Everyone knows how unbalanced I am – more
ways than one, some would say! Just look at me funny and I’m apt to fall
for you. So far I have been able to get up at least one more time than I
fall. That’s my own hard-found secret to life: keep getting back up! Keep
rising from every fall, every death. So much of the good of the body, the
body personal, the body familial, -- congregational, political, global,
universal – so much of the good of the body has to do with balance, with
right proportions in the mix of things making us up, with a kind of creative
tension between and among the body’s myriad differences and diversities,
subtleties and complexities. Unbalances lead to dysfunctions. Dysfunctions
lead to falls.
I am particularly aware of the marvel of our
joints, our connecting parts, our links among all our parts, since mine have
been under attack for years, and most of the major ones have been replaced.
Sometimes I feel like I am completely disconnectable! As if I could be
pieced back together in a whole variety of other ways! Most of the joints
come in twos, in balances of left and right – The shoulders, the wrists, the
hips, the knees, the ankles, the fingers and toes with all of their
knuckles. Think all the inglorious yet indispensable work they all do with
nearly every move we make! Our connecting links keep us going in any and
all directions at once. Only one joint is singular, one of a kind, and that
is the neck! The connection between the mind and the body! The flesh and
the spirit!
Baby Suggs, the “unchurched preacher” in
Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, “uncalled, unrobed, unanointed,”
matriarch of the family, who made it out of slavery, calls all the family,
the parts of the body, together deep in the woods. As they laugh, and
dance, and cry, and dance, and laugh, and cry all at once, Baby Suggs offers
up her great heart. “Here in this place,” she preaches, “we flesh; flesh
that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love
it hard. Yonder, “as she recalls slavery, “Yonder they do not love your
flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes . . . No more do they
love the skin on your back . . . And O my people they do not love your
hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your
hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them,
pat them together, stroke them on your face, for they don’t love that
either. You got to love it, you!” She reaches the neck: “And
O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and
straight. So love your neck. . . .” Love your neck!
So much of the life and the work of the
church has been cut off at the neck. We have separated mind and body, flesh
and spirit. We make Jesus the head, the mindset, without any body, any
boneset. We supernaturalize him, place him up on a pedestal of ideals,
quite apart from the mundane and messy realities of our day-to-day lives in
the frail bodies of our persons, our families, our communities, and our
world. When Paul tells us that setting our minds on the flesh is “death,” I
hear a warning against setting our minds apart, as if they were superior to
our bodies, looking down on our bodies. That may be a mindset of the
Greeks, who influenced Paul. But it is not a boneset of the Hebrews! It is
not biblical to fail to appreciate the delicacies and the intricacies of our
bodies, made up of such wondrous parts, -- each with its own form and its
function, each with its gift to contribute, relentlessly, to the good of the
whole. The Spirit, as I hear Paul, is like that “unnoosed” neck Baby Suggs
celebrates, -- that connecting link to keep us in touch between and among
mind and body, heart and soul, spirit and flesh.- That neck, that Spirit of
connection, keeps us believing, for all our differences, all our
diversities, all the stresses and strains on the body in every last part of
our life and work, -- yet and still, we are all one in Christ Jesus who
makes us whole.
So much of our life and our work in faith is
the challenge of choosing what Deuteronomy calls God’s offerings to us of
life and death, blessing and curse. Jesus is for us God’s ultimate offer of
life, of life in the Spirit of wholeness, of connectedness and relatedness,
-- life that Jesus says in the chapter of John just before this he comes
that we might have, and have abundantly! Jesus confronts in this story not
only the death of Lazarus, one whom Jesus loves, though that is enough.
Jesus as always, in all ways, is preparing us not just to live with our own
deaths, the deaths of others we know and love, or even with Jesus’ own
death. Jesus is always preparing us to live with the powers of death
itself, the forces of death, -- as they surround him here and as they
surround us now. Resurrection for Jesus is not so much life beyond death as
it is life in the midst of death, life even in spite of death, dare we say,
at times, life in defiance of death! When Jesus says to us here, “Let us go
to Judea again,” we know we have just been stoned there and run out of there
many times at the point of death. We know he is asking us, once again, to
witness to life with our very lives on the line. Fine, says Thomas among
us, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”
This is no trick of fake death. This is
real death, down and dirty, soiled and smelly. Jesus waits three days, the
time it allegedly takes the soul to depart the body, so Lazarus is now good
and dead. The question can no longer be only, what might have kept him
alive? How might Jesus have got to him in time? The question can only be,
can he be raised from the dead? Can these bones live? Will these bones
live? Not on “the last day,” some time in the sky by and by, but on this
day, at this time, in this place, among all the scattered parts of this
people, this body of Christ? For the real threats of death are always at
hand, no matter how healthy, how lively we feel. The real threats of death
are not those that would kill us, but those that would keep us from living!
Dying and not living, -- not getting it, not giving our lives to Jesus, not
taking up his life and work, his mission of practical justice and lasting
peace, whatever that may cost us, -- dying and not living are differing
things. It’s like being “safe” and being “saved.” Our hope is not be safe,
to avoid death at all costs. Our hope is to be saved, delivered from death
– as the life and the work of the “Christ,” savior of life itself!
Esther Leatherwood was a kind of Mim
Davis/Auntie Mame woman of faith in life as a banquet at our church in San
Rafael. Esther dressed and presented herself every day of her life as if
she was going to meet Jesus that day, or someone just as important, -- at a
bus stop, in a coffee shop, or at the library. Near the end of her life she
gave me a poem by Sira Cassidy from a magazine she subscribed to called
SageWoman, subtitled, Celebrating the Goddess in Every Woman.
The poem is called “Singing Over Our Bones.” It begins, “I’ve been singing
over my bones / but first I had to collect them. “I found my skull so far
from the rest of me, [Doesn’t that sound like the skull? The mind apart
from the body?] / sitting on top of a windy mountain, / thinking there was
no more of my pieces left to find.” After searching out her arms and her
ribs, her pelvis and her legs, the poet concludes, “I arranged my bones in
new patterns and sang for flesh. / With each bit of my new flesh, / a
Goddess-bone appeared. “I found Her bones under my altar. / I found Her
bones in books. / I found Her bones in cooking-fires. . . I found Her bones
in church basements / and the crying-eyes of children, left alone . . . .”
Reading this poem I got the vision that we
might take time in the midst of worship to go off in search of all of our
bones! Don’t we all know we are missing some bones? Some broken-off,
scattered, abandoned, left-to-die, forgotten, repressed, if not buried, and
drying bone-parts of ourselves? First we would do it as persons: Where are
all of our personal bones and parts, lost and hiding from us? But also as
families: Don’t get us started on family bones! The proverbial, what?
“Skeletons in the closet!” Anyone want to go there? And what about
congregational bones? I’ve heard a few pastoral “bone stories” since I got
here. And we’ve got Bob Olmstead here among us today! How many
bone-stories have we forgotten? Or never knew in the first place? It would
take the rest of our lives to collect all our bones again.
What about all the bonepiles of the whole
church? Bonepiles of sexual preference and orientation, of course – don’t
go there! But also of gender, of class, of color, of creed. Bonepiles of
all of those ideal distinctions we like to make. Take a look at all those
bones, and you’d swear they all come from one source! From that same old
one bone-making God! We couldn’t tell one person’s bones from another’s!
What fun would that be? If the bones don’t tell us who’re holier, more
saved, closer to God? And what are the bonepiles of Nevada? Of the United
States of America? Of other systems that have yielded such power and such
domination at the expense of weak and indigenous peoples throughout the
world? Bonepiles of Iraq, Rwanda, Kosovo, South Africa, Cambodia, Central
America. Bonepiles of the Soviet Union, the Chinese Revolution, the Third
Reich. Of Word Wars I and II and continual wars ever since? Bonepiles of
empire – British, Ottoman, Roman, Babylonian. This is a whole nation of
bones, says Ezekiel, a very whole people of bones!
So why do we mess with this bone-finding,
bone-naming, bone-collecting and bone-connecting stuff anyway? Why not let
sleeping bones lie? Because, sisters and brothers, with Jesus, even in
death, -- even in doubt and denial, even in fear and ignorance, even in
guilt and shame -- we are a people of life! Even along the road to a
bone-smashing, bone-smothering crucifixion of one we name God Incarnate, God
Made Flesh-and-Bone, we are a people of resurrection! Chapter 11 lies at
the center of John’s carefully constructed gospel. Jesus as the Christ, the
Resurrection and the Life, lie at the heart of all we are. If we are
content to let sleeping bone lie, the “lie” of those bones is on us! We
must, with Jesus, try to face the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth about us. We are headed with Jesus up to Jerusalem to be arrested
and hauled into court to speak our truth, up against all the powers of
death, but “armed” with all the powers of life! (We are mindful this week
how dangerous courtrooms can be.)
Jesus comes, not to help us worship the
death of this world, -- painful, often tragic, always grievous, as Jesus,
who loves Lazarus, well knows death to be. Jesus weeps with us in our
despair. Jesus knows how long it takes us to heal and recover from death.
But Jesus calls us to know, in the end, the dead must bury their own dead,
and the living must get on with life. Jesus comes always and everywhere to
bring forth life, life from the tomb, life from under the weight of the
rocks and stones we may carry around. Jesus is shouting to each of us now,
in the midst of whatever the deaths of our lives and of our life together,
-- Lazarus! Are you in there, Lazarus? Can you hear me? Is there anything
left of you there? The smallest place for me to start with? Any stirring
at all in those old and dead bones? ‘Cause I’m coming after you, Lazarus!
I’m not taking “death” for an answer, and I am not done with you yet!
Reminds me of my favorite poem, “The Rebel,” by Mari Evans -- “When I die /
I’m sure / In will have a / Big Funeral . . . / Curiosity / seekers . . . /
coming to see / if I / al really / Dead . . . / or just / trying to make /
Trouble . . .” Come on, church! If we’re not dead, we got some more
trouble to make! Amen.
Rev. John J. Auer
