Help us to trust that we are always alive in you, O
God. Amen.
It’s a joke, and especially this time of year it really is true in my home, that there are two certainties: death and taxes. With Holy Week coming and nine sermons between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday, I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about death. And being married to a certified public accountant means that a lot of evenings and weekends, in addition to the work day, are all about taxes. Why Jesus had to die during tax season, I really don’t know, but it makes our household rather busy. The joke about death and taxes being the only certainties works because, the truth of the matter is, none of this belongs to us.
It’s all a gift. Sure,
maybe we’ve worked hard for the money we have to pay taxes on, but none of us
chose the situation into which we were born, none of us arranged for all of the
circumstances that we lucked into, none of us created the economic system that
we’ve inherited – they were all given to us and we don’t get to take any of it
with us. And when it comes to life, clearly, none of us chose to be born and as
I was reminded this past week when I administered Last Rites to Kathy Dunn, death
is part of what it means to live. It’s one of the reasons why when someone is
near death, I drop everything and get there because death waits for no one. As
much as we want to be in control and as much as we want to think about what we have
in terms of money, accomplishments, or things, the reality is that none of us
are in control and the only thing we leave this world with is the one thing that
we had when we entered into it: the love of God. Death and taxes might not be
fun, but they do remind us of the idols of control and possessiveness that so many
of us worship.
Though death may be
inevitable and property and wealth do not ultimately belong to us, our hope is
that, because we belong to God, death is not final. This is the promise around
which our Scripture readings the morning orbit. This is clearest in the reading
from John in which Jesus raises the dead Lazarus to life. As you heard, it’s a
very long text and I suspect that as I’m closing in on retirement 30 years from
now that I’ll not have had enough time to explore the full depths of this
passage. What I want to say at this point about this passage is something that
we didn’t hear read. If we had continued reading, we would have arrived at a
verse that says “From that day on they planned to put him to death.” That’s
what happens when you mess with things that we take for granted, even something
like death – we don’t like it when the foundation shifts underneath our feet.
What exactly it meant that death could be overturned, the chief priests did not
know, but they knew that it was a power beyond their power to understand or
control, and they wanted it gone.
I mention this because in
this sermon I’m going to poke holes in some of the platitudes and cliches that
we use when we speak about death. A lot of what people, even Christians, think
about death does not come from Scripture, but rather from Greek philosophy. And
when we are presented with what our faith actually says about death and eternal
life, some people might not like it. So, feel free to wrestle with this and
invite me into further dialogue, just don’t have a secret meeting and decide to
put an end to me.
In the Old Testament,
perhaps the most well-known passage about death and Resurrection is the vision we
heard from Ezekiel. The prophet is in a valley of dead and dry bones. And the Lord asks him, “Can these bones live?” Now,
his response seems very pious and holy – “O Lord
God, you know,” but it’s actually a rather weak answer. The obvious answer
is “No.” Piles of dead, dry bones do not live. But Ezekiel knows that a good response
to God is always a deferential one, one that always leaves room open for God to
do more than we might expect or imagine. So he says, “I don’t know God, why don’t
you tell me.”
And God not only tells,
but shows. These bones rattled around as the Spirit came into them and then
they stood again, giving a vision of hope that God would raise up Israel again,
even when in midst of their destruction and Exile. I wonder where things feel
dead in your life? Where do we encounter the dryness of death? Where do new
life and vigor seem absurd and impossible? Maybe you’re out of work and finding
a way forward seems hopeless. It could be that your marriage has dried up.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that the pews aren’t as full as they were before the
pandemic and that our church’s budget has gone from “tight” to “in the
negative.” Maybe it’s a health concern or diagnosis that has you feeling
uncomfortably close to being a pile of bones. Perhaps an addiction or
depression has sucked the Spirit right out of you. It could be struggles in school
or with friends that feel lifeless.
From time to time, or
even for most of the time, we all feel as the Psalmist must have felt when they
said, “Out of the depths have I called to you, O Lord.” There is death all around us – both literal and figurative
death. Sometimes there’s just no substitute for the King James translation of
the Bible. Whereas our translation this morning said, “Lord, already there is a
stench because he has been dead four days,” King James says “he stinketh.” And
that’s the truth. Sometimes life stinks. And that’s okay. It’s okay to admit
that things are not okay because our hope is not in our ability to make
lemonade out of lemons, rather our hope is in a God whose love makes all things
new, in a God who raises the dead.
St. Teresa of Ávila, a 16th-century
nun, wrote “Let nothing disturb thee; all things are passing; God alone
suffices.” Taxes remind us that nothing truly belongs to us and death reminds
us that all things are fading away, but Jesus reminds us that the love of God is
something that will never be taken away and makes us eternally alive to God.
The first law of thermodynamics says that energy can never be destroyed, only
changed. Well, the law of God’s love says that anything that God loves can
never be lost, only changed. Because God is God, it would be impossible for God
to love something that does not exist, because, by God’s perfection, God’s love
would make it exist. Because we are loved by God, it means that we are always
alive in the love of God.
This is what St. Paul is
getting at in the passage we heard from Romans: “You are in the Spirit since the
Spirit of God dwells in you… If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the
dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your
mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.” The same Spirit that
blew through that valley and gave life to those dry bones is what animates us.
That same call Jesus made to Lazarus to come out of death is issued to each of
us as well. Jesus does not say that he will be the Resurrection and the Life, but
rather that he is the Resurrection and the Life, and this changes everything
because it means that eternal life does not await us in the future; instead, by
definition, eternal life has already begun in the love of God.
And that means that death
is an enemy of God that distorts this love. As Genesis teaches us, death was
not a natural part of Creation, it came in through the door opened by Sin. And
we get a hint of the unnatural and adversarial reality of death when we read
that Jesus was “greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” The words there connote
something like the snorting of a raging bull or the snarl of a prowling lion. Death
is a villain that is opposed to the will of God, and in Jesus, God is working
to dismantle and destroy this enemy power. But we’ve come to accept death as
something natural. This doesn’t mean that we should cower in fear of death, but
it really does mean that the Church needs to stop using such saccharine and wrong
wording like having a “Celebration of Life” instead of calling it what it is “Burial
of the Dead.” I went to another Episcopal Church recently for a funeral, which
they called a “Celebration of Life” and it took all I had not to go up to the
priest and ask on what page in the Prayer Book they found the liturgy for the “Celebration
of Life.” And I won’t even say that it’s well-meaning because avoiding the
truth is not well-meaning. Death is unnatural and God is a God of life, not
death.
The other place we really
get things wrong is in thinking about our bodies and souls, which are not two separate
things. That is Greek Platonist thought, not Judaism or Christianity. The souls
of the dry bones are not animated, rather their bodies are. Jesus does not
assure Mary and Martha that their brother’s soul is at rest; no, his dead and
stinking body is raised up. And that is our Christian hope – not that, one day,
some immaterial part of us will escape the burdens of the flesh and live for
ever with God; that is a heresy known as Gnosticism. No, our hope is that God
is making all things new, including our bodies, our broken institutions, our fallen
relationships. If God only cared about saving our consciousness or our souls,
then Jesus would have been some sort of spirit, not a Jewish man born of a
woman who was beaten and crucified. But, no; the same God who created all
physical things plans to redeem all physical things. God’s salvation is bigger,
bolder, and more audacious than we can imagine. Our hope is not merely for a
part of us to be saved, but rather for all of us to be made new in full and abundant
Resurrection life.
And the reason why we
have to get this right is that too often the Church sets its sights too low.
Too often we think that things like bodily Resurrection are too improbable, too
complicated, or too impossible to hope for, and so we lower the meaning of Resurrection
to meet what we think is possible instead of what God has said is possible. And
this hope seeps out of other aspects of our lives. We start to lose our hope
that we really are loved. Our hope for the forgiveness of our sins begins to
fade and we carry around that excess guilt and shame. We start to lose our hope
and trust that God hears our prayers and ministers to us. We begin to even lose
our hope that God is real as our faith becomes impotent and disconnected from
our actual lives. Once we reduce the grandeur and the scope of the Resurrection,
grace, mercy, life and even God begin to leak out of our faith.
God is not limited to doing
what we think is necessary or possible. God is not bound by our ability to
understand death and Resurrection. God is not interested in redeeming only part
of us, but rather the whole of Creation is being made new in the love of God. And
I wonder if instead of saying “God will do this” or “God can’t do that,” we
instead left more open to the infinite power of God by borrowing a line from
Ezekiel and said more often “O Lord
God, you know.” Who knows what might walk out of the tomb of impossibility if
we trusted that Jesus really is the Resurrection and the Life?
