This weekend marks the fifth Sunday of Lent. It also anticipates the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq on March 19th. In commemoration of the latter, members of a number of faith communities have gathered in Washington, D.C., to participate in the Christian Peace Witness for Iraq, and interdenominational protest against the war. Friday, the participants gathered in worship services in a number of Washington churches, including Christ Episcopal Church, Capitol Hill. On Saturday, protestors participated in nonviolent civil disobedience in protest of the continuing violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and America’s role in continuing that violence, instead of seeking negotiated settlements. In recognition of this series of events, and also remembering my membership and active participation in the Episcopal Peace Fellowship, some of you may want to step out of the Nave and explore the beauty of the rest of this grand cathedral for the next twelve minutes or so.
In this Sunday’s Old Testament reading from Ezekiel, the prophet found himself transported, either by a vision or a dream, into the middle of a valley. All around him were scattered the bones of those who had died, a metaphor for the kingdoms of Israel, which had fallen to pagans years before, and Judah, which had been taken into captivity in Babylon. God asked Ezekiel, “Mortal, can these bones live?” When Ezekiel responded that only God knows, he was instructed to, “Prophesy to these bones,” to tell them that God will breathe life into them, and cause flesh to cover them, that by hearing and heeding the word of God, they will be restored to life. By heeding and acting on the word of God, God’s spirit will dwell within them, and they will be restored to the Promised Land. Resurrection! Messiah!
In our Gospel from John, we heard the well known story of Lazarus of Bethany. After performing many wonders in Jerusalem, including the restoration of sight to a man born blind, which we heard last Sunday, Jesus was threatened with stoning, and he escaped from the city and crossed the Jordan River to the place where John had baptized him.
However, Jesus’ dear friend, Lazarus, was taken ill, and Mary and Martha sent for the healer. Jesus, inexplicably though, stayed across the Jordan for two days longer before starting for Bethany. When he arrived, he found that Lazarus had died and been buried four days prior. But instead of joining the mourners, Jesus instructed the sisters to have someone roll away the stone that sealed the tomb. When they complied, Jesus prayed to his father in Heaven, then cried out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out.” Actually, it’s much more dramatic in the King James translation, “Lazarus, come forth!,” and he does, still wrapped in his burial shroud.
The abrupt dénouement to this story of resurrection, of life after death, is disappointing in a way. We are merely told that many of the Jews who witnessed the event believed in Jesus. One wonders if the same ones were shouting, “Crucify him!” a short time later.
When I told my Facebook community that I was preaching on this gospel, and what was being placed in my heart, one of them, also a deacon, responded that, when confronted by the grief of Mary and Martha, Jesus was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. When he beheld the tomb of Lazarus, he wept. It is the shortest verse in the King James Bible, and hardly longer in our translation. In the Greek, is also two words which are translated as, “Jesus shed tears.”
My Facebook friend asked, “What is Jesus shedding tears about today?”
If he is shedding tears about anything, the Prince of Peace is surely shedding tears about the War in Iraq. It has been almost five years since the American-led invasion to protect us from mythical, “weapons of mass destruction.” It does not matter whether the myth was the result of ignorance or malfeasance, the results are the same. As of yesterday, almost 4,000 American sons and daughters have been killed, and 30,000 have been injured. A conservative estimate of 85,000 Iraqis have been killed, with uncounted thousands injured, and 4.5 million made refugees.
The impact of the Iraq War reaches our home shores as well. Last year, 121 American veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed suicide, and the rate of those suffering from post traumatic stress disorder exceeds the rate for the war in Vietnam. Even those who are not affected to that extreme will be changed by their experiences for the rest of their lives. Ask my wife what she knows about my experiences in Vietnam. She will tell you, “nothing.” Forty years after the fact, I still carry visions and smells of those twelve months that will never completely go away.
In our mania to ensure the horrors of September 11th, 2001, never happen again, many of us have forgotten the axiom that “he would sacrifice liberty for security deserves neither.” We have systematically looked the other way as the government has abrogated the principles of due process upon which our country was founded, and thereby losing our moral standing in the eyes of the rest of the world. Just yesterday, congressional legislation banning the use of waterboarding and other coercive interrogation techniques was vetoed.
Beyond the human costs, and the cost to our liberties, is the cost of misplaced priorities. Every day of the Iraq War is costing $720 million, which our grandchildren will be paying for. With that amount, we could pay for 95,364 Head Start placements. The next day we could build 84 elementary schools. The following day, we could pay for 1,153,846 free school lunches. The next day we could provide health care for 423,529 children. The following day we could provide four-year college scholarships to 34,904 young people. With what we are paying for the war in Iraq, we could achieve the Millennial Development Goals. All of them.
The War in Iraq is our Valley of Dry Bones, a metaphor for what is ailing in our country’s spirit. But what are we to do, individually, and as a church?
When God asked Ezekiel if the bones in his vision could live, Ezekiel didn’t know. But God instructed him to “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.” Ezekiel prophesied as he had been commanded, and the bones came together and took on sinews and flesh. And Ezekiel prophesied to the breath, and they lived and stood on their feet. When confronted with the tomb of his friend Lazarus, Jesus ordered the stone to be rolled away, and he called to the corpse to “come forth.” And life was restored to the dead, and a brother restored to his family. Had Jesus and Ezekiel not spoken out when commanded by God, the dry bones would still be lying in the valley, and Lazarus would still be lying in his tomb.
Our role, as individuals and as a church, is to prophesy to the bones, to speak the word of God to the United States, to hold up the principles of the Prince of Peace to those who advocate violence as a solution to our nation’s problems.
As a church, we have opposed the war in Iraq since before it began, when our bishops wrote to Congress expressing the belief that it was not justified. Our 75th General Convention called upon us, “as an act of penitence, to oppose and resist through advocacy, protest and electoral action the continuation of the war in Iraq.” Last May, 100 of our bishops, including Katherine, now our Presiding Bishop, and Barry, our Bishop, sent a letter to Congress expressing their “deepest concern for the situation in Iraq and for our servicemen and women,” and calling upon the United States to seek security and peace throughout the Middle East. Most recently, our own diocesan convention passed a resolution supporting the stand of our national church and calling for an expeditious end to the war.
We are called individually to do the same, to oppose and resist the continuation of the war in Iraq, by advocacy, protest, and electoral action. In the Valley of Dry Bones, we must prophesy. In the face of war, we much preach peace. In the face of death, we must preach resurrection. In the face of hopelessness, we must preach the hope of the inevitable victory of our King; the same King who once said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”
