“Counting
It All Joy”
3.
Come Out
John 11:1-44
First Presbyterian
The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
July 8, 2007
One of the themes about which we have talked repeatedly in this church is that the call of God to each of us in our lives is that we live toward and into our true and full humanity. That he did so as much and maybe more than any human being who ever lived is, to me, the greatest gift of Jesus to us.
I believe, and I know that this is not a news flash, that the parable of the prodigal son is the central message of the Bible, how the story of the father’s prodigious and unwavering love for his prodigal child is meant to teach us of God’s prodigious and unwavering love for us, that the heart and embrace of God are unfailingly and unceasingly open to us, no matter what. The story of the Pharisee and the publican in Luke 18 is a derivative story, I think…the Pharisee presenting himself to God in all of his self-righteous and moral glory and the publican humbly confessing his brokenness…and the publican being the one to feel the full force of God’s favor. Both of these stories suggest that we are not acceptable in God’s sight because of any moral or spiritual rectitude we are able to summon or produce, but just because we are.
The story we have read today about Jesus calling out Lazarus from his tomb is this close in importance to the parable of the prodigal son, and I want to explain that today. What God desires of us is not perfection, but humanity in as large a dose as we are able to live into. Our own unique humanity. Joy comes to us as we become more truly and fully ourselves.
I recently have been given a book about women mystics, and one of them, from the thirteenth century, is Mechthild of Magdeburg. God, Mechthild says, is the torrent of love that pours out of the Trinity, and the soul in us is like a thirsty deer. God sees that Mechthild is carrying something and asks what it is. She replies, “Lord! I bring Thee my treasure.”
It is greater than the mountains,
Wider than the world,
Deeper than the sea,
Higher than the clouds,
More glorious than the sun,
More manifold than the stars,
It outweighs the whole earth!
God replies to Mechthild, seeing in her a divine reflection because of the fullness of her humanity:
O thou! Image of My Divine
Godhead,
Ennobled by My humanity,
Adorned by My Holy Spirit,
What is thy treasure called?
To which Mechthild answers,
Lord! it is called my heart’s desire!
I have withdrawn it from the world,
Denied it to myself and all creatures,
Now I can bear it no longer.
Where, O Lord, shall I lay it? (1)
The treasure is our heart’s desire, that which beats at the core of our being, our own true self. Not who others construe us to be, not what the world around us wants to make of us, not our own denials of what is deep within us in order to conform to convention. The treasure is our own true self.
Writer Liane Cordes says it this way:
to everyone else’s truth and tried
to make it mine. Now, I am
listening deep inside for my own
voice and I am softly, but firmly,
speaking my truth.
Is that not what our gospel story of the calling out of Lazarus by Jesus is telling us? The story is not simply an historical reporting of a dramatic event that may have happened to a solitary man a long time ago. What would be the point of that because it would have no connection to us? In telling the story, the gospel writer is wanting us to know that it is the desire of the God of the universe that every single one of us comes out of whatever tombs we inhabit, out of the dead places in our lives, out of whatever binds us up and keeps us from being our true selves. More than that, God is calling to us through the voice of Jesus and the power of the Spirit of God to do so. “Come out,” is the call of God to each of us.
Sometimes we believe that our lives cannot be significantly different than they are right now. We feel caught in routines and pressures and trapped by expectations and repetitive cycles. Or something that has happened to us in the past causes us to respond today in ways that are not particularly healthy and we feel powerless to escape that tyranny. Or maybe we are expected to play a role that weighs heavily on us. On the last day of our aging and saging group a couple of weeks ago, we got to talking about our church and I said to those who were present: “One of the things for which I am most grateful to this congregation in regard to my ministry is that I pretty much am able to be who I am.” That is not the case in many churches where pastors labor in straitjackets. Even so, there are times I know that people here and there see me as a “role” rather than a person. When that happens it feels confining and constraining, and in those times I feel bereft of my humanity because the gift of my authentic self in both its glory and its brokenness is sacrificed on the altar of pre-determined standards and expectations.
Sometimes it is not that roles are forced on us from the outside but that we ourselves choose to play roles in our lives and we are in danger of losing our authenticity whenever we do so or whenever we hide behind deceiving masks…which, by the way, in its Latin form is the root word for the word “hypocrisy.”
Role-playing happens a lot in churches because of the unspoken agreement that church is for “put-together” people and so we are scandalized when someone turns out visibly to be a sinner in our midst. If the church cannot be a place where people are called out from covering up and covering over their shortcomings and failures, if the church cannot be a place where people can admit they are dying inside and then are called to life from all of their big and little deaths, then it has departed far from the mind of Christ who offered himself as both a haven and a home to those who allowed the cracks and crooked lines in their humanity to be evident. It is one of the reasons why so many of what I call our Monday-Friday congregations who come into our churches for help during the week do not find their way into the sanctuary on Sunday. With their obvious problems and no way to hide them, they feel out of place.
The experience of being called to life in the way that Jesus called Lazarus is described, it seems to me, in this poem called Morning in a New Land by Mary Oliver. When I read this poem, I imagine it is what it must have been like for Lazarus as he came out of his binding tomb and came to himself:
Morning in a New Land
In trees still dripping night some nameless birds
Woke, shook out their arrowy wings, and sang,
Slowly, like finches sifting through a dream.
The pink sun fell, like glass, into the fields.
Two chestnuts, and a dapple gray,
Their shoulders wet with light, their dark hair streaming,
Climbed the hill. The last
mist fell away.
And under the trees, beyond time’s brittle drift,
I stood like Adam in his lonely garden
On that first morning, shaken out of sleep,
Rubbing his eyes, listening, parting the leaves,
Like tissue on some vast, incredible gift. (2)
“Shaken
out of sleep, rubbing our eyes, listening, parting the leaves like tissue on
some vast, incredible gift.” That
sounds to me like joy, the joy that comes with greater self-discovery, the joy
that comes whenever we are able to shake free from something that has been
holding us back, the joy that comes with waking up to greater truth about
ourselves or the world, the joy that comes when we no longer are cowed so much
by what others think of us, the joy that comes when the grave-clothes of
self-doubt are exchanged for new suits of affirmation and confidence, the joy
that comes when we are obedient not to our fears but to our loves.
“Inside
everyone,” the
poet says, “is a great shout of joy waiting to be born.” (3)
We
never are too old or too young to hear the call of God to us to come out of our
binding tombs in which our own true selves lay dormant, dying, and dead.
My prayer for you and me this day is that we shall have the courage so to
do. And, thereby, to enter into joy.
Amen.
(1)
Flinders,
Carol Lee, Enduring Grace.
(2)
Oliver,
Mary, New and Selected Poems, Volume 1.
(3)
Whyte,
David, The House of Belonging.
© Copyright 2007 First Presbyterian Church