LENT 5, 2005
March 12, 13

There is a big part of me that thinks I should not open my mouth. You have had the Word already and what need have you of words.

Nonetheless here I go, where angels fear to tread.

You have witnessed resurrection. You have seen it. In your bones you know it, you already knew it.

These two lessons from Ezekiel and John are most welcome as we try to live in, make sense out of, and respond to what is going on all around us and our world. Everywhere we turn we see new evidence of atrocity, of greed, of lack of concern for people as human beings at home and abroad. The headline on the front page of the Press Citizen the morning I wrote this said,  “41 corpses found in Iraq .”  With the help of television we can see pictures of bodies in a way that our forebears could only imagine. We know way too much for our own good about what is happening—in Iraq , the Congo , the Sudan , to name a few places. If you have not yet seen the movie Hotel Rwanda , I recommend it highly, even though it piles it on higher and higher.

The other night when I was dealing with a long list of e-mail after a long day, I suddenly thought, with the internet now we not only see and know what is going on in far too vivid detail, but we are given the challenge, opportunity whatever, to do something about it. Call this Senator, sign that petition, come to this rally. It can all feel overwhelming, esp. when all I want to do is to crawl into my little cave and pretend that none of it is happening. Move over Lazarus.

Well, let’s take this to a different level. You have heard that they have found Mozart’s grave?  And what they found when they opened it?  He was sitting there with a piece of music and an eraser in his hand. The exhumer asked, “Mozart, what are you doing?”  He calmly replied, “I’m de-composing.”  We can use that laughter, can’t we.

Laughter is sometimes the only way we can keep from letting the heaviness of the world settle into our bones. When I taught at the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry New York thirty years ago, I had a student whose mother had been a child in one of the concentration camps. The mother came and spoke to the students one day. She told how as a girl of 13, about her own daughter’s age, she and her mother had been led into a gas chamber. Standing there naked, with so many others around her, scared and crying, she started to laugh. The guard who was near-by was taken with her, demanding for her to tell him why she was laughing. She said, “I will tell you, but not in here.”  Okay, he said, come out here and tell me. Only if my mother can come, too. Okay, said the guard. And so he removed both of them from the gas chamber seconds before the door closed and the gas was released. You know, I can’t remember what she told the guard—and perhaps it’s not important. Her laughter saved her life, and her mother’s life, that’s what’s important.

And we know far too well what happened to the others. Finally they were just a pile of bones, like the lesson from Ezekiel, with no life in them.

How fundamental to life are our bones. We talk about knowing something in our bones. We talk about getting down to the barebones. They are our foundation. We can go no further. Bones take our eternal soul on its physical journey. And the journey to the bones is one to the bedrock of our being, to our very roots. The bones are what is left when all else is stripped away.

I need to inject some more humor. Do you remember the Far Side cartoons by Gary Larsen?  One of my favorites had rubber chickens strewn all over the place—entitled “the boneless chicken ranch.”

We do not go very far in life without our bones. I have a special affinity for bones myself because of my own experience of lying under a bone scan, a routine test after I was diagnosed with breast cancer and suddenly having it flash into my mind. “Oh, my God, it’s in my bones.”  And that’s what that test and subsequent ones showed.

In my spine, the very backbone of my being. I spent most of the next year realizing that I could eventually be paralyzed if the tumors in my vertebrae grew. And I realized that the bones do not lie, and that I had not been speaking my truth and I had not been living with backbone.

So if I seem to be a big mouth now, it’s all part of my resurrection experience. I have learned to listen to my bones and trust what I know there. Linda Hogan, a Native American woman, a wonderful writer, talks about her own experience of near death after a horseback riding accident. With many bones in her body shattered and her mind equally shattered, she recalled a dream she had had earlier of her” spine coming to life, green as the first rising of spring, alive and supple,” and it gave her hope.

And hope is what we need, and hope is what we have been given today. The Hebrew people in exile were given this vision of the bones rising to life as proclaimed by the prophet Ezekiel. The community of Israel would rise again. And it did. They returned from exile and started life anew.

When I learned that 48% of the legislature in genocide ravaged Rwanda is women, I rejoiced. These women were elected because it was thought that they would be the healers of their society, that healing is a gift that does not belong exclusively to women, thank God, but healing and reconciliation have long been thought of particularly as feminine gifts. The bones of Rwanda are coming together and new life is being breathed into them.

And the raising of Lazarus is for John the most important story of his attempt to tell us who Jesus is. He is not just the giver of life, he is life itself. The irony is that in giving life to Lazarus, he is sealing his own death. Jesus gives back physical life to Lazarus as a sign, the seventh and most important sign in the Gospel of John. It is a sign of his power to give eternal life, ever lasting life.

We are always moving toward this life, or away from it. It is our choice, every day and every moment to move toward the darkness or toward the light, toward death or toward life. Eternal life is not something for just after our physical deaths; it begins in this life. We have it now, if we embrace it.  It is a state of being, a state of consciousness. And it comes after we have gone through pathos and suffering and faced death.

Lazarus was buried in a cave; we often dwell in caves of our own making. They can be caves of greed, selfishness, isolation, even success. We can make just about anything a cave—a place where we are cut off from life. As we approach the final weeks of Lent, here is a question to ask yourself, “What caves do I need to be called forth from?  The cave is after all, not only a symbol of death, but of re-birth, of a place of new life. We have to be willing to look honestly, to go to the truth deep within our bones, and find out what caves we are dwelling in from which Christ wants to call us forth.

And then listen—can you hear Christ shouting your name—and saying Come forth!

The word shout is not used often in John’s Gospel. It stands in contrast to the crowd who will soon shout for Jesus’ death. Here is Jesus shouting for Lazarus’ life—and for yours.

As the world shouts for death and about death, let us listen to Christ, who weeps and shouts and calls us forth into life, as a people, and as individuals.

            Amen.