One of the traditions I appreciate from our Latinx kindred is the tradition of the ofrenda. This is an altar which is decorated with names, photographs, and other mementos of those who have passed away. I usually put up a picture of my Dad near his name—and often one of his pocket knives. He collected them. This year, even though we have been back with in-person worship since the beginning of October, the number of funerals we have had precluded putting up the ofrenda again this year.
This pocket knife is also a reminder of the first time I saw him cry. It was when I was moving out to go to college. Sitting in his aluminum lawn chair in the driveway as the King of the Neighborhood, he watched me pack the car, and then he reached into his pocket and handed me this knife. He wanted to make sure that I had one of his treasures, not just because it was so practical (it’s a knife! It’s a screwdriver! It’s a narrow prybar! It’s a hole-punch! It’s a pencil sharpener! It peels apples! It’s a bottle opener!) But he also wanted me to have a reminder of him—as if I needed one.
He asked me for a nickle, because my Dad taught us that giving someone a knife was bad luck. So I dug around in the pockets of my shorts and found a nickle and gave it to him. As I climbed into my 1966 Mustang that he and I had worked on to move my stuff to the dorm where I would live, he burst into tears and hugged me, telling me how much he would miss me.
I was shocked. First of all, this was the man who hadn’t cried in front of us when his mother died. Secondly, I was going to college IN TOWN, so I was literally moving about seven miles away. When I could catch my breath—my Dad had the strength and build of a lowland gorilla—I reminded him, as practically as a hungry teenager can be, “Daddy, I’m going to be back in a couple of hours. The cafeteria isn’t open, and now I don’t have any money—not even a nickle.”
My Dad later admitted he had spent three years dreading my leaving, and so soon my leaving was all he could think about. Even though, unlike most of my high school friends, I didn’t move to Stillwater to go to OSU but was literally ten minutes away from our house in East Tulsa. I was the first kid on his side of the family to go to college, and so this was a new experience for him. His crying was a new experience for me and one I did NOT want repeated. And soon we got to where we could laugh about it—especially after I promised that I would come over and watch Monday Night Football with him at least every other week (and also do my laundry for free—I’m no fool).
But it’s so often like that with all of us, isn’t it? We spend too much of our lives dreading something, until that the thing we dread overshadows the beauty of now and even the hope of the future. Grief in all its forms is a natural part of life, and a natural response to some of the biggest changes we will encounter. Time rolls along in a blur, and suddenly we look up and a decade has passed. And yet the sharpness and ache of losses can rise up unbidden like a zephyr. All it takes is a sudden flash of memory—like when I opened a drawer a few weeks ago and found this knife my dad sold to me from his collection for a nickle as I moved into my dorm.
In our gospel today, weeping and grief also play a prominent role. We just heard the story from John of Jesus weeping over his friend Lazarus, even as he prepared to raise him again from the dead. Nonetheless he wept. And for a long time I didn’t understand Jesus’s weeping in that moment any more than I understood my Dad’s weeping back in August of 1982. Yet over the years of hearing this story, I have come to appreciate the fact that Jesus, in all his power and his glory, nonetheless reminds us that feeling and expressing grief is a completely human thing to do.
To be clear: Jesus models empathy, compassion, and solidarity, three things that seem to have become extinct in too much of our public life—even among too many self-identified people of faith. He doesn’t approach the grieving sisters and tell them what he is feeling, making his grief the centerpiece. He listens to them and shoulders their feelings of hurt and sorrow. He grieves alongside them, in solidarity with them. Throughout this story, Jesus speaks and acts from the center of love. Jesus is not at that moment the teacher, but the listener and the learner. This is what we are all called to do with those who mourn.
When Jesus calls Lazarus forth out of that tomb, he calls Lazarus with the voice of love-- not into his old life, but into a new life, a life of resurrection and hope. This is a story of death and life held in tension, as of course it is for us all at every moment. And then I focus on the last words in this story. Jesus urges those present to help unbind Lazarus from his grave-clothes. Lazarus can’t really be free of the prison of death until he is unbound-- with the help of others.
We in the West in particular take great pride in the belief that each person is completely responsible for his or her lot in life. The myth of the “Self-Made Man” or “Woman” looms large over the cultural landscape in the Western world especially. And this is one myth that I am certain does no one any favors. It leads to denigration and shame on the part of those viewed as “unsuccessful,” and to hubris and self-delusion on the part of those who are considered “fortunate.” It insulated us from any notions of gratitude. It denies the concept of grace—that idea that we receive blessings we do NOT deserve from God out of God’s incomprehensibly enormous love for us. That denial of grace received is also a denial of grace’s embodiment in the world—a grace we are called to embody as children of God. Too many only give when they expect a tangible return on their investment. Yet grace is NOT transactional.
Examine today’s gospel story again, and it becomes clear that a vital part of the miracle of Lazarus’s resurrection is not just his new life, but his restoration to the community with the help of the community. As family and friends unbind Lazarus, they also let their own fears and dreads drop to the ground. Perhaps Lazarus’s bandages symbolize all that holds us within the grip of sin and death, separating us from true communion with God and each other: our angers, our jealousies, our vanities, our competitiveness which always comes at the expense of others, our malaise, our lack of empathy, our compulsion toward dominance and power, and our festering wounds from the past that we often use as excuses-- and simultaneously seem vindictively determined to pass along to others.
Too many of us live our lives in fear of death—and that goes for communities of faith, too. Especially now, as we are told the church is declining or that it will not survive this current crisis, as some doomsayers predict. So we allow death to overshadow life. And while we do that, we cannot truly live. We are often unaware of the things that weigh us down, so that grief subsides to grief. We cling to what we know and habits of thinking and doing even if they hurt us, even if those habits and modes of thought leave us locked in patterns of helplessness and hopelessness. I am convinced that we cling to the familiar that does us no good because that familiarity is more comfortable than getting a hand free to take hold of something better. We gouge out a path of anxiety in not just our hearts but the hearts of those around us. Those old patterns only serve to deny love the power to heal, even when we name that healing as our most ardent wish.
And that has too often been the case in our own lives here too much of the modern Church. We hold the power in our hands to proclaim a gospel the world desperately needs; to seize back the lie that greed is good, that it’s clever to take more than you give, that even charity and generosity will only be encouraged if there’s a tax-write-off as an enticement. To celebrate how little we give to enable our common life together, rather than rejoice that we can use what we have to make a real difference in the lives of others. To embody the same empathy and generosity that Jesus did.
That last line in this story of Lazarus also reminds us even when we answer the call of Christ, there are other loving hands waiting to help free us and welcome us into new life. We can’t always unbind ourselves, but we can be grateful for those who are there to help. It is only when loving hands reach out to release us from our bonds that we can walk free. That’s why Christ calls us to follow him in that family and community known as “Church”- that ragtag rejoicing host of witnesses remembered as saints that extends from antiquity to friends, family, neighbors, and even strangers who themselves are attempting to shed what binds them too.
Lazarus had been shut away, his memory eventually to be forgotten forever, yet the voice of love spoke the breath back into his body. Loving hands helped him discard the raiment of death, and welcomed him back into the light. We long for that quickening, too—to be set free to live with the integrity and compassion that is the foundation of the life to which Jesus calls us to not just imitate but make our own. Like Lazarus, we have to shed those bindings of scarcity and hopelessness, so that we can walk out of the dank tomb and feel the light and love of resurrection. We remember the saints and souls who have gone before us for what they gave, not for what they held back. It’s just that simple. That’s what lives on.
And what a gift this resurrection faith is! It calls us to answer the call of love with love, to engage in reciprocity in all things: to celebrate our inter-connectedness, to our ties to each other. To acknowledge where, with the help of God and our community, we have been unbound from the things that hinder us, and to then accept the challenge to be a similar force for freedom and justice to those around us. To be able to celebrate our shared bonds, we are called to be brave enough to do what we can to enable our shared future together—not just for ourselves, but for those communities that we are called to serve and help reconcile—to welcome the refugee, help the struggling, share the light of Christ with the lost. This is our common purpose and honor—to share in this work of redemption and rebirth with Jesus Christ our Savior, who invites us into this holy responsibility in love.
All the fears we leave behind make us lighter for the journey ahead of us, and leave our hands open to receive the good things that lie before us. We are assured there will be companions with us on this journey. The hands that unbind us are just as important as the words that call us into the light, because they witness to us as well about the love of Christ in our lives—and carry it forward.
Preached at the 10:30 am service of Holy Eucharist, in person and online, at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.
Reading:
John 11:32-44
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