O Lord, prepare us for the beauty and the
wonder of new life in Christ ✠ in the name of the Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Have you ever wondered why, for some people, faith is the foundation of their lives and for others, it’s barely a passing thought? It’s a question I often think about. Why are Christians in Iraq willing to risk their lives to gather for Sunday worship while American Christians don’t think twice about skipping church if the lawn needs to be mowed and the weather is nice? Why do some members give thousands of dollars each year to support the ministry of St. Luke’s and others give only a hundred or two, if anything? Why do some people find church to be the most beautiful, stirring, and majestic experience of the week and others find it pedantic, irrelevant, and boring? Or, in terms of our identity statement, why does Christ make all the difference for some, and to others it seems there is hardly a difference at all?
Well,
speaking in very broad terms, there are two reasons that people fail to come
and see the difference that Christ makes. The first is that the faith is not
understood or articulated in a way that makes it compelling. Perhaps the
greatest sin we commit as people of faith is being boring; of hiding the light
of faith under a bushel; of not being ready to give an account of the hope that
is in us. And here’s the thing, Christianity is not about what happens after we
die, that’s far too abstract and distant for most people to worry about it. For
goodness’ sake, we know what the climate crisis is already leading to and we,
as a people, aren’t willing to make changes about that, so why do we think people
are going to be compelled by some further out than the other side of the grave?
Nor
is Christianity about finding your inner peace. That might well happen, and it’s
lovely when it does, but meditative breathing or yoga will do just as much to
lower our blood pressure. And certainly, Christianity isn’t about making us
into nicer people; if that were the case, we wouldn’t be opening the liturgy
with a confession of sin. Neither is our faith about God showering us with
happiness and blessings because if that were true, people like Martin Luther
King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Oscar Romero, and Jonathan Daniels would not have
been killed on account of their faith.
Instead,
our faith is in a God who calls us to die to self and who raises the dead. We
too often miss this. We make faith about things that it is not and set goals
for faith that are actually contrary to it. And so faith is unintelligible to
those inside the church and unattractive to those outside of it. That is the
first reason for faith being rejected – it is grossly misunderstood and misrepresented.
It would be like someone buying lottery tickets and saying they do it because they
want to support public education and they don’t actually care about the
winnings. Too often faith is no more compelling than that line of thinking.
The
other reason why faith is pushed off to the side is that we understand exactly
what it is all about and we’re not ready to pay that price – like the wealthy
man who Jesus tells to sell all his possessions and instead walks away from the
call to discipleship. You’ve, perhaps, heard the quote from Bonhoeffer – “When
Christ calls us, he bids us come and die.” We’ve heard Jesus say that we cannot
serve God and wealth. We’ve sung the hymn “take up your cross,” but deep down,
we have no intention of doing so. We might know that God brings the dead to
life, but we don’t want to do the whole “dead” part. We’d rather make our own
story than be a part of God’s story. We’d prefer to set our own priorities instead
of living by someone else’s. We don’t like words such as obedience, forgiveness,
or generosity because they ask too much of us. As one writer has put it, “It is
not so much that Christianity has been tried and found wanting, it has been
found difficult and left untried.” This is the second reason for people not
finding the difference Christ makes – simply put, we don’t want to be made
different. Even if things aren’t perfect, we prefer stability, predictability, homeostasis.
“Say your prayers,” they say, “just don’t rock the boat.”
We
see all of these dynamics playing out in today’s Scripture readings. As I’ve
been mentioning throughout Lent, the theme of death is present in all of the readings,
as is the fact that God brings new life to dead situations. The trick is that
it’s not possible to have new life when we won’t give up on the old. As we
heard the prophet Isaiah say, “Do not remember the former things, or consider
the things of old. I am about to do a new thing.” God reframes what is possible
and what is reasonable, which means that we have to give up what we thought was
true.
The
reading from John opens with Jesus being at the home of Lazarus, whom he had
raised from the dead. You’ll remember that Lazarus had died and was buried in a
tomb when Jesus came and called to him, “Lazarus, come out!” and the dead man
got up. Here’s that theme of death: Lazarus was dead and in the grave, and God raises
him. If God can do that, what else is it possible that God might be up to?
Though we have little evidence to suggest that it’s possible, bipartisanship
could actually happen. Through God’s grace and mercy, those in addiction have
found sobriety, those stuck in hatred have found forgiveness, those who are addicted
to money have found generosity, former KKK members have become advocates for
racial healing, those in despair have found hope.
God’s
story of redemption is as old as time, and yet we either tell the story so
poorly that no one listens or we refuse to admit that we need redeeming and say
“I’m fine as is.” But Isaiah tells us that God is afoot, that God is doing a
new thing. And I just can’t help but wonder what new thing God is ushering in
that I’m blind to – either in ignorance or willfully. I’m not sure how exactly,
but God is using this pandemic to do something new in the Church. A lot died,
literally and metaphorically, in this pandemic. Rhythms were disrupted, traditions
stopped, priorities shifted, patterns changed. We’ve all been through a tremendous
loss over the past two years. And I’m not saying that God caused these deaths,
but I’m confident that God is going to bring new life out of them. Trust me, I’m
a traditionalist, an “if it ain’t broken don’t fix it” sort of person. Though I’m
in the Resurrection business, there are some things that I don’t want to die,
there are some things that I’d rather keep on life support than find out what
new thing God might be doing.
Even
though God does bring new life, there’s still death; meaning there is still
grieving to do, and grief involves pain, and we don’t like pain, so we avoid
the grieving, so we resist and deny death, so we miss out on the new life given
to us. All this is to say that things are going to change when God is involved.
And I don’t have an ulterior motive here; I don’t have any particular changes
in mind for St. Luke’s, but I’m confident that God does. We have not achieved
the perfect vision of God’s plan on earth as it is in heaven. So I’m preaching
to myself as much as to anyone else – when God is bringing new life, let’s not
insist on trying to prop up what is dead. If Mary and Martha had refused to
accept that their brother, Lazarus, was dead, it would have been impossible for
them to recognize it when Jesus raised him up.
The
inverse of this is also true – not only does God bring life to the dead, but
sometimes there are things that are alive that need to die so that Resurrection
life can come. Case in point: Jesus. Mary takes a pound of pure nard – a burial
ointment – and slathers it on Jesus’ feet, as you would do to a corpse. This is
a seemingly extravagant and irrational thing to be doing. For one, the value of
a pound of perfume was roughly equal to a year’s worth of wages – so about
$25,000 in our terms. And not to overstate the obvious, but Jesus isn’t dead
yet.
Judas
is an example of us all when we are unable to see what’s going on right in
front of us. We don’t see the difference that Christ is making. Sometimes that
failure is because we haven’t attuned ourselves to see this difference and sometimes
it’s because we focus on other things that blind us from seeing the difference.
John, parenthetically, says that this was Judas’ problem. He thought of
everything in terms of dollars and cents, of returns on investments, of
cost-benefit analyses, which prevented him from seeing the abundant grace of
God. Judas was unwilling, or because of sin, unable to see things differently.
I’m
reading a book right now that is fascinating and challenging. It’s called Thinking,
Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and Israeli-American Nobel prize-winning
psychologist and economist. Essentially, the book points out the fact that none
of us know what we are doing and even what we think we are being logical and
unbiased, we are easily and often influenced and skewed in ways that we are completely
unaware of. We might think we are doing the right thing and making the right
arguments, such as saying that the money should be used to help the poor
instead of anointing a living man’s feet with burial spices, but just because
we think we’re on the right side of things doesn’t mean that we are.
This
is why we need Scripture and the Church – to hold us accountable to God’s Word
instead of the logic of the world. This is what St. Paul is getting at in his
letter to the Philippians: “Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to
regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss
because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I
have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order
that I may gain Christ and be found in him.” Coming and seeing the difference
that Christ makes takes an intentional rethinking of our assumptions, values,
commitments, and priorities. And we can’t do that alone. We need a beloved
community that creates a safe space to try this out and make mistakes. We need
a beloved community that holds us accountable so that we don’t start to rationalize
our deadness as normal. We need a beloved community that through Scripture and
Sacraments that holds up a vision of the difference that Christ makes.
We
have grown so accustomed to the death that surrounds us, new life seems like an
unsettling, scary, or impossible proposition. Some can’t fathom new life
because our witness to it is so weak and others don’t want new life because it
would mean giving up too much, even if it’s all dead weight. The difference Christ
makes is a life worth dying for and the grace of receiving new and abundant
life after that death.
How
do you need God to bring new life to the dead places in your life and our
world? Where do you need God’s comfort in grieving what has been lost? What do
you need God’s help in letting die so that new life can begin? Pray about these
things in the upcoming week. And don’t be surprised when you start to see the
difference Christ makes, as Isaiah prepares us: “God is about to do a new
thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”
