Sunday, November 19, 2017

This Week's Sermon: "I Learned that Love Remains," John 11:38-44

John 11:38-44

Jesus was deeply disturbed again when he came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone covered the entrance. 39 Jesus said, “Remove the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said, “Lord, the smell will be awful! He’s been dead four days.” 40 Jesus replied, “Didn’t I tell you that if you believe, you will see God’s glory?” 41 So they removed the stone. Jesus looked up and said, “Father, thank you for hearing me. 42 I know you always hear me. I say this for the benefit of the crowd standing here so that they will believe that you sent me.” 43 Having said this, Jesus shouted with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” 44 The dead man came out, his feet bound and his hands tied, and his face covered with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Untie him and let him go.” (Common English Bible)



“Reconnecting with a Loving Church: Healing Spiritual Wounds,” Week Nine



If you remember from my message to you two weeks ago, I shared with you about my first-ever God experience, which ultimately put me on the path that I remain on today: as an ordained minister of the Christian Church. But there is an aftermath to that story that is important for me to tell as well.



The sanctuary that served as the backdrop for that God moment would reappear again in my life, right as I was about to enter into all of yours. I started my ministry here in mid-September of 2011, and my final Sunday before I officially began here was actually September 11, the tenth anniversary of 9/11, which that year fell on a Sunday. I took that weekend to fly home to Kansas City to preach with one of my childhood friends—herself also now an ordained Disciples pastor—at our old congregation. It was the last time I have ever been to that church that I was raised in.



The reason our services were required to preach on so emotionally and spiritually difficult a Sunday was because that loving, socially just congregation was in the midst of what became a massive schism that permanently splintered it over several years’ worth of accusations. It was incredibly painful to witness take place, but doubly so as I was just beginning my work here, in my first full-time call after my ordination and graduation from seminary.



In the end, I had to be able to let all of that go if I was going to truly be able to focus on you the way I had been called to—and the way that any congregation deserves. That letting go, that unbinding of myself to the pain now associated with such an integral part of my past, it was a surrender but it was also a liberation. Which is the entire crux of Carol’s epilogue, and of, I believe, the raising of Lazarus from the grave.



This has been a sermon series for the autumn season of our church calendar that has taken us almost all the way to Advent—when I return to the pulpit on Sunday, December 3, it will be the first Sunday of Advent! Earlier this year, my friend and role model, the pastor and author Carol Howard Merritt, released her latest book, entitled Healing Spiritual Wounds. She wrote it from a place of vulnerability that I rarely see from any writer—Christian or otherwise—in print, and she did so, I think, in order to give her readers permission to be vulnerable to the singular reality that sometimes, church hurts.



If that sounds like a depressing premise upon which to base a book, much less a sermon series, it ought not be. As Jesus says in John 8, you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. The truth is that the church can do a better job caring for, and ministering to, each other and the vulnerable, yet so often, we choose not to. Acknowledging that fact ought to be liberating to us because it means that a) we do not have to pretend otherwise, and b) we can actually get down to the sacred work of doing church better than we have before. Which is what we should have been doing from the off—always working on being better and doing church together.



We end this series with an excerpt taken from the epilogue of Carol’s book—the very last words she writes, in fact, about the aftermath of her father’s death and funeral:



Sleeping became something I no longer did on purpose. It overtook and captured me at odd hours; then it left me, abandoned. I lived in a fog of irritability and forgetfulness. Tears flowed at awkward times, unbidden and unwanted. Friends prayed for me, and for the first time, prayer felt like palpable sustenance. I was getting through the days by consuming others’ hopes and yearnings for me.



Later I realized I had not forgiven my father. It was when I read the passage of Lazarus and heard Jesus thundering, “Unbind him, and let him go.” The words echoed through me. My resentments had bound me to my father, even in his death. I had been afraid that without them, there would be nothing left of our relationship—nothing there to bind us. So I had secretly nursed discontent and an unwillingness to forgive. But then I heard that command of Jesus, booming through generations until it called up death itself: “Unbind him.”



So I unfurled the linen pieces and peeled off the bandages. I gave the wounds air to breathe. I unbound him from my bitterness and acridity. As I let each piece go, I learned that love remains.



The letting go of just about anything—even things we claim we want to let go of—is an incredibly difficult thing for most of us. Sometimes, it’s involuntary: post-traumatic stress may mean that we relive it, or an illness or injury may mean we live it. But other times, it is simply because emotional and spiritual antidotes to emotional and spiritual poisons often take lots of time to eventually work.



That may seem an odd pronouncement to make upon a passage that concerns an earthly death—that of Lazarus—and the subsequent earthly resurrection, but it ought not. As is the case in so many Gospel stories, there is a proxy within the story for the audience hearing it. And that proxy, in John 11, is Lazarus himself.



Think about it: when Jesus calls out to Lazarus in the tomb, “Come out!” it could just as easily be any of us ensconced away in a cubby of rock and sand. We die in sin, and we are called forth from that death into eternal life by God, through Jesus Christ. Lazarus is dead, but in his death, we too are dead. Similarly, Lazarus lives, and in his living, we too are alive.



That is why it is so important that it takes Jesus four days to arrive after Lazarus’s death. On a more fundamental level, there can be no doubt that Lazarus is indeed deceased—as the traditional prose of this story would put it, “Lord, he doth stinketh!” But it also goes to show that sometimes, the antidote to the poison does not always take effect immediately. And our antidotes to our own pains and hurts and ills do not always hit us right away. Sometimes it takes months, years, or even decades to begin to truly unbind ourselves from our graveclothes, as Lazarus does at Christ’s command of “Unbind him, and let him go.” That is partly why, for instance, it takes decades for a victim of sexual assault to finally come forward, or why it takes years to achieve catharsis with an estranged relative. It is also why it is so painful to see pastors, of all people, denigrating the stories of victims now, because we really ought to know better.



Jesus is similarly commanding you to not only emerge from the tomb, but to be unbound of the trappings that bind you to death. And it is not always so simple a thing as to say so. Lazarus presumably needed help in loosening himself from his own shroud, which is why Jesus is commanding others to help him by unbinding him. To accept that help from others in loosening yourself from your shroud is no sin; on the contrary, it is a holy command from Jesus.



It is hard to ask for that, though. We are raised on a steady diet of do-it-yourselfness, even as we realize in at least some reptilian part of our cerebral cortex that no person is an island, that everyone at some point is going to need help, and that one day, that someone who needs help is going to be us.



The church has so very often not provided that help, or even actively done harm in the place of that help when it is asked of us. To repent of that legacy—to women, to LGBTQ people, to people of color—that can be a part of the antidote to our own poison.



And in your own life, individually, the poison you carry from hurtful people who have injected it into your life—the antidote to that may well exist. I cannot tell you how fast it is supposed to work, because the extraction of such poison cannot happen on anyone’s timetable but yours and God’s.



But what I can tell you, from my own experience, is that while it can take years, the liberation that comes—if it ever does—is very much worth the wait. Because for me, I knew it came from God, even when it took some time at a moment in my life when I absolutely needed stability and to be grounded to start this brand new work, instead of feeling left out to sea like I was.

But that freedom did come from God. And before that, everything else sort of fades off into the background.



And whatever else you may have taken from this lengthy sermon series, I hope that you are able to take that singular truth: that from God, our wholeness and healing comes. And that before God, love always remains.



May you too find the balms to the past hurts which ail you. May we find them together. And may, at long last, they make you whole before yourself, just as you already are made whole before God.



Thanks be to God. Amen.



Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington 
November 19, 2017

Sunday, November 5, 2017

This Week's Sermon: "Being Born Again," John 3:1-9

John 3:1-9

There was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a Jewish leader. 2 He came to Jesus at night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one could do these miraculous signs that you do unless God is with him.” 3 Jesus answered, “I assure you, unless someone is born anew, it’s not possible to see God’s kingdom.” 4 Nicodemus asked, “How is it possible for an adult to be born? It’s impossible to enter the mother’s womb for a second time and be born, isn’t it?” 5 Jesus answered, “I assure you, unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, it’s not possible to enter God’s kingdom. 6 Whatever is born of the flesh is flesh, and whatever is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Don’t be surprised that I said to you, ‘You must be born anew.’ 8 God’s Spirit blows wherever it wishes. You hear its sound, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it is going. It’s the same with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” 9 Nicodemus said, “How are these things possible?” (Common English Bible)



“Reconnecting with a Loving God: Healing Spiritual Wounds,” Week Eight

Some of you know this about me. Many of you may not. But to understand why I even am a pastor, why I take so much meaning from my life’s work of ministering in the name of Jesus Christ, you need to hear this story.

Back in high school, I was scheduled to preach at my home congregation the day after my senior prom on the Good Shepherd passage in John 10. It was a very challenging sermon for me to write because I used it to share about a little boy named Reese I used to supervise at a day camp. One day in the summer of 2002, I spent the entire day with him and his camp class at the American Royal rodeo. The very next day, he went on a lake trip with his adoptive parents and while swimming in the lake, drowned and died. I had spent so much time with this child on the last full day of his life, and years later, I wanted to talk about how Jesus had shepherded me through that.

But the night of my senior prom (or, really, early in the morning), we got that two-in-the-morning phone call that no family ever wants to get. The son of a family friend, coincidentally also named Eric, had been in a car accident, wasn’t wearing a seat belt, and was killed almost instantly.

I was still supposed to preach, though, obviously—even though I would now be doing so on an hour-and-a-half of sleep and in a state of shock and grief.

As I was preaching during the 11:00 am worship service, I couldn’t get my lapel mic to work—I think I had accidentally muted it—and I was absolutely exhausted, no energy, no voice, nothing. Then the sun came out from behind the clouds and shone through the skylights in our sanctuary’s ceiling so that the sunlight fell right on me, like through a magnifying glass.

My temperature erupted, I could feel the gooseflesh on my skin, and I regained my voice. I vaguely remember some of what I said, but I am told that it was lovely. It was, for me, like the Pentecost story—a light came down from the heavens and enabled me to speak so that I was understood, even as I was grieving. I knew that if I could preach in such circumstances, I could preach in any circumstance. So I became a new thing that morning, from a teenager to a minister in formation.

That was my first of a couple of mystical God experiences, what we might call a born-again experience, except that being born again tends to carry a specific connotation, of living an exciting life of sin, then finding Jesus and becoming a boring ol’ Christian! But can it mean even more?

This is a sermon series for the autumn season of our church calendar that takes us all the way to Advent. Earlier this year, my friend and role model, the pastor and author Carol Howard Merritt, released her latest book, entitled Healing Spiritual Wounds. She wrote it from a place of vulnerability that I rarely see from any writer—Christian or otherwise—in print, and she did so, I think, in order to give her readers permission to be vulnerable to the singular reality that sometimes, church hurts.

If that sounds like a depressing premise upon which to base a book, much less a sermon series, it ought not be. As Jesus says in John 8, you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. The truth is that the church can do a better job caring for, and ministering to, each other and the vulnerable, yet so often, we choose not to. Acknowledging that fact ought to be liberating to us because it means that a) we do not have to pretend otherwise, and b) we can actually get down to the sacred work of doing church better than we have before. Which is what we should have been doing from the off—always working on being better and doing church together.

We began this series with a passage from Carol’s first chapter, “A Tree Grows in My Bedroom,” and then we heard passages from the following chapters: “Finding Shalom,” “Healing Our Image of God,” “Recovering Our Emotions,” “Redeeming Our Broken Selves,” “Reclaiming Our Bodies,” and last week, “Reclaiming Our Hope.” This week, we arrive at the last full chapter of the book, “Being Born Again,” before ending this series later this month with the book’s epilogue. In “Being Born Again,” Carol writes of her own mystical experience as a youth, and described the lead up to it:

The first time I rejected the model of Christianity I learned throughout my whole life was during the summer before I graduated from Moody. I was home in the Florida humidity that coaxed the corners of the grass-cloth paper to curl off the walls. Seeing the paper reminded me of the sacrifices that my parents made. They went without air-conditioning in the Florida heat to pay for my Bible school.

I was thankful for my parents and for the many people who contributed to my education, but I had come to the realization that I could no longer drink from the same theological stream that they did. It was too poisonous for me. So I tried to appreciate the education for what it was: an opportunity that allowed me to grow spiritually. It offered me the chance to flourish in my own understanding of God.

I felt so out of place in the familiar living room. It shrank somehow, and my family had become different people. Of course, that wasn’t the case. The walls didn’t diminish. I had grown. My parents hadn’t morphed. I had.

Carol frames this mystical experience that follows as an expansion of her faith for her, beyond the strictures of assigned roles in the church, especially gender roles. And truthfully, that is what born again, mystical, God experiences—whatever you want to call them—ought to be able to do in part for the church: serve as a tonic against the strictness of having your role defined for you because of who you were born as, not who you were and are called to be.

The religious teacher Nicodemus comes to Jesus for a theological discussion, but it quickly becomes a one-sided teaching because Nicodemus cannot quite grasp what Jesus means when Jesus says one must be born anothen (in the Greek), which means “again,” but can also mean “from above.” Nicodemus takes this to be a literal, rather than spiritual, rebirthing, but it can just as easily mean a mystical rebirthing.

Birthing necessitates the feminine, because aside from those adorable little seahorses, giving birth is the realm of femininity. Jesus is using feminine imagery to describe this mystical experience of being born again, and the church’s own history is populated with a great many female mystics, from Hildegard of Bingen to Julian of Norwich.

So we hopefully ought to be able to look beyond the surface level optics of two men debating theology with one another to see both the femininity and the universality in what Jesus is trying to teach Nicodemus. He can experience being born again, and indeed, all of us can experience being born again. Even if you do not fit the stereotype of a called-and-redeemed sinner, you are still one, just as I am, and as such, you too can experience that birth from above, or that birth again—in whatever form it may take in your life. It need not be so dramatic as mine, or as Carol’s.

It needn’t even be as dramatic as Nicodemus’s, although there is more to it than meets the eye. Jesus is a carpenter from Nazareth (“Can anything good come from Nazareth?” is the joke in John 1), and Nicodemus is a religious teacher in Jerusalem. Yet in a sublime, if perhaps frustrating for Jesus, moment of role reversal, it is the blue-collar carpenter from somewhere north of nowhere who is educating the religious teacher. There is something good in that, and something mystical. Their previous roles count for little, and only the truth of God’s love matters.

The fruit of that experience of the truth of God’s love is borne at the end of John’s Gospel. The other three Gospels depict Joseph of Arimathea’s mission of mercy to ask Pontius Pilate permission to take the body of the crucified Christ and bury it as a solo endeavor, but in John’s Gospel, Joseph of Arimathea is joined by Nicodemus—indicating that perhaps, just perhaps, Nicodemus too had had a God experience by encountering Jesus Christ.

What is your mystical God experience? What in your life has made you born again, a new thing freed from the shackles of wrong expectations or unnecessary societal roles? What has liberated you to be who you are in Christ, not simply what you are to the world?

Because ironically, that is what the world needs. That is what the church needs. And it is what we all *most* need—to be set free in spirit and in truth to follow God and love each other with reckless abandon.

Unchained, unshackled, and free to pursue that following as God’s own child. And in so doing, may you too, were you not already, be born again in Christ.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
 
November 5, 2017