Death Is Not Natural

 

March 26, 2023 – The Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year A

Ezekiel 37:1-14; Romans 8:6-11; John 11:1-45

© 2023 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video of the entire service can be seen here with the sermon beginning around 24:50.

Barbara and Earl Pettey didn’t stand a chance. But, before I tell you why, let me ask you to play a little game with me. Take a look at the people on your pew and the pews around yours. Look around, and, in your mind, get a group of about a dozen people together. Got that group together in your mind? Now imagine that you are on a plane with those people and that that plane makes an emergency landing in the middle of the ocean. You scramble into a life raft before the plane sinks out of sight, and that group of people sitting around you is the group of people with you in the life raft. With me so far?

Before long, it becomes clear to you and everyone else in your raft that the raft isn’t big enough for all of you. You’ve begun taking on water, and the raft is sinking fast. Someone has to go. In fact, a quick assessment of the situation produces the incontrovertible fact that two people need to be thrown overboard or else the raft will sink and everyone will perish. For the purposes of this exercise—not unlike the movie Titanic—it is pointless to ask whether you could take turns in the raft or whether there is some way to shift people around or bail water quickly enough to avoid the necessity of sending two people to their deaths. Just accept the limits of the exercise and ask yourself who are your throwing overboard? Which two people in the pews around you would you vote off your bright yellow floating island? And why?

I asked a similar question to a group of people at a Theology on Tap gathering back in Decatur, Alabama. We met every week in a local restaurant for some theological conversation, and that question proved to be one of the more effective conversation starters. In the end, Earl and Barbara were voted off the raft unanimously. Both were in their eighties and by far the oldest people in the group. She was a violist, and he played the trombone, but both had retired a long time ago. Their children were all independent and healthy, and both the Petteys and the people around them felt that, if anyone needed to go into the drink, it should be they. 

Did you come to a similar conclusion? Do you share that instinctive belief that older people’s lives are less important to preserve—less valuable—than those of younger people? Don’t we feel a greater sense of tragedy when a teenager dies than when an octogenarian passes on? What if I told you that the only reason we feel that way is because we have been fooled into thinking that death is a natural consequence of life? What if I told you that our faith actually teaches the opposite and that, in today’s gospel lesson, Jesus challenges the assumption that death is an unavoidable reality?

To get there, we have to hear this story as more than a miraculous resuscitation. We need to recognize the role it plays in the gospel writer’s deepening portrayal of Jesus as the Son of God. Since the second chapter of his gospel account, in one miraculous sign after another, John has been building the case for Jesus’ divinity. Last Sunday, we heard the story of Jesus healing a man who had been born blind. At one point, the once-blind man described the unparalleled nature of what Jesus had done, saying, “Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If [Jesus] were not from God, he could do nothing.”

By the time we get to today’s story, just two chapters later, it seems that Jesus’ reputation as a one-of-a-kind miracle worker has become well known. Did you notice how both of Lazarus’ sisters—first Martha and then Mary—said to Jesus, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died?” Both understood that, had he arrived in time, Jesus would have been able to keep their brother alive. Later on, while Jesus wept outside Lazarus’ tomb, some of those in the crowd looked on and asked, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” The point John seems to be making is that someone who had the power to give sight to a man born blind surely would have been able to heal his sick friend if only he had gotten there a little earlier. But Jesus didn’t want to.

When Jesus heard that his friend Lazarus was deathly ill, instead of dropping everything and rushing to his bedside, he said, “This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Accordingly, John tells us, even though Jesus loved Lazarus and his sisters, he decided to stay where he was for two more days—long enough for Lazarus to die. Why did he linger and only head to Bethany after it was too late? Because with Jesus it is never too late. Because John wants us to know that Jesus is more than a miraculous healer. John wants us to believe that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world, and that he is even the Lord over life and death.

No one has the power to bring someone back from the four-days dead besides God. There is no spell, no incantation, no prayer that would work. Not even a once-in-a-millennium miracle worker could do such a thing. Only the one who has ultimate power over the universe and everything in it could call Lazarus out of the tomb, and that’s exactly what Jesus did. And that changes everything.

Most of us can muster enough faith to believe that, after we die, something good will be waiting for us. Although we don’t really know what it means, we maintain that generic, amorphous hope that we will go to heaven when we die. But how many of us have enough faith to recognize that Jesus’ victory over death is not just a bit of good news that waits for us on the other side of the grave but an earth-shattering, nature-redefining truth that reorients everything we know about this life and what awaits us? 

Jesus’ power over death reminds us that God did not create us out of the dust of the earth and breathe into our nostrils the breath of life only to allow that breath to leave us when we are too old for this world. God did not establish an endless cycle of birth and life and death as the foundation upon which the universe is built. Death is not the natural consequence of the life God breathed into creation but a tragic consequence of the brokenness of creation that Jesus came to restore. He is more than the means by which we cheat death or escape its effect. He is the one through whom death itself has been put to death.

If you’re having a hard time figuring out how Jesus’ victory over death is real and complete even though the people we love still die, you’re not alone. I want you to know that I don’t understand how it works. I don’t know how it is that this universe and all of the matter and energy within it, although governed by the laws of thermodynamics, will somehow give way to a way of being that isn’t ruled by death and decay. But I take comfort in knowing that Martha didn’t understand it either. With tears streaming down her face, she said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” Instinctively, she knew that Jesus was more than a miracle worker, but she still couldn’t quite understand the significance of the one who stood before her. 

Jesus didn’t hesitate. “I am the resurrection and the life,” he said to her. “Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” he asked, coaxing from her a faith she did not know she had. “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world,” she replied. We can believe that, too, even though we cannot see clearly what is being given to us. Martha’s faith becomes our faith as we, like her, grapple with a reality we cannot fully understand and yet, nevertheless, fully give our lives to. 

Every time someone we love dies, we experience the grief and pain that come with that loss. And so did Jesus. He wept the same tears we weep when a friend or family member dies. When death takes someone from us in an untimely fashion, we often feel anger and confusion at what should not have been. And so did Jesus. When he saw Mary crying, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved—moved to the point of trembling with indignance—at the thought that death could take his friend away. Even the one who had the power to bring Lazarus back from the dead experienced the sting of death in this life. Our grief, therefore, is not a sign of faithlessness but a mark of love. 

But, because of Jesus, we know that our grief must give way to a new hope—not because we hope that one day death will be no more but because we have already seen in Jesus Christ God’s victory over the inevitability of death. In him, even the laws of nature become subject to the law of God’s unending love.

We Must Be Born Again

 

March 5, 2023 – The Second Sunday in Lent, Year A

Genesis 12:1-4a; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17

© 2023 Evan D. Garner

Audio of the sermon is available here. Video of the service can be seen here with the sermon starting around 11:00.

Are you tired of Lent yet? My Lent Madness bracket is busted. My Lenten disciplines are hanging on by a thread. My quads and hamstrings are tight from all this kneeling. But there’s more to Lent than what we make of it. Several of you have reminded me that you don’t have to take on a penitential practice in order to experience a Lenten wilderness. For all too many of us, that desolate place of struggle comes and finds us whether we’re looking for it or not.

Several years ago, a bishop told me that he is suspicious of people who enjoy Lent. He was talking about me, of course. He had seen how much I love these forty days of self-imposed misery, and his words were offered as an important counter-balance—a reminder that my ability to choose a season of voluntary hunger and self-prescribed longing is a sign of considerable privilege. Not everyone has that choice. There is nothing holy about going to bed hungry each night if you don’t even have enough cornmeal to make one griddle cake for you and your child.

For plenty of us, there is a different nagging, crippling hunger that follows us day after day—the hunger to know that we are beloved of God. Too often religious leaders have singled us out as sinners in need of repentance—not because we carry our share of a universal brokenness that needs to be restored but because we have not lived up to their standards of holiness. You know what Jesus says to spiritual leaders who take pleasure in making us feel bad about ourselves? “Woe to you…for you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.” Nevertheless, for those of us who have come to the Episcopal Church from other traditions that deal primarily in guilt and shame, Lent’s annual call to lament our sins and acknowledge our wretchedness—no matter how grace-filled we intend it to be—strikes at an old wound, reopening painful experiences of spiritual abuse. 

Perhaps we should skip Lent altogether and jump straight to the end. Maybe we need less wilderness and more resurrection. Someone I only know through social media shared a post that rightly criticizes the institutional, imperial church for imposing a period self-denial instead of nurturing a season of human empowerment. The author of the original post, Susan Thistlethwaite of Chicago Theological Seminary, asks, “Why isn’t Lent observed by marching into the centers of power, overturning some tables, healing people, and arguing with authorities?” The answer she identifies is Constantine, which is to say the church’s continuing love affair with power. The problem, though, is that until we examine our own love affair with power, any tables we turn over in the name of Jesus we will only reset in ways that serve our own needs and not those of God people—God’s reign on the earth.

As if he were anticipating this intrinsic problem, Jesus warns us in today’s gospel lesson, saying, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the reign of God without being born from above—without being born again.” Those might be Jesus’ words, but is there anything more thoroughly un-Episcopalian than being born again? I’d bet that we’d happily accept the Great Litany every week during Lent if it meant we could avoid talking about being born again. Even the NRSV—the translation we use here in worship—renders Jesus’ criterion for seeing and entering God’s reign not as “born again” but as “born from above.” That’s how much we’d rather avoid it. 

But it turns out that there’s a funny little word play in the Greek text that makes it seem like Jesus might be telling a joke at Nicodemus’ expense. The word in question—ἄνωθεν—means both “again” and “from above.” If you think about it, that dual meaning makes sense because starting over again is, in a way, like starting from the top. So, when Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be born ἄνωθεν, and Nicodemus responds, “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born [again]?” it’s possible that Jesus chuckled a little bit because this religious leader, who had come to him by night, isn’t quite picking up what Jesus is laying down. Nicodemus seems to be confusing a heavenly rebirth with a second earthly nativity.

But I’m afraid that most of us aren’t getting what Jesus means either. Despite our namesake, aren’t we here at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church somewhat skeptical of any story of radial conversion as belonging to a brand of Christianity with which we’d rather not identify? We often use the label “born-again Christian” with a derisive tone in part because those who would emphasize the need for a born-again experience usually look down on those of us who never had one as insufficiently Christian. But Jesus wasn’t speaking to evangelicals or fundamentalists when he told Nicodemus that no one can see the reign of God without being “birthed” again.[1]  He was talking to a died-in-the-wool religious elitist just like us.

We need to be birthed again, which is to say birthed from above, as much as Nicodemus. How often do we walk where he walked and ask the questions that he asked? We, too, have heard about this Jesus and the signs that he is able to do. We recognize that there must be something good and godly at work in this man. But, when it comes to showing up and taking our stand beside him, we’d rather lurk in the shadows, walking quickly in the dim light, lest someone confuse us for one of those religious zealots we like to point our fingers at. 

Nicodemus came to Jesus at night, when no one else would notice, but isn’t our equivalent Sunday-morning worship, when there is nothing out of place or unseemly about showing up in church? This is the safe time to be faithful. No one thinks twice about you walking through those doors on a Sunday morning. But what if they saw you looking for Jesus at the quorum court meeting or the booking room at the county jail or standing in the line at the polling place? What if they heard you at a rally in Little Rock or at a march in Washington? What would they think if you went all in for Jesus? What would they say if you were truly born again?

We cannot follow Jesus into the majesty of God and do so halfheartedly. And if we are going to leave behind our attachment to this world and our love affair with the power structures that are inextricably intertwined with our way of life, we must climb back into the womb of God and be born anew—born not of the flesh of our earthly parents but of the water and the Spirit of our Mother God. Jesus challenges the assumption that our primary identity comes from this world. He asks us to believe that there is nothing more fundamental to our being than our place and participation in the family of God. And he knows that we will never achieve that focus—that singularity of identity—he knows that we can never give ourselves completely to God— until we are born all over again—reborn in the waters of baptism and in the tears of repentance and restoration.

We who belong to the institutional church have a rather unpleasant habit of rushing in and turning over all the tables so that we can put new tables in their place. But too often we do so without remembering the privilege that we carry or repenting of our lust for power. Think Christian antisemitism. Think Islamophobic crusades. Think transatlantic slave trade. Think settler colonialism. Think Manifest Destiny. Think marginalization of queer people. Think domination of women’s bodies. In every case, Christians, working in the name of Jesus, pushed aside an example of embodied power that they found threatening in order to establish their own self-serving power structure in its place. And to them it sounded like gospel work, but it was really just the kingdoms of this world operating in a Christian disguise. 

There are plenty of tables of injustice and oppression in this world that need turning over, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ has shown us that in time God will flip them all. But, if we are going to be about the work of recognizing God’s reign and offering ourselves as vessels through which God’s majesty comes, we cannot skip ahead to the end. This Lenten journey of self-examination and repentance is essential because it is how we leave behind our attachment to this world and embrace the coming majesty of God. If we are going to be a part of God’s reign, we must be born again.

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1. I am indebted to the Rev. Dr. Wilda Gafney for the use of the word “birthed,” which she read aloud as her own translation of the text.