Now What?

John 20:1-18

April 16, 2017

I.

Every time we learn something there are three stages to it.  There’s the What?  the So what? and the Now what?  The What? refers just to the basic statement itself, the facts, the data, the opinion, what is actually said or perceived.  The So what? asks what this means for me, how does this information apply to my world?  But the key, the place where the rubber meets the road, is always the Now what?  Because that’s where we do something with this information.  We tend to spend an awful lot of time and energy on the What? and the So what? about things, and comparatively very little on the Now what?

All of the Resurrection narratives hinge on the Now what? question.  We have historically paid a great deal of attention to trying to figure out what happened and interpreting what it means.  But we do not invest enough in the question of what we are called to do now in light of this event.  We do not even get to the Now what? most of the time.  Instead we leave it as a story, a historical event, and maybe we study its context, and its theological, mythical, symbolic, spiritual, religious, historical importance.  Sometimes, it seems hard for us to imagine that there is any Now what? at all, that the story actually demands that we do anything.

Within this story, Mary’s Now what? is when she breathlessly runs back to the upper room where the disciples are staying, and announces what happened to her.  The Now what? of her story is her telling it, as Jesus instructs to do.  She doesn’t just take this news in and go home to think about it.  She starts spreading this amazing good news that Jesus is now alive!  That’s why she has always had the title of “Apostle to the Apostles.”  The Now what? is always about communication and testimony.  It is always about witness and discipleship.

The Now what? of the resurrection for us is the same.  This story and the truth to which it points must reshape our lives.  It has consequences.  It requires us to live differently.  It insists that we act in new and even odd, countercultural ways in the world.     

When Mary tells the story, she in so doing becomes herself part of the story.  And it is the same with us.  Our telling of the story means we have to become the story.  We have to become ourselves the good news so profoundly that it is no longer just about something that happened to somebody who lived a long time ago, but about us.  It is about something that happens to us, here and now.  

II. 

Jesus himself makes this point when he tells her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father.”  Here we learn that it is not his earthly, mortal, historical form that is most important.  Jesus says “Don’t hold on to what you can see, and touch, and feel, and measure.  Even this is temporary and conditional.  That is all still facts and data.  That is all happening out there to someone else.  Jesus tells Mary it’s really not about walking with me and talking with me, as a popular old song croons.  He is really going to be closer to us now than he was in his mortal, historical form.  

Jesus explains to her, “I am ascending to the Father.”  By saying this he does not mean that he is going away to some other, remote, inaccessible place.  He does not mean he is abandoning her and leaving her alone.

Ascension is an ancient and metaphorical way of recognizing that the higher we get, the more we can see; that is, the more inclusive our vision becomes.  If you get as high as God, you can see everything.  Height is a biblical image for inclusiveness.  Ascension is a way to talk about how Jesus becomes omnipresent; it means there is a sense in which he is emerging everywhere.  

Jesus is lifted up on the cross, he is raised up in resurrection, and he ascends to heaven… and it’s all one continuous upward movement.  Just as in his incarnation he descended from universality to particularity, now he ascends from particularity to universality.  When he says that he goes to prepare a place for us and that where he is we will be also, he means that he brings us along with him in this ascent. “When Christ who is your life is revealed,” says Paul, “then you also will be revealed with him in glory.”   

Jesus instructs Mary to tell the disciples: “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”  The normal way we understand this is that she is to tell them what Jesus tells her about himself.  But the text is ambiguous.  She is to stand before the disciples and “say to them ‘I am ascending.’”  She is talking about Jesus… but at the same time she could also be heard as speaking about herself.

To encounter the risen Lord is to have your perspective blown open, widened, broadened, and made infinitely more inclusive.  It is to ascend with him.  It means we can no longer view things from our little, limited, self-centered perspective.  In Christ we have a wider view of things.  We no longer put ourselves, our family, our nation, or our interests first; we now see things from above, so that we act, think, and speak according to what is good for all.  Jesus gives us a God’s-eye-view of everything, uniting us to everything in love.  He shows us how to live for all.

To be united with him in a resurrection like his, to walk in newness of life, to follow him… all these are ways we talk about how his resurrection is not just about him but about all, beginning with those who by placing their trust in him see that.  To be united with him in a resurrection like his means living your life now with the care, joy, and love that he has for all.  To be united with him in a resurrection like his means we see and enact the big picture.          

III.

So the Now what? for us, in light of the resurrection and our participation in God’s life in and through Jesus Christ, is that we live in unity and identity with all creation and all people.  The Now what? is that we live to tell the story, not just in words, but with our whole lives.  The Now what? is that we cherish every life, every creature, every soul.

The Now what? is to see and live from God’s perspective.  It is to approach everything and everyone with wonder, compassion, and joy.  It is to actively express humility and perform self-less service to others.  We become visible, embodied expressions of God’s openness, peace, and love.  We recognize that we together are Christ-in-the-world.

In Christ we renounce and reject the violence, exploitation, selfishness, and ignorance that ravages the Earth, oppresses the poor, excludes the stranger, and murders the enemy.  In Christ we see the we are all one and we have no enemies, no competitors, and no opponents.  In Christ we are all about equality and forgiveness, healing and liberation, because we know that, from God’s viewpoint, which Christ gives us, we are all one.  Another’s suffering is my suffering.  Another’s joy is my joy.  And God’s peace is given for all.

Today we celebrate with some of our members who have chosen to take on themselves the promises made at their baptism.  This is a beginning.  They are only dimly aware of what they are getting into, in this journey of faith, hope, and love.  It begins with the resurrection.  And at every turn, at every moment, we need to be opening ourselves to the adventure of the Now what? of new life in the Word and Spirit of God.

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Suffering Servant.

Isaiah 52:13-53:12

April 14, 2017 + Good Friday.

I.

Jesus Christ, as truly and fully God and truly and fully human, shows us the way we must go if we are to emerge into his light and life.  What must happen is the breakdown of our self-centered, self-righteous, selfish “old self.”  Our ego has to be overcome.  Our identity rooted in what Paul calls “the flesh” has to be dethroned in our hearts, so that our new identity in “the Spirit” may emerge in us.  Who we have made ourselves and who we think we are must be reduced to its basic elements, so that who we truly are may be revealed.

This is not an easy or pain-free process.  We do not shed our accumulated sinfulness, our habits of separation, violence, hubris, and blindness readily.  Jesus himself says that “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies it remains just a single grain.  But if it dies it bears much fruit.”  

The Lord is continually telling his disciples to take up their own crosses, lose their own lives, give up all that they have, and follow him.  He does not say that he will do this for us so we don’t have to.  He says, I am going ahead of you so that “where I am you may be also.”  He does not exempt us from death; he assures us that he will be with us through it, to emerge with us on the other side.

Jesus’ Way is the way of the cross.  It is the way of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53, who “bears all things.”  This chapter of Isaiah has always informed the church’s understanding of who Jesus is and what he does.

On this day of all days, we focus with great intensity on what he is doing, lifted up on the cross, and how his action saves us and the whole world.  It saves us to the extent that we participate in it, through the sacrament of baptism and through the sacrament of his Body and Blood.  We participate in his death and therefore in his life by our communion with and in him in the gathering of disciples under the Word in the Spirit.  We participate with him by means of the repentance which is the new way of thinking, the new mind we receive in Christ.

As with the Suffering Servant, this new mind embraces service and humility.  It puts others first so profoundly that we identify with them and lose ourselves in them.  Indeed, in him there are no others, just extensions and manifestations of the common humanity we share with Jesus; just one glorious creation of which we are each a particular manifestation and reflection.  

Having the mind of Christ means a conscious and categorical rejection of the standards for success which are rampant in our culture, our addiction to consumption, extraction, and acquisition; our invented scarcities and our willingness to murder others — usually out of our sight — to get what we want.  

And it means an acceptance of suffering and the necessary losses through which we grow into God.  The Suffering Servant passage reveals that we attain to true and eternal life more by what we lose than by what we grasp.  We lose our falseness, which falls from us, revealing who we always were, deep within: humans created in the Image of God.

II.       

Because this passage is about Jesus, it is also about us; for he embodies the true humanity we share with him.  It sets out the way of repentance and therefore salvation.  We are not spectators or impartial, objective observers of what Jesus is doing.  We are participants in and through him.  

The early church had a saying: “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”  It was their way of saying that the church miraculously grows where disciples suffer the way Jesus does.  A martyr is a witness, but not a passive bystander.  We can’t witness from afar what Jesus does.  We can’t just watch it on TV or read about it on Facebook.  The witness goes with Jesus and testifies to the truth of what he does.  The witness experiences something like what Jesus goes through.

This does not mean we have the life literally crushed out of our physical bodies, although there are plenty of Christians for whom this is their witness.  Neither do we look for opportunities to harm ourselves; we are not a suicide cult.  

But it does mean that we face the disintegration and loss of our old selves by other means.  It does mean we walk a path of renunciation and loss.  It does mean we move into the turbulence of life, and enter places of deep discomfort.  It does mean we stay vulnerable and open, receptive to what life gives us.  It does mean emptying ourselves of ourselves.  And it does mean that our lifestyle goes against the grain of society and its authorities.    

We can never forget that Jesus Christ is also fully God.  In a sense the Suffering Servant is God, self-emptying for the life of the people and the whole world.  Is this not Paul’s point in his astonishing and powerful words from Philippians, where Christ Jesus “did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave… and became obedient to the point of death….”?  Does not creation itself begin with the offering up and out of the Word and Spirit of God, when God breathes the whole universe into being?

What is going on here in this Suffering Servant passage is not just something humans have to do to embrace the full truth of who they are, it is also what God does all the time!  God is not up there throwing punishing lightning bolts at us when we mess up.  God is always taking the lowest place, and allowing peace and blessing and goodness to well up and in and through everything.  God is always pouring love into the world and into our hearts.

God is down here, with the afflicted, with the oppressed, with the hungry and the broken and the lost, bearing our infirmities, carrying our diseases.  God cherishes and inhabits the ugly, undesirable, despised, and rejected ones.  Paradoxically and mysteriously, God is most with those abandoned by God.  God flows.  To receive God is at the same time to be abandoned by God in the same way that a garden hose receives water and simultaneously pours it out.

The Suffering Servant passage describes not someone under God’s condemnation, but someone participating in God’s flooding life of self-offering, self-emptying, self-giving, infinite love, filling everything.

III.

The worst thing we can do with a passage like this is to say, “Oh, that was all fulfilled by Jesus.  We thank him for doing that.  But it has nothing to do with us.”  Rather, the Suffering Servant passage shows us the life that Jesus liberates us to live in his name.  For Christians are called to lives of humility and service, even including suffering, as well.  We are called to set our own personal agendas aside, we are called even to let go of the habitual reactions of our own personalities, not out of any kind of self-hatred or masochism.  

Rather it is because of the way letting go of our self-importance, self-righteousness, and self-centeredness opens us up to receive real joy, peace, hope, faith, and love.    

The cross shows us that it is our losses that allow God’s life to emerge in us.  It is when we follow Jesus in willingly sharing and bearing, however unfairly, the pain, exclusion, disease, and despair of others, that we are set free to prosper in God’s will, obtain light and knowledge, and share in God’s righteousness.

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"Hypocrites!"

Matthew 23:13-36

April 9, 2017

I.

Anyone confused about why Jesus was killed need look no further than Matthew 23 where he blasts the religious leaders of his day without much ambiguity.  “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” is the refrain repeated by the Lord here no less than seven times.  He is disgusted and offended by the leaders of his own people.  They were mercenary control-freaks keeping up appearances to hide their own corruption and perversity.  In my view and experience, there is a lot of that going around.

Immediately prior to this passage, the Lord talks about the character of leadership in the Kingdom of Heaven, which is to say, his church, the gathering of his disciples.  In contrast with the scribes and Pharisees, who like to be important and exert their power over others, Jesus says that his disciples are not to be called rabbi, or teacher, because only God is our teacher and we are all students.  No one is to be in the position of a domineering, controlling father-figure; only God is our Father.  No instructors either.  Leaders are servants in Jesus’ community.  “All who exalt themselves will be humbled and all who humble themselves will be exalted,” he says.

Leaders often get to be leaders by doing well according to the normal standards for worldly success.  That is, they know how to cave in to the three temptations we heard about from chapter 4.  They do what needs to be done to get money, fame, and power.  In fact, they don’t really “cave in” to these temptations at all; they pursue them and grab for them wholeheartedly.

These were not considered to be bad people.  Just the opposite!  They were exemplary, admired, respected figures in society.  They were successful.  They were pious and patriotic.  People looked up to them.  These were the preachers, judges, teachers, lawyers, and scholars.  These were the people you wanted your sons to grow up to be.  

Jesus says they are hypocrites.  That is, they say one thing and do another.  They look good on the outside, but are not so good on the inside.  They talk the talk, but they don't walk the walk.  Indeed, not only do they lack integrity themselves, but their actions actually prevent others from walking the walk.

First, Jesus says that the leaders “lock people out of the Kingdom of Heaven” from the outside.  The Kingdom of Heaven for Jesus is the new life of doing God’s will, living together in equality, justice, and peace.  Jesus describes the Kingdom of Heaven throughout his ministry.  Indeed, the Kingdom of Heaven is the main topic of his mission; it is what he came to Earth to proclaim, embody, and establish.

Good leaders are supposed to facilitate this; they are supposed to exemplify it and welcome people into it and help them live this way.  They are supposed to open up space for the Kingdom of Heaven to emerge among us.  Good leaders are intended to function as a doorway into the Kingdom of Heaven.  We’re supposed to see the Kingdom of Heaven in their lives and feel ourselves invited into it.

II.

The Kingdom of Heaven, for Jesus, is emphatically not just some place to which we hopefully graduate when we die, or some reality that God establishes at the end of time.  Jesus continually and repeatedly talks about the Kingdom of Heaven as “near,” “within or among you,” and otherwise present and available here and now.  One of the most effective and frequently used ways to lock people out of the Kingdom of Heaven is to relegate it to some far off time or place that we may not attain in this life.  Jesus insists that this Kingdom is present today; we just have to learn to see it and live in it. 

Not to do that, not to live according to the values of this Kingdom, this new, transformed set of relationships, basically leaves someone in effect dead and lost.  It is worse than remaining a pagan.  Pagans at least don’t know what they don’t know.  It is far more destructive to know the truth and nevertheless refuse to acknowledge it.  

And then to prevent others from knowing it and following it is even worse.  Jesus refers to these illegitimate leaders as “blind guides.”  Which sums up what it is like to have leaders who don’t know where they are going… but pretend like they do.

And as with all self-important leaders, they make up stuff to boss people around about.  They invent these petty distinctions and silly rules that need to be kept because of some precious nugget of theological insider-talk.  But the main point is really keeping people off balance and proving their own control over people.

So apparently there was this whole superstructure about what it was appropriate to swear by and how binding it was to swear by this or that.  Only lawyers could make this stuff up.  Or children.  But you didn’t say “mother may I?”  Like how a promise doesn’t count if you have your fingers crossed.  Like there is always some obscure technicality that can void a promise. 

They were teaching people that if they swore by the sanctuary it was not as binding as swearing by the gold in the sanctuary.  Or making a distinction between swearing by the altar or the dead animal on the altar.  And so on.  Which creates wonderful arguments generating many billable hours for attorneys and prosecutors over whose evidence and testimony is more reliable.

But Jesus makes the radical and outlandish suggestion that maybe we should just tell the truth.  “Do not swear at all,” he says in chapter 5, “Let your word be ‘yes,’ ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ ‘no.’  Anything more than this comes from the Evil One.”  The community of Jesus’ followers is one of truth-telling, and discernment of the Spirit together.  We are to be an alternative to a world of “alternative facts,” “fake news,” self-serving spin, propaganda, and equivocation.  We are to be a place where people may be honest and direct about themselves without fear of reprisal.  There is a reason why the Evil One is referred to in Scripture as “the father of lies.”

III.

The scribes and Pharisees diligently kept the letter of the law.  They knew the rules about tithing and fasting.  But they turned them into regulations to be kept merely literally.  They went through the outward motions of perfection.  But they failed to see how this superficial obedience is meant to extend into both inward into the soul and outward into society.  Instead of being manifestations of discipleship, these practices in effect prevented discipleship.  They were meticulous details they kept instead of giving attention to what is really important.

Jesus says that the weightier matters of the law are “justice and mercy and faith.”  In other places, the law is summed up as love.  The law, the Torah, is really about inhabiting a good, blessed, generous, forgiving, non-violent community together.  It is really about hospitality and equality; it is about lifting up those on the bottom and bringing down those who think of themselves as above others.  But of course the leaders had no interest in mentioning this.

The Lord gets perhaps to the heart of the matter when he condemns the radical contradiction he sees in these leaders between surface presentation and interior spiritual state.  They are all for show, he says.  They look shiny and neat on the outside, but in their hearts “they are full of greed and self-indulgence.”  Greed and self-indulgence reveal the selfish ego-centricity that rules these leaders.  

In the end, that is the battle we all have to fight.  Whether we in our souls will be ruled by what we want for ourselves or by what God wants for all of us.  For what rules in our souls will be expressed in our actions and create the world we live in.  A world of greed and self-indulgence is a world of violence, deprivation, inequality, scarcity, and fear.  It is a world that pointedly kills those who, like Jesus and the prophets, point out how wrong this is.

Our choice then is, on the one hand, “greed and self-indulgence,” or, on the other hand, the “justice and mercy and faith” which is the real aim of the Scriptures.  Our choice is to follow leaders who look good but are really only out for their own gain, or to follow Jesus Christ and the beautiful life of grace and peace he gives us.  Our choice is to follow those who look good by the world’s standards, or the ones who are good by Jesus’ standards.

IV.

Jesus doesn’t appoint any leaders in the church.  He makes disciples.  Our job in this life is to be the best followers of Jesus we can be.  Our job is to be single-minded followers of Jesus, obedient to his commandments, inspired by his Spirit and example.  

And those among us who are particularly faithful and wholehearted in their discipleship in effect become leaders, not because they put themselves forward as such, but because they don’t.  Rather, they become leaders because others look at them and see their example as worthy of following.  Others in the church see in them something of the life of Jesus Christ, who rejects the temptations to wealth, fame, and power, who lives as a servant of all.  

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"Take Away the Stone"

John 11:1-44

April 2, 2017

I.

Last week we talked about how the man born blind represents all of us.  Today we will reflect on how Lazarus the dead man also represents all of us.  In fact, all of the maladies the Messiah comes into the world to heal stand for the condition of normal human beings, caught in the prison of their egocentricity or sin.  Whether we are described as blind, lame, deaf, bleeding, feverish, leprous, or dead, these describe different dimensions of the human condition we all share, even if we are not experiencing them physically or literally as individuals.  Jesus comes to restore us to our original goodness and wholeness, which he embodies.

In order to ensure that people get the point, Jesus deliberately waits for several days before going to visit his dear friend Lazarus, whom he hears is terminally ill.  This in itself is difficult for us to hear, as it was for Lazarus’ sisters, Mary and Martha.  We all know how permanent death is.  You don’t mess with death.  There is no room for procrastination.  Death means that we have run out of time and options… or so we think.

For all this is what our ego tells us about death.  This is how we have learned to experience death: as the annihilation and permanent extinguishing of the individual forever.

Yet when Jesus finally shows up in Bethany to visit his friends, after withstanding Martha’s bitter disappointment with him, he says, “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.”  It is one of the most blunt, direct, and astonishing things that Jesus ever says.  

We say these words at funerals even today.  We quote Jesus as saying, “Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”  And we say it when there is often a dead body right there visible in the room!  Either we are simply spouting incoherent nonsense; or we are saying that the person who died didn’t believe in Jesus.  But one thing is obvious, which is that the person has died.  That seems to be the incontrovertible fact.

It is the same for Martha.  Jesus says this to her, and she is deeply aware that her brother is dead.  Then he looks at her and says, “Do you believe this?”  In other words, “Do you trust that what I am telling you is truer than what you know by direct, personal experience?  Do you believe me or your own eyes?”

And Martha says, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah the Son of God, the One coming into the world.”  In other words, she says that she trusts that Jesus is more real, more true, and far better than everything she has known or experienced in her life.  If he says that Lazarus will rise again, then that, not the raw fact of Lazarus’ body decomposing in a dark tomb, is what must be true, even if it doesn’t make any sense to us.

II.

Jesus sees us and knows us in a way we cannot imagine.  We are only aware of a tiny portion of who we ourselves even are.  We think we are small, discrete, limited packages of meat that only live for few years, and then we are gone.  Jesus comes into the world and says… “No.  I don’t think so.  I will show you who you really are.”

So: Are we going to believe our own experience?  Are we going to believe our own senses and reason?  Are we going to go along with what just about everyone else says and thinks and does?  Or are we going to believe this one guy who is saying something totally different?

The writer of this gospel says he wrote it so people may believe.  That is, he is telling us about Jesus for a specific purpose, which is so that we may be inspired to place our whole-hearted trust in him.  These are not just interesting stores: they have a point.  And that point is of existential importance.  Because if you do come to trust in him, you “will never die”.

And yet Lazarus has died, in a sense.  Indeed, he has died in the only sense we normally think is meaningful.  His physical body doesn't work anymore.  No brain-waves, no heart-beat, no breath.  Rigor-mortis and decomposition.  You can’t get any deader.

Jesus asks to be taken there, to the tomb.  They even invite him with the characteristic revelatory words of this gospel, “Come and see.”  Come and see how this “never dying” thing is delusional at best, and a heartless lie at worst.  

When they get to the tomb, Jesus begins to cry.  The tears he sheds are tears of empathy recognizing another’s pain and at the same time realizing it doesn’t have to be this way.  They are the tears of a parent whose child has become an addict, or whose child has a brain disease called depression and has tried to end her own life.  They are the tears of one who reflects, “If only they were able to see that the tomb they thought they were stuck in wasn’t real.  If only they had just reached out their hand to discover the walls were imaginary.  If only they were able to change their way of thinking and come to trust, follow, and obey — instead of their own eyes, instead of their own reason, instead of what everyone else said — the Word of Jesus Christ.

Jesus cries here, over all of us, and each of us.  We who have diligently and innocently messed up not only our own lives, and not only lives of strangers across the planet, but especially the lives of those we love and cherish the most.  For we are all entombed in our own self-interest, which filters and distorts everything we see and know and do.  We think we are doing good, when in reality we are doing violence and neglect.  We think we are helping, when in reality we are harming.  We think we are preserving and protecting life, when in reality we are agents of death.

III.

Finally, Jesus instructs them to “take away the stone” which had been rolled across the mouth of the tomb, which, we are told, is a cave.  Lazarus, obviously, is not in a position to remove the stone himself.  He has been dead for four days.  Neither are we — who don’t even know we’re spiritually dead and locked in a tomb of our own making, which we have convinced ourselves is normal life — neither are we able to remove the stone that blocks us from emerging into new and true life.  We cannot be born again on our own.

Lazarus is inert.  And after four days he has no choices to make.  He is empty.  He has given up everything.  Even life.  His body is disintegrating, returning to its primal elements, breaking down.  He has let everything go.

I wonder if this isn’t the key to the transformation from death to life.  I wonder if it isn’t less about what we do, and more about what we let go of.  Maybe this is the mystery of God’s grace, that only when, as they say in AA, we “let go and let God,” that we discover how we have been held, and fed, and empowered all along.  Maybe the way to life is not by our planning and striving, not by what we do, but by what we don’t do.  Maybe it’s not what we grasp but what we let go of and let flow through us.  In that case, the dynamics of renewal, rebirth, and resurrection are more about ceasing and relaxing, opening and exhaling, and falling.

In the next chapter, Jesus says, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies it bears much fruit.”  Lazarus has died and fallen into the earth.  And that is precisely the precondition for rebirth and the bearing of much fruit.  Falling and dying.  Letting go and letting God.  Giving up what you think you are so that who you truly are may emerge.

Martha’s worry that there will be a stench if the stone is removed reminds me of the way we rationalize our not letting go: we are afraid we will be ashamed of what is revealed about us.  Someone might be offended.  Someone might get angry.  It could get messy.  We don’t know what will come out of us if we stop holding it in.  In fact, we have a pretty good idea that it won’t be very nice.  

But Jesus just says, “Didn’t I tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?”  Stop worrying about what you think you’re going to smell.  Get ready for what you are about to see.  Because you are going to see something wonderful!  For when we stop grasping, holding, projecting, trying, and striving, what comes out of us is nothing less than the glory of God.  We are made in God’s Image; we are made to have God’s glory — God’s presence, love, and wonder — flow through us into the world.  That is the wonder of who we are.

IV.   

Jesus calls out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”  And Lazarus, his hands and feet still bound, somehow appears at the opening of the tomb.  The fact that he is still tied up means that even in the end it was not his doing to get himself to the light, it was a pure response to the Word of the Lord.  It was the Word, calling his own name, which draws him up and out of the tomb.  

Jesus then tells the astonished onlookers to “unbind him and let him go.”  The final letting go happens in community.  We emerge from our darkness and paralysis into the arms of others.  We need the attention and work of others to remove the remaining bonds which had tied us into our entombment.  Unbinding each other is our task as a community of those who trust in Jesus.  Identifying and removing the constrictions we have around us is important work for the community of transformation.  

So not only can we not break free on our own initiative, neither can we break free by ourselves.  We need a community that embodies the Word of Jesus to us.  We need a community to be the Word of liberation and enact upon us the coming out and the letting go which is the only path to new life.

Unbinding people and releasing them from their own bondage becomes the mission of Jesus’ followers.  It is the ultimate expression of the “new commandment” he gives us, which is to love one another as he has loved us.

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