"You've Got A Friend In Me"

Sermon Preached at St. Aidan's Alexandria (April 10, 2011) Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year A: Ezekiel 37:1-14, Psalm 130, Romans 8:6-11, John 11:1-45

"O Israel, hope in the LORD! For with the LORD there is steadfast love, and with him is great power to redeem."

This week I finally broke down and watched the movie Toy Story 3. By now I'm guessing those of you out there who are either children or the parents of young children have seen this movie dozens of times. But I had heard from several friends that Toy Story 3 would leave me in tears at the end, and I just don't need that in a cartoon, so I avoided it. But there it was sitting in my Netflix instant queue, taunting me, and eventually curiosity won out. Maybe because I had been prepared for a more somber animation experience, I didn't completely lose it. In fact, as the final credits rolled I was smiling through those tears, because the movie is a powerful tale of new life.

The delightful cast of toys faces a new frontier in their third movie. They have been gathering dust in the toy box for quite a few years now as their kid, Andy, has gotten older. They reminisce about their golden age as toys, when their days were full of play and they were Andy's first choice of entertainment. But now their kid is grown up and getting ready to leave for college, and the looming question is what will happen to his old playmates.

If the toys could have their way, everything would go back to the way it was when Andy was 8 years old, and it would go on that way forever without changing. Even in the world of Disney, though, that isn't possible, so the toys prepare to go into "attic mode." To them it is more appealing to live out their days in a musty, dark corner somewhere than to imagine life any other way. They're trying to stay as close as they can to those good old days, even though it really means they are giving up life altogether.

Last time I preached, I spoke about considering the lilies and not making life more complicated for ourselves by trying to be more than we are. And while we are often tempted to foster anxiety, we can be equally tempted to avoid those situations that would call us to new life, because they might shake up the way things have always been for us. Crawling into a cardboard box in the attic just to stay near what is familiar starts to sound pretty appealing.

Today's gospel reading is all about new life. It may seem at first that Jesus simply restores life to Lazarus, and he goes forward like nothing ever happened. We don't necessarily know anything to the contrary, because we don't hear much about Lazarus after this story. In the next chapter he attends a dinner party with Jesus, and soon afterward the Jewish authorities plot to kill Lazarus, because his return to life has caused many Jews to believe in Jesus. But what Lazarus received from Jesus was new life – it was something much more than what he had known before.

We have been reading from the Gospel of John on Sundays throughout Lent, so it is important to touch briefly on the differences between this gospel and the others. Some of you already know this, so you can just sit there looking smug for a minute. The other three gospels – Mark, Matthew, and Luke – are closely related to each other. Matthew and Luke incorporate large sections of Mark, and they seem to have shared some other sources as well, though we no longer have any manuscripts or records of what those were. But John is not part of all that. Though the author of John was aware of the same Christian traditions as the other gospel writers, and he may have even seen some of their writings, he is in a league of his own.

I tell you this for two reasons. First of all, you have to understand that everything in John's gospel – every single word – has a theological focus, and the primary message is that Jesus came from God and will return to God, that he is a channel of the divine. John was not really trying at all to write an accurate historic account of Jesus' life. He was writing a theological document. All of the details he shares about Jesus' life point toward Jesus' divinity – there is no nativity story in John, but instead the beautiful prologue that speaks of Jesus' origin with God – "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

You also need to know that the story we read this morning, of the raising of Lazarus, only appears in the Gospel of John, which means it was something that was important to John in particular and his theological message. This story has a crucial place in the plotline of this gospel. In the other gospels, the event that pushes the Jewish authorities over the edge and makes them start plotting to arrest Jesus is his "cleansing of the Temple," when he pitches a fit and turns over the tables of the moneychangers and merchants. But in John, that story appears in the really early chapters, and instead it is Jesus' raising of Lazarus that serves as the final straw for the Jewish authorities. So what happens in this story changes the whole trajectory of the gospel. What happens in this story is remarkably powerful.

Some of the details of the event reinforce its miraculous nature, like the specification that Lazarus had been dead for four days by the time Jesus arrived. There was a Jewish belief at the time that someone's spirit hovered around their body for a couple of days after they died, so if Lazarus had been in the tomb for a shorter amount of time, folks could have assumed that his spirit just slipped back into his physical body. The story also tells us about the odor around the tomb – all these details make it clear that Lazarus was dead as a doornail, and his return to life can't be attributed to anything other than the power of God working through Jesus Christ. These details show that Jesus didn't just revive Lazarus' old life by sticking in a new pair of batteries. He gave him a new life and a new beginning.

Last week we read the story of Jesus healing a man who had been blind from birth. That event also generated skepticism rather than joy. Afterward, the Pharisees interrogated the blind man and his parents, and they drove the man away. It is hard for anyone, then or now, to argue that instantly being able to see after a lifetime of living in darkness could be called anything short of new life. But again, the idea of something so powerful was frightening to those witnessing it, because if Jesus could bring such power and such change to the blind man, he might try to shake things up in their lives as well, and they liked things they way they were.

Last week we told a version of Jesus' healing the blind man in Godly Play as well. The story the children heard ended this way: "When Jesus came close to people, they changed. They could see things they could never see before. They could do things they could never do before." After that, each of the children was invited to choose another object from the room that would help to show more of the story of the blind man. One child went straight for Noah's Ark, and with both arms full of that big heavy boat he explained why he chose it: "Because it's full of life," he said, "and Jesus loves things that are full of life."

You probably don't need more sermon than that. I've been upstaged. Jesus loves things that are full of life. The question is whether we do too. Because the life that Jesus gives requires change. The life that Jesus gives asks us to do things we never thought we could do before. And to be full of life, we sometimes have to give up part of what is old and familiar, even what is beloved.

Noah and his family sailed away on a boat full of new life, but first they had to watch everything they knew disappear underwater. Andy's cherished toys found new life in the arms of another child, but first he had to unselfishly give them away so they could all begin the next chapters of their lives. Jesus gave new life to his dear friend Lazarus, but first he had to say goodbye to him and weep beside his tomb. In a few weeks I will embark on a new life in ordained ministry, but first I will have to leave this place. And you – you all have your own stories of the loss that new life requires, as you have started new schools, changed jobs, welcomed children into your families.

"I AM the resurrection and the life," Jesus says. "Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live." Jesus not only gives away new life; Jesus is that life. The Gospel of John asks us to embrace this as the reality of our lives, to give up the old ways that limit us to make room for the mystery and power of what God can work in us. As we walk through this last leg of Lent together, I invite you to prayerfully examine what in your life needs resurrection and life. Do you want to go into "attic mode"? Or are you ready to be raised into new life with Christ?

Consider the Lilies

Sermon Preached at St. Aidan’s Alexandria (February 27, 2011)
Eighth Sunday after Epiphany, Year A: Isaiah 49:8-16a, Psalm 131, 1 Corinthians 4:1-5, Matthew 6:24-34

"I do not occupy myself with great matters,
or with things that are too hard for me.
But I still my soul and make it quiet."

Today's Gospel lesson is a classic, a perennial favorite for Christians. It is straightforward and poetic, the kind of thing that should be printed up on motivational posters as a reminder to slow down and simplify when life gets frantic. "Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?"

Maybe this passage speaks to us because it doesn't take much imagination to bring to mind the things in our life that are worrying us. You may have been spending some quality time with your worries at 3 a.m. last night: that big project coming up at work, a falling out with a friend, knowing someone who is battling serious illness, perhaps you are graduating from seminary in three months and have no idea where you will live or work after that (just hypothetically). Jesus' recommendation to not worry about our lives sounds pretty impossible most of the time. Can this advice possibly hold up when the rubber meets the road?

Besides which, is worrying all bad? Doesn't worrying show that we care, that we want to do our best? If we stopped worrying altogether and said we were putting every ounce of our faith in God, couldn't that quickly lead to laziness, to not doing our part? And as Christians, we celebrate God's incarnation in human form through Jesus Christ, but now we hear that our physical life is not important? What exactly are the terms and conditions of Jesus' advice?

This discourse about considering the lilies comes up in two gospels: Matthew and Luke. In Matthew's gospel, which we read today, it is part of the Sermon on the Mount, a marathon teaching session where Jesus lists the Beatitudes ("Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven," etc.), imparts the Lord's Prayer, and interprets Jewish law in new ways. This passage comes at the end of a series of idealistic teachings about how we generally orient our lives to God.

Both Matthew and Luke place the "consider the lilies" passage somewhere near the advice about storing up treasures in heaven instead of treasures on earth, setting this lesson within a framework of the dichotomy between how we calculate worth and how God calculates worth. Matthew goes further, adding the verse that begins our reading today: "No one can serve two masters; you cannot serve God and wealth." So Matthew's advice about not worrying about our earthly needs is prefaced and framed by this warning about choosing which God we glorify.

This evening I imagine many of us in this room will tune our TVs to the 83rd Annual Academy Awards. We all know that the Oscars are sort of about movies and mostly about celebrities and their latest designer gowns, and it is difficult to conceive of an event that is a greater antithesis of our Gospel reading. "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these." The idea of King Solomon in all his glory making an appearance on tonight's red carpet or seeing a wild lily on the cover of People magazine's "Best Dressed" issue is just comical. The Oscars are a parade of a very different ideal, the lifestyle that is possible with money and fame. Our culture is pretty clear about which god it glorifies, which master it serves.

But how is the red carpet related to the worries that keep us awake in the middle of the night? Most of us are not tossing and turning at 3 a.m. because another celebrity couple is splitting up. It's related because of those ideals Jesus sets out in the Sermon on the Mount, about the big overall orientation of our lives. If a People magazine lifestyle is what we strive for, if it is our measuring rod of success, we will always be unfulfilled, always striving for something we will never be, always anxious. I don't think most of us are actively striving to be a celebrity, but I think most of us spend more time than we realize striving to be something other than what God created us to be.

When I was in high school, someone gave my family a kit for growing an amaryllis bulb. It came with everything you needed: a pot, a little plastic sack of soil, instructions about light and watering, and of course the bulb itself. The kit promised that within two weeks you would have a vibrant pink and white blossom right there on your kitchen table in the dead of winter. For some reason the whole process absolutely fascinated me. I had seen plants grow before, but this somehow seemed more dramatic, more magical. Every day after school I rushed to check on the amaryllis and its progress. An amaryllis, by the way, is a kind of lily, and its name comes from the Greek word 'amarusso,' to sparkle. Sure enough, two weeks later we had a full-grown, sparkling beauty, and I had considered that lily half to death.

Looking back, I think what fascinated me about that amaryllis was the singularity and simplicity of its mission. While I had spent my day doing math problems and practice essays for the SAT, that lily was devoting all of her energy to just growing, to becoming a lily. Lilies are never trying to be more, or less, than what they are. They are just doing what lilies do – drinking water, reaching for the sun, growing roots – and, in the process, they seem to sparkle.

When Jesus tells us not to worry about our lives, the word Matthew uses for "worry" is the Greek "merimnao." On several occasions in the New Testament, this word describes worry that the Greek dictionary defined as "that which is existentially important, that which monopolizes the heart's concerns." Of course we will and should worry about our basic needs at times – that is only natural – but the problem arises when those worries monopolize our hearts' concerns, when they shift our overall orientation from the God who made us and who made the lilies.

Certainly it is much easier for a lily to devote itself singularly to God and God's creative vision for its life, to believe that God will take care of everything extra: lilies don't have to hold down a job or take care of baby lilies or file tax returns. We humans will always have things in our lives that cause us worry, but the question is whether we carry those burdens all by ourselves or recognize that God is the author of our story, worries and all.

Earlier we prayed these words together: "Most loving Father, whose will it is for us to give thanks for all things, to fear nothing but the loss of you, and to cast all our care on you who care for us: Preserve us from faithless fears and worldly anxieties, that no clouds of this mortal life may hide from us the light of that love which is immortal, and which you have manifested to us in your Son Jesus Christ our Lord."

So often our worries are faithless fears – they are void of everything we have learned to be true in our lives. I recently ran across a quote from Flannery O'Connor that has been a life raft for me during this time of uncertainty. She said: "Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not." I'll say it again, because it's so good: "Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not."

Faith is not mindless absence of worry. Faith is not allowing that worry to monopolize everything else we have known to be true. It is actively stepping into what we were created to be. It is inviting God back into the story with us. It is orienting our lives toward the singular and central vision of God's promise of new life.

When I'm able to step back from today's worries and articulate the overall orientation of my life, I know that my attempts to radically control my own future and anticipate everything that will happen have always been futile, and I do actually believe that God will point me in the right direction if I am able to let go of my own expectations. But then I forget again, and I lie awake at 3 a.m. wondering how I am going to steer this big ship all by my lonesome. It's a lesson I learn the hard way, every time. In other words, sometimes I'm not very good at believing, and living into, what I know to be true.

A lily doesn't ever try to steer the whole ship. A lily doesn't try to be anything more or less than a lily – she just follows the things she already knows will help her in the work of growing, one day at a time. And so a lily lives a life that is faithful because it simply follows what is true, and in this way a lily serves and glorifies God.

It really is a life worthy of consideration.