FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT
Ezekiel 37:12-14 | Romans 8:8-11 | John 11:1-45

By your help we beseech you, oh Lord our God.  May we walk eagerly in the same charity with which, out of love for the world, your Son handed himself over to death.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.

Today’s gospel completes the five major teachings we find in the season of Lent.  In the early church, these gospels were used, because people would be baptized on Easter, and so in a way, you could say that these were the gospels chosen for a person who was entering into a life with God would have to understand these before they could be baptized.  And they are powerful teachers.  And one of the things I want to start with is that we see very much the notion in these set of readings a progression of how we are to understand our faith, and by understanding it, I don’t mean figuring it out or describing it perfectly.  It’s a mysterious way of being in the world.  It’s mystical, and it starts off with just describing who it is that Jesus is, a human being filled with divinity who comes into the world, who pockets his divinity, in a sense, and then goes through a process that we all go through in order to fulfill our destiny here.  And Jesus’ destiny was to be there for other people, invite them into being who they really are. 

The Old Testament was very, very clear and, in a way, very over-simplified and not very complex about the way we would relate to God.  He will give us a rule, a law.  We will do everything he says; 613 laws pretty much covers everything you do during the day, so I know I’m doing what God wants when I follow his rules and regulations.  If I break those, he’ll punish me.  So I don’t want to be punished, so I have a motive to do what he wants, and then when I die, I will go and live with ⎯ the bosom of Abraham was what they thought, but let’s just say that they would go to a better place.  

It's not that simple, and so what does God reveal through Jesus?  He brings someone into the world who is God, and he does this by a miraculous birth so that we know that Jesus is not simply a human being but uniquely connected to God.  And what we’re taught throughout the New Testament is that Jesus is God, and of course that gets very confusing.  So back to my image of the danger of oversimplifying our religious life, our spiritual life as a simple choice between good and evil.  Jesus awakes in us a new nuance into the somewhat binary world that we live in, in that it’s not about good and evil.  It’s about darkness and light, truth and lies.  Interesting how different that makes things, because we look at this first story, and what we see in Jesus, the God/man ⎯ now, when I use the word even God, be careful, because the essence of God is not that he is a male father figure.  He’s not male; he’s not female; he’s not a dad.  He never named himself.   He only invited us to begin to know him by using images that we already knew and take them to a new level, but one of the things that’s interesting about God giving himself a name.  He said the best name that I think we should all think we are, and he says, “I am.  Who am I?  I am who I am.”  

So let’s take this image of Jesus coming into the world, who is fully human, fully divine.  The union between the two is the major teaching of this set of readings.  God is not separate from you.  He is in you, and he is not a male figure who’s a daddy, but he is being  fulness.  He is being.  And when you look at yourself ⎯ I don't know if you do this, but I look in the mirror, and I say, “Well, I was a young man.  Now I’m an old man.”  So my image of myself is I’m an old man.  Or do I think I’m a white man, therefore I’m not a black man, I’m different or that I’m short or tall or whatever?  Think of it.  We have a label for ourselves that is so limiting and really kind of insane when we look at what God is trying to say to us.  It’s that every one of us is a reflection of who God is.  We all participate in beingness of being human.  To see each other as human beings created by God, filled with Spirit would do away with all kinds of racism and illusions and lies that we’re told about other people.  So we start off with an image then of what it means to be human.  We’re human and divine, and then we think about, “Well, what are we here for?  To obey everything that God tells us?”  No, Jesus reveals to his disciples on that second Sunday, we’re here to be enlightened, to be the fulfillment of the Old Testament and not just to be enlightened but to be a light that enlightens other people.  Darkness is illusion, is lies.  We lie about who we are.  We lie about other people.  We lie about what the world ⎯ the world will tell us things about itself.  It’s not the world.  The world is a place for beings to exist and to be engaged in a relationship with one another so intimate and so connected that the only way we can sort of begin to describe that is that we are light.  And this light that is given to us, this truth of who we are is like a lifegiving water inside of us.  We thirst for it.  We long for it.  When we see ourselves as isolated and separated and less than or more than, we’re in an illusion, in a lie, and none of that satisfies us.  What does satisfy us?  And so we’re told that what God has come to do in our life is to give us this understanding, this lifegiving water, which then opens our eyes, and when our eyes are open, the gospel today makes so much more sense.  Then we have life.

Look at the first reading.  Way back in the Old Testament, God was using these images of light and life.  He’s looking at the Israelite people, and he’s saying, “You live in your humanity.  You think you’re human.  That’s all you think you are, a person, but you’re so much more than that.  And what I want to do is pour something into you, an awareness, a Spirit of understanding, a kind of wisdom that you, when you’re only human, you are like dried up bones in graves.  You’re not really fully alive.  So what I want for you to be is more in tune with the fact that I’m putting my Spirit in you.”  He said it at the very beginning.  “I’m putting my Spirit in you.”  

Then the second reading is Paul talking about living in the Spirit.  God lives in you.  God lived in Jesus.  Jesus is the model.  God lives in us.  If you see that, you’ll see life and light.  So today’s readings are really wonderfully in ⎯ how would I say this?  They have the quality of awakening us to something that is so essential, and if you look at all five of these gospels, you can’t miss it.  And so what is Jesus doing?  He is doing the very thing that human beings are made to do.  We are ⎯ we are beings made to bring life into other beings, and that life is something that is absolutely indestructible.  It never dies.  It never fades.  It always is there.  So once he’s opened the eyes of the blind and seeing God more clearly who he is, we see him as the one who destroys death.  There is no more darkness.  Only there is always light in darkness.  Notice the difference between the image of good and bad and light and darkness, because light can life in darkness.  You can light a match around a circle of people in total darkness, and you see they are enlightened, but there’s still darkness all around them.  The world is filled with light and darkness, death and life.  And when Jesus is in this beautiful gospel, you see him, at one point, weeping.  The shortest line in scripture, “Jesus wept.”  He only wept two times in his life.  What did he weep over?  One was the temple, and one was this moment when everybody around him was wailing and crying, and the people that he loved the most, when he wasn’t there to accomplish the task that he hoped they would know he could do, they kept saying, “If you were just here, this wouldn’t have happened.”  Martha, “If you were just here, this wouldn’t have happened.”  And maybe his weeping and his deep ⎯ he was perturbed, which is a deep anxiety.  Maybe he’s just, as a human being, thinking, “They still haven’t gotten it.  I’ve been with them.  I’ve shown them this.  I’ve done all kinds of miracles.  They simply won’t look at it.  They can’t see it.”  And maybe he just felt the wave of, “It’s not going to work.”  As a human being, he could say that, because he’s human.  And so he shouts it.  He shouts out, “Lazarus, be a symbol for these people of who I am and what I am in them when they have me in them, and it’s you’re no longer tied up.”  I love the image at the end of this gospel when Jesus is looking at Lazarus, and he’s all wrapped up in all these kind of things.  And he doesn’t say, “Someone unwrap him.”  No, “Lazarus, you now are an image of who all these people are, and you have the ability to unwrap, untie all those things that keep you from being who you are.  You are a being.  You’re neither male or female or old or young or tall or short, and you connect with every other living being.”  Think of that.  Our destiny is to be belonging to one another.  How can we condemn or judge or criticize someone else when they are ourselves?  Why would Jesus say, “When you forgive your brother, you’re forgiving yourself?”  This oneness is the key message of the gospel, being conscious, aware.  I am who I am.  I am in everyone, and they are in me.  And in that process of that union and communion, we become, together, who God intended us to be, his body.  It’s called the church, not a building, not a denomination, but people filled with Spirit.  Amen.

Father, we so often don’t really see who you are, and we see religion as a burden, something that keeps us from being who we want to be or what we want to do.  Just free us from all the lies that we’ve been told about who you are and who we are so we can be free to truly enter into this communion, this union with you and with each other, with nature.  It’s what we’re made for.  It’s the only thing that can bring us the joy and the peace of the thing that you taught us to believe in called the kingdom of God.  Amen.