Unbind and be unbound
Link to video: https://www.facebook.com/138797592802860/videos/216237959607939
Thumbnail image: Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
March 28, 2020—Lent 5A
I heard this phrase the other day, and I’m guessing I’m not the only one who could relate: “This is the Lentiest Lent I ever Lented.”
So I hear today’s reading about a field of bones, about a people who are so far down that they harbor no hope of getting back up, and I’m like: Yep, I hear that.
Then I hear the story of Lazarus, dead and wrapped in his burial cloths, trapped in his tomb. And it almost makes it to hard to breathe, it feels so real: that sense of being imprisoned by things that are sucking the energy out of me. I’m guessing that meets a lot of us where we are right now.
For me, what’s got me tied up is the anxiety of the larger situation. Because there is always another report, more projections, more detailed epidemiology. There is always more to learn about the options we have in responding, and the difficult realization that even the least-bad option will be extremely costly. And I can’t seem to make myself stop reading about and thinking about these things. So I am constantly struggling, slowly suffocating in, these wrappings.
Maybe you are too. Or your bindings might be different. Yours might be fear that you, or your loved ones, will be struck by this disease. And so you spend your days disinfecting everything, and worrying about how to keep everyone as safe and separate as possible, adding up their risk factors, and berating yourself for things you did two weeks ago when you just didn’t realize.
Or you might be a health care worker, who will be on the front lines of this. At risk. Over-worked. Surrounded by suffering that you do not have the resources to fully respond to.
Or perhaps your bindings are the walls of your house, closing in on you, miring you in boredom and a strange sense of purposelessness.
For others, it might be the anxiety of a job they don’t really know how to do from a distance. Or that they no longer have, because it can’t be done from a distance, and the business is foundering.
Still another option: left with all this silence but so little space, some find themselves facing things they can no longer ignore or pretend away. I have to say that the grief books did not warn me that a state-wide quarantine would bring my loss back into such stark relief. Because this would be so. much. better. if I were locked in with my very favorite person. Then again, that makes me think of what it would be like to be shut in with relationships that aren’t so good. To have no escape, no distraction from a difficult marriage, or a fractured family. Or worse: no escape from the emotional or physical violence of the house you find yourself stuck in.
When you are caught inside situations like these, you are in the bonds of death. Like Lazarus, wrapped up and in the tomb, and there is no reason for anyone, most especially YOU, to expect any change.
But Jesus, apparently, isn’t particularly interested in anyone’s expectations. Jesus steps into the scene when Lent is at its Lentiest, when death has reached the “it stinketh” stage. Just like God stepped onto that field when the bodies had become nothing but bones. Nothing but DRY bones. Way beyond help. Way beyond hope. Not just “mostly dead,” but DEAD dead.
Even Miracle Max can’t help us now. Lent and the tomb and hopelessness have us in their clutches, and we can hear our sister Mary out there, angry and lamenting that it is TOO LATE to try to fix anything now. We are inclined to agree with her.
Nonetheless, Jesus speaks life into the stinking tomb. And God has Ezekiel prophesy to those bones: that our God is the God who speaks into chaos and brings order; that our God is the God who breathes into rocks and dirt and brings forth life.
Which means, my friends, that no matter how powerless you might feel in your current situation, that God can bring hope and possibility. Which means, my friends, that no matter how dead you might feel, you are still well within range!
Jesus steps up, and calls into the tomb: Lazarus, come out!
Come out. Can you imagine his voice, coming through those walls? What would it be to hear? What would it be, to listen? What would it bring, to obey that call? Come out, he cries. Let me untangle you from what imprisons you in its clutches. Allow yourself to be freed from the fears and anxieties that are literally killing you.
He calls to us, and we are filled with new and unexpected power. He does it first by calling every one of us out of the bindings of death. But that isn’t the end of it. There is a second time in this story that Jesus calls us into life: after Lazarus stumbles out, Jesus commands the people to unbind him. These two calls are intertwined, I believe: our freedom is bound up with the freedom of others, our abundant life is connected to theirs. Because we are all part of the same body, and when one part suffers, the whole body suffers. And because there is nothing more joyful and life-giving than working for the health and welfare of our neighbors.
Jesus calls us back into full and abundant life, and he calls us to be part of that work of healing and liberation for everyone else. He invites us to recognize the ways in which we are hostage to death, and having done so, to see the ways in which those around us might be similarly trapped. He calls us to be unbound, and connects that to the work of unbinding each other.
Come back into fullness of life. Help each other back to fullness of life. The two are inextricable parts of the same invitation, the same promise, the same Jesus who walks life and hope into the middle of what seems like nothing but death and despair.
His voice calls out to us, in a time when the worries of the world threaten to stifle us off as tightly as the “stay at home” order. His beloved voice cuts through it all, calling us out, calling us beyond, calling us to him and to each other.
What would it be, to let those commands enter us, to let them come to life in us, to have them grow within us?
Step free of the bonds of death.
Unbind each other.
And live!