After the Thrill is Gone...Laughter!

Lent 5, Year A

Text: John 11.1-45

Although I was not a card-carrying fan of John Cougar in the 80's, as I get older I have to appreciate the wisdom of his “ditty” about Jack and Diane. How can you fault a chorus that goes “Oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone”? In my teen years I did not get what it meant nor did I care. 

Now, in my forties, it’s a different story, especially as I ponder my vacation reading of Angle of Repose by Wallace Steger, a novel is all about life going on, long after the thrill of living is gone. It’s about how a conflicted pioneer couple were able to find that angle of repose, that way of being together, long after the thrill of courtship and romantic hopes for the future had been buried deep in the mines of the West, long after failures and hurts, betrayals and tragedies, had eroded their lives together. In their later years they reached a point of surrender, a hidden grace to keep them together. Still, the reader wants more for them. Is the best we can hope for repose, a kind of malaise, life without the thrill?

Maybe it's a good thing that life goes on without endless thrill, and yet there are times when something pierces the daily routine and calls our attention to something greater. An unpredictable moment of truth and decision. That something happens in our readings today, as dry bones- a myriad of them – are re-knit together with flesh and muscle to become living, human beings with breath again. It happens amid the funeral routines of a small family as their loved one is laid in a tomb; and as all the trappings of death play the shrill tune we are all too well attuned to: death is final, and death is our destiny.  It’s the latent despair behind the saying on my Professor William Spong’s wall: “Life is what happens while you’re waiting to die.”

The despairing signs are there: Mary and Martha, pleading, “If you had only come earlier, he wouldn’t have died!”; the professional mourners, “If he can open the eyes of the blind can he not also prevent death?”; Martha, “Are you kidding me? Open the tomb? He’s been in there 4 days, he’s got to stink!” These are the words, our words, of those for whom the thrill has been gone, and the finality of death as seeped in, now our defining metaphor. One so defining we fail to see how confining it is.

I don’t know if it would make very good theater, but playwright Eugene O’Neil calls us on the confines we create in his play “Lazarus Laughed”, as he shows a returning Lazarus, having enjoyed 4 days of heaven’s delight, shouting “Yes!” in fits of laughter. In fact, Lazarus’s unstoppable laughter gets him in trouble – Judean leaders think he’s blaspheming God, followers of Jesus think he’s betraying their Lord.  Greeks try to idolize him as an avatar of Dionysus. Romans try to snuff him out, because if there is no fear of death then there is no imperial power. Yet despite all their attempts to silence Lazarus, he cannot help but laugh at the games we play in our attempts to tame life, to sap it of its wonder, and to drown out the din of God’s laughter with the droning hum of routine whose author is Death.

Lazarus knows firsthand the fulsome life God intends. But for us, it takes a raising of someone like Lazarus – and more profoundly still, of Jesus, to shake us out of complacency. Can we stumble on the thrill of living? We celebrate Easter every year not to place resurrection on a predictable timetable, but only to show that resurrection happens, in different ways, at different times in our lives. Paul Martinson of Luther Seminary once wrote that Christianity is a faith not of discovery, but surprise. We go to our tombs – those places where we are bound and tied up, the places of darkness and disappointment, failure and fear, places of hurt and betrayal and tragedy --places we hazard only by compulsion –as if sleuths or archeologists, asking “What happened here?” But as we dig we are surprised that someone has already been there before us, bringing life to dry bones, and calling us by name, shouting: “Be unbound, Be set free!”  We peer in. The tomb is empty, trappings of death are left behind.

If a reading like today’s causes our eyes to glaze over from familiarity (or length!) it’s only because we are so captive to the deathly repetition that we fail to see the resurrection before us. Even when the thrill of living is gone, Surprise! Resurrection happens! God’s laughing matter in the midst of our dead seriousness.

2 Advent 2013A

Change. Just earlier today I mentioned a staffing change going on here at St. Paul. We have some changes in our town happening very soon. I’m sure you have some changes in your life or in the lives of those you love. Some of these changes are welcome, others not so much. The Buddha said that all is change, all is in flux; not even from one moment to the next is anything, even the most stable mountain, the same. And the lion’s share of the suffering we inflict on ourselves and others stems from our desire to resist change. The Buddha did not say what the change was leading up to, only that it is. And is constant.

John the Baptizer comes on the scene to say change is coming. And it’s not a comfortable message! He talks about wrath, and the ax lying at the tree, ready to chop. It’s a call to repentance, as you know in Greek metanoia: a change of mind and perspective about their lives and world. The surprising thing is that people are actually coming out to him, in droves even, and in him find a kind of renewal in this ritual called baptism, offering a hopeful view of the future.

A couple weeks ago I shared a view of the future which you might call dismal. After all, the readings were apocalyptic, a healthy perspective to consider now and then. Because unlike the Buddha the Biblical Prophets, including John the Baptist and Jesus, say the change is headed somewhere. It’s not just change for change’s sake. Sometimes that somewhere is frightening: like the Titanic sinking, and there’s a warning call, like John the Baptist today, who says the ax is ready to swing. Where there was once a majestic poplar, soon there will be but a stump. But we’d be remiss if we stopped there. In the Old Testament reading of Isaiah there’s an axed stump, but look closely! There are shoots coming out! And all of those shoots are brimming and bursting with potential life and hope.

We simply do not know when either is going to happen – the ax or the shoot. We just know both are inevitable.

Who says this better than Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” a movie a watch almost every year about this time?  Jimmy Stewart, as George Bailey, is regular Joe, small town businessman, a good man. His whole life is all about making sacrifices for others, and as director of a Building and Loan he makes risky loans to people and trusts in their innate goodness. When an honest money error lands him on the edge of bankruptcy, and worse, possible scandal and criminal charges, he ponders ending it all. That’s when some divine intervention comes in, and he’s given a chance to see what life would be like if he hadn’t ever been born. What if he hadn’t helped all those people in mundane yet significant ways, with loans to build their businesses and homes; if he hadn’t made interventions which at the time he thought nothing of; if he hadn’t made certain self-sacrificing decisions? That world is now before him. And he does not like what he sees. Suddenly in comparison the world of his real life blooms with significance – AND when he returns from his parallel universe help comes from unexpected places.  He comes back to his own with new eyes. That’s repentance!

While John the Baptizer proclaimed disaster – which did happen, by the way: Jerusalem would be a smoldering pile of ashes within 40 years -- he also saw beyond the stump to the shoot. And that takes repentance. And for us too. Jesus, it turns out, is less of an axe-swinger and more of a “shoot-bearer”! Jesus himself was cut down, but the ax, or the cross, did not have the last word. The tomb miraculously empty did. Just as in the case of George Bailey, we can see God at work to bring about change, but the change that gives a fresh start and a healing space. Just as we look forward to the great day when God restores everything to the immortal hope that is stirring in God’s breast, which Isaiah foresaw: lions and lambs together; the cow and the bear, grazing. Cosmic restoration.

We may not see the grand vision yet. But you have already seen it in miniature in your own life. Maybe just in little shoots. Or if not, you know it’s coming. It’s not just a vain hope, it’s a proven reality. So for any George Baileys out there, repent, change your mind, to see the wonderful life before you.

In Christ. Amen.