THE SACRED JOURNEY

4. Power
April 1, 1990
8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Ezekiel 37:1-6, 14
John 11:1, 17-27

“And I will put sy Spirit within you, and you shall Live,..."
-Ezekiel 37:14a (RSV)

At the top of her career as a popular comedienne, someone asked
Phyllis Diller to what she attributed her ability to make people laugh.
She thought for a moment and said, "When you have the matter of death

resolved, the rest is easy.”

The distinguished psychologist, Abraham Maslow, was recuperating from
a heart attack when he wrote to a friend

"The confrontation with death - and the reprieve from it —
makes everything look sco precious, so sacred, so beautiful
that I feel more strongly than ever the impulse to love
it, to embrace it, to let myself be overwhelmed by it. My
river has never looked so beautiful... Death, and its ever
present possibility, makes love, passionate love, more
possible. I wonder if we could love passionately, if
ecstasy would be possible at all if we knew we'd never
die." [Rollo May, Love and Will, p. 99]

And so, two weeks before Easter, as preface to the drama of the

passion, the entry to Jerusalem, the Last Supper, the trial and
crucifixion, we come to the question that lies beneath all our questions:

how shall we live in the presence of the reality of death?

No one ever put the issue more powerfully and eloquently than
Macbeth...

“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time:

And all cur yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death..."

Along the way, this matter of death, death in general and our death
in particular, is something with which we must contend. ft is not easy to
do so. It is a topic easily and conveniently ignored. Ina culture whose
values are success, power, winning - death is the ultimate irony... the
ultimate, and inevitable loss. “The one who dies with the most toys Wins."
Perhaps, but the bottom line is not much of a victory.

Our way of life insultates us from dying... it happens mostly in the
sterile isolation of a hospital room. Death is the new pornography,
someone noted. Scotsman George Docherty used to say that in his native
land sex was unmentionable and all the jokes were about death. Today, in
this country, it's the other way around. Death is unmentionable and most
of the jokes are about sex.

And then one day you bump inte it: a dear friend dies, or you find
you are looking at the obituaries with more personal attentiveness than
usual, or suddenly, out of the blue, you are reminded of your own
mortality. "Have you noticed that you will die?" Annie Dillard asks
innocently. It is the most profound question with which the artist
contends, the source efther of a maddening despair, or perhaps the
loveliest creativity. But confront it we must, and you can either deal
with this matter or push it away, back into the recesses of your mind
where it will not stay for long. The famous existentialists Jean Paul
Sartre and Albert Camus agreed that there is a sense in which you are not
alive until you embrace your own death... which is surely part of what
Abraham Maslow meant. And it is surely what happened to a peculiar prophet
of Israel by the name of Ezekiel one day, but that does get us ahead of
ourselves.

i have been proposing recently that one of the ways to look at our
own lives is as journeys of faith, sacred journeys... that we are called to
this journey by our creator, given provisions along the way, including the
confidence we need. I have been proposing that the story of God's people
in the scripture of the Old Testament, is, in a sense, a metaphor for the
story of everyone of us; that we can see our own lives and experiences in
the mirror of the Bible... the lives and experience of the individuals in
the story; but also in the whole, sweeping panorama.

So we thought about Abraham and Sarah: settied, mature, established,
and how God called them to pack up and move and made an unlikely promise ;
that they still had quite a future to live; and how it is the nature of God
to call us to the adventure of living faithfully.

And we thought about the children of Israel after their unlikely
liberation from Egyptian slavery, “murmuring in the wilderness,"
complaining to Moses because there was no food and no water, and how good
the security of slavery looks when you are in the wilderness; and how when
you know how hungry and empty and vulnerable you are, God provides for your
deepest needs. , .

And we thought about how when God needs a King for Israel, the choice

falls on someone who does not appear to be qualified, a wisp of a lad by
the name of David, and we thought about God's love for and faithfulness to

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David even though David does some terrible things; and we considered the
mystery that there is nothing we can do to cause God to stop Joving us.
God sees possibility in all of us, and seeing our potential, has
confidence in us.

' Today, as we continue the story of God's people, the journey
comes to a difficult time, a time of loss and grief: a time when it does
not seem plausible that meaningful life ean go on. That, too, is a
metaphor for a stage in life's journey for each of us. But first the
story.

It is about the exile, a very important period in Biblical history.
In the year 598 B.C. the small Jewish state had become a nuisance to the
ascendant Babylonian Empire: so the Babylonians carried off a small
group of Jewish leaders from Jerusalem into Babylonian exile. A temple
priest by the name of Ezekiel was among them. The Jerusalem government
entered an unwise military pact with Egypt; the Babylonians became very
angry, sent their army back in, this time leveling the city, executing the
royal family, and exiling the entire ruling class - the upper crust of
Jerusalem society. It would appear to be the end of the line. After their
escape from Egypt, wandering in the wilderness, the conquest and settling
of the land, the unification of the people under a monarchy... it would
appear that Israel was confronting the fate of every earthly kingdom -
extinction. After years in Babylonian exile, the Jewish community would
simply disappear, melt into the prevailing culture of Babylon. Ezekiel,
without a temple to be a priest in, becomes a prophet and begins to
interpret the events he is watching unfold, putting them in the larger
context of God's will. And so it is that Ezekiel has a vision of a valley
strewn with bones, an eloquent symbol of death of his nation’s prospects.
Some historians suggest that there actually was such a valley, a
battlefield where the armies of Israel lost to the Babylonian forces, that
ali those bones were what remained of Israel's fighting force, and that the
exiles saw that sight on the long march into captivity.

In any event, it is a grim, but powerful image. But, in his vision
Ezekiel receives an astonishing promise. The bones will live. God will
breathe breath inte them and they will live. In the midst of death - life.
In the midst of the most eloquent image of human mortality - God's dearest
promise of power to go on living.

The promise of faith is that God's love is more powerful than death
and that therefore, ultimately, there is no reason to fear. The Bible
doesn't say much more than that on the subject. The church, of course, has
speculated endlessly on who gets in and who doesn't; religion has been
entranced with the topic... "the guest list and the decor of eternity,"
someone quipped. The Bible doesn't. What the Bible focuses on is the
promise of God's eternal love which transforms death into life: despair
into joy, and turns into power for living in the present for those who know
it and trust it.

“ET will put my spirit in you and you will live," God says to the dry
bones in Ezekiel's dream; and to anyone else wha happens to feel like
those bones, like death warmed over - which means all of us, sooner or
later.

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The simple truth is that on this journey there are going te be bad
days. It is not possible ultimately ta insulate yourself. It is not
possible to Jove very long without sustaining a loss. Sigmund Freud taught
that it is a primal and basic fear and that every small separation in life
reminds us of final and ultimate separation.

It comes at us in different ways, of course. The death of a loved

one, the death of our own grandparents and parents: the random death of
dear friends.

People who measure stress say it is the most traumatic thing that
will ever happen to us. Sometimes it comes in the form of the little
losses that occur along the way; on the day when we must lower our
expectations, and let go of a dream, and get realistic about the
possibilities for the remainder of the journey.

And in this culture at this time it comes in the form of our
obsession with youth and absolute refusal to acknowledge aging. Dear
Jessica Tandy struck a blow for all of us... but did you notice that the
Health and Fitness supplement in the newspaper last week was full of
advertisements, not for ways to stay fit and healthy as you get older and
the task becomes more difficult, but ads for liposuction and face lifts?
That is, ways to deny the reality of aging and mortality.

How to live remains the question. How to find power to live in light
of life's losses and the diminishments of aging and the personal insult of
our mortality? How shall Israel live in exile? How shall we live through
and beyond our losses?

The ancient promise is that death is part of God's economy, and that
it is not an enemy, not because it isn't real and tragic, which it is, but
because God's love creates life in its midst. Hard to believe? You bet it
is. And yet, there is a gentie wisdom in God's economy; people who have
thought about it for very long and with any depth, seem always to conclude
that there is a wisdom in this mortality of ours. oo

Maslow knew that without death there would be no love, no passion, no
ecstasy.

John Updike in his recently published memoir, Self Consciousness,
closes with an essay in which he reflects on his own journey in maturing.
“Aging,” he says, “calls us outdoors, after the adult indoors of work and
love-life and keeping stylish, into the lovely simplicities that we thought
we had out-grown as children. We come again to love the plain world, its
stone and wood, its air and water... The act of seeing is itself glorious,
and of hearing, and feeling and tasting." [p. 247]

Frederick Buechner wrote that as a young man he would have jumped
at the chance to remain young forever, but that he has changed his mind.
“IJ love my life as much as I ever did and will cling to it for as long as I
can, but life without death has become as unthinkable to me as day without
night or waking without sleep."

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There is a sense in which we are given the grace to love fully
insofar as we acknowledge our mortality. And there is a sense in which we
are given power ta live fully insofar as we can trust God with our own
death.

That is what is going on in the 11th chapter of the Gospel] of John -
in a New Testament story every bit as powerful and terrible and mysterious
as Ezekiel's vision - the raising of Lazarus.

It is the event that immediately precedes Jesus' decision to go to
Jerusalem. It is the event that so frightens everybody that the process is
set in motion that will result in his arrest and crucifixion. The
authorities understand with perfect clarity, that one who has power over
death will threaten every other authority and power. So they determine, as
soon as they hear about Lazarus, to do away with him.

The exiled community must look at the reality of dry bones in order
to know God's power of life.

Jesus must confront the death of his dear friend Lazarus ~ maybe his
best. and oldest friend... must go to the tomb on a blazing hot afternoon
and there with the stench of death all around confront the fact of his own
mortality. When he hears about Lazarus' death, he doesn't do anything for
several days. Why? Because when you are thirty-three and your best friend
dies and there's a rumor that your life is in danger... you simply don't
want to have anything to do with it. And when he finally arrives at
Bethlehem, he weeps for his dear dead friend, for friendship gone, but also
for himself. Jesus, our brother, weeps tears of grief... for his own
mortality.

What happened next will not be reduced to words and perhaps should
not be...

But faith knows that God created life in the midst of death...

And that for Jesus, this drama will become personal, as personal as
it can possible become; that he will know the end of his thirty-three year
old life and will have to either give it up to despair and cynicism and
rage —- or trust it to God.

That is a metaphor for what comes to all of us and each of us on
this journey... that day - or string of days -— when we know our mortality
and must decide who we will trust and how we will live; that day when we
must open our hands and let go of those we dearly love and give them up to
God, and then noticing how empty our hands are — give our own death to God.
and in that giving, receive power to live.

The promise of the Gospel is this... in Jesus Christ God has loved us.
That love gives us the gift life... calls us to the adventure of living
faithfully... prevides for our deepest needs... gives us confidence that we
are adequate for the challenges and now, that love promises there is
nothing ultimately to fear... There is no tragedy out of which God cannot
call new life.

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T do not know how Ezekiel saw what he saw and [ do not know what
happened that day when Jesus strode up to a tomb holding the dead body of
his friend Lazarus, but I believe what he said there is for you and me:

“fake away the stone, come out, unbind him and let him go."
That's for you and me

Even though the church must now journey through the most difficult
days of Lent: days for the remembering of triumph turned into tragedy,
betrayal and denial, humiliation and suffering... and finally — the tragic
beautiful mystery of Good Friday... even though our journey now becomes

arduous, it is a Sacred Journey, particularly now because of the one who
said,

“I am the resurrection and the life: he who believes in me, though
he dies, yet shall he live..." Pee

Eternal God, there are no words to contain our gratitude for your
love; no way to express our heart's intent to trust you with our lives.

So we come ta table, as he invited us to come, his guests... even
Jesus our Lord. ue

Amen.

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