Sunday's Script

April 10, 2011 "Talking About the Power of Jesus"

(to listen to the sermon, as delivered, click here)

A cartoon from the New Yorker: It shows a scribe sitting at a scriptorium… "…nobody's going to take this stuff literally." The ancient writers and listeners understood figurative language. They knew about metaphor as a way of saying things that could not be put into words directly. More than the other gospels, John celebrated spiritual ways of story-telling! Think of all the "I am…" metaphors that Jesus used. And think of the number of times the gospel invites us to laugh at the characters who take its words literally:

Nicodemus takes "born again" literally and asks, "Climb back into my mother's womb?
The Woman at the well, misunderstands "living water" and thinks, "Give me some of that, so I'll never have to come back to this well to draw water!"

Martha imagines the raising of Lazarus to be about resuscitating a decaying corpse and warns, "There will be a stench."

The crowd at the grave misunderstand Jesus' tears and say, "See how he loved him."

The disciples of John the Baptist take the Eucharistic language literally and are offended when Jesus invites them to "Eat my flesh and drink my blood."

Nathanael thinks that Jesus' hometown is where he comes from and asks, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"

John's Gospel tells us about someone who was dead and came back to life. But if we know John's Gospel, we know not to take it literally. If we take it literally, then the maggot is a better symbol of resurrection than the butterfly. And perhaps it is! The butterfly represents metamorphosis, transformation, the maggot is literally life coming out of decay. And Christian hope is not wishful thinking. It's grounded in very real, earthy terms. A visit to the tomb, the stench of death, touching the illness, as we say in last week's healing, where Jesus spit on the earth, made a muddy paste and applied it to the eyes of the blind man.

When Jesus said, "Untie him and let him go!" to whom was he talking? The community who had just witnessed the unbelievable. We do not become fully human by ourselves. We are unbound by a community in which live and which supports us in our growth.

This is a particularly powerful insight, one which is not so often heard in our increasingly individualistic culture. We live in a land where "self-help" rules, and self-reliance is recognized as perhaps the leading virtue. Yet Lazarus does not have the power to free himself from his bonds (just as he was incapable of raising himself from death). He needs the community to unbind him and set him free.

Congregations as well as individuals can get bound up in grave-clothes. We need to be called out of our memory-places to live the life in its fullness which Jesus' followers have found throughout the centuries.

Resurrection power comes from God. It flows through Jesus, and his followers—through each person who will claim and use it. The power of Jesus was that he called a community together. A community we call the Body of Christ. The power of the church is new life literally coming out of the tomb. From the regions of death, new life emerges. The promise is that if we enter the depths of life's pains, we will find resurrection power at work. It's like a preview of Easter!

Last week we talked about spiritual blindness and the way John's gospel transmuted a healing miracle into a message about how Jesus' followers had their eyes opened to a new reality. This week we are dealing with spiritual resurrection and John gives us a story in the Raising of Lazarus that shows how joining Jesus' community was like waking up from a long sleep, like coming back from the dead.

Ezekiel tells us a story that is clearly labeled visionary, but it has a very this-world intention: to bring hope to a people who seemed to have lost all power to believe in a better tomorrow. The vision tells of the Spirit's power to breathe life into utterly dead situations.

The Bible is not a book of science (although it contains much careful observation), and it is not a book of history (although it records much history). The Bible is a book that wants to teach us how to live in relation to God. Above everything else, it wants to tell us how to be fully human. This is the heart of Jesus' teaching.

It is why Jesus chose to call himself "the son of the man" (or "the Human Being"). Jesus apparently avoided titles such as Messiah, Son of God, or God, though his disciples called him these things after his death and resurrection. Walter Wink uses this phrase to help us to understand Christ but to understand ourselves as well.

Jesus' phrase came to be mean the "Human Being" or "Truly Human One." The Fully Human One (Jesus) shows us how to be transformed into what God intended us to be from the beginning. Jesus shows us how (in his life, death and resurrection) to become who we were meant to be, or more properly perhaps, to become who we truly are.

According to Walter Wink, the implications of this are profound. "We are freed to go on the journey that Jesus charted rather than to worship the journey of Jesus. We can rescue Jesus from the baggage of christological beliefs added by the church. We are enabled to strip away the barnacles of dogma that installed Jesus as the second person of the trinity. Now he can be available to anyone seeking to realize the Human Being within. Jesus becomes uniquely a criterion of humanness. He shows us something of what it means to become human, but not enough to keep us from having to discover our true humanity ourselves. That means we are to be co-creators with God."

Wink says, "We are only fragmentarily human, fleetingly human, brokenly human. We see glimpses of our humanness . . but we have not yet arrived at true humanness." He goes on to say, "we are incapable of becoming human by ourselves. We scarcely know what humanness is, but we know well what inhumanity is."

Brothers and sisters in Christ, can we DARE to be "FULLY HUMAN"? Can we USE THE POWER of the Body of Christ to find our way with Jesus in this audacious journey? Can we help each other, like the community of Lazarus, to get untied from the clothes of death that bind us up, and be free to be you and me? The power of Jesus, power of resurrection, is available here and now. We have the POWER to be FULLY HUMAN today! Amen

--Jack Lohr, Interim Pastor