Sermon for the Second Sunday after Pentecost

June 6, 2010

Readings

Last weekend, Mary and I went to the American art gallery. We hadn’t been in a few months and it is one of the places we try to visit often so we hopped on the metro and spent a couple hours looking at art. In the hall of presidents, I noticed for the first time a quote from Martin Luther King written large above the portraits of some of our recent leaders. It said, “Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, it comes through continuous struggle.” That seemed apropos for most of our nation’s history, and certainly for the times I can remember, but the quote kind of struck me and I ended up writing it down because I thought it might have something to say about the healing stories we have heard this morning. Does change come quickly, or does it come through the kind of struggle that can take a lifetime? That seems to be a worthwhile question to ask about the kind of miracle stories we have in the readings from Kings and Luke.

Does new life--rebirth--come upon us all of a sudden or might we have to struggle for it. The question is important because if we hear in these stories that divine restoration and healing are characterized by happening quickly, then we may not enter into the kind of collaborative, life-long work of being made new to which Jesus calls us. We may not recognize that slower, more complicated process as resurrection or even as divine. If we think being raised from death into new life happens in a flash or not at all then we may discount or dismiss all the little ways in which we are invited daily to become new people, more alive than the day before.

I am asked sometimes if one has to believe the miracle stories in our tradition in order to be a good Christian. My answer is always, “no,” of course. I hear religion’s detractors go on about miracle stories, wondering how anyone could believe such things. I read such stories and I wonder what to make of them, how to take them and where they came from. How did these stories begin? Did such things really happen in those earlier times? I generally deal with my own questions about the miracle stories by choosing not to spend much time trying to come up with the answers. I don’t think we have to be able to believe them literally; we may someday, but we don’t have to begin there. In fact, I think we are in greater danger of missing the point when we treat such stories literally than when we take them metaphorically. Literally, they seem to function as signs of the greatness and power of God, but they also leave us with the problem that such signs are not present, or at least not common in our time. Metaphorically, these stories speak of the nature of God and of the relationship between God and creation. God creates life, restores life, raises us up into the life for which we were created. That is taking place even now. Literally, these stories are about a few particular individuals. Metaphorically, they are about all of us. Literally, the miracle stories are about fixed moments in time. Metaphorically, they speak of what is happening throughout our lives, and about what has been taking place since the beginning of creation.

So what does it mean then to be brought back from the dead? What does it mean to be alive? What might it mean for a community, a nation, a culture, humanity itself to be raised into life from the way of death? The questions go way beyond the stories of a couple of people who lived in another time?

Last week, as we celebrated Trinity Sunday, we heard God described as “Wisdom.” In his book, Original Blessing, Matthew Fox writes about a Native American understanding of wisdom. He says wisdom means: that the people may live. He goes on to say, “Wisdom wants the people to live. What does that mean? Obviously to not die before their time, yes, but to live is not merely to survive. Living implies beauty, freedom of choice, giving birth, discipline, celebration. Living is not just shopping. Living is not building a nest to protect us from the suffering of others.”

Fox’s words startle me in their truth. They stop me with their truth and sadden me because, like Ezekiel in that great story about the valley of the dry bones, I find myself looking around at so much of what is taught and valued in our time and in our culture and I ask, how can these bones live? Our marketplace and economy are based on making people want to shop, on making us want to have whatever is bigger and better and easier. The voices of those who have been telling us for the last forty years that we have to end our dependence on oil, those voices have too often fallen on dead ears and now that oil has come back to haunt us. As a culture we celebrate the accumulation of wealth as if there will always be more of everything for the taking and as if wealth for one doesn’t mean poverty for another. I know that I am, in some respects, preaching to the choir. Some of us are struggling with these issues and trying to turn things around in our little corner of the world.

Foxes words about life being more than shopping and insulating ourselves from the need of others startle me and they give me a glimmer of hope. They speak on the one hand of what is wrong in our world while at the same time holding out the promise of something else…..a new way of living. The place to begin that new way of living would seem to involve taking stock of what really is important. It must involve asking, what does it mean to live? Besides breathing and being above ground, what does it really mean to be alive. Fox offers a partial list--beauty, freedom of choice, giving birth, discipline, celebration--but that is only a beginning. Each of us can assess what it would mean for us to be truly alive and to struggle in whatever way we have to live the life to which we are called. Yes, I am speaking of call. I don’t think we can make our lists--describe what it means to be alive--in isolation. If being alive is living out the possibilities that our creator has imagined for us, then deciding what our lives can still be about must involve listening and interacting with our creator. As we meet God in prayer, in the community, in the ancient stories, in nature, in family, who knows? We may discover what really constitutes life.

By going beyond the literal story of Jesus raising the dead and asking what that would involve in our lives we can begin to see ourselves as part of the ongoing work of creation. We have a role to play--a witness to provide to the world around us. You may recall that Jesus said his friends would do the kinds of amazing things that he did and more. In the literal version of today’s story from Luke, we might expect to have to come up some kind of quick fix for the problems we se around us. In the version where transformation and the call to life is an ongoing work, maybe our most powerful response to the world’s pains can be our lives. We can live lives that are unexpected, lives that are a little out of synch with the general movement of our culture. We can witness by living lives that make others want to know something about their source. JB