Service on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/100064617886792/videos/26536097465983178
I have been listening to Jeremy Renner’s memoir that he wrote after he was crushed by a snow cat in January 2023. There are several horrific pages where he tells the story recounts what it was like being under the six steel pointed treaded wheels of this snow plow as they rolled over his body. It is horrific. And I’m more than halfway through and more than a week past the accident and I feel like he’s too inspiring and all I really want him to do is have a bad day. Just one fleeting thought that says my body hurts today and I don’t want to do physical therapy. Or maybe I should take an extra day and rest instead of doing everything to push my body to heal as quickly as possible because honestly he could, I think, do more damage along the way, but what do I know? There’s a lot of privilege and having a lot of money to purchase all equipment you would need to recover brought into your home, but that’s neither here nor there.
He doesn’t speak of a particular religious belief or a god so far at least, but he does write about that this experience, one that for a moment at least literally killed him, taught him that the only thing that really matters is love the love he has for his family or his daughter or love that kept him motivated breathing when his body wouldn’t do it on its own. The love that was given to him from his family and his friends that surrounded him on his most injured days and on all of those days he got up kept working toward recovery anyway.
I am not an expert in near-death experiences, but I think they can take more than one shape or experience. I’ve talked about Kate Bowler before, she wrote about her own near-death experience of being told by doctors and believing them that the cancer was untreatable and would kill her only to find out later. It was the one kind of this one kind of cancer that could be treated, maybe. Among the many things she does now is a podcast where she interviews people and often they have near-death experiences like the rabbi who looked into the casket of his father and saw himself in 20-30 years. He realized this was what his children were going to see. His mortality was in his face, the face of his father. And the retired theologian in his 90s who has lived and grieved the death of loved ones and facing his own mortality and limited time left on this plain, theoretically closer to death than the rest of us, than me.
For Kate, for the people that she interviews for those who have experiences near death or near death experiences for many of them, it fundamentally changes them changes of focus. It changes a perception of the world. It changes how they interact with people, their family.
And I’m certain we could say the same for us. Whether it is our own or a loved one’s sickness, accident or death, we are changed by it. Mary and Martha would have been changed by the illness and the death of Lazarus.
Here’s one of the hard things when it comes to resurrection in general, and the resurrection of Lazarus, and as Jesus is describing it because whatever illness Lazarus had was in fact fatal, one of the hard things is that Lazarus is going to die again. We start left with Ash Wednesday remembering that we are mortal and finite and fragile creatures and we too shall someday shuffle off our mortal coil.
So it isn’t that as the resurrection we are going to live in this bodily form forever.
And when Martha says about believing in the resurrection in the last days, Jesus seems to almost disagree with her that what he means isn’t what she’s saying.
Jesus spends all of his time in this gospel concerned about the darkness and the light of this world and the empires of this world and the Empire of God and about relationship and community in this world. And so, despite what we may have been told all of our lives, despite what everybody says, the meaning is, maybe Jesus isn’t talking about some idealized heaven exclusively but Jesus is talking about something more, something a little different.
We are always struggling with understanding our faith as individuals and as a collective, particularly in our time and space where we don’t really have a good understanding of collective union living, even in the church. Most people live in a way in which they are out for themselves or at the very least living isolated from their neighbors.
But the Christianity was never meant to be about our individual selves, it wasn’t about your own personal salvation or Jesus, like scripture wasn’t intended to be an individual study, reflection, and discernment. But that’s not how we have been taught about Christianity, we have been raised in a culture, in an empire that thrives on individualism. There are whole histories that explain how this shift happened, but some of them include the empire, the oligarchy and political powers of this world made moves to shift the church from union to individual.
This is all to say, that perhaps we focus too much on this idea of eternal life, of our own salvation, to the detriment of understanding the collective society that Jesus lived in… and calls us to. All our translations seem to say “believe,” those who believe in Christ; but it would be a fair translation to say trust, those who trust in Jesus, the Christ. It takes it from something that you can claim as a cognitive assertion to something that requires a relationship and time and action. It isn’t about a prayer you pray as an individual but the relationship you have with God revealed in Christ and with creation.
We are made in the image of the eternal God invited to live and follow the ways of the eternal wisdom and word came to live among us. Show us how to live in this world well to love this world to live as love in this world. We are invited into eternity living in the way we are invited into a relationship and that relationship doesn’t end with death. Just like the love you have for those loved and died. Doesn’t go away.
Jesus’ love for Lazarus, relationship with Lazarus didn’t go away because Lazarus died. It didn’t end in death. Not this time. And though he would die again, someday, he will still live in that relationship with God. It doesn’t end. And that is a new way of living. Trusting Christ, living in Christ, living in relationship with Christ, living in community with God and creation–not centered on ourselves, but in mutual support, whole and abundant living, eternity living for all. In that way, in our living and loving and trusting, we live more in Christ, like Christ, reveal Christ.
And Lazarus follows Jesus, he doesn’t stay home with Jesus but is with him in these final days of his life. And Mary, if it’s Mary the Magdalene, she’ll be at Jesus’ last dinner and she’ll know something is about to change, and she knows she has changed, and she’ll be at the cross when he dies, and she’ll be in the garden when he raises himself to life.
Lives are changed in light of the trust in Christ.
But for them to really see it this day, Lazarus had to die first. I would like to think there is another way, but the story doesn’t give it to us.
Sometimes, things need to die for us to really life. It’s worked into our symbol of Baptism and how we talk about new life. Any time you say yes to something, you’re saying no to something else, isn’t that letting something die?
The Rev. Dr. Stephen Ray Jr. was given a long introduction during a webinar with a list of impressive jobs, callings, positions, and books. He was also one of my seminary professors. The webinar was related to LGBT folks and White Christian Nationalism. (clip used approximately: 30:00-35:00 https://youtu.be/4toUCT1emyE?si=vAMrgvdMNagk4zf8)
There aren’t very many people who could say, essentially, the protestant church is dying and maybe that’s a good thing and not fill me with… horror, but I trust Dr Ray. Maybe there are things about the protestant church that need to die so that Christ can be revealed in us in new ways. What do we as a church need to let de, need to let go of, trusting in Jesus that the relationship of the body of Christ isn’t really at risk, what do we need to die so that Christ might live more fully through this community, through love, through mutual aid through showing up, through making space, through taking risks, standing and speaking up for the vulnerable. building intentional and woven relationships with all of creation, because we are called to live in community.
Sometimes it is with great grief and relief, the loss of Ladies’ Fellowship took years. Their good work echoes through the decades of this community and is missed, has been missed, will be missed, but will also make room for Christ to be revealed in new ways with time and energies directed in new ways and new opportunities for others to share their gifts and talents and maybe even baked goods.
It’s letting die the old images of God, of white Jesus. It’s letting die what we have always assumed the place of the church in the world: the defaultness of it, the power, privilege, the assumed good will while still running the vulnerable out of town for the image of purity.
And it is trust in the one who shows up and holds the power of life, re-newed life, abundant life.
Do you trust this? That in living and dying there is Christ, there is life. Let us cling to that, let us see what Christ will do with life.