None Of Us Are Free Lent 5A

“None of us are free, if one of us are chained, none of us are free” – Solomon Burke

Mary, Martha, and their brother Lazarus lived outside of Jerusalem. Jesus would sometimes stay with them to get away from the crowds, the disciples, and to just spend a quiet day or night with close friends. Martha, we know, was the consummate hostess, while Mary is more reflective, sitting at their friend’s feet to listen to his teachings, his insights on how one can live in the eternal presence of God – every moment with God is an eternity. And it felt that way when in the presence of Jesus, God’s Son. [John 11:1-45]

 

We know less about Lazarus until word comes to Jesus that Lazarus is ill. Please come, the sister’s plead, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.”  Oddly, Jesus delays going to Bethany. He says it is so the glory of God, and of God’s Son, may be made manifest – visible, undeniable. Two days later he says to the disciples, “Let’s go to Bethany.” “But there are people there who wish to stone you, who wish to kill you!” the disciples say. Thomas goes one step further, “Let us all go so that we may die with him.”

 

Jesus and his followers barely get to the edge of town when word comes to the sisters that he is on his way. They are sitting shiva, the three days of mourning with friends and family, for Lazarus has been dead for four days. It was believed in those days that the soul departs the body on the third day. Lazarus is already in the tomb.

 

Martha leaves Mary and the neighbors and marches out to the edge of town, and let’s Jesus know how disappointed she is. “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.” Disappointment, even anger, but held within a tremendous sense of hope. “Your brother will rise again,” he says. “Oh, I know, we all know, he and all those who have gone before will rise on the Last Day. But we miss him now” Jesus responds with yet another “I am,” this perhaps the boldest of all: “I am the resurrection and the life. 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?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”

 

He has said, “I am the light. I am the bread of life. I am the vine you are the branches. I am the Good Shepherd” We can be sure, that those who heard him say these things only heard two words, “I am.” The same words the burning bush uttered to Moses when Moses seeks to know who it is sending him to challenge Pharaoh: “I am what I am. Tell him ‘I am’ sent you.” It is a phrase that reduces all to a barely perceptible stillness as Elijah found out. Martha hears it, and replies to his question to her, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Christos, the Anointed One of God.” She joins the Samaritan Woman at the Well and the Man Born Blind at Birth, both of whom also say, “Yes, I believe.” Mary may sit at the Lord’s feet, but Martha, busy serving everyone else’s needs, is the first in Bethany to declare who Jesus is.

 

Martha hurries back to tell Mary. Mary goes out to also express her disappointment. Those who were with the sisters at home followed her. Mary is weeping at his feet. The friends and neighbors are weeping. Jesus is moved to see so much love and grief poured out in human tears.

Jesus says “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. The gathered crowd says, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

 

Jesus orders the crowd to roll away the stone. Martha warns, “But Lord, he has been in the tomb four days. There is a stench!” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” They rolled away the stone, and Jesus calls in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

 

Unbind him and let him go. The message “I am” instructs Moses to take to Pharaoh, “Unbind my people and let them go!” Only now, Jesus does not act alone. Jesus enlists the whole crowd to participate in the raising of Lazarus. It is they who roll away the stone. It is they who unbind him and let him go.

 

The story, as Evangelist John says later, is told as an invitation to all who hear it to get into the business of rolling away the stones that keep others, and even ourselves, entombed. John’s story calls all who hear this story to get about the business of unbinding those who need to be set free. Especially ourselves. What keeps us from growing? What keeps us from rolling away stones and freeing those who are bound? Because Jesus knows, as we all know when we are honest with ourselves, none of us are free if even one of us are chained, if even one of us is bound. None of us are free! None of us are free! None of us. None of us!

 

Of course, leave it to some people to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time. Immediately there are those who murmur that there must be a stop to the things Jesus does and says. And those who even said we must plan to put Lazarus to death as well, since it was on account of him that many were believing in Jesus. Let’s make sure that both Jesus and Lazarus are put to death. That will stop all of this!

 

Of course, they were wrong. They killed Jesus, they probably killed Lazarus, they killed many if not all the twelve disciples. But they could not stop the love that stands against all death and all those who are bound or sealed away in tombs, especially tombs of our own making. Because what Jesus says to Martha is the way, the truth, and the life. “I am resurrection and I am life.”

 

As The Reverend Edmund Harris says in this week’s Sermon That Works. “Jesus does not say that resurrection is something that will happen someday. He does not point only toward the future. He says that resurrection is present now. Resurrection is not simply an event at the end of time; it is bound up in the very presence of Jesus. Where Jesus is, life is already pressing in on death…The miracle is not only that Lazarus is raised. It is also that the community is drawn into the work of restoration. The bindings of death must be removed. Life, once given, must be set free. Resurrection is not only something received; it is something lived into, together.”

 

We are to live into Resurrection together. Can those of us who listen to this story allow ourselves to be mobilized, as the crowd was that day in Bethany, and allow ourselves to be drawn into the work of restoration wherever there are those who are bound; those who are being deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Because Resurrection is indeed not only something that is received; it is something we are called to live into together, on behalf of others – for none of us are free, none of us are free, if one of us are chained, none of us are free! None of us! None of us! Roll away the Stones! Unbind them and set them free!

None of Us Are Free 

Shabbat Shalom! Lent 4A

Shabbat Shalom

“As Jesus walked along, he saw a man blind from birth.” [John 9:1-41] Thus begins a drama in seven scenes: After healing the man Jesus talks with the disciples; the neighbors talk to the man; the Pharisees talk with the man; the Judeans talk with the man’s parents; the Pharisees talk with the man again; Jesus talks with the man; Jesus talks with the Pharisees.

 

Jesus says, “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” The man does, and he sees for the first time. The neighbors cannot believe it. They take the man to the Pharisees, those who devoted their lives to understand what God expects from us. Then the narrator let us know what is really at stake: “Now it was a sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes.”

 

Sabbath. Shabbat. Sabbath is the gift of time God offers to humankind. It’s the third of the Ten Commandments. The idea is simple: Six days God created the world and appointed us as stewards of creation, and on the Seventh Day, God rested. We are given six days to work in the realm of space, working with things, acquiring things. To enhance our power in the realm of space and things appears to be our main objective. Yet, to have more does not mean to be more. As Abraham Joshua Heschel reminds us in his volume, The Sabbath: It’s Meaning for Modern Man, “The power we attain in the world of space terminates abruptly at the borderline of Time. But time is the heart of existence. To gain control of the world of space is certainly one of our tasks. The danger begins when in gathering power in the realm of space we forfeit all aspirations in the realm of time.

 

“[Sabbath] is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern… Many hearts and pitchers are broken at the fountain of profit. Selling himself into slavery to things, man becomes a utensil that is broken at the fountain.” It is this brokenness that leads to so much sin in the world; in our lives. The Sabbath Day, a day off, is not a religious observance, though it is at the heart of how live a religious life. It is not a day to go to synagogue or church in its inception. Shabbat is a day that is prescribed to break the tedium of our self-imposed slavery to doing and having and taking and controlling; to offer a time, a day, to let the brokenness of our lives be healed and to simply “be.” Over time, Shabbat and the preparations to take a full day-off has been likened to preparing to welcome a Queen, The Queen of Days, the Queen of Time, into our home, and thereby into our lives. It is a time to simply be and to be restored; a time to reboot; a time to remember that it is only by the grace of God that we are here at all!

 

As we reflect on the story of the man born blind coming to see, we must resist the urge to see the Pharisees as the “bad guys” for wanting to preserve the holiness of the Queen of all days, Shabbat. Indeed, it is altogether right for them to question why Jesus could not wait 24 hours for the next day, the first day of the week, to do his work of healing. Shabbat is meant to remind us that God does not intend for us to continue to slog from day to day, often working without purpose, until finally you reach the borderline of time and die pointlessly. Sabbath is meant to be a foretaste of the feast to come, and a reminder of having once been liberated from slavery: slaves in Pharaoh’s Egypt, in the Empire, get no day off. The Pharisees are correct to argue that to “work” on Shabbat is a serious matter!

 

Which points to a fundamental dimension of life in the realm of God’s mercy: Argument itself is a gift from God that allows faithful people to work out proper courses of action. Argument is a sign that the faithful community is living faithfully. If they did not care about faithfulness, they would not argue…It is the Jewish ritual of thinking hard together, chewing on those things that are important, as a sign that the whole community cares about integrity. Such wrestling and arguing has resulted in  exceptions made to allow certain “work” on the Sabbath. (Swanson, Richard, Provoking the Gospel of John)

 

The standard Sabbath greeting is, “Shabbat Shalom.” And just what is Shalom? The central vision of world history in the Bible is that all of creation is one, every creature in community with every other, living in harmony and security toward the joy and well-being of every other creature, including creation its self. The vision is that all persons are children of a single family, a single tribe, heirs of a single hope, and bearers of a single destiny, namely the care and management of all God’s creation, everyone and everything therein. This persistent vision of joy, harmony, well-being, and prosperity is difficult to capture in a single word or idea, but Shalom is that word that bears a tremendous freight – the freight of a dream of God that resists all our tendencies to division, hostility, fear, drivenness, and misery. Shalom, therefore, connotes persistent themes of justice and peace for all persons, and the respect for the dignity of every human being. (Brueggemann, Walter, Living Toward a Vision: Biblical reflections on Shalom)

 

As the story of the Man Born Blind wends its way through one scene and argument after another, two things emerge: First, the Man whose life had been reduced to begging near the town gates has been truly liberated. Not only can he see, he can now participate as an equal in the disputations of the Pharisees as to the nature and will of God. When ordered by the Religious Authorities to give the Glory to God for his new-found ability to see, AND to declare Jesus as a sinner for having healed him on the Sabbath, he speaks with authority as he says, “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” His declaration is the very genesis of the hymn Amazing Grace, written in 1779 by a man who commanded a slave ship in the eighteenth-century, saw the sinfulness of his participation in a system of injustice, and left the slave trade to become an Anglican priest, confessing, “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.” As a mentor to William Wilberforce, Hannah Moore, and other abolitionists, Fr. John Newton helped to bring about the end of the slave-trade in England in 1807!

 

Secondly, what the Man Born Blind ultimately comes to see is who Jesus is as he confesses: “Lord, I believe” that you are the Son of Man. It is unclear whether or not the neighbors, the man’s parents, the Pharisees, or we have come to see who Jesus is, or whether or not it is the will of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of the Exodus and the Passover, to heal those in need on the Sabbath. It is fair, however, to suggest that as time rolled on, the greeting, “Shabbat Shalom,” has come to embody the notion that healing of others, the healing between nations and tribes, the healing of God’s Green Earth, is always more than just “all right” on the Sabbath, and is to be the very heart of every single day of the week. For there are few ideas in the world of thought which contain so much spiritual power as the idea of Sabbath, for observance of Shabbat allows us time to know God and be known by God, and to know the many ways in which we can love our neighbors. Aeons hence, when many of our cherished theories only shreds will remain, that cosmic tapestry of the Queen of all days will continue to shine! Sabbath Time is God’s gift to those of us who live in the world of space. And for this we give thanks! Shabbat Shalom! 

Not Your Father's Story at the Well Lent 3A

 

Not Your Father’s Story at the Well

A man and a woman at a well. For those who read the Bible, this is a familiar story; a familiar set-up. One returns or sends a servant to their hometown well to find a wife. That’s where Isaac found Rebecca. That’s how Jacob found Leah and Rachel. Now Jesus is at Jacob’s well in Samaria! Jesus sits down. He’s thirsty. A Samaritan woman comes along. He asks her for a drink of water. As it turns out, the story is about water – living water. [John 4:5-42]

 

“How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” The narrator John adds context. (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Not even a water bucket or dipper. It has been this way for nearly 700 years when the Northern Kingdom of Israel was taken over by Assyria. Much of the population was deported and replaced by people from other territories the Assyrians had captured – the strategy being there would not be enough of the original tribes to mount an insurrection. Both Samaritans and Jews use the same Torah, but there are disagreements over where it was proper and holy to worship: Jerusalem in the south, or Mount Gerizim in the north? Both locations claim to be where Father Abraham set out to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. This is geography freighted with meaning.

 

It’s Noon. Jesus answers her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Suddenly, this Samaritan woman becomes more of an insightful theologian than Nicodemus was a few nights ago in Jerusalem. Or, is this some kind of clever flirting at the well? And why is she at the well in the middle of the day, in the heat of high-noon? All the other women in town fetch the day’s water in the cool of the morning?

 

Jesus is obviously impressed. He says, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” Now he is no longer talking just about at all, but about eternal life: living life, here and now in the presence of the love of God! The woman has never heard anything like this, and immediately replies, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” Again, the invitation to ‘eternal life’ is accepted, unlike poor Nicodemus, an expert in the Torah texts who was unable to comprehend what Jesus is talking about. The contrast cannot be any greater.

 

The Samaritan woman has her entire world-view rewired! This Jewish man not only talks to her, but he ignores the standard gender and ethnic barriers in initiating a conversation with her. He recognizes her as an equal, as a human being, not as a despised enemy. Jesus raises the position of women in society! Though she does not fully understand “living water,” she must be moved to be included in the kind of conversation that typically only occurs among men. This is no idle chat. This is no minor topic. Her life is being changed just by being in his presence.

 

Then comes a new direction in their conversation when Jesus says, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” The woman answers him, “I have no husband.” Jesus says to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband,’ for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” Which may explain not drawing water in the morning when other women might comment about her relationship issues. It is often suggested that with five marriages perhaps she is somehow morally loose. We need to remember, women were typically married off to much older men. Men who could die. Or, in the case of Levirate marriage which requires a man to marry a deceased brother’s wife if there are no children, anything can happen. Surprisingly to her, we imagine, Jesus knows about her past, and yet does not condemn her. Leading her to identify him as a prophet. “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain” she says,, “but your people say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” Rather than hurt feelings, she surprisingly takes the conversation to another level. Surely this man can tell me where to worship.

 

His answer is equally surprising! “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.”  Jesus says to her, “I am; the one who is speaking to you.”

 

“I am.” The inscrutable name YHWH shares with Moses at the burning bush. This Samaritan woman is the first to discern to whom she is speaking. This is the heart of the Good News. She has been waiting for just this moment, but wow! She who has had five marriages has met the Christ, the great I Am,  for whom she has been waiting. The One for whom she and her people have been waiting. In the presence of Jesus, suddenly all barriers have fallen. Samaritan and Jew no longer matters. Men and women are no longer to be segregated. Where one worships is no longer an issue. That this conversation even takes place ushers in a new era, a new reality of inclusiveness heretofore unimaginable. God is Spirit; pneuma; ruah! God is truth. And all is One.

 

Seven hundred years of animosity and bickering and disagreements on how one is to serve the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is wiped away. Note the utter astonishment of the disciples when they return from their lunch run and see him talking with, gasp, a woman! Not only a woman, but, gasp, a Samaritan woman. They had never imagined let alone seen such a thing. With Jesus the walls come tumbling down! In the best of ways. The utter inclusiveness of it all is difficult to comprehend. Yet, Paul understood what Jesus was all about. Martin Luther King Jr understood what Jesus was all about. This story means to ask us just when we might drop all the barriers? Can we ever get past red and blue states? Can we ever get past intractable left and right politics? Can we no longer segregate ourselves male and female, slave and free, black and white, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Jew?

 

The disciples ask Jesus if he wants something to eat. “I have food to eat that you do not know about,” he says. “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.” Which is to drop all barriers and welcome a new era of inclusiveness. We are, after all, all in this together.

 

The result? The Samaritan woman becomes the first evangelist as she goes back to town and tells everyone what she has seen and heard. Many Samaritans go to see for themselves. Once they see Jesus, they tell her, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.” Yet, who could imagine? Samaritans declare a young Jewish man to be the “Savior of the World!” The sweeping, inclusive character of Jesus’s mission is a note that needs sounding again and again today. Rebuilding walls seems so much easier than tearing them down. For just that reason, the iconoclasm of this text cannot be ignored. Oh, that we might live up to what happened that day by a well in Samaria. There was no marriage sealed at the well, people who had not spoken with one another for 700 years were reunited in Christ, if only just for that moment. Now what about that secret food Jesus has? Are we ready to do the will of Him who sent Jesus to sit at the well in Samaria one day long ago?