Life to the Dead (Lent 5A)

 

 

Raising of Lazarus, Brian Whelan

 

Life to the Dead
Homily delivered the Fifth Sunday of Lent (Lent 5A RCL)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
26 March 2023; 10:00 a.m. Sung Holy Eucharist
Mission Church of the Holy Spirit, Sutherlin (Oregon)
Readings:  Ezekiel 37:1-14; Romans 8:6-11; John 11:1-45; Psalm 130

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

 

 

My wife and I had a major trial in our faith just after we were married while we just starting our own family. We had become friends with a young couple. After several years, they were finally able to get pregnant and had a beautiful little baby boy. After a month or so, though, it became apparent that sometime was wrong. He had been born with a genetic defect: the upper layers of his skin were not fully connected with the deeper layers. If you touched him slightly on the arm, it quickly would turn into a large blister, would easily burst and become infected. There was little that the doctors could do. Despite two months in intensive care, the baby’s body was covered with second-degree burns.  His parents were not allowed to touch him, so they could not even comfort him as he screamed his little life out in agony. During the ordeal, we prayed. Our friends prayed. And the baby suffered and slowly died.

 

It is not the only time in my life when I witnessed the unbearable, wondering if God existed at all, or if so, how he could be good and loving.   My mother-in-law, after a long life of hard work and joyful service, deserved, to our minds at least, the golden years with her children and grandchildren.  But cancer robbed her of that, and us of her.  My father, whose faith in God, love for others, and joy in living was such a sign for me as a young man of God’s love, also did not get what appeared his just reward.  Early-onset Alzheimer’s disease robbed him, bit by bit, of his personality and memory, and left his sweetheart, my mother, bereft and abandoned.    

 

Life can seem at times to be a string of scenes where God, if Good, seems absent or impotent, or if Almighty and ever-present, seems to be a monster.  There is no way to get our heads, let alone our hearts, around it.  Maybe the problem is the term “Almighty.”  A much better translation, I think, would be “All Nurturing.”  The point is not that God can do anything, but that there is no situation so bad that God cannot help. 

 

I have just finished reading the book “The Faraway Nearby” by Rebecca Solnit.  In it she notes that Hansen’s disease, what we normally call “leprosy,” is a disease caused by a bacillus.  Here’s the thing—the damage caused by the disease, the disfigurement, the loss of extremities, the gradual death of the body part by part, is not caused by the bacillus.  The bacillus attacks the nerves, and what happens is that the damaged nerves no longer feel pain. But pain is one of the ways we define the limits of our body: without it to warn us, we take hold of burning pains and don’t flinch away.  We stub our toes savagely and then don’t favor them and care for them.  And so the painless damaged parts, no longer felt or seen as part of ourselves, become infected and die.  Pain is in part what defines us, and helps us care for ourselves.  It’s a package deal—pleasure and pain, joy or horror.  We mustn’t blame God for this.  It’s just how our species evolved. I think it’s what God intended in creating us.        

 

From the beginning, people of faith have had to deal with unfulfilled hope, and apparent abandonment.  In today’s Gospel, both Mary and Martha separately confront Jesus about his delay in responding to their plea to come and help their brother Lazarus: “If you had been here, he would not have died.”  When Martha asks it, she adds hopefully “Even now, I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” She does not dare ask him to raise her brother from the dead; she has already been disappointed enough in Jesus.  Jesus’s answer, “Your brother will rise again,” draws an ironic, almost bitter reply from Martha, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection—on the last day!” She leaves unsaid what she is feeling, “But that doesn’t do us much good here and now, does it?” 

Jesus replies, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” She replies, timidly, “Yes, Lord, I believe”—not that her brother will come forth again—but “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God.”  She trusts Jesus, but is too beaten down by grief to hope for anything concrete for her brother.

 

When Mary in her turn confronts Jesus about his delay and lack of help, she is reduced to weeping.  Jesus does not reply.  Like all who truly love, he is content to be silent and yet wholly present with the beloved.  Observing the scene of bitter grief he himself is deeply moved.  The Greek says simply “his insides were put into turmoil.”  And when they show him the place where the body lies, he begins weeping.

 

So the bystanders say, “See how he loved him!” But others take it as an occasion to doubt Jesus: “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

 

When confronted with horror, we respond with despair, or sometimes with what seems to be unwarranted persevering trust.  At other times we blame others, questioning their motives or abilities.  All these responses are seen in this story of bitter disappointment and loss.

 

But then in the story, Jesus performs a sign pointing to the mystery of God being present here in Jesus, this Jesus who weeps and suffers alongside us. It is his last great sign before the cross and its inevitable sequel: coming forth victorious from the tomb. 

 

He raises from the dead his friend Lazarus, something that Martha hoped for, but was afraid to ask.  He raises him not to life eternal and transformed.  Remember that Martha specifically said she would not be comforted by Lazarus’ resurrection on the last day.  She wanted her brother back here and now, with things close to as they were before the grim visitor Death had come calling.  Jesus gives Martha and Mary what they want, and brings Lazarus back from the grave to this mortal life.

 

The author of the Gospel of John tells us: “...these things are written so that you may come to trust that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through ftrust in him you may have life” (John 20:31).  As this story tells us, it matters little whether it is life here and now or life on the last day. 

 

In Dostoyevsky’s great novel Crime and Punishment, this story plays a central role.  Young radical Raskolnikov has committed a murder and theft to even, as he thinks, the score of social injustice. But he suffers from guilt and self-loathing from it.  He meets a young sex-worker, Sonya, forced into the dehumanizing trade to feed her younger siblings.  She herself once suffered from guilt and self-loathing.  At the main turning point in the novel, she tells Raskolnikov what changed her: this story from John’s Gospel. She reads it to him. It is hard for her. Her voice breaks several times, she pauses and stammers, but she reads the whole luminous tale. 

 

When Jesus says, “Whoever believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” Sonya draws a painful breath, and reads on, in her own voice “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who should come into the world.”  The story changes Raskolnikov’s heart.  He begins the long hard process of regaining his own humanity. In the end, there is redemption and joy, both for him and Sonya, who accompanies him to Siberia to help him through his penal exile.

 

When Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, he leaves the deed unfinished.  Lazarus comes forth, but still bound by his funeral wrappings.  Jesus tells Mary and Martha to untie the burial cloths, to “unbind him.”    That is how it is with us: We, though alive back from the dead, remain bound and paralyzed by the grief and disappointment we have felt. Jesus tells us to unbind each other, to complete the miracle.  Sonya goes to Siberia with Raskolnikov, we assist one another in this ordeal.  We share in being present for each other, sometimes just being there silently with our beloved, and weeping along with them.   

 

Beloved, I have known the healing and strength of Jesus.  I have seen what can only be called him giving life to the dead.  I have seen it in my own life in the last two years: crushed by the death of my wife and retirement, bereft of feeling and a sense of who I was, I have been taught to feel, and love, and fully live again.  And with Martha, and with Sonya, I say with all my heart, “Yes, Lord Jesus. I trust you.  I believe, I give my heart to you.”

 

Beloved, we are going to get safe and sound through this messy, cruel, but all the same glorious life.  In fear and anxiety, we will find Jesus mighty to save, and always at our side in whatever we have to go through.  In illness, mourning, and even in death, we will see that the way of the Cross is the way of light and life.  As St. Julian of Norwich taught, all will be well, all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well. 

 

In the name of God, Amen.

 

Impossible Jesus (Wednesday of Third Week of Lent)

 

 

Impossible Jesus
Homily delivered on Wednesday after the Third Sunday of Lent

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
15 March 2023; 10:30 a.m. Said Mass
At the Chapel of the Rogue Valley Manor, Medford (Oregon)
Readings:  Deuteronomy 4:1–2,5–9; Psalm 78:1–6 Attendite, popule; Matthew 5:17–19

 

 

Collect for Lent

Give ear to our prayers, O Lord, and direct the way of thy servants in safety under thy protection, that, amid all the changes of our earthly pilgrimage, we may be guarded by thy mighty aid; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

 

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill…” After these words in the Sermon on the Mountain, Jesus adds, “Unless your uprightness surpasses that of the religious scholars and Pharisees, you will not enter into the heavenly domain.  “You have heard that it was said to your ancestors, ‘You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment.’  But I say to you, if you merely are angry with someone, you will be liable to judgment, if you call someone ‘Stupid!,” you deserve to be in court, if you call them “Moron!,’ you might land in the burning garbage heap itself…. You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’  But I say to you, everyone who reduces others to objects of lust might as well, as far as their inward beings are concerned, have already committed adultery” (Matt. 5:17- 22). 

 

Have you ever met anyone who has never gotten angry or used even a mild insult to put down someone?  And aren’t sexual desire and urges built into us?  These statements of Jesus are indeed not additions to the law and the prophets, not implicit ways of abolishing them.  They are the ethics of the impossible. 

 

Jesus regularly in his sayings seems at times to make impossible demands of us:  “cut off your hand, or put out your eye, if that’s what you need to do to keep from sin” (Mark 9:43-45),  “be just as complete as your Father in heaven is complete” (Matthew 5:48), “abandon your family and loved ones for me” ( cf. Luke 9:59-62).   I think this is not so much a setting of minimal standards, his own version of the law and commandments, than it it is a way of saying just how impossible it is to be right with God all on our own. 

 

 “But what is impossible for us humans is possible with God” (Luke 18:27).

 

Jesus also says, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30). 

 

The path of following Jesus is not full of super heroic demands and denials: it is gentle and grows organically from where we are.  Jesus loves and has the best interest of everyone he encounters in mind, yet he challenges us all.  To the woman caught in adultery, he says, “Neither do I accuse you” (John 8:11), adding, “Go, and stop falling short of what you’re supposed to be.”  He is asking her to turn from her past, not demanding that she be perfect, right here, right now, and forever on.  

 

I think that one of the great reasons that the Church is in such bad odor in our society, both for the religious and the non-religious, is that we have made Jesus into a point of doctrine, and “believing in” him a point of division between insiders and outsiders.  We have made him into a petty tyrant giving us more and more demands, commandments at odds with our very natures.  But that's not what our faith is about.  It’s about following Jesus, not about beating yourself up to have a particular set of opinions about him or following specific rules you think he has given us to avoid at all cost impurity or contamination.  Any  opinions and behaviors we should have as followers of Jesus must of necessity follow on, grow from, our trusting him, loving him, and following him--not vice versa. 

 

I find great hope and solace in the line from the Creed: Jesus Christ will come to be our judge.  That isn’t a threat of some angry, pissed-off toxic masculine Jesus coming to punish us. It’s an affirmation that in God's economy and plan, the one who will come to set things right and settle all accounts in the final day will be Jesus, our loving and gentle sibling who said “I come not to condemn, but to heal.”   

 

This hope and trust color how we see even the nasty bits of life--the illness and suffering and horror we experience.  They color even how we see (I wouldn’t say “understand!”) death itself. 

 

I recently wrote a poem about my experience with deaths that sums up pretty much how trusting and loving Jesus has changed how I see such things:

 

May Their Memory be a Blessing

 

Some say there’s

life after death.

This much is clear:

the rest of us go on living.

Our memories of the dead

May indeed be a blessing

For those of us who go on living,

For a while at least.

Blessed are those who mourn

With memory

And unformed hope

Against hope.

But alas,

We, glorious with bright eyes,

are all born to die.  

And our memories with us?

What blessing then? 

The rest of us go on living,

With loss and yearning

For those whose death

Reminds us of our own. 

 

I’ve always had  

A hard time believing

That anything of us

Endures after death:

A fable just too good to be true. 

The only thing we really

“Know” about it

Is when you’re dead,

You’re dead

Unavailable to take calls, really,

At least in any normal way of taking calls. 

The dead, so different from us who live,

Share this one thing fully with us:

We don’t communicate well at all.

At all costs we hide our hearts

From others,

And even from ourselves.    

 

Since I was little

I’ve doubted 

Any persistence of

The individual after death.

My native skepticism, I suppose, or

Brutal honesty.

Maybe “the individual”

Is just something too abstract

And removed from what’s

Before my eyes

To believe anything about "it" at all. 

 

But then

I was with people as they died. 

 

One, a stranger, brutally  

And deliberately crushed

Along with my sanity

for a season

And hope even for live human beings.

So horrible even my memory revolted:

A curse, not a blessing.

A horror

in which the one who died

Was somehow not diminished.     

 

Another, a dear friend,

Quietly lapsing into smiling silence as

I played harp beside her hospice bed.

Like falling asleep, but the breathing stopped.

And what was left began to grow cold.

Blessing.

 

Another, my beloved,

When she simply did not wake up

From a well-deserved nap.

Agonal breathing aside—

That struggle of the body to keep on

          Doing what it's been doing

Though its person is already gone. 

When she died,

What mattered most to me and to her—

Her personality, her memories,

Her gritty will, wit, hopes, and love

The beauty that was her

even as the disease ravaged

those many years the parts of her that mattered less—

What mattered most of her  

Simply went somewhere else. 

Simply went somewhere else.

 

To say she dissolved, was erased, ended— 

That would be dishonest

Too cruel, too hopeless,

And not really honestly tell what I have seen

When I have seen

Our sister Death.   

 

How can I describe

such beautiful and cruel

Mystery? 

They were here one moment,

And the next moment, gone,

Though food for worms remained.

“They” left.  “They” departed.  “They” passed over. 

Whatever that means. 

 

What I’ve witnessed when

I’ve been with those who are dying,

I think, is not oblivion, but change. 

That’s the only way I can rightly describe

What I’ve seen.   

 

But I wonder too about our bodies. 

Meat for worms though they be,

They too are part of

What matters in us:  

Integral to personality,

Relationship, and consciousness. 

The ground of deep joy and harsh pain.

 

So I find comfort in the old myths

That say that the Love that made us

Whole and fully alive

Keeps all of each of us in mind.

And will someday,

Soon perhaps,

Make us new

According to the first plan but 

“Shining like stars above”

With all our hope and memory intact. 

All of each

And all of all,

Whole, well, and untroubled by fear and brokenness. 

God’s memory of us: the ultimate blessing. 

 

That Love, too, died and came forth again whole

Though with scars.   

 

At least that’s what I hope

in moments of love. 

 

It’s all about following Jesus, our gentle and loving Lord.  I would not have had the blessing of being with those people as they died had I not been trying to follow Jesus.  It's about following him, yet we have not always been good disciples, doing his work and learning from him.  But Jesus understands and still loves us, gently beckoning, “Keep on following me!  It’s OK.  It’ll get better and all will end well!”    The Way of Jesus is a gentle way, where we are as kind to others and to ourselves as he is to us.  “Cast away your ego and self-absorption.  Kill your false self and wake up into the true one God has intended for you all along.”     Jesus does not ask the impossible, but encourages us to shoulder his light yoke, to have him help us pull along the burden of our lives to that bright place.  This yoke and burden, it turns out, is liberation and rest, and no real burden at all.  Grace and Peace. 

 

The Dangers of Literalism (Lent 3A)

The Dangers of Literalism
Homily delivered the Third Sunday of Lent (Lent 3A RCL)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
12 March 2023; 8:00 a.m. Said and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of St. Mark the Evangelist, Medford (Oregon)
Readings:  Exodus 17:1-7; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42; Psalm 95

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

I learned in almost 50 years of happy married life when my beloved brought an issue to me, I needed to listen to not just her words.   Like many, as a younger man I tended to be quite literal in how I understood what she and others said to me, and this got me into trouble time and again.   Tell me I had done something wrong, I’d ask exactly what and when, and start trying to explain why I did it, how I didn’t intend harm, and why it wasn’t important.  If her words bore a lot of emotion, my default position was to hunker down, shy away, and avoid that particular minefield at all costs.  Don’t lift that rock—you don’t know what’s going to crawl out! 

 

But I learned through hard experience that I needed to listen both to what she was saying and to the feelings with which she spoke, to the depths beneath the surface meaning of the words.  I am so thankful that I learned well before she got sick, well before she died.  We had a couple of decades of real communication and love shared as deeply as we were willing to risk looking under those rocks, well before the silence of death ended those deep conversations I learned to thrive on. 

 

Instead of replying back to the anyone’s surface language, I now find it better to try to plumb the depths of their expression to me right out.  I don’t always get this right, but I try to correct course as soon as I realize what’s up. 

 

The Gospel of John has several scenes that reveal Jesus’ true identity where people misunderstand him because they understand only the surface meaning of what he says.  In chapter 3, Nicodemus asks “How can a person enter back into the womb and be born again?” as he is standing before Jesus, the one who brings birth from on high. In chapter 5, the invalid at the pagan healing Temple at the Pool of Bethzatha complains, “I have no hope of being healed since have no one to put me in the water when the water is stirred up…,” while Jesus, the one who will heal him and make him whole, stands before him. 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus offers to quench the thirst of a Samaritan woman. She replies pointedly, “And just how are you going to do that?  This well is deep and you, sir, you have no bucket or rope.” 

With Nicodemus, Jesus is talking about spiritual birth and the new life it brings.  With the invalid by the pool, Jesus is talking about the healing that he brings, not therapeutic magic from a spring’s sporadic bubbling. With the woman at the well, Jesus is talking about spiritual and life sustenance, not a simple thirst quencher.

Jesus meets her at about noon, the hottest part of the day and least desirable for hauling water.  This suggests that the woman is a social outcast even within her community, the Samaritans, who were themselves treated as social outcasts by Jesus’s community. 

In Tyler Perry’s magnificent film, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, the protagonist encounters a cousin she knew in her youth but has not seen for many years.  The cousin is in rough shape, strung out on heroin.  The woman asks her grandmother “What happened to her?” The reply? “Life happened to her! That’s what!” 

Life has happened to the Samaritan Woman.  Whatever it was that drove her into her hard life decisions that have led where she was in life, they clearly were something not wholly of her choosing.  Now she is scarred by all this rejection and the hardness of her life, and is somewhat rough:  Jesus asks for some water and she immediately replies, “You, a Jew, are asking me, a woman and a Samaritan for a drink?  Don’t you know that I am one of the unclean ones you shouldn’t speak to?”  

Life has happened to this woman.  As it has happened to us all.   

No way she’s going to give this chummy stranger a drink.  It’s just too creepy. 

Jesus answers, “If you knew who I truly am, you would be asking me for a drink.” 
And she again misunderstands him.  “You have no bucket, sir, and the well is deep. How are you going to draw water for me?”  She has heard Jesus’ words, but not their meaning.   Like Nicodemus and the invalid, she misses it by being too literal. 

Literalism!  Some people today boast that they are good Christians because they, as opposed to others, “read the Bible ‘literally’.”  I find this odd, given the fact that for the first 14 centuries of the Church, our best theologians and teachers consistently taught that the “literal meaning” of the Bible was its least important sense. 

Literalism!  Taking things ‘by the letter.’  Remember St. Paul said, “the letters kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:7). 

You remember all those passages where Jesus condemns the scribes?  Here's the thing: the Greek word for scribe used in all of them is grammateus, that is "one who goes by the letter, a literalist."   .

There are many ways we let literalism get in the way of our faith and in the way of our love. 

How often do we use the words, “but you said,” trying to hold someone to a meaning of their words we had heard but they had not intended?

How often do we let our literalism bring us to unreal expectations and disappointment in our faith?  “It says here that God will answer our prayers and give us what we ask in faith.  I prayed in good faith, and my loved one still died.”  “I prayed for healing and just got sicker.”  I prayed for protection for my family and my child killed himself.” 

And, on the other hand, how often do we let the literalism of our previous experience tell us that God cannot help us?  “The well is deep and you have no bucket.”  After all, miracles on occasion are known to occur, and prayers to be answered as we had hoped, though when and why is a mystery. 

When Jesus surprises the woman and tells her things he otherwise could not have known, she begins to see that perhaps there is mystery here, another meaning deep beneath the words Jesus has used.   “This man must be a prophet.” Maybe even the prophet who was to come and fix everything.
 
Jesus says, “Drink from this well, and you will thirst again.  But the water I offer will become a spring in you welling up to unending life.  You will never be thirsty again.”  

You don’t need a bucket for this living water.  He offers it whenever we stand at a deep well beyond our reach with no bucket.  He offers healing when no one is able to put us in the healing waters of the pool (physicians, counselors, care givers).  He offers new birth just when we seem most dead. 

Even though Jesus says we'll never be thirsty again, we do, in fact, even as we live in Christ, experience “dry times.”   After the initial incandescent moment where we stand before the frightening and alluring mystery, which we gradually or suddenly recognize as the face of Jesus, we do come, from time to time, to times of dryness, of renewed thirst. 

 

Such dry spots usually occur when we start worrying about not having a bucket for a deep well.  In C.S. Lewis says that God sends us “dry times” for a reason: so we learn to walk as free and equal partners with God.  So we can grow in our right practice of the will uncoerced.  So we actually deepen our relationship with God when the wellspring within us once again bubbles forth.

 

This story touches me personally, and has reminded me again and again of why I love Jesus and trust him deeply.  Jesus reaches out to that woman, unclean and repulsive as his religion taught him she was, and impure and immoral as her own community standards declared.  He travels a hard and dangerous road not often taken by his compatriots just to seek her out.  He does this because he loves her, as he loves each and every one of us, even me.  He talks to her with his feelings, not just words, and then when she tries to avoid his meaning, he begins to lift up that rock for her by asking her about herself.  And when she lies to him, as we all lie to him at first, he gently tells her the truth so she can maybe start listening to the deep message of love he has offered to her in what had appeared to be riddles.   

 

The African American spiritual says it all.  I used to sing it as a lullaby to my children: 

 

Jesus met the woman at the well
Jesus met the woman at the well
Jesus met the woman at the well
And he told her everything she ever done.

 

He said, woman, woman, where is your husband?
Woman, woman, where is your husband?
Woman, woman, where is your husband?
I know everything you ever done.

 

She said, Jesus, Jesus, I ain’t got no husband!
Jesus, Jesus, I ain’t got no husband!
Jesus, Jesus, I ain’t got no husband!
And you don’t know everything I ever done!

 

He said, woman, woman, you've got five husbands.
Woman, woman, you've got five husbands.
Woman, woman, you've got five husbands.
And the one with you now, he ain’t your own.

 

She said, this man, this man must be a prophet!
This man, this man must be a prophet!
This man, this man must be a prophet!
He done told me everything I ever done!

 

Jesus met the woman at the well.
Jesus met the woman at the well.
Jesus met the woman at the well.
And he told her everything she ever done.

 

This week, I invite us each to try a spiritual practice intended to help us develop our imagination, be less literal, and overcome dryness.  Upon waking each morning, instead of hopping out of the sheets immediately, stay there.  Thank God for the new day, and then lying still take five minutes.  Imagine what the coming day will be like if God is present and fully in charge.  Let your imagination run wild through your day, and then bring it back to focus on a concrete task you must do this day to help God’s gracious Reign arrive. 

 

The fact is, Jesus meant it when he said we’d never go thirsty again.  The dry times, needed as they are, come to an end.  The spring indeed wells forth again with living water.  We see that our literalness was shallow and blind, and that we didn’t ever really need that bucket or that rope. 

 

Thanks be to God.