March 9, 2008
The Fifth Sunday in Lent (Year A)
Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8:6-11; John 11:1-45
Greetings from Spring Training where [I went this week to work on this sermon] -- all is well with the Home Town team. Now I know that some of you are Manny fans or Papelbon fans or Mike Lowell fans or some Big Papi. So in a way, I feel like St. Paul when he arrived at Corinth: “…all these slogans that you have, like: 'I am for Paul', 'I am for Apollos', 'I am for Cephas'.” Or some of you may not be believers at all -- sort of like sports Unitarians.
This Sunday's readings are singularly focused on death. Ezekiel paints for us a picture of utter desolation -- the vision of a valley filled with death and lifeless bones. We have seen such landscapes: the graphic newsreels from the liberations of the Nazi death camps to the present day live feeds from Baghdad or Kabul or Kenyan marketplaces bombed due to sectarian or religious zealotry and to the fast-food or campus killing fields.
The epistle to the Romans repeats Paul's frequent dialectic on the powers of death -- those who live in the veniality of the flesh.
And finally we have the story of Lazarus' death -- a gospel often used to console the grieving at funerals. And as if a fitting cap to this triad of death, last evening we moved the clocks forward, creating a rude disruption of our circadian rhythms, making us disoriented and confused with something as simple as our sense of time. Thankfully we are not hearing these readings or making this adjustment in November or December knowing that the sun would set sooner and sooner, quite literally shortening our days.
There are two things I will ask you to do this morning. First,
There is a poem I have offered up for your consideration. If all the world is a stage and we…
Robyn Sarah's “Riveted” takes this image into our contemporary experience.
It is possible that things will not get better
than they are now, or have been known to be.
It is possible that we are past the middle now.
It is possible that we have crossed the great water
without knowing it, and stand now on the other side.
Yes: I think that we have crossed it. Now
we are being given tickets, and they are not
tickets to the show we had been thinking of,
but to a different show, clearly inferior.
Check again: it is our own name on the envelope.
The tickets are to that other show.
It is possible that we will walk out of the darkened hall
without waiting for the last act: people do.
Some people do. But it is probable
that we will stay seated in our narrow seats
all through the tedious dénouement
to the unsurprising end -- riveted, as it were;
spellbound by our own imperfect lives
because they are lives,
and because they are ours.
Having sat through many movies, riveted by their story line, how much more spellbound should we be about our own? And what is our story all about? Where does the final act take us? What will the final credits look light?
St. Paul would tell you that our movie is something like a war picture -- a battle between the allure of the world and the values of the spirit. He paints a picture also in which all life is prelude to the life to come. Each of today's readings raises this question of future life. And lent has been observed as a preparation for Easter, using the observances of Lent, the penitential deprivations and the liturgies of Holy Week finding climax in the Crucifixion and Death, and ultimate affirmation in the Easter resurrection.
Let's think a little about Lent and the life to come.
The second task I will ask you to do is to turn and observe the installation at the rear of the church. As you study this, how does this visual display of what are meant to be nails convey to you? Is this something of a rude reminder of many sins -- does this communicate reproach for sins? Does it reinforce your belief that Jesus died for sins?
I must confess that in originally conceiving and executing this sculpture that this may have played a part in my mind. But honestly I have never been fully comfortable with that idea. And when we installed it this year, the whole structure developed a slight twist, and I see in it a representation of the DNA helix - as if by our very nature we are flawed. It seems to me that all created objects or beings -- all that exists outside of God's nature and within time -- is inherently flawed. All matter must pass into other matter - the spirit alone can escape this very nature of createdness. The biblical stories of Adam and Eve are one inspired writer's attempt to explain this experience of life. “Original sin” is also an attempt to explain how God could create life which somehow chooses to rebel against God - to describe how human life is fundamentally less than perfect.
Some may say - Jesus came to save us from this reality -- to save us from sin -- that Jesus through his death has undone the sin of Adam - that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away sins. Jesus' death is efficacious on our behalf. Theologian Murray Joseph Hann describes what he calls a “rampant sickness within the American church” - a self-serving redemptionism which is captured by this phrase: “Jesus died for my sins”.
Standing alone (Jesus died for my sins) is a distortion of the Christian faith, for it separates the life of Jesus from his death. This separation was seen very dramatically in Mel Gibson's movie “The Passion of the Christ.” This film almost entirely separated the passion of Jesus from the passion of his life. The passion of Christ was almost entirely limited to his death. There was no understanding that his death was the consequence and fulfillment of the passion of his life.
The phrase “Jesus died for us” is used to focus our understanding of Jesus' death as atonement for sin. There were seeds of this understanding in the New Testament but it was not formalized until St. Anselm. The origin of the concept is that all have sinned against God and thus are separated from God. In order to be restored to a relationship to God, all needed to be forgiven. In the Jewish tradition the offerings of gifts were the atonement and restoration of the broken relationship with God. So it is not surprising that given this background, the cross was understood as the sacrifice of Jesus for sin. Jesus, a sinless human being, offered himself as the perfect sacrifice acceptable to God. Thus Jesus died for us.
The theologian Marcus Borg, having given a lecture on faith was asked whether he believed in faith in the cross. To clarify the question, he asked: “Do you mean do I believe that Jesus died for our sins? I don't think that Jesus literally died for our sins. I don't think he thought of his life and purpose that way; I don't think he thought of that as his divinely given vocation.”
Another theologian, John Dominic Crossman has said: “Never, never, ever separate the life of Jesus from his death.” From that admonition, we can say: “Jesus lived and died for us.” If you say Jesus lived and died for us, we have an entirely different picture of his life and purpose.
In the Gospel of Mark, the earliest of the gospels, when Jesus began his ministry, the first words he spoke were “The time has come; the Kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent, and believe the Good News.”
Matthew describes Jesus' early ministry thus: “He went round the whole of Galilee teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the Good News of the Kingdom and curing all kinds of diseases and sickness among the people. His fame spread throughout Syria, and those who were suffering from diseases and painful complaints of one kind or another, the possessed, epileptics, the paralyzed, were all brought to him, and he cured them. Large crowds followed him, coming from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and the Transjordan.”
Luke recounts Jesus' visit to Nazareth: “Taking the scroll, he found the place where it is written: The spirit of the Lord has been given to me, for he has anointed me. He has sent me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives, and to the blind new sight, to set the downtrodden free, to proclaim the Lord's year of favor.” Jesus declared this good news in the context of the absolute domination of Caesar, the client king Herod Antipas, and the high priests of Jerusalem. It was a world of unjust economic conditions, oppressive political relations, biased race relations, patriarchal gender relations, hierarchical power relation and the use of violence to maintain them all.
The way Jesus lived his life, what he said and did, revealed God's domination free order for all who had ears to hear and eyes to see. Jesus and his disciples, proclaiming the Kingdom of God was at hand and living lives of compassion and justice were a threat to the domination order created and maintained by Caesar and his underlings. To eliminate the threat, Jesus was crucified, executed by the Romans. The death was the consequence and fulfillment of the passion of his life, living the compassion and justice of God.
In today's gospel we have one of the high points of John's whole message: when Jesus proclaims, “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.” If we only hear this message during Lent or Easter or at funerals, we lose its impact for both future life and present life. The church preaches about death and resurrection at the time of death, but shies away from such topics in the midst of life. But it is as we think about the normal rhythms of everyday life that the church most needs to talk about Jesus' power as the resurrection and the life, so that death can indeed lose its sting. John 11 asks the church to reflect that Jesus is the resurrection and the life not just for the crisis moment of death, but for all moments in life. With Jesus, the world is now definitively under God's care and power, freed of domination.
Our place in this plan of salvation is to advance the Kingdom of God here and now. It is up to us to here and now continue to free the oppressed, to bind up and heal. The theologian Teilhard de Chardin wrote: “Is not the Kingdom of God a big family? Yes, in a sense it is. . .the day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of mankind, man will have discovered fire.”
Amen.
Andrew Carpentier
Church of the Good Shepherd