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He cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, His hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, And his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him! Let him go!” (John 11:43-44)
A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on Easter Sunday, March 23, 2008 Volume 2 Number 39 First United Methodist Church, 605 West 6th, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653
Bishop William Willimon tells the story of a friend who, usually complimentary of his sermons, didn’t say a word about his Easter morning sermon, even though the two spent the afternoon together. Finally, Willimon couldn’t resist asking, “How did you like the sermon today?”
“Fine, Will. The sermon was fine. But I confess that the sermon is rarely the main thing for me on Easter.”
“What is the main thing for you on Easter?”
“I always find music a bit more to the point of Easter. Easter strikes me as something not to be argued, reasoned out, or demonstrated. It’s something to be experienced, enjoyed, wondered at. So at Easter, the music of celebration seems more to the point.”
Thank you to our choir for an anthem “to the point” of Easter. You have stirred our hearts with the message of the resurrected Christ.
I really, really know what Willimon’s friend meant. I find it much easier during Lent than at Easter to assemble words for the teaching of classes and preaching of sermons. What can be said to add to this celebration of Christ’s resurrection, the light so focused on an empty tomb and so central to who we are as Christian persons. This is a celebration which seems best conveyed by music, by symbol, and by the reading of the gospel story itself. Easter seems, well, Something Other.
It’s the same in the Holy Land, by the way, and I find each time I return that each trip becomes a microcosm of the entire Christian year. I feel more equipped to say something worth hearing in Bethlehem where the Savior was born, or in Nazareth where he grew to be a man, or in the Galilee where Jesus called the fishers to fish for people, or in Jericho where he healed blind Bartimaeus, or in Gethsemane where he prayed and was betrayed and the Via Dolorosa where his agonies intensified. But when we come to the Garden Tomb, the place where we most powerfully remember the resurrection, staring at a 1st century tomb hewn into the rock standing open with the stone removed . . . the best guides learn to shut their mouth, to let the symbol of the empty tomb and the elements of Holy Communion which we share there to tell the story. This is the place, Easter is the place where guides fall silent, allowing awe and wonder to do their work.
I am, most assuredly, not a poet, yet occasionally I try writing something other than sermons, something with a bit more attention to poetic style structure than a usual sermon with its attention to story and narrative. This morning I share with you something I wrote a few years ago while at Subiaco, written one March evening while sitting on the balcony of my room at Coury House. I had been reading of St. Benedict’s Rule, which taught that each Benedictine monk should keep their momento mori, their “moment of death” before their eyes each day. It’s a thoroughly Lenten practice, to be sure, just as our forty days of Lent began in smeared ashes and the sobering words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” St. Benedict, it seems, intended to extend Lent to every day of the monk’s life.
This may seem a rather morbid exercise, but for those of the monastic order there is a wonderful paradox. The discipline of momento mori becomes not at all morbid, but the surging of a certain sense of aliveness. To keep one’s momento mori before one’s eyes is something on the order of Religious X-treme Sport. The popularity of X-treme Sports is found in what we might call the thrill of fear. While you and I may think that X-treme sports like BASE jumping (jumping from buildings, antennas, span, earth) are dangerous and unnecessary, others get the supreme rush – a sense of Aliveness to the moment not found in the ordinary, a moment of fear in which all the brain’s receptors are popping and all the nerve endings are tingling with the rush.
So I took a break from study that night, pausing to look over the valley to the distant mountains. I had been working with the Greek text of John 11:44, lusate auton, “Loose Him.” As I looked toward the distant hills and knew myself free to roam that vastness, it became something of a metaphor of life, and very clear that death’s fundamental character is one of Binding. From birth’s escape from the confinement of the womb, our life is like an expanding universe. At some point, though, that expansion reverses, life begins to contract, to revert back to being Bound. In this Binding there is suffering. In this Binding there is fear.
One of my closest friends in the early days of my ministry, hard to believe it’s been over 30 years ago, was Hal Brunson. Hal’s mind is among the sharpest I’ve ever known. He had a photographic memory, memorizing the New Testament before we graduated. We earned the same degrees, pastored the same churches, preached in joint conferences, even began a theological journal together called The Shepherd’s Voice. We were young and a world of potential lying before us vast, the fields ripe unto harvest.
When I moved to Michigan and eventually came back to the Methodism of my upbringing, our paths diverged. He earned a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Texas and today pastors a church and leads a theological school in Dallas. Though our paths took us in different directions, we have stayed in contact, and I was saddened to see this e-mail from Hal on Saturday, concerning his father, Dr. Harold Brunson, a pastor and evangelist who was an early friend and mentor back in the 70s. Hal writes, “Yesterday and today have been two of the most difficult days I have ever experienced with my dad, specifically our family taking the firm position that he can no longer drive. He has been extremely insistent not only about driving but also about buying a new car. Gentle persuasion and reasoning were not sufficient, and thus the emphatic firmness that has created such difficulty. Our family doctor . . . and my wife, whom dad calls ‘my hero,’ were the convincing voices, their gentility and wisdom a necessary complement to my much more forceful tone . . . of course, the real reason for this difficulty for him is not driving but rather the complete loss of independence that it represents; that is a major emotional issue in the life of any older person, especially one so independent, vibrant, and confident as my dad. It is in fact a letting go of life as he once knew it.”
Yes, our lives seem to be an expanding universe, then at some point that expansion reverses, life begins to contract, to revert back to being Bound. In this Binding there is suffering. In this Binding there is fear.
That such suffering is part of human nature is plainly, distressingly obvious. And yet, insomuch as death is human nature, the very word nature implies birth, for nature and natal are from the same Latin root. Dare we imagine that all that is nature, even death, may be understood as a new and Wholly Other natal experience? This would mean that death itself is the birth of Something Other. Natalie Sleeth’s words are accurately titled, Hymn of Promise, as it looks and death and allows us to sing: In our end is our beginning; in our time, infinity; in our doubt there is believing; in our life, eternity. In our death, a resurrection; at the last a victory, unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see.
Birth is the emerging from the narrow confines of the womb into Openness, into an Unbound experience of life. Death seems the reversal, a returning from that Openness into a different confinement. Life seems Unbound. Death seems a Binding. That’s why Jesus words are so striking. “Unbind him! Let him go!” In those words Jesus declared himself Lord over death’s binding power. “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me shall never die.” These words affirm a flow of life contrary to experience, that we die forward, into the Unbounded, rather than the Bounded.
With apologies I close with my those words I wrote three years ago, and you will find them printed in your bulletin:
“Unbind him! Let him go!” (An Easter Reflection on John 11:44)
Chill of night upon my face. Glitter of lights on distant hills beyond vast spaces. Free and Unbound, yet I shiver to sense my momento mori, the chill of death’s Binding moment.
In wide open spaces I journey through life Unbound. It was not always so, my first stirrings Bound in the dark, yet attached and nurturing confinement of a mother’s womb. Birth was a step into emptiness, into openness, into wonder-filled vastness.
Life’s journey follows the Lenten path, suffering its own Good Friday of death, the return to another confinement, dark and without nurture, without attachment, without voice or the hint of voice – Stirrings stilled, narrowed from vastness to a house, to a room, to a chair, to a bed and, at last, in momento mori, to a box.
Yet, as the third day discovered a neatly folded shroud in an empty tomb abandoned by its guest, so may death’s Binding be, for me, a tomb not without voice – but awakened, stirred by the voice of Another, not mine – “Come out!”
With such command, divine command, to discover in the crushing nature of death life’s grandest natal experience and, Unbound step into emptiness, into wonder-filled vastness of Sacred Presence.
As in birth my “No!” became “Yes!” a “Yes!” blossoming with discovery, “Yes!” overflowing with joy, so may it be in death – at momento mori crossing the shadowy threshold from my most fervent “No!” to the “Yes!” which negates death’s sting and loosens death’s strings.
Death’s Binding moment robbed of victory. “Unbind him! Let him go!”
(Written by Siegfried S. Johnson at Subiaco Abbey, March 1, 2005) |
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“Unbind
him! Let him go!”