March 9, 2008

by The Rev. Constance Jones

John 11:1-45

From today’s Gospel: in the New Revised Standard Version
“... though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus,
after having heard that Lazarus was ill,
he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.”

From Peterson’s The Message,
“Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus,
but oddly, when he heard that Lazarus was sick,
he stayed on where he was for two more days.”

“Oddly” indeed. Peterson couldn’t resist the remark that Jesus’ delay is pretty odd.
The author of John’s Gospel didn’t say that,
because John wants to show that everything Jesus does proves his Godhood,
everything happens for the glory of God.

But even John’s polished certitude can’t take the raw edge off this story.
Mary and Martha both make the accusation flat out,
“If you had been here, our brother would not have died.”
In other words, You are the healer. God works through you.
You could have prevented this. And why didn’t you?

Anyone who’s lost a loved one, or who has witnessed such a loss,
says the same thing in their heart.
God, if you are God, how can you possibly allow this to happen?

This lament may be shaking a fist and cursing heaven.
It may be a trickle of doubt that begins to erode a smooth and simple childhood faith.
But the questions are the same.
How could you allow war to claim the lives of the innocent and the idealistic?
How could you let mean people flourish and permit a child’s death?
And cancer – if you are the maker of heaven and earth –
How could you set cancer loose in the world?

I guess I’d say Jesus caught an earful from Mary and Martha, and I’m glad of it.
Thank God John didn’t edit it out,
because sometimes John’s inclination
to say it’s all for God’s glory doesn’t do us much good.

But Jesus’ weeping does.

I went to a seminar a couple of weeks ago
given by Alan Wolfelt, a renowned grief expert.
Amazingly, it wasn’t a grim way to spend the day,
because he’s forthright and positive and even funny.

Wolfelt talked about “carried grief,” which he says is epidemic in North America.
Our culture denies death and thinks it’s optional.
When it happens, we see it as a failure, an aberration, and something to be sequestered.
“Keep busy” people say to the bereaved.
“Think good thoughts.” “Do you have ‘closure’?”
People say the things like, “God would never give us anything we can’t bear.”
But the grief is quite unbearable, and the loss can never be repaired.
If we aren’t allowed to mourn properly, to storm heaven with our outrage,
and to go deep into the valley of darkness to experience its bitter, ashy taste,
we become ourselves like the walking dead, like ghosts,
sometimes for years and years.¹

Well, if you want the full report on this wonderful seminar, including the funny parts, you will have to come to our bereavement group, Next Chapter,
for lunch tomorrow at noon in the Parlor. Bring a sandwich to share.
But I have to say that those of us who’ve suffered loss
(and eventually of course that means all of us) –
it never stops being “odd,” as Peterson in The Message puts it,
or as we might put it, utterly appalling,
that God did not prevent this.
I am so grateful that Mary and Martha said it,
God, where in the name of everything holy were you when this happened?

The Nobel Prize-winning writer Elie Wiesel has not stood mute
in the years since he was a prisoner at Buchenwald during World War II.
In a passage in his little book Night he writes
of the Jews gathering for prayers on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year.
He’d been a pious boy before the world for middle European Jews
was set on fire by Hitler,
and his whole being rebelled when the men in the camp raised their voices in praise,
“Blessed be the Name of the Eternal!”

Why, but why should I bless Him? In every fiber I rebelled. Because He had had thousands of children burned in His pits? Because He kept six crematories working night and day, on Sundays and feast days? Because in His great might He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many factories of death? How could I say to Him: “Blessed art Thou, Eternal, Master of the Universe, Who chose us from among the races to be tortured day and night, to see our father, our mothers, our brothers, end in the crematory? Praised be Thy Holy Name, Thou Who hast chosen us to be butchered on Thine altar?” . . . This day I had ceased to plead. . . . I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone–terribly alone in a world without God and without man. Without love or mercy, I had ceased to be anything but ashes,...²

There are times when we cannot be as articulate as Wiesel,
when we become speechless before the reality of loss, the victory of evil,
the finality of our own helplessness.
It is as though a black pit has opened up in front of our path,
and we can see that there is no bottom to the dark.
And if when the reality confronts us, we pretend otherwise,
our soul will retreat into a deep freeze.

Thank God that later words come.
And friends, consolation, and those who will listen without mouthing glib platitudes. Thank God there are places like Grace church,
where truth-telling and mourning are welcome.
And above all thank God that we come to discover that even in our darkest hour,
God never abandoned us.

But you don’t “get over it” or put it behind you.
You have visited a very terrible and holy place,
and you must remember what your open eyes have seen.
There will be healing, community, and a return to the orderliness of life.
There will be beauty, and new sweetness of life.

But it isn’t closure, and never denial.
You can’t claim you know suffering exists, or why God permits it.
You do not ever lose your outrage, or put on a happy face.
The scar will never go away.

But in the dark, a door has opened and you have seen the light.
You are invited a little farther into the mystery of God.

So I say this very carefully,
because glib assurances and slick platitudes are a desecration.
I never wish to say that suffering, loss, and death are good things
that God uses to punish or “train” us.
Violent death, cancer, and the Holocaust can never be called good.
They are surely contrary to God’s will for all creation.

But I believe this with all my heart,
that just as John says,
Mary and Martha only witnessed the miracle only
on the worst day of their life –
when Martha proclaimed her faith in Jesus
but her despair in him at the same time, for her brother was dead.

New life may call you into the valley of the shadow of death.
You can know God in the light,
but what you see of God in the dark will change you forever.

Peterson is right. This is odd. It is a mystery.

I hardly blame non-believers
who use history and reason and quite righteous anger at the story of suffering
to argue that God is not good, or that God is not all-powerful,
or that there is no God at all.

But if you walk in the valley of the shadow of death with your eyes open,
you are at one with Christ on the Cross.

As Elie Wiesel says upon witnessing a hanging in the concentration camp,

Behind me, I heard.... [a] man asking:
“Where is God now?”
And I heard a voice within me answer him:
“Where is He? Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows.”³

In the watch before the dawn, there is a ray of promise.
The story of the Cross and the Resurrection
is not a commonplace, not a sentimentality.
For those who’ve walked in the dark places,
it is always a shock, an impossibility, a scandal.

But the journey to Easter must go through the Cross and not around it.
I am increasingly sure there is no “around it.”
But I am becoming equally sure
that just beyond our Lenten darkness and smallness of hope,
there is unboundedness and release and Resurrection.
Far more than we can even whisper in hope.

So I suppose John is right after all, it is about the glory of God.
An authentic experience in this life
for those who greet the dark, however painfully, with open arms.
We hear Jesus say, “Lazarus, come out!”
And please Jesus, we are unbound, and let go. Amen.

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