We had another close encounter the other night. Maybe she's learning how to dodge it a bit, this being the third one in three years. For when our dog, Lucy, takes a direct hit from a skunk she is truly the most miserable of creatures. This was limited to a glancing blow in the right shoulder area.
But back to the main point: there's life out there...living things with incredible ability to survive and thrive, even through inhospitable winters. Birds, that coyote that you sometimes see wandering the neighborhoods...on and on.
Perhaps that's why when death comes it is usually a surprise. As persistent as life is, death must also be persistent too, intruding as it does on such prolific tendency.
So these forces stand at odds. And it's what's at the core of this story. It brings life and death in such close proximity. And as they're brought together sorrow and despair and hope and courage are faced.
The emotions of the story draw us in. In fact you can track the story by the unfolding emotions. All of these stories we've been reading from John during our Lenten Sundays are long. But let me summarize the opening... Mary, Martha, Lazarus are siblings - brothers and sisters. And out of concern Mary and Martha send a message to Jesus that their brother is ill. That's the first emotion: concern. Jesus receives the news and in spite of that stays two days longer where he is. But John tells us that Jesus loved Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. After these two days Jesus says it's time to go to Judea again to pay the family a visit. The disciples respond with the third emotion: fear. They say, "Rabbi, they were just about to stone you, and you're going there again?" Jesus affirms hope not just for Lazarus but for his mission of bringing light. The disciple's response is simple resignation. Thomas says, a bit sarcastically, "Let us go, that we may die with him." Concern, love, fear, hope, resignation...all the feelings at the opening of this story, coming out of the various perspectives.
Finally Jesus arrives and finds Lazarus in the tomb. Martha and Mary are being consoled in their loss by friends. Martha is happy to see Jesus in spite of her loss. Mary is the one who is deeply consumed by her sorrow...a sorrow that's contagious. She's weeping, her friends are weeping, and at the sight of them the high point of emotion is reached: Jesus himself weeps. It's the shortest verse in scripture: "Jesus wept."
All this emotion is packed into these events that lead up to Jesus positioning himself before the tomb, calling Lazarus forth: life taking charge over death. Jesus' words ring out so loud and clear that even death can't ignore him. "Lazarus, come out!" he shouts. And one final emotion must claim us all in this story: wonder and awe!
I suppose it is our tendency to keep life and death apart. It seems better that way...or at least is a way of keeping the emotions at bay. For if we stay in the neutral zone we can occupy ourselves and insulate ourselves.
But then it intrudes. We catch a word from the news. College students, children, shootings in stores... I won't go further with the list, because you know it and have heard it. This isn't the news, after all. But I do need to check in with you... Is it just me, or can you remember another time when these rare events...and we have known them before...but did they ever before begin to be so common and come so often? So much so that we've become desensitized to it?
And I know...if we do talk about it, we may be drawn in emotionally. It may even bring us to tears. But I'm sure it brings God to tears.
What to do? Do we keep our distance, keep those emotions at bay? Do we open ourselves fully to it, and perhaps be overwhelmed, unable to respond?
Or what about a third way...a way that acknowledges the pain and yet doesn't give up on hope? And isn't this the place, isn't the church the place where help each other struggle most fully with these things? Isn't it in the church, and in the stories of the church that death and life are brought together, as well as meaning and purpose, as well as hopelessness and promise, brokenheartedness and joy...where we acknowledge that Jesus cried...and sometimes we cry, and yet continue to believe that hope is possible.
I have a Presbyterian colleague who lovingly refers to his denomination as the frozen chosen. And then there was Archie Bunker's constant advice to Edith, "Aw, stifle it, Edith!" Coach Tom Hanks advised his female players in A League of Their Own that there's no crying in baseball. But remarkably it was his players who reopen him to his own emotions in the story. If we don't feel deeply the pain, insulating ourselves, can we also feel fully the hope?
I'm going to take you back...maybe even back before you remember. Once upon a time there was a democratic Senator from Maine who ran for President and then became the Secretary of State for Carter. Remember his name? Edmund Muskie. On the web you can find his career summarized in a few words: "In the presidential election of 1968 he was the vice-presidential candidate for the Democrats, and in 1972 he ran for president against the Republican incumbent, Richard Nixon. He withdrew from the 1972 race early on after it was perceived that he had wept while defending his wife." (http://www.answers.com/topic/edmund-muskie)
In a way I find that a sad epitaph - not for him, but for us. That we as a society would be so intolerant of emotion, so demanding that people keep their composure, even if it's a dishonest composure, that even when tears might be appropriate we reject the person who sheds them.
Jesus' sympathy for Mary is a tell-tale sign for us of what it means to follow Jesus. It may open us to tears. Sympathy and tenderness for one another isn't rejected in the Church. And it's not just accepted or tolerated. It is part of what binds us together. Remember the old hymn...blest be the tie that binds? "And often for each other flows the sympathizing tear?"
May the Church be a place where we do not fear our emotions, but embrace them, find the freedom to express them...and continue to hope in the promises of God. Is there pain? How can there not be? Maybe we need to talk more rather than less about its source. Maybe Darfur ought to be on our minds, a topic of conversation each day. But along with the sorrow, let us also work hopefully believing that newness, even resurrection is possible. It's our calling.
Let us pray,
O God who knows what sorrow feels like through the life of Jesus, allow us also to feel...to feel the pain that is real, to wonder at injustice, to never mistake tenderness for weakness. Let us be the community of Jesus Christ where we can dare to speak because we always dare to hope. Amen.
Note - Some of the basis of this sermon, including the reference to Edumnd Muskie is derived from a newsletter article from the Union Church Communicator, March 31, 1996, by Rev. Chuck Mize.