The Old South Church in Boston

A MATTER OF DEATH AND LIFE

 Sermon by James W. Crawford

Palm Sunday, March 31, 1996

From John 11

Do you know the purpose of Jesus' coming among us? Do you know why we confess this first century Galilean, Christ? Pure and simple. We confess Jesus the Christ because with him, through him, our God demonstrates a radical commitment to life. Our faith and our hope rest finally on the assurance that undergirding each of us and all creation there lies love never letting us go, there stands life ready to break in upon us, seeking renewal, transformation, recreation. As church people we may find ourselves doing many things: attending services, scheduling committee meetings or raising money. Important as these functions may be, they are only penultimate. They testify finally to the fundamental purpose of our faith and its expression in this world: to invest ourselves in the risks of life and to celebrate life to the fullest.

Nowhere do we find this purpose more forcefully articulated than by John the evangelist. John's presentation of Jesus is no conventional biography. The events John describes in Jesus' life will never be corroborated in a daily diary. And John couldn't care less. You see, John writes from an outlaw Jewish sect.

He writes from a community fiercely guarding its own solidarity and mutuality. John believes his community stands for life and love against all worldly communities who finally surrender to disbelief and the powers of death. From within that tight little community, John composes a series of metaphors, a set of images, a constellation of narratives, written some 70 years after Jesus' death, reflecting on the meaning of Jesus for the history of the world. Through these narratives--these images --water transformed to wine; a paralyzed man, healed; a blind man receiving sight--John probes the dimensions of the full identity of the Christ: dimensions of meaning, wholeness, reconciliation, peace, community. So when we come to this astounding Lazarus episode, we come not with the question, "Did it really happen this way?" Or "Is this a verifiable scientific fact?" No. Rather, we come prepared to be encountered and embraced by another set of John's images and metaphors. And this time, John testifies to faith's unalterable and victorious stance for life. He breaks open abundant, dynamic, qualitatively different life we call Christ; life as an alternative to and challenge to a divided, warring world. And mark this well: for John the raising of Lazarus constitutes our story, and commands us, figuratively speaking, to come out of our tombs and to live triumphantly amid the onslaughts of existence determined finally to do us in. Through his discourse on Lazarus, John invites us to celebrate abundant life--now!

Now friends, no less so than you and I, the New Testament knows life to be consistently threatened by death. And for John's Gospel, for our faith, death is not exclusively a simple biological necessity. For John, death is not just the extinction of our physical body. Death itself becomes metaphor. Death becomes symbol for a power refuting and crushing everything we would affirm about life and love. When John describes Lazarus bound, gagged, stones in his eyes, wrapped in shrouds, walled up in a tomb, dead for four days, a stenh-ridden, rotting corpse, John points toward the powers of death pervading, mutilating, strangling human life.

The powers of death, you ask? Well, Paul calls them principalities and powers, human constructs and realities to whom we give our lives in the search for meaning and discover instead they own us; they take us over; milk us; deceive us with promises; hold us hostage to their survival.

I've never forgotten William Stringfellow some years ago describing these death-dealing powers as "images," "institutions," and "ideologies." I think Stringfellow is on to something. Take "image" for instance. Let me ask a question. Do you have an image to uphold? Does your profession, your vocation, your position demand from you a certain image? Do you want it? Do you hate it? Would you love to break it wide open because it is not you, but you would lose your job, supposedly corrupt your reputation, subvert a cultivated identity by failing to groom your image appropriately?

 Surely, images can wall us in and, yes, institutions can too. My soul, how many of us are slaves to where it is we work? How many of us feel as if our jobs are killing us? How many of us would get out if we could? I filled out a little questionnaire the other day for a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Iowa. She was measuring job satisfaction among ministers. Some of the assertions on this clergy job-satisfaction survey were telling. Assertions like:

"I feel dissatisfied with my job." Agree or disagree.
"There is a good chance I will search for another job during this year." Agree or disagree.
"I almost always follow up on other job opportunities; I definitely dislike my job;
I do not feel a strong sense of belonging to this local church." Agree or disagree. And on and on.

I read recently of one of my colleagues who left the ministry. Do you know why? Well, as he put it, he could no longer meet expectations that he be Lee Iacocca in the board room, Joyce Brothers as a counselor, the Fuller Brush man with house calls, and a combination of Chevy Chase, Tom Brokaw and Robert Schuller in the pulpit.

Now, I want to tell you I love my job and I love this church and I love you--you have been bearers of life to me--but I do know there are men and women in the ministry who are badgered, beat and drained. No different from some of you. Institutions can be bearers of life. And they can kill us.

And ideologies: racism, militarism, sexism, nationalism. These world views can take on a life of their own; they begin to mold and control us. We become tools, not masters, of ideology. They can become what John might call structures of death. Let me illustrate. I believe there is a pernicious ideology eating us alive these days. It is an ideology called "the market." "The market" is increasingly deferred to as the bearer of truth. It has become the arbiter of value, an almost mystical power, mesmerizing us with its intricacies and dynamics, persuading us as to its ultimate authority, making us believe in its invincibility, convincing us that it is built into the very structures of the universe and to mess with it is to mess with a divine creation. The so called "market" devours much of our common life these days. It turns human beings into commodities, disposable junk, bar-graphs and dollar signs. On university faculties it drives scholars to produce or perish, to malign and discredit the work of others. It drives young researchers to cheat on data in order to win foundation grants. It drives doctors, hospitals, the health care networks to shortcuts and cynicism, and worse, to excluding the vulnerable, the high risk, the neediest. It compels ministers and churches to guard their own turf; to conceive ministry as market place competition, "How are they doing down the street, around the corner, across the square?"--the very antithesis of united mission for Christ's sake.

Talk about structures of death! This market ideology glorifies individualism, fosters envy, makes a virtue of selfishness, casts aside human beings. We need be wary of its pervasive claim on our lives. And for Christians who give ultimate loyalty to Jesus Christ, the true Sovereign of creation, we who envision John's beloved community, bound in trust and united in mutual service as the true future of the human family--for Christians I have a suggestion: how about we treat the claims to sovereignty of the so-called market system as rubbish. Surely it can serve society in creative ways. That is undeniable! But any link to divinity is human pretension, idolatry and complacency usually by those at the top of the heap. What is divine is not the market system, but justice. What is divine is not dog-eat-dog, but fairness. What is divine is not the rich getting richer while the rest hang on by their fingernails, struggling to keep the wolf away from the door. What is divine is not grasping for more and more, but acting out of generosity and magnanimity. What is divine is sharing, throwing ourselves onto the scales for our poorer, powerless neighbors. A friend of this church told some of us a week or so ago that "it's perpetual war out there." That is not life. In John's terms, that is burn-out amid a structure of death. And therefore hear this: when John describes our Lord's entry into Lazarus' tomb to call forth that ragged, stinking corpse, he believes Christ faces the dark forces mangling creation, the powers of chaos, division, death, whether they be images, institutions, ideologies or whatever else drags us down and walls us up.

Do you remember what happens at the tomb? Do you recall what we see Jesus say and do when confronting the dead Lazarus? What a moment! Jesus commands the stone be rolled aside. He goes into the tomb. He cries in a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out." Lazarus emerges. Jesus commands again, "Loose him. Let him go."

This image ranks among the most luminous in the whole of the New Testament. "Loose him! Loose her! Let them go!" This conveyor of "grace and truth," this Christ we confess as Resurrection and Life confronts powers shackling us, and grants liberation. For us, the Lazarus story can be our own biography, our own history. We celebrate our crossing from death to life; our stepping out of the grave clothes, our walking out of the tombs imprisoning us, holding our church, our city our nation, ourselves in bondage. John invites us to a realm of solidarity, trust, mutuality and service we call Christ. John invites us to life, free from the images controlling us, the institutions owning us, the ideologies splintering us. He promises life in a realm free from the tombs of racial division wracking and killing our cities; he promises the possibility of a realm free from the tombs of international distrust, dominated by antagonists holding one another hostage to blood and soil. This Christ, this "Resurrection and Life" invites us now to a new realm, a new community capable of demonstrating to a world bent on surrendering to the structures of death, a manner of life so radical, so selfless, so bound by mutuality and solidarity that a disbelieving and self serving world might itself be drawn from tombs, and finally choose to stand with, and for life.

And so this morning I ask, can we make the choice? Can we stand for love and life? Can we witness to this resurrection and life? That stance can come at great cost, you know. That is why, in his Gospel, John inserts this metaphor for life--this great Lazarus story--on the eve of Holy Week. Choosing the kind of human community offered in Christ precipitates enormous resistance by those eager to retain the status quo. Can we choose life, and face the consequences? Let me remind you of one person who did: a woman who faced incredible resistance, scoffing, contempt, and ridicule for her stance against slavery and for women's rights. Her name: Sojourner Truth. Harriet Beecher Stowe tells of a confrontation Sojourner Truth had with another great Black abolitionist, Frederick Douglas on the eve of the Civil War. Douglas had grown cynical and discouraged over the harsh resistance to the abolition of slavery and for him a proposal by President Buchanan to stop the agitation against slavery with a constitutional amendment legalizing slavery was the last straw. As Mrs. Stowe tells the story, "Frederick Douglas, fired with the wrongs of his race, and the despairs of the white race, declared that there was neither hope nor help for the slave but in their own right arms."

In the pause that followed this appeal, Sojourner Truth lifted her dark face, working with intense feeling, and said in a low, deep voice, which was heard in every corner of the room, "Frederick, is God dead?" And Stowe concludes, "Let that old black slave-woman's question ring through the nation, as then it rang though Faneuil Hall. To all who hope or dream to put down the agitation by a covenant with death and an agreement with hell, old Africa rises, and raising her poor, maimed, scarred hand to heaven, asks us 'Is God dead?'"

On this Palm Sunday, as we head into Holy Week, when the forces of death attack most virulently the forces of life, I pray we stand with John, witnesses at the tomb of Lazarus to the death of death; and yes, I pray we stand with Sojourner Truth, engulfed by the powers and structures of death: poor, black, uneducated, a woman, a slave nonetheless convinced amid the bleakest of historical moments that the God of love and liberation is yet alive, working in your behalf and in mine for redemption, freedom, and release. "Is God dead?" No way! Hear and rejoice in those words even now aimed at you, at me, at this world of God's: "Loose him! Loose her! Let them go!"