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
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