5th Sunday in Lent: Fixed on Christ Jesus Where True Joys are to be Found

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

5 Lent, Year A

The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector

Sometimes the Collect for the Day says it all. As I sat down to do my lectio divina with the readings appointed for this Sunday (it usually takes me an hour or so) I found myself stopped in my tracks by the phrase, “[that] among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found.” “Swift and varied changes,” certainly captures these topsy turvy times, doesn’t it? The current public health crisis seems to change hour to hour, minute to minute, even moment to moment. Things that once seemed permanent and unshakeable—school, meeting together in public for worship, seeing our friends and neighbors, going to the store, going to the movies, or taking the kids to the playground—have suddenly vanished. It’s astounding how quickly everything we have taken for granted is simply gone.

I was reminded of that famous poem by the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, the great 17th century Japanese haiku master who so attentively captures the preciousness and fleetingness of the human condition:

     summer grasses!

all that remains 

       of the warriors’ dreams

Staring out over the field of a famous battle, all that remains of those great military ambitions and the soldiers’ dreams of honor and glory and riches is waving grasses whispering in what passes for summer breeze. The swift and varied changes of the world, indeed.

Paul’s word for this recognition of fleetingness and transitoriness in the Letter to the Romans is, “flesh.” He writes, “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” Sometimes Paul gets a bad rap when people misunderstand what he means by “flesh.” They think he’s talking about bodies—that somehow being Christian means we should hate our bodies. There’s nothing scriptural about that at all, of course. God created the world and declared it good, good, indeed very good. And God in Godself became human, took on flesh, walked and talked, ate, drank, touched, laughed, and cried. 

What Paul is pointing to is the question of where we place our ultimate trust. “Flesh” or “Spirit” are really places we come from, modes of perception, how we relate to the things of this world. Being “in the flesh,” means that we’re seeking for security, happiness, joy, and peace in what is ultimately passing away. It’s the illusion that we can find the rest for which our restless hearts yearn on our own, under our own steam, and separate from dependence on God. Being “in the Spirit” means being rooted and grounded in the reality of the Risen Christ. It’s trusting in something bigger than ourselves, someone bigger than ourselves. Instead of relying on ourselves and our efforts—the frantic arrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic that is life with ourselves at the center of the picture—being “in the Spirit” points to a life with God at the center. It points to a life of joyful surrender and trust.

The astounding thing, the truly Good News of the Gospel, is that there is nothing we have to do to earn the Spirit of God. Paul reminds us, “But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you.” It’s easy to miss the truly radical nature of that phrase—“the Spirit of God dwells in you.” God has made God’s home in us already. The only question is whether we can learn to come home to where God already is and dwell, abide, with the one who always already abides in us—free, unmerited, and undeserved. That’s what our psalm is pointing us towards—waiting for the Lord is just another way of reminding us of the futility of relying on ourselves and the peace and fruitfulness that comes from resting in God and God alone. Life in the Spirit is, “life and peace,” as Paul tells. Everything else is a poor knock-off, a shoddy imitation.

When we come to our Gospel for today, it’s clear that this is a story of death and new life. It’s a story about Lazarus, but it’s also the story of each one of us. Something in us needs to go into the Tomb and be sealed behind the stone in order that life in Jesus Christ, unending life in Him, might be born, might become the ground from which we spring. Or perhaps a better way to think of it is that the life with the self at the center of everything—my needs, my wants, my requirements, my expectations, my unquestioned preconceptions—needs to be seen for the Tomb it really is. The KJV’s “He stinketh, Lord!” shifts to “ME stinketh, Lord!” And then the fun, the adventure, the journey into love of the Christian life of discipleship begins.

Recovering addicts of different stripes will be the first ones to tell you about the power of this recognition to change, to reorient, to turn their lives. They know all too well those words from Ezekiel, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.” It’s a moment of realizing that the life I’ve been living is no life at all. It’s a moment when those “warriors’ dreams” of which Basho so eloquently writes are just summer grasses swishing in a puff of breeze. It’s a moment of realizing that it’s only in turning our lives over to God, waiting for the Lord--more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning--that we awaken to the full scope of who it is that God has called us to be. 

When the stone is rolled away and Jesus calls Lazarus by name, it’s symbolic of the new, resurrected life that is available to each of us, right here and right now. Especially in John’s Gospel, eternal life, the boundless, untrammeled, and inextinguishable freedom that is life in Christ, is not just something that awaits us when we die. We can be people who live from the Spirit, from that true life and true peace even here, even now. It’s not that we won’t encounter suffering and hardship, or even that we won’t die, but that we relate to that suffering and hardship and inevitable death from a different place. When we’ve made a practice, a daily habit, of dwelling with the One who dwells in/with/for us, when we’ve made a habit of companioning ourselves to Christ, difficulties somehow seem more navigable. There’s a deep well of peace--Christ Himself in the depths of the heart--available to us even when the going gets tough and hits just seem to keep on coming.

The urgent call of the Gospel is to fix our hearts where true joys are to be found: in God as revealed in God’s only Son Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. Only by Him and with Him and in Him will we be able to navigate “the swift and varied changes of this world.” That could be the true gift of this contemporary moment—that it shows us the futility of placing our trust in what is passing away and directs us by the scruff of our stiff, stubborn, and grumbling Israelite necks towards the wellspring of the peace that comes from putting our trust in God and God alone. The gift of this time could be in helping us realize that what we took for our life, was really a tomb. The gift of this time could be that as the stone is rolled back we, too,  hear our own name on Jesus’ lips calling us to new life with the voice of unconditional love that loves us just as we are. And all this time we thought we had to “be a somebody!”

The interesting thing about the end of Gospel passage is that Jesus says to people around Lazarus to unbind him. Sometimes we hear this passage and think that Jesus waves a finger and—poof!—the funeral shroud unspools from Lazarus’ stinky body like a toilet paper roll in the hands of two-year-old. But that’s not what happens, is it? It’s the people around Lazarus who unbind him. And that’s an important thing to recognize in a time when people are isolated and alone, bound by the cloth strips of fear, worry, anxiety, depression, sadness, scarcity, and lack. How can we as a community unbind the bound in our midst? How can we help others to make contact with the life and peace that is life in the Spirit? 

Perhaps it’s a phone call, a card, an e-mail, an offer of help: reach out with your heart not your hands. Sanitize and sanctify. Perhaps it’s a reminder like I get from my wife from time to time to go and be still before the Lord in our prayer room in the basement when I’ve been running all day. Perhaps it’s simply committing to being a person who lives from the resurrected life of Christ and displays a steady, faithful, groundedness in the face of great challenges. Perhaps waiting for the Lord who is waiting for us to wait on Him, knowing in our bones that we are already in the Spirit is the most profound gift of life and peace we can offer in a world gone mad with anxiety and fear. 

When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” Come out Fred , Bob, Bill, Jane, June and Suzy…. All of us. Come out. Know that Jesus meets us in the midst of dry bones. He is here in the midst of stink and death. Listen to his call to come out of fear, come out of anxiety, and then be that voice calling others into life, the love of Jesus on your newborn lips.