FIFTH SUNDAY IN LENT, YEAR A

March 26, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

Ezekiel 37:1-14

Romans 6:16-23

John 11:17-24

 

These five Sundays in Lent have presented us with a series of images and contrasts. Four weeks ago, on the First Sunday in Lent, we explored the contrast between Adam’s disobedience and Christ’s obedience in the face of temptation to sin. The following week we looked at faith as the human response to God’s call to set out into the unknown, exemplified by the Patriarch Abraham. On the Third Sunday, we engaged with the image of water, as a sign of God’s loving providence for the Hebrews in the desert and as a symbol of God’s grace in Our Lord’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well. Then, last week, we considered the contrast between blindness and sight, between light and darkness, in the stories of Samuel anointing David and Our Lord healing a man born blind.

 

Today’s readings culminate the series by bringing us to the most gut-wrenching contrast of all: between life and death. We generally don’t like to talk about death, because deep down we know the ultimate futility of all our efforts to resist it. Death is omnivorous. It gets us in the end. If you find that thought depressing, then today’s readings offer a powerful message of comfort, reassurance, and hope. For they testify to God’s unbounded creative power: a love strong enough to bring forth light out of darkness and life out of death.

 

Both the Old Testament and Gospel begin with scenes of utter hopelessness. The prophet Ezekiel is transported in a vision to a valley littered with dry bones—likely the scene of some great battle where hundreds of corpses have been left with no one to bury them. Over the years these bones have been picked clean by vultures and vermin, washed by the rain, dried by the wind, and bleached by the sun. The question, “Can these bones live?” seems totally rhetorical. Of course, the answer is no.

 

Likewise, when Jesus arrives in Bethany, his friend Lazarus has been in the tomb four days. The dead man’s sisters, Mary and Martha, both believe that had Jesus been there, he could have prevented Lazarus’s death. But now all seems lost. 

 

When Jesus asks that the stone sealing the tomb be rolled away, Martha probably thinks that he merely wants to have one last look, to pay his respects, and say farewell to his friend. So, she protests: “Lord, by this time there will be an odor.” Actually, the King James Version better captures the graphic force of the original Greek: “By this time he stinketh.” We’re way beyond any possibility of resuscitating a still-warm corpse. By now the inevitable processes of physical decay and dissolution have set in. Better to leave the stone in place and remember Lazarus as he was.

 

So, in both the valley of dry bones and at the tomb of Lazarus, it seems that the grip of death has taken its victims long past the point of no return. And yet, in both cases, the creative, life-giving power of God shows itself stronger than death.

 

Ezekiel prophesies to the bones, and a great sound of rattling fills the air as bone joins to bone, sinews and flesh miraculously regenerate, and the breath of life returns to reanimate a host of newly resurrected bodies. Likewise, standing outside the tomb, Jesus cries out, “Lazarus, come forth,” and the man four days dead emerges to be unbound and released. Clearly, the power at work in both instances is nothing less than the same power that created the universe and brought forth life in the first place: God himself restoring and renewing his creation.

 

The message here is that if God can do this for the dry bones, and for Lazarus, then he can certainly do it for us. In the Christian tradition of interpretation of this Gospel, the raising of Lazarus has a threefold significance.

 

First, the raising of Lazarus anticipates the resurrection of Jesus. Strictly speaking, what happens to Lazarus is not resurrection, because once raised from his premature death he grows old and dies again. But the raising of Lazarus points beyond itself to something infinitely greater. And when Jesus is raised from the dead, unlike Lazarus, he’s raised to eternal life, never to die again.

 

Second, the raising of Lazarus anticipates our own resurrection. An article of Christian faith is that the resurrection of Jesus is the first fruits, the token, the pledge, of what will happen to us on the last day. Just as Jesus has the power and authority to raise Lazarus from the dead, so at the end of time he shall raise us all in what’s known as “the general resurrection.” Just as Jesus calls into the tomb, “Lazarus, come out,” so he tells us earlier in John’s Gospel, “the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.” Or, as Saint Paul puts it in today’s reading from the Letter to the Romans, “the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

 

And third, the raising of Lazarus points to Our Lord’s power to bestow new life, here and now. For in addition to physical death, there’s such a thing as spiritual death, manifested in a life lived apart from God. Even though we may be physically alive, so often we make our life here on earth a living death, walled up in tombs of our own devising: with walls made not of stone but of self-pity, jealousy, anger, bitterness, and all the other barriers that cut us off from God and one another, and so prevent us from truly enjoying life as God intends.

 

Today’s readings proclaims that God is infinitely stronger than all the forces separating us from him. Just as Jesus called Lazarus by name, so he calls each of us, and bids us come forth from the darkness of our self-made tombs. Still he commands us to be unbound and released from all the sins and vices that cling round us like a death-shroud. Still he invites us into the light and joy of his presence. Saint Irenaeus of Lyon summed it up well in the second century when he wrote: “The life of humanity is the vision of God, and the glory of God is humanity fully alive.”

 

So, we remember that the resurrection to eternal life takes place not just in the past or in the future but also in the present. We begin to share in this resurrection even now when we turn to God in repentance and faith, finding new and eternal life in Christ.

FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT, YEAR A

March 19, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

I Samuel 6:1-13

Ephesians 5:8-14

John 9: 1-13, 28-38

 

Saint Thomas Aquinas remarks that of our five senses, the two most closely related to understanding are sight and hearing. In the case of hearing, the connection is obvious. If we can’t hear what people are saying, we usually don’t know what they’re trying to tell us. [Although, of course, many deaf people are able to do amazing things with lip reading and sign language.]

 

And without sight, it’s a challenge to situate ourselves in the world around us, as we probably know from our experiences in an unexpectedly darkened room of stumbling over furniture and other obstacles. Along with touch, the gift of sight is our most direct means of contact with our physical environment. Moreover, our ability to see allows us to discern the spatial relationships among the objects in our field of vision—which ones are near, which ones are far away—thus putting them into proper perspective.

 

This visual sense of perspective is analogous to perspective in the more general sense of the word: the ability to distinguish which issues, concerns, problems, tasks, and goals should take precedence in the big picture of our lives, and which should be placed in the background or at the periphery. In this way, seeing becomes a metaphor for understanding. And so we speak of it. When we try to explain something or make a point to someone, we so often conclude by asking, “Do you see?” In other words: “Do you understand?” To which the response is often: “Yes, I see. Yes, I understand.”

 

All three of our scripture readings for today invoke the image of sight as a figure of spiritual understanding. Running through them all is the contrast between blindness and sight, light and darkness, seeing and not seeing, perceiving and not perceiving, understanding and not understanding.

 

Our Old Testament reading from First Samuel emphasizes the difference between how God sees and how we see. Jesse of Bethlehem brings his oldest son out to the prophet Samuel, who’s come to identify and anoint the new king of Israel. Samuel thinks, “Surely this is the Lord’s anointed.” But God tells Samuel, “Don’t be impressed by his appearance or his height … you look on the outward appearance, but I look on the heart.”  And so Samuel remains in the dark until God enlightens him by revealing his choice of David, Jesse’s youngest son, deemed so insignificant as to be left out in the field tending the sheep.

 

A similar contrast between darkness and light dominates the Gospel reading from Saint John. The man born blind receives his sight in more ways than one. At the natural level, a miraculous healing occurs. One who was physically blind from birth receives the use of his eyes.

 

At the same time, his spiritual eyes are opened as well. The people around him naturally want to know what’s happened. And each time he tries to explain, he displays a steadily growing understanding of who Jesus is. First, when his neighbors ask who healed him, he answers simply “the man called Jesus.” But later, when the Pharisees denounce Jesus as a sinner for healing on the Sabbath, the man born blind comes to his defense: “If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” For this, they insult him and expel him from the synagogue. Finally, when he meets Jesus again, he exclaims, “Lord, I believe,” and worships him. So, he’s received his sight both physically and spiritually. He’s come out of the darkness of ignorance into the light of faith.

 

The healing itself is shot through with sacramental symbolism. Jesus makes a bit of mud, smears it on the man’s eyes, and tells him to go and wash in the pool of Siloam—clearly an allusion to baptism. Not only that, but from the earliest days Christian baptism included an anointing, and this story features an anointing of sorts, albeit with mud rather than the oil of chrism. Symbolically, the story is telling us that Holy Baptism brings us out of darkness into the light of Christ. Indeed, the early Church often referred to baptism as “enlightenment” and to the newly baptized as “enlightened ones.”

 

In today’s Epistle reading, Saint Paul clearly has in mind conversion, baptism, and the baptized life when he writes to the members of the Church at Ephesus, “once you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.” His message is that those of us who’ve been baptized must continually grow into our new identity in Christ: “Walk as children of light . . . and try to learn what is pleasing to the Lord.”

 

In the eighteenth century, the Anglican Evangelical preacher John Newton started out as the captain of a slave ship. But when he encountered Jesus, he knew that his life had to change. Eventually ordained as a priest in the Church of England, he became a leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade, and was a spiritual mentor to the Abolitionist politician William Wilberforce. In his well-beloved hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ he could repeat with total conviction the words of the man born blind: “I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.”

 

The Evangelical Anglican movement to which Newton belonged offered a salutary alternative to the eighteenth-century philosophical school ironically known as the Enlightenment. Particularly in France, but also in England and indeed in the American colonies, the thinkers and writers of this so-called Enlightenment emphasized the autonomy of human reason at the expense of divine revelation and religious faith. Its perspective was that of a rationalist reductionism that narrowed and constricted the human vision of reality.

 

We should always remember, however, that the term “enlightenment” belonged to the Church first—well before the eighteenth-century philosophes got hold of it. In the Christian tradition enlightenment signifies the opening of our eyes to the vast expanse of a new field of vision, infinitely broader and deeper than any secularist philosophy: a perspective that allows us to see ourselves and our world in light of the great cosmic drama of creation and redemption, of time and eternity, of death and resurrection to eternal life. 

 

We pray, then, that God will continue to enlighten our minds with the truth of his Word. Jesus, the Word-made-flesh, is the light of the world. Above all else, today’s readings invite and exhort us to come to his Light.

THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT: YEAR A

March 12, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

Exodus 17:1-7

Psalm 95

Romans 5:1-11

John 4:5-26, 39-42

 

The image running throughout today’s readings is that of water: a necessity of human life. We human beings can go without food for several weeks before we starve to death. But without water to drink we die of thirst within a few days. Human survival depends on the availability of water to drink.

 

Today’s Old Testament reading [and Psalm] recalls a crisis occasioned by the lack of water. This part of the Book of Exodus tells of the wanderings of the Hebrews led by Moses into the desert after their escape from Egypt. 

 

At one point the Hebrews come to a place called Rephidim, where there’s no water. The people start grumbling against Moses: “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst?” 

 

This moment represents a crisis not merely of physical thirst but also of faith. Just a short time earlier, God liberated the Israelites from captivity in Egypt by opening a path through the Sea. But even after this miraculous escape, the Hebrews are doubting that the same Lord who delivered them from dying at the Egyptians’ hands can also deliver them from dying of thirst in the wilderness.

 

Moses cries out to the Lord, “What am I going to do? These people are ready to stone me.” In response, the Lord tells Moses to go before the people to the rock at a place called Horeb, and strike it with his rod. When Moses does so, water comes gushing out of the rock, and the people drink.

 

This provision of water in the desert solves two problems at once. At the physical level, the people are saved from dehydration and death. And at the spiritual level, God reaffirms his continuing presence and commitment to provide for his people wherever they go.  So, the stream of water gushing from the rock of Horeb becomes a sign: not only of survival and life, but also of God’s providence and care.

 

In the Gospel reading, the image of water bears the same kind of double meaning. Jesus is traveling through Samaria. Wearied with his journey, he sits down by a well. A Samaritan woman comes to draw water. So, tired and thirsty as he is, Jesus asks her for a drink. 

 

But when she questions how it is that he, a Jew, is crossing all kinds of national, religious, and ethnic boundaries by asking her, a Samaritan, for a drink of water, he takes the conversation to a whole new level. “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

 

What follows is one of those wonderful dialogues of double meaning so typical of John’s Gospel in which someone totally misunderstands what Jesus is saying because they’re using the same words in completely different ways. In ancient Palestine, “living water” meant the kind of water you get from a spring or a running stream: fresh, clear water that flows, gurgles, and bubbles: not like the murky still water that stagnates in wells and cisterns.

 

When Jesus tells the woman that he can give her living water, it sounds like a pleasant alternative to what’s in the well. “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.” She’s probably being sarcastic, doubting that Jesus can give her any such water, just as the Hebrews once doubted that God could provide water in a barren desert.

 

But Jesus isn’t speaking of literal water. Pointing at the well, he says, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

 

Although the Samaritan woman doesn’t get it, Jesus is speaking of a spiritual gift that only he can give. The point is that, whether we realize it or not, just as our bodies thirst for water, so our spirits thirst for God. And Jesus is saying that he’s come to offer us a new relationship with the God who alone can quench our deepest thirst of our souls. 

 

In today’s epistle reading Saint Paul says, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.” Here Saint Paul likens God’s love to a stream of water poured out into the parched interior landscape of our souls to make us blossom and flourish.

 

Both Jesus and Saint Paul are using the image of water to describe the gift of the Holy Spirit. Just as Moses gave the Israelites water flowing from the rock, so Jesus gives us flowing rivers of grace and peace. And just as physical water sustains the biological life of our bodies, so God’s Spirit imparts eternal life to our souls.

 

After this woman’s encounter with Jesus, many Samaritans in the city come to believe in Jesus on account of her testimony, “He told me all that I ever did.” Clearly, she did receive the living water that Jesus was offering her. Earlier on, she doubted Jesus, just as the Israelites doubted Moses in the wilderness. But just as the Israelites ended up drinking water from the rock, so the Samaritan woman and her neighbors ended up drinking of God’s Spirit.

 

At those times in our lives when we feel spiritually dry and arid, we may even feel abandoned by God and tempted to doubt him. Then, more than ever, we do well to remember the Israelites in the wilderness, and the Samaritan woman at the well. Despite their doubts, questions, and fears, they received what they needed in the end. Likewise, we may trust God in Christ to quench our spiritual thirst with springs of living water welling up to eternal life.

SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT, YEAR A

March 5, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

Genesis 12:1-4a

Romans 4:1-5, 13-17

John 3:1-17

 

Some versions of Christianity have been criticized for making salvation too easy. Simply profess your faith in Jesus as Lord and Savior and you’re guaranteed a place in heaven. And I suppose that if faith is reduced to canned formulas – however sincerely recited – the criticism has some merit. But today’s readings offer us a picture of faith that’s so much more challenging and exciting than that.

 

In the epistle, the Apostle Paul holds up the Patriarch Abraham as the model of faith: “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” We’ve already encountered Abraham in the Old Testament reading from Genesis, when he was still known by his original name of Abram.

 

Contemporary readers are apt to miss the profoundly shocking quality of God’s call to Abram: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation …”

In the Ancient Near East, respectable deities didn’t do things like that. The gods and goddesses of Egypt and Mesopotamia were conservative upholders of the social and political status quo. Such societies held a place for everyone, and everyone knew their place. Kings were kings, nobles were nobles, artisans were artisans, merchants were merchants, and slaves were slaves – because the gods said so. You were born, lived, and died in your appointed station in life all according to divine decree.

 

Against this background, God’s call to Abram represented an unheard-of upheaval of the settled social universe. Abram was called to leave behind all those things that gave people in the ancient world their deepest sense of belonging and identity: “country and kindred and father’s house.” Moreover, God’s promise to make a no-account upstart like Abram into a great nation, a blessing to all the families of the earth, likely seemed downright subversive and revolutionary.

 

Abram’s faith can be fully appreciated only in relation to this radical disruption of everything that has given his world order and stability. He leaves it all behind to venture forth into an unknown future based solely on trust in God’s promise. Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann writes that the three most shocking words in the Old Testament are those in our first reading today: “So Abram went …”

Thus begins the journey of faith. Christian theology has long made a distinction between two equally valid and necessary types of faith, faith-as-belief and faith-as-trust. Faith-as-belief entails intellectual assent to the teachings that the Church proposes to us as true. But faith-as-trust is more relational, implying a personal relationship with the God in whom we believe.

 

British theologian Alister McGrath distinguishes two more types of faith, which he describes as faith-as-commitment and faith-as-obedience. All these images of faith – belief, trust, commitment, and obedience – help us to understand the fullness of what faith really involves. But as I reflect on the story of Abram, what comes to my mind is a fifth image, namely faith as adventure.

 

In the Book of Genesis, the story of Abram’s life unfolds as a series of adventures that begin with his response to God’s call. An adventure, after all, is a journey into the unknown: evoking excitement and exhilaration, on one hand; fear and trembling, on the other.

 

It’s long seemed to me that an essential aspect of Christian faith, of following Jesus, is precisely this sense of adventure—of being called out on a journey into an unknown future in which we let go of the pretense of being in control of our lives and entrust ourselves to the care of a God who leads us literally God knows where.

 

In today’s Gospel, Nicodemus is called to a similar adventure of faith. This Pharisee and ruler of the people approaches Jesus under cover of darkness for a bit of discreet theological dialogue. His opening address seems sincerely polite and respectful: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God; for no-one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.”

 

But those words represent an attempt to pigeonhole Jesus, to fit him into the ready-made categories and definitions of Nicodemus’s pre-existing worldview. In response, Jesus takes Nicodemus on a roller coaster ride of startling new ideas and images: new birth, the Spirit blowing where it wills, a serpent lifted up in the wilderness.

 

Nicodemus is left dizzy, befuddled, bemused, and confused. He’s a teacher of Israel and yet he does not understand these things. He began by acknowledging Jesus as a teacher come from God; but Jesus ends by describing himself as so much more than Nicodemus ever imagined: the Son of God sent into the world to bestow eternal life on all who believe in him.

 

Nicodemus is thus called to leave behind the settled pattern of assumptions, beliefs, and values that has given his life order and meaning. The evidence in the rest of John’s Gospel indicates that Nicodemus does in fact become a disciple. And so, perhaps in that nighttime encounter Nicodemus takes the first steps on his journey into the unknown, into his own adventure of faith.

 

I remember my own first sense of being summoned to this adventure. In my early twenties, when I was a graduate student in Washington DC, a friend invited me to the local Episcopal Church, and I went. Having grown up as an agnostic in a non-churchgoing family, I hadn’t been to a Sunday morning church service in years. And against all expectations I found myself profoundly moved by the liturgy, though I couldn’t really say why. 

 

Later that afternoon, as I was remembering my experience that morning, I felt a strong desire to return to that church the following week. Combined with this powerful sense of attraction was an equally clear feeling of trepidation borne of the intuition that I’d brushed into into contact with a reality over which I had no control, but which certainly had the power to change my life and take it in directions I didn’t know and might not want. (Little did I know!) Despite these misgivings, I did return the following Sunday, and so began a journey that continues to this day.

 

We mistake the nature of faith if we think that it’s all the comfort of settled convictions and established certainties in a well-ordered and predictable universe. Yes, faith does involve assent to the truths that God has revealed in Scripture and entrusted to the teaching and preaching of his Church. But it’s also a journey that is simultaneously exciting, fascinating, unsettling, risky, and sometimes downright scary – yet always rewarding and totally worthwhile. In today’s readings, then, Abram and Nicodemus offer two glimpses of this quality of faith as adventure.