First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
13 March 2005
Dress Rehearsal
When I became a pastor five years ago, I promised myself that I would always be really, really grateful that you come to church. I know that nobody's forcing you to, and I know that church can sometimes be less than it's cracked up to be. And so I decided never to get down on you or on myself if the attendance numbers should slide one Sunday or another. I also promised myself that I would never complain about people who come to church only when it's time to be hatched, matched or dispatched, and that I would not make coded remarks from the pulpit on Easter and Christmas about how happy I am to see so-o-o-o-o many people in the pews (read: it would be even better if you'd all come back when the holidays are over).
I know a pastor who was in the habit of doing things like this, and it always made me squeamish. He could barely disguise his contempt for spotty attenders. He was always badmouthing the adult children of stalwart old parish families who had bagged church after Confirmation only to pop up later demanding to have their nuptials blessed and their babies done. He snarled about folks who came to church "seasonally," meaning never in summer, even when they were in town. His dislike of the "twice-yearlies" was especially fierce. It oozed out from jokey little comments he'd toss out at the start of his Christmas and Easter sermons, and you'd have had to be in a coma not to get his point. Predictably, the whole congregation eventually took on his polite hostility towards annual visitors.
I didn't get it. What's not to like about a hundred or so extra voices that actually make the hymn-singing sound good for a change? And how can you complain about greatly enlarged offerings? And that's not even mentioning the potential for making a spiritual difference to somebody. And so, as I said, when I got ordained I swore that I'd never speak or act in such a way as to leave folks with the impression that the most important part of a pastor's job is taking attendance.
But after five years, I think I may be weakening. It's just a twitch at the moment, but without immediate attention it could turn into an unbecoming peevishness, and if allowed to fester—well, I hate to speculate. So I think that if I confess it in public early, I can nip it in the bud. To this end, please know that I am counting on the salutary effects of your good-natured ridicule.
Here goes. It has to do with Holy Week and the way many people who could come to Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services don't. On the Lenten journey, they make a wide detour around the sorrow and the cross and slip into the pews in time for the alleluias and the trumpets. Some life-long Christians have never made it to a Good Friday or Maundy Thursday service, even when they didn't have rambunctious kids or an exhausting job that complicated their already-tight schedules.
Now if this is you, please, don't take this personally. I'm not judging, I'm confessing. It's my problem that this bothers me. I just have to get over it. The truth is that although I and the community miss you (we are never the same without you), we love you whether you show up or not, so does God, no note is going in your file, on the Last Day no on is likely to mark you down for missing a church service, and I am not going to say another word about this subject after today!
But since skipping from Palm Sunday directly to Easter seems to me a little like going to the theater just for Acts 1 and 3 of a 3-act play (something that I know none of you would ever do on purpose), I just thought I'd mention the oddity of absence from the critical plot developments of the great human drama of the last days of Jesus.
There, I said it! I feel better already. Maybe I don't need a referral after all. Besides, the Lectionary for today is providing some relief for what ails me too, relief in the form of this long, strange story called 'The Raising of Lazarus' that it has appointed for us to read today. It turns out that this story is a dress rehearsal for Holy Week and Easter—so much so that after reading it a few times, I began to think that the compilers of the Lectionary were local church pastors with attendance complexes who, by assigning this story, have figured out a sly way to give the folks who avoid Act 2 a compact sense of what they might experience if they actually showed up for it!
Yes, it's all here in this story. Danger, betrayal, violence and death? Plenty of it. Did you hear Jesus talk about being 'glorified' by Lazarus' illness? In John's gospel, glorification is not about getting your own talk show; it's about the way the power of God to love, forgive, gather up, reconcile and heal everything, gets played out in Jesus' passion, death and resurrection.
Thomas the Twin is here too, putting his soon-to-be-infamous finger on the violence in the air. Once Jesus has decided to return to Bethany, Thomas blurts out that all the disciples should go too, to die alongside him. And why wouldn't he be expecting death? Bethany is two miles from Jerusalem where only a few days earlier an attempt had been made on Jesus' life. But Thomas' bravado is hollow; just like Peter's later, it is meant to foreshadow its opposite—the disciples' shameful denial and abandonment of Jesus when Roman soldiers finally come for him in Gethsemane.
And, of course, Lazarus' death, a real putrid, ugly human death, prefigures Jesus' own.
Here we also see Jesus 'deeply troubled.' He weeps and laments. It seems as if he bears the weight of the world and every human grief on his shoulders. He is as sad as he will be at the table with his betrayer. He is as profoundly disappointed and even angry as he will be in the garden as he prays. He groans and utters loud cries, just as he will when he hands over his spirit to God and dies. Here too are the mockers who take cruel note and advantage of his weakness: "He gave a blind man his sight," say the onlookers, "Why could he not prevent the death of his own friend?" Sound familiar? "He saved others, himself he cannot save!"
And that tomb at Bethany where Lazarus has been laid? It is a cave hewn from rock and has a large stone for a covering that will need to be rolled away.
On and on the rehearsal goes until it reaches its climax, a climax that would not be what it is without the agony, but that in the end is not about death at all, but about life. Jesus does for Lazarus something like what soon God will soon enough do for him. "Lazarus, come out!" he commands, and Lazarus emerges, trailing his burial bands behind him like swaddling clothes he has outgrown. ("I have seen birth and death," T. S. Eliot wrote, "but had thought they were different." Not really. Born. Then born again.)
So if you were listening to this story carefully, and if you were trying to feel what you were hearing, and not just pick it apart with your rational mind (Did it really happen? How could it have happened?), you may just have gone through in brief what the worship life of the church intends that we all go through together at length during Holy Week; and therefore you also just might have come to feel in a deeper way the truth of Holy Week and Easter. This truth—that there is, as one author puts it, a power loose in the universe that is stronger than the real death that faces us, stronger even than our fear of death, stronger even than our perverse love of death; a power that commands us out of every form of death that we are afflicted or by or indulge in and commands us into the fullness and mystery of life; a power that makes us refuse the "oblivion and solitude of the tomb and take up instead the risks, agonies and joys of responsible agency and human fellowship."
This same power calls us into a mystery of Life-Together—that is, life in the church, where, if we are doing church right, the two most important commandments we help each other obey are the commandments we just heard Jesus give us, for our health and salvation—"Here. Outside. Now!" and "Unbind him! Let him go!" ''” that is, the commandment to reveal ourselves in the light, to tell our pained stories and share our wondrous dreams; and the commandment to minister to each faithfully other until the last binding burial shrouds falls from our bodies, minds and souls, unneeded and unwound.
If 'eternal life' is what Jesus promises, then this story of the raising of Lazarus is also a dress rehearsal for that. But it is an eternal life that we don't have to wait around for until "the Last Day." When in this story's theological dialogue between Jesus and Martha, she professes her faith in that far-away life, Jesus does not tell her in reply that yes, he will be resurrection and life. He says that he is resurrection and life, here and now—that in walking his Way and trusting him, we can find and have a kind of life that is more than resuscitation, more than another few years tacked on for buying and selling, much, much more than merely marking time until we die, much more life than even our own selflessness or integrity can offer. By the gift of the gospel, we can live now into all our days and into all our inevitable first deaths in such a way that eternal death is already conquered, in such a way that death in any form holds no soul-killing fear for us, in such a way that, free of that fear, anything becomes possible for our love and witness and joy .
I never hear the story of Lazarus or contemplate this graceful gift without thinking of another story, one that Barbara Brown Taylor tells in an old Christian Century column about a friend of hers, Matilda, who died almost ten years ago. Let me step back now and let her have the last words today:
Matilda had...Lou Gehrig's disease, which means that she gradually lost control of all her muscles. Her face went first, then her vocal chords, then her legs. For the last year of her life, she communicated by writing on a slate, one of those erasable things kids play with. Sometimes she would get so excited that she would write and erase faster than anyone could read. Matilda found a lot to be excited about.
Watercolors, for instance. When she could not talk anymore, she taught herself to paint, until her kitchen walls were papered with tulips, peonies, daffodils, hibiscus. When you went to visit Matilda, you painted. That was one of the rules. It did not matter if you had no ability, if the last time you held a paint brush was to put a coat of latex on your bathroom wall. Matilda stuck one in your hand, shoved a plastic egg container full of colors in front of you, and you painted. The best part was afterwards when she admired your work, sticking her thumb in the air and rewarding you with her loose, drooling grin.
It was all I could do to watch her die. I wanted someone to walk into her room with a pill or a prayer that would cure her illness or at least halt its progress, but even if that had happened—even if Jesus himself had showed up to call her from her tomb-she would have had to die all over again later, as Lazarus did. It would have been a rescue from death instead of a triumph over it, a resuscitation instead of a resurrection.
Something bigger than that was going on with Matilda. Every time she lost something she thought she could not live without, she found out she could. First there was a painful void that lasted an hour, a day, a week. Then something new moved in to fill the empty place: a fresh series of paintings, a new friend, a deeper sense of the presence of God. "He is calling me," she wrote on her slate one day, "like a bridegroom calling his bride."
Her resurrection began before she died, and everyone around her saw it. When she set her cup down it was empty. There was nothing wasted, nothing left over to spill or lament. She died clean as a whistle, and several of the people who sat by her bed that day say their fear of death died with her. Having watched her do it, they believe they can do it too.
Lord (Taylor prays in conclusion), I believe, but help thou my unbelief, because I still do not want to die. I believe Jesus has power to raise the dead, only I do not want him practicing on me. I want a God who will cut my losses and cushion my failures, a God who will grant me a life free from pain. I want a God who will rescue me from death, who will delete it from the human experience and find another way to operate.
What we have instead, however,
is a God who resurrects us from the dead, putting an end to it by working through it instead of around it—creating life in the midst of grief, creating well-being in the midst of infirmity, love in the midst of loss, and faith in the midst of despair—resurrecting us from our big and little deaths" giving us to each other in the church for daily mutual knowledge and mutual liberation, and "showing us by his own example that the only road to Easter morning runs smack through Good Friday."
Good Friday, you say? The "only road to Easter goes through Good Friday"? Yes, and Maundy Thursday too. Those solemn and dramatic days lie ahead of us, beckoning. They lie ahead of us full of mystery and gifts. And we are all invited to travel through them with Jesus—oh, yes, and with the church too, if you want to, if you can, at 8 p.m. right here, on the 24th and 25th of this very month, before the trumpets sound.
© 2005, J Mary Luti