This One Life

 Grace Episcopal Church, Monroe, La., Lent 5

Five weeks ago, as I was preparing a homily for the Ash Wednesday service down at Christ Church in St. Joseph, I was inspired to go online and order a small hourglass on a chain. My theme for that homily was memento mori, “remember that you are going to die,” and my plan was to wear the hourglass pendant as a Lenten discipline.

 

The plan did not work so well. The pendant came, quickly enough, but the moment I opened the package, I realized that I had ordered too short a chain. I needed to get a different chain for it, and somehow… I just never got around to doing that. Until yesterday, when I finally robbed a cord from another pendant so I could wear it this morning.

 

Or, at least, that’s my excuse for not making good on my Lenten discipline!

 

Why an hourglass? Well, because time is running out—not just in the general sense that everyone must die, but in the particular: I’m going to die! My time is running out. Lent is about remembering that.

 

In today’s Gospel story, Lazarus gets something the rest of us will not get, namely more time after his hourglass had run out. Did you ever wonder what he did with it? Did you ever wonder what that multitude of dry bones did with their second chance after Ezekiel—with God’s help—prophesied them back into life?

 

Mary Oliver, recently deceased, is one of my favorite poets of all time. I’m going to read a poem of hers called “The Summer Day.” The last line of this poem is quite famous. You will most likely recognize it; you’ve probably heard it before. But I think the entire short poem makes the punch line even more powerful.

 

Here it is: “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean—

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

 

To be perfectly honest, I am sorely tempted to sit down and simply leave that poem hanging in the air… to give us all time to reflect on what it is we are doing with the one wild and precious life we have been given. But that would not be according to Sunday morning protocol, so…. here are a couple of my thoughts on this business of life, death and being raised from the dead.

 

First, life is a series of mini-deaths and mini-resurrections. It is quite literally a messy mix of deaths and resurrections, so much so that I often think of Khalil Gibran’s famous statement: Life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.

 

We have all experienced those times of loss or adversity or change we neither asked for nor wanted—times of loss of control, times that feel like dying. And I also know, because I know my stories and I have heard some of yours, that we have also experienced God pushing aside the stone and calling us to come out of the tomb of hurt or anger or despair we are in and back to life again.

 

At last Tuesday’s Lenten luncheon, it was my turn to give the meditation, and “forgiveness” was on the agenda of the booklet we are using, “Living
Well through Lent.” One of the things I pointed out, contrary to what the culture teaches us, is that forgiveness is not a “once and done” deal. It is a daily decision we must make.

 

Like forgiveness, resurrection is not a once-and-done deal. Forgiveness and resurrection are to be practiced, and I do believe they are connected. It seems to me that we cannot experience resurrection until we have experienced being forgiven, and forgiving… the person who wronged us, maybe ourselves for doing something stupid that got us into this current messy death-like situation, maybe just reality itself for being exactly what it is, nothing more, nothing less. And this human life will give us plenty of opportunities to practice both.. forgiveness and resurrection, of that we can be certain.

 

The second thing I want to say about life, death and resurrection is that, as followers of Jesus, God has a claim on us. God has a claim on our lives. With our baptism, we made decisions well in advance that necessarily shape what we do with our one wild and precious life. Not in detail, but certainly in substance and in principle.

 

To echo one of Fr. Don’s themes, one of those things we promise is to be in church. So, you’re here, I’m preaching to the choir, but… have you considered picking up the phone and calling someone you haven’t seen here in awhile to just remind them that “the fellowship and the breaking of the bread and the prayers” is incomplete without them! 

 

BTW, in case you don’t know, research shows that it is umpteen times more effective for you to do that than for clergy to do it. 

 

But to me the much harder promises come at the end of the baptismal covenant. Those would be the promises to seek and serve Christ in every other person, loving them as myself, and to seek justice and peace for all and to respect the dignity of every human being. I don’t think we do those things well at all.

 

So I’m a teacher. Giving grades comes naturally. I would actually give us a B on church attendance, and maybe a C on seeking and serving Christ in every person. That’s charity. We do some of that. Not enough, but some.

 

But that last one? Seeking justice and respecting the dignity of every person? Well, I would say D at best. Because I have heard the poor blamed for their poverty inside every church I have served or attended.. by people who haven’t the slightest idea of what systemic poverty is like or what it takes to get out of it. To respect the dignity of every human being surely requires, at minimum, hearing their story before coming to conclusions about the cause of their condition.

 

I give us a “D”  on that last promise because seeking justice involves change. Justice is not a hand-out. Doing charity does not produce justice. At best it produces survival within the status quo. Seeking justice means looking at causes and examining systems that produce injustice. It means being willing to change, even those systems that worked well for us. And just talking about such things makes us deeply uncomfortable.

 

These things are in our baptismal covenant because God calls us to do them. And we agreed! We made a solemn vow that whatever else we do with this one life, we will—with God’s help—do it all within the context of God’s claim on us, guided by the Spirit, walking in the way of Jesus.

 

Easter Sunday is just around the corner. Our Easter liturgy is a major baptismal event. Using Lent to prepare for baptism became a tradition of the church many centuries ago. My prayer today is that we use what remains of this Lent to assess honestly, to look forward courageously, and to renew our baptismal covenant again, as if for the first time.

 

In the name of God, Father, son, and Holy Spirit, AMEN

Hello darkness, my old friend...

Lent 2, Christ Episcopal Church, St. Joseph, La.

Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence

 

I hope you can hear the music of Simon & Garfunckel in your head as I read those words. I certainly can, but… be grateful I’m not singing!

 

 

Today’s Gospel story puts me in mind of that song. Nicodemus has heard about Jesus and the things he is doing. Perhaps he has even seen Jesus in action, doing what the Gospel according to John calls “the signs”: converting water into wine, healing people, even raising them from the dead. 

 

These signs of Jesus have planted the seeds of a vision in Nicodemus’ brain. He is compelled to go talk to the source, but he goes at night—under cover of his friend, darkness.

 

Why is darkness Nicodemus’ friend? He was a prominent Pharisee who saw something in Jesus, and his response—wanting to talk with Jesus—was very different from that of his colleagues—who throughout John’s Gospel become angrier and angrier, and more and more threatening, and soon plot to kill Jesus.

 

But there’s more darkness in this story than the physical darkness that hides Nicodemus’ visit to Jesus. Nicodemus lives in spiritual darkness. His feet are mired, his body entangled in things of the earth, specifically religious law. It’s all he knows. He is a teacher of the law! 

 

 

And religious law, like civil law, is all about control and order and social identity and politics. It’s about who’s “in” and who’s “out,” who is an acceptable dinner companion and who not, whom your child is allowed to love and whom not, who is “saved” and who not.

 

Nicodemus was about the letter of the law. Jesus was about the spirit of the law. And so it is not too surprising that when Jesus attempts to engage Nicodemus on the spiritual plane, it seems to fall on deaf ears. Jesus speaks of being “born” of the spirit; Nicodemus can’t get past physical birth.

 

They are like ships passing in the night. Or, better yet given my theme song today, like people who show up in verse 3 of Simon & Garfinckel’s song:

 

People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never shared
No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

 

Nothing is more deadly to the process of learning than thinking you already know. I’ll never forget the young man who came into the mass communication major at ULM a number of years ago. He had already worked in television. His father had a sportsman’s show—a fishing show, I believe—and this kid had grown up helping him produce his show.

 

He came to ULM to get his ticket punched. Not to learn, but to get a degree so he could climb those ladders of success that require degrees. In his first or second semester, he failed a class because of missed deadlines. He was always certain his excuse—helping my dad on his show—would get him extensions and endless grace. It didn’t. He failed. Furious, he disappeared.

 

Several years later he returned, a different person. He came back a person who had discovered how much he didn’t know. And he became a model student. Today he runs his own successful media production business.

 

Jesus calls us to walk out of the darkness of knowing into the light of unknowing, of giving up our religious rules for the sake of love and compassion that knows no rules, that follows no rules.

 

And why is it so hard for us to do that? I must go back to Simon & Garfunckel one more time. Remember the final verse? It goes like this.

 

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
In tenement halls"
And whispered in the sounds of silence

 

You see, we make idols of what we know, and the rules that worked for us, that helped us organize and manage our lives, that give us our identities and helped us be successful in earthly terms. And we should not forget those things and I am certainly not saying we should reject them or despise them.

 

But we make idols of them and that is when they become darkness that enshrouds us, and blinds us to seeing God in our neighbor and in all of God’s creation.

 

Nicodemus clung to human religious knowing and theological certitudes, devoid of the wind of the Spirit. He was blind to the new thing God was doing before his very eyes: Jesus, the Son of Man who came to preach love as the fulfillment of the spirit of the law.

 

We do know that later on, Nicodemus stood up for Jesus a little bit when Jesus was being interrogated by the Sanhedrin. Later still, Nicodemus helps Joseph of Arimathea take Jesus down from the cross and lay him in a tomb. That gives me hope that eventually Nicodemus was able to experience himself as a beloved child of God.

 

How about us? Are we stuck in the dark of thinking our particular religious beliefs and practices are all there is to know about God? Our Holy Scripture and our interpretations of it the one and only truth? That our social and cultural ways are morally superior to everyone else’s? Have we made an idolatry of a political party?

 

The Bishop actually addressed that last thing very specifically in his address at Diocesan Convention. He said, If a political party is your primary identity, stop it! Just stop it. That is not who you are.

 

To follow Jesus is to relinquish knowing and certitude. It is to be open to the movement of the spirit. In the words of early 20^th Century poet Jessica Powers, The soul that walks where the wind of the Spirit blows turns like a weather-vane toward love. …To live with the Spirit of God is to be a lover.

 

  In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. AMEN.