You Shall Live—A Sermon about Stories

Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.

Welcome back! It’s the first week of spring quarter, it’s the first week of April. Time flies when you’re having fun. With all this happy, springy newness, though, comes our final week of Lent. Tonight’s readings were, umm, lengthy, as well as fairly...odd. Very bodily, right? In Ezekiel, we were in the valley of the dry bones, and there were a lot of words we don’t usually say—like sinew, and flesh, and skin, and bones.

It’s in readings like this—and our Gospel, the raising of Lazarus—that we can go back and forth about whether God really brought a pile of bones to life, or raised a man from the dead, right? And we can argue yes, definitely, and we can argue no, definitely not. But that’s not the point, and that’s not what we’re going to do tonight. Because whether or not these things literally happened, they’re part of God’s story.

The authors of these books wanted us to read these words and know something about the truth of who God is. The first story in the whole Bible is about the creation of our world, because God is a God of creation and of newness. The people who put the book together wanted us to know that, right off the bat. God is a God of life and breath and bodies. Same in this Ezekiel story. God and Ezekiel come upon these dry bones, and, so the story goes, God asks Ezekiel a fairly rhetorical question. “Mortal, can these bones live?” The answer, unbelievably, is yes.

God says to the bones, “I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.” God says to us, “you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.”

When God comes upon dry, dead things that were formerly alive, God does not shrug and turn away. God says no to death and yes to life. And not just this one time! Every time.

In the Gospel tonight, there is one such other time. Jesus has been told that his dear friend Lazarus has died, and has the audacity to go to Bethany and bring him to life again. As we read, this was a very controversial situation. And, again, we don’t know if Lazarus was a man who lived and died and lived again—and, presumably, died again. And if he really did live and die, we don’t know how Jesus made him alive again. But! Again! The people who wrote the book want us to know something about God because of this story. They want us to read of a God who weeps and a God who says no to death and yes to life. Again and again and again. Even when it doesn’t make sense. Even when it’s dangerous.

Since we know the rest of the story, we know that it was very dangerous for Jesus to do this. We know what happens next week. But an odd thing about this lectionary reading—though it was approximately 7000 verses long—cuts off at chapter 11 verse 45, before the story is truly over.

In John 11:48, the verse we never read in the Sunday lectionary: “If we let Jesus go on like this, everyone will believe him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.”

I am curious about why we don’t get that last little bit. In this story, “the threat of Rome is real, and the author of John knows this, because by the time John is written, Rome has indeed come and destroyed the temple. And Jerusalem. And carried off the spoils to Rome. Jews were also carried off as slaves to the empire. The trauma of this destruction would still be present and felt in this community, and so is present and felt in John’s Gospel.”* It isn’t that the Jewish religious leaders are worried about Jesus being Jewish incorrectly—or making them out to look like they’re being Jewish incorrectly—it’s not a question of right belief or right practice, here. They are afraid for their lives. “The different groups we see in John’s Gospel (Jesus-followers, John-followers, pharisees, sadducees) these are all factions trying to figure out how to survive under Roman imperial occupation, and they don’t all agree on the best way to do that.”* They’re all worried, rightfully, about how much attention Jesus is drawing to himself, and to them by association.

It is easy, though slippery, to want to draw connections between this reality and our present. We in the progressive movement in the United States of America are all trying to figure out how to survive under a burgeoning fascist regime, and we don’t all agree on the best way to do that. “Should we vote? Close down freeways? March every weekend? Kneel during the national anthem? Call people in? Call people out? Make phone calls every day to our senators? Become sanctuary churches? Chain ourselves to pipeline drills?”* We have to be cautious, though. Because “as we read this story from John, we have to admit that as white Western Christians, we have no idea what it is like to live under imperial occupation in the way that Jesus and his community did.”* Our holy places are not under threat in the way that theirs were. We do not live with the trauma that they did.

But we’re still here, in Davis, California, reading the Gospel According to John on a Wednesday night.

Why are we talking about all of this political stuff? Because our society is where we live. The laws that govern us as residents and citizens of the United States are, in some cases, the difference between life and death. That is not to be ignored, because there will always be an empire to resist. The reason we’re talking about all of that here at the Belfry on this night when we have read of the raising of Lazarus is because “God’s power is far beyond what any empire can muster.”*

To Lazarus, and to Ezekiel, and to the dry bones, and to you, and to me, God says “you shall live.” God doesn’t need to remind us that death is real. We know that. We see that all too often. We need to be reminded, though, that death is not ultimate. Death does not have the final word. Our God, who is a God of life and breath and flesh and bones and creation and liberation, is the one who says no to death and yes to life.

Because God has breathed life into you, and put sinews and muscles and flesh onto your dry and weary bones, you shall live.

You shall live. Thanks be to God!

_________

* I was deeply inspired and this sermon was deeply informed by The Rev. Anne Dunlap's episode of The Word is Resistance, the podcast from SURJ, entitled "3.12.17 Resisting Anti-Semitism in John" (which also featured heavily in this previous sermon) and so every quotation you read here that is not from Ezekiel or John is from that podcast. I've marked them with asterisks, because putting several footnotes to the same thing down here felt silly?

Listen, I Will Tell You A Mystery--A Sermon on Death and Hamilton

Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you always.

Spoiler alert: everyone dies. We are a culture obsessed with death--the one thing we all have in common, the one thing we cannot control. As Americans, we spend so much of our energy, our time, and our money trying to figure out how to live longer--eat better, exercise more, drive safely, use some age-defying face cream. Some of these tactics are more reasonable than others.

In the United States, in 2016, life expectancy hit a record high. For women, it’s 81 and for men it’s 76. There are a lot of reasons for that difference, mostly to do with occupational hazards. Now, those are averages--we know a handful of people over the age of 81, so obviously it’s not a hard line. But just 100 years ago--in 1916--the average life expectancy was 49. In 1816, it was 34. In just the last 200 years, Americans have more than doubled the length of our lives.

In 2011, a biomedical gerontologist (person who studies old people), claimed that the first person to live to be 150 has already been born. Take that with a grain of salt, though, because this guy, Dr. Aubrey De Grey, also claimed that the first person to live to be 1000 will be born in the next two decades.

What he means by this is that the rate of technological advancement in biomedicine is so great that we will soon be able to prevent every degenerative condition we know of. His ideas of preventive geriatrics do not mean that once we get old and ill we will stay in a haphazard state of old and ill for 1000 years, but rather that he believes we will reach a capacity of “preventing people from getting sick as a result of old age” in the first place. We will soon be able to reach in on the molecular level to solve problems before they spread.

All this because we are afraid of death.

The world we live in is full of images of death. We see constant images of death as headlines pour out of Syria, that another bombing has killed dozens of innocent civilians. We see death every 29 hours, when an unarmed black person is killed by police in the United States. We see death as climate change results in another hurricane sweeping through Haiti, killing everyone in its path. We see death when we log on to Facebook to find a bittersweet Rest in Peace post about a friend’s grandparent. We see death all around us.

And then God comes along and swallows up death forever. God promises that, though we die, we will live. That we will not truly die, for we will be raised. Jesus comes along and says, “I am Resurrection and I am Life!”

This resurrection business is a struggle for all of us. In our reading from Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth, we get a clue that they weren’t sold, either. That didn’t bother Paul. “Listen, I will tell you a mystery!” He writes. 

“We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will all be changed.” Remember, Paul was convinced that the second coming of Christ would be in his lifetime. That the kingdom of God was right there, just over the horizon, just out of their grasp. “Any minute now…” I can hear him saying.

Safiyah Fosua is a professor of spiritual formation at Indiana Wesleyan University, and she wrote about this resurrection skepticism: “The Corinthians were not unique in their struggle to believe in resurrection….[we] continue to have difficulty with both the historicity of Christ’s resurrection and the likelihood that believers in Christ will follow suit. God’s promise of resurrection from death confronts us with yet another promise that we cannot control, predict or understand.” [1] And if there’s anything we 21st-century Americans like, it’s control. We want to lay everything out for our best life, and never encounter anything that thwarts us. Every once in awhile, death thwarts us. Doesn’t it?

From up here, I have a wonderful view of our altar in the back, covered with beautiful photos of your loved ones, and some of mine. Thanks be to God for their lives. Thanks be to God for the ways they loved us, the ways they made our lives more fun and more full. You can tell that some of those pictures are of grandparents and other older folks, of whose lives we witnessed mostly just the end, and whose deaths kind of made sense. But there are a few photos there of young people. Middle-aged people. Those deaths, in particular, thwart us. Those deaths don’t feel right.

That’s why today is one of the best/worst feasts of the Church. Today, we look at those photos of those whom we have loved and we weep. We think about those around us who are in the process of dying, today. We think about the atrocities in the world that call death to the front of our minds without our consent. We think, for a moment, about our own eventual deaths.

I know that, like me, some of y’all are fans of the Tony-Award-Winning Musical Hamilton. It was written by a genius named Lin-Manuel Miranda, and I have been a devotee of his for nearly a decade. If you aren’t familiar, it’s about Alexander Hamilton, one of the founding fathers of the United States—fairly unusual subject matter for musical theater—and it is completely constructed of hip-hop music—also fairly unusual for musical theater. In the first act, Aaron Burr—the man who eventually kills Hamilton in a duel—sings the most beautiful, poignant song of the show. It’s called “Wait For It.”

Life doesn’t discriminate between the sinners and the saints
it takes and it takes and it takes
and we keep living anyway
we rise and we fall and we break and make our mistakes
and if there’s a reason I’m still alive when so many have died
then I’m willing to wait for it 

Aaron Burr’s life was full of tragic deaths—his parents, his wife, his daughter—but he had faith. He didn’t understand the way the world worked, why he could never quite win. But he had faith. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to identify with an American Revolutionary before, but I bet you have faith. I bet that you don’t always understand why things happen the way they do. I bet you wonder a lot about why bad things happen to good people, and why not-so-good people seem to be getting ahead. I bet you wonder why people you love die, and I bet you’ve asked God to bring them back from the dead.

I am not here to tell you that that is possible. But I am here to tell you that resurrection, transformation, rejuvenation, and new life are possible. “...this promised transformation of the physical body offers hope that other transformations are also possible. The belief that flawed circumstances need not be our permanent estate is an extension of resurrection thinking. Belief in the resurrection conditions us to believe that dead [relationships] have hope, that people once imprisoned by dead works have a future, that imperfect governments and broken economies can be repaired, and that even hurricane-flooded cities or cities buried under the rubble of earthquakes are able to rise again.” [1]

None of those things will happen without work. None of those transformations are possible without faith, without hope, without prayer, without struggle, without justice. It is a mystery, as Paul wrote, how any of this resurrection business actually happens. But the good news of the Gospel, my friends, is that it does. When? We don’t know. How? We don’t know.

I am Resurrection and I am Life, says the Lord.

I’m willing to wait for it.

_____

[1] Safiyah Fosua, “Proper 3” in Preaching God’s Transforming Justice, 261-262.

Get Up—A Sermon Decidedly Not About Sheep

 Acts 9:36-43

Revelation 7:9-17

John 10:22-30

Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.

We didn’t read the psalm assigned for today, Psalm 23, the Lord is My Shepherd, so you may not have been clued in that this set of texts qualifies as this year’s “Good Shepherd Sunday” lectionary. [You may have noticed that we sang Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us at the beginning, yeah?]

There are a handful of stories that Jesus tells about sheep, and so we have this week every year where we read one or two and then all preachers have to somehow figure out a way to tell people that they are or are not sheep, and that this is good news! Aside from the fact that I definitely befriended a sheep at the petting zoo on Picnic Day, I don’t really know a whole lot about them, and I don’t imagine that you do, either. [Unless, of course, sheep were under your care in FFA, Kenton.]

The interesting thing about this sheepy text is that it is paired with one of the most interesting and underrated stories in the whole New Testament. [Were you listening carefully during the reading from Acts?]

The story goes that in Judea, there was a coastal town called Joppa, and in Joppa there was a disciple whose name was Tabitha. She was devoted to good works and to acts of charity. She became ill and died. Peter was nearby, in Lydda, so they sent for him right away. All the widows stood beside him, weeping and showing tunics and other clothing that Tabitha had made while she was with them.

This would be a lovely story of one of the first followers of Jesus, even if it ended here. Tabitha was devoted to good works and to acts of charity. Her fellow widows and dearest friends were devastated at her death. They celebrated her life among them by sharing with Peter the tangible proof of all that that she had given to them when she was alive. This is all that we know for certain about Tabitha. This is, to my knowledge, the only story about her. We know, from its few verses, that she was well-loved and a devoted disciple. Tabitha sounds to me like a classic church lady.

How many of you can think of someone from your home parish, or the parish you attend here in Davis, or the parish you work at, that you think resembles Tabitha? A sweet, kind woman who knits or sews or whatever the textile project of choice is in your congregation, and everyone loves her. And she’s like maybe 1000 years old. Okay, so picture her playing the role of Tabitha. When she dies, people will come to talk about the ways that she made their life better, and show off the quilt she made them when they went away to college. She’s a really nice lady.

But Tabitha’s story is not in our scripture because she was a really nice lady. Her story is in our scripture because Peter was called out to Joppa to resurrect her.

In this season of Easter, we have recently heard a pretty big resurrection story. And we often hear of another, the raising of Lazarus, which is important, too. But here, tucked away into the 9th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles is the quick, quiet story of that time Peter raised Tabitha from the dead.

Did you know this story before today? Did you know there was a woman so devoted to the Christian life that St. Peter himself drew upon the power of God to bring her back to life?

Maybe our dearest Catholic brothers and sisters in the room are more familiar with her, as she is sometimes referred to as Saint Tabitha; the very unthorough google search I did of her was inconclusive as to whether or not she is, in fact, a saint. My main man Martin Luther, though, would certainly call her one. One of the most memorable things Marty left to us was the notion that each one of us is simultaneously saint and sinner.

I think that’s so helpful for us, living in a world of black and white, good and bad, right and wrong, Republican and Democrat. It is possible—it is necessary!—that we understand ourselves to be more than just one thing.

We can be all the things that we feel we are, all the time. We can be happy about something while being sad about something else. We can be excited about the future and worried about it at the same time. We can be grateful for the relationships that we have, and long for the ones that we don’t. We can be pretty confident right now, and have some doubts tomorrow. We can be kind in one minute, and snap at someone the next. None of these things make us only a good or only a bad person.

Like Sirius Black once said to Harry Potter, “the world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters. We've all got both light and dark inside us.” He goes on to say that it only matters which we act on. That’s true, except we act on the light and the dark inside us, all the time. There’s no switch to flip. And that’s okay!

That’s sort of how grace works. We are beloved children of God, no matter what. Because we know that we are beloved, we are more able to act on the goodness we know to be somewhere in there. But we’re not completely sin-free, and we never will be. God knows that. God’s love is beyond that. Because Jesus lived, died, and lived again, we know that God has power over all the things that our world can throw at us.

There’s an awesomely bad hymn that I grew up singing called Every Morning is Easter Morning. Do you know it? I like it because it sounds like Jesus was resurrected to star in a Broadway musical. Hear me out:

Every morning is Easter morning, from now on!

Every day’s resurrection day—the past is over and gone!

Goodbye guilt, goodbye fear—good riddance!

Hello Lord, hello sun!

I am one of the Easter people; my new life has begun!

It helps if you pretend to tap dance while you sing it. Okay, so, this song is like as cheesy as it is possible to be, right? Welcome to church music in the 1970s, I guess. Cheesiness notwithstanding, the lyrics of this song are right on. Every new day,  you are alive. Every new day, you are free. Every new day, you are so beloved by God, that the Holy Spirit is at work in you—as she was in Peter and in Tabitha—to show the world that they, too, can be alive and well. As the Easter people, you are literally shining examples of the love of God through Jesus. The powers of this world—fear, oppression, death—do not have the final say. God has the power to breathe new life into all of us. 

Our world has a habit of knocking people down. But like Peter said to Tabitha, God says to you, so simply, “get up.”

Because Jesus is risen, and Tabitha is risen, you, too, are risen. Thanks be to God!