SERMON PREACHED BY THE REVEREND DR. HAROLD
T. LEWIS
IN TRINITY CHURCH IN THE CITY OF BOSTON
ON THE FIFTH SUNDAY IN LENT
13 MARCH 2005
Let us pray:
God of grace and God of glory, on thy people pour thy power;
Crown thine ancient Church's story, bring her bud to glorious
flower.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the facing of this hour.
--- Harry Emerson Fosdick, Hymn 594, stanza 1
Bethany was a suburb of Jerusalem, --- just over the crest of the Mount of Olives, two miles to the east of the city, a comfortable walking distance. Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus lived there, and from what we read in the Gospels, it seems that Jesus was especially close to them, a closeness, cemented, perhaps, by the incident of Mary's anointing Jesus with perfume and wiping his feet with her hair. It was at their home in Bethany, then, that Jesus could take his sandals off and put his feet up. It was here in Bethany, after a hard day's work of healing the sick and restoring sight to the blind, he could come to "chill" --- away from curious crowds and meddlesome Pharisees. Now given the proximity of Bethany and Jesus' affection for Lazarus' family there, it is clear that Jesus could have responded without delay to the news of Lazarus' illness. Yet he seems to succumb to an uncharacteristic procrastination. But actually, he knew (as the obtuse disciples could not grasp) that he was on a particular mission "so that the Son of God may be glorified." So by the time Jesus and his disciples arrive in Bethany, the sick Lazarus had been dead for four days --- a significant detail since there was a Jewish belief that when anyone died the soul of the dead person lingered in the vicinity of the body for three days. By the fourth day, there was no longer any possibility that the soul would reenter the body and any recovery take place. Lazarus, therefore, wasn't just dead. He was dead and gone!
Upon his arrival at Bethany, Jesus is first greeted by the Type-A, frenetic Martha, who immediately complains to Jesus that he had come too late. He then gives her a mini-course in the theology of the Resurrection. Duly enlightened, and a little chastened, Martha then calls her sister. Mary registers the same complaint with Jesus as Martha had, namely that had he been there, Lazarus would not have died, but Jesus, seeing her wailing, responds not to her theological misunderstanding but to her grief. John tells us that Jesus is deeply moved and troubled in spirit. He asks her "Where have you laid him?" And when Mary invites the Lord to follow him to the tomb, John tells us, "Jesus began to weep."
But if we look carefully at what Jesus does when he arrives at the tomb, we see that he engages in what we might call a minimalist approach to miracle-working. He does as little as possible. First, he commands the stone to be rolled away. Our first reaction is that the Miracle-worker could have done that himself, but he seems to want to involve the community in this particular miracle. Second, he rebukes Martha --- again. This time, the ever pragmatic woman warns Jesus that there would be an odor after four days. Or as the King James Version bluntly put it, "By now he stinketh." But Jesus reminds her: "Didn't I tell you that you would see the glory of God?" Next, we notice that when the stone is removed, Jesus doesn't enter the tomb rouse the dead Lazarus. Jesus does not try to shake him out of his sleep of death. Jesus does not even touch the dead man. Jesus, instead, stands outside the tomb, and summons Lazarus to come forth. There is a tacit question here, reminiscent of his spoken question ("Do you want to be healed?") to the paralytic at the side of the pool at Bethesda: Jesus seems to be asking the dead man: "Do you want to live?" Lazarus silently responds to the summons, and emerges (since he is bound hand and foot he probably hobbles) from the tomb, wrapped up like a mummy in his smelly grave clothes. And once he expresses that desire to live, indeed to live again, Jesus commands: "Unbind him and let him go." Again, he enlists the aid of the community. It is Jesus' wish that that he be loosed by the very people among whom he would walk again as a living being.
My sisters and brothers in Christ, it is always Jesus' wish that we have life and have it abundantly. That is his wish for each and every one of us, but it is also his wish for his Body, the Church. And it is the church that is foreshadowed in this story of Lazarus and his fellow townspeople from Bethany. The church, ekklesia, literally means a community that is called out. God did not call the church into existence once and for all at Pentecost. God continues, in every age, to call us out. And Jesus continually asks us, "Do you, Church, wish to flourish?" Or as the Prophet Ezekiel asks in his morning's lesson, "Can these bones live?"
Now preachers are admittedly a presumptuous lot, but it would be really outrageous for me to look out on the hundreds of people assembled here on this fifth Sunday in Lent, in this thriving parish in the midst of this bustling metropolis and declare that the church is dead or even dying. But you know that Paris isn't France. Prophets of doom are thick on the ground. Some say the church's bones have atrophied; others that they are brittle; and still others have diagnosed that full-blown osteoporosis has set in. Their slogans are varied but the message is the same. "The revisionists are holding the church captive." "They have abandoned the faith once delivered to the saints." "They have rewritten the Bible to suit their own needs." "They condone gross immorality." As a result, say such pundits, the faithful --- the so-called orthodox --- are leaving the church in droves, taking their money with them, and are organizing the "true" church, which, at last count, had at least a dozen branches! I put to you this morning that it is precisely because of your numbers, your resources and your spiritual health that you are called upon to assist our Lord in the miracle of resurrecting his church.
First, you must roll away the stones behind which the church is all too content to entomb itself. One of the heaviest stones will be the stone of Biblical fundamentalism, with its selective picking-and-choosing, a practice which enables certain people to declare that certain verses of Scripture --- and their interpretations of them --- are chiseled in stone for all time (such as a handful of texts that purport to condemn homosexual behavior) while others, for example, on divorce, are deemed to be culturally conditioned. Peter Gomes, just across the river from here, has rightly stated that too often, people look to the Bible as neither a moral compass nor spiritual guide, but as a place to find justification for the positions they already hold.
The stone of prejudice must also be removed. It is not coincidental that a rector who is fed up with the Episcopal Church and has sought to place his parish under the jurisdiction of an African bishop, has stated that the church has been in a state of decline since the civil rights movement! Decline, to him, is equated with redressing injustices against racial minorities, women and homosexual persons. And speaking of Africa, isn't it interesting that members of the so-called orthodox party warmly and enthusiastically embrace Africans, with whom they presumably share theological views, yet their membership on this side of the Atlantic is almost entirely bereft of African Americans?
We must also roll away the stone of apathy. It has been suggested that the worst "ism" in our society is neither racism nor sexism, but somnambulism ---- sleepwalking! We can ill afford to assume that the church will always be here for us in the same way that it has always been --- a "shelter from the stormy blast, and our eternal home." The church is under siege, and we must fight to preserve her.
But having rolled away the stones, our real work is to unbind the church and let her go. What is tying the church down? I think that it is tied down in a slavish deference to legalism. The problem with Anglicanism today is that it has ceased to be guided by covenant, but instead is guided by contract. All of a sudden it has a profound reverence for and reliance on laws --- Biblical, constitutional, canonical --- that would put Pharisees to shame. As a result, there are those who are seeking to establish new structures --- dioceses and provinces ---- not based on geography but on ideology. They would thus become spiritual ghettoes where everyone presumably thinks, acts and speaks the same. In so doing, there has been an attempt, for example, to remove the American and Canadian churches from the Anglican Consultative Council, so that that body won't be "tainted" by a North American presence.
I don't remember much from my seminary education, really ---- a smattering of Greek and a few historical dates, perhaps, but I do remember what our dean said to the senior class: "Gentlemen," (which shows how long ago I went to seminary) "if you must appeal to the canons to lend authority to your role as rector, you have already lost the battle, and probably the war." In other words, if you must demand instead of command respect, if you cannot lead based on mutual trust, you are in trouble. The church is caught up in legal and canonical conundrums, and we must loose her from a growing sense of distrust. It is a sad day, for example, when at a meeting of the Primates of the Anglican Communion, they are forced to have evensong because certain primates don't wish to receive communion at the same table as others!
The Church may not be dead, but it is experiencing little deaths. We can understand that if we look at our own lives, in which we experience deaths and losses every day. Relationships with those closest to us crumble, our trust in each other erodes. And like the decomposed body of Lazarus, it stinks! Jesus presents us with a radical new way of looking at things. Even in death, he says, with its finality and stench, we can see the glory of God. He tells us that if we believe in what we see, then we submit to the power of death --- but if we believe in Whom we see, "death," as St. Paul tells us, "is swallowed up in victory." We are not saved once and for all, at 4:22p.m. Thursday afternoon. We are works in progress, and this is why we return to the altar week by week to bring "our selves, our souls and bodies" to be refreshed, renewed, and given new life. Jesus summons us to come forth from our respective tombs of despair, cynicism, and distrust, to be the church once again, "to bring her bud to glorious flower."
With your indulgence, I would like to share with you a vision of the church based on a childhood reminiscence. I grew up in the Diocese of Long Island, and every year in the spring, all the Sunday School children from throughout the Diocese converged on the Cathedral in Garden City for a humongous picnic. We arrived by the busload with our Sunday School teachers and our be cassocked priests. After we had fared sumptuously, we all assembled on the south lawn of the Cathedral grounds, and on the Cathedral porch was enthroned James Pernette De Wolfe, bishop of Long Island, and "last of the great prince prelates," weighed down in a cope and mitre made of cloth of gold, a jewel-encrusted crosier held at his side by his perpetual deacon. The Bishop would rehearse the catechism: "What is your name?" "Who gave you this name?" "What is your bounden duty and service as a member of the Church?" and so on. And when he was convinced that we were sufficiently grounded in the faith, he rose, which was our signal to hit the deck. And then he intoned the pontifical blessing, which was broadcast by loudspeaker throughout the grounds, after which he would lead us in a rousing chorus of "Onward, Christian soldiers." We marched back to our picnic tables where our Sunday School teachers were waiting with huge scoops of ice cream!
This, my brothers and sisters, was the faith, pure and undefiled! Through these experiences I learned that I am part of a great community of the faithful in the church militant and the church triumphant. I learned that with that membership came responsibility. I learned that "membership has its rewards," but I also learned that church can be fun! We have lost sight of that fact as we take ourselves far too seriously, forgetting that the church, which has only been entrusted to us, is actually God's. May we have the courage to unbind the church from the grip in which we hold her, and let her go!
Let us pray:
Lo! The hosts of evil round us scorn thy Christ, assail his ways!
From the fears that long have bound us free our hearts to faith
and praise;
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the living of these days!
Hymn 595, stanza 2.