THE BARN HAS BURNED

On Lent 5, we hear about Lazarus.

His story falls on Lent 5 because in John’s Gospel,

            this is the tipping point.

Raising Lazarus pushed Jesus’ opposition

            over the edge into a murderous plot.

This is the point at which they realized

            what a revolutionary change Jesus was ushering

                        into the world.

What do you suppose life was like for Lazarus

            before he fell ill?

Scripture doesn’t say.

So it probably wasn’t remarkable.

It was probably typical – an ordinary life.

I once asked a friend, “How are you?”

He answered honestly. He said “Mixed.”

His life was somewhat afflicted but generally ok.

That’s how life usually is.

That’s how Lazarus’ life was.

Then he got seriously sick and life was a lot worse.

So his sisters sent word to Jesus.

They wanted him to come and heal their brother.

They wanted him to restore Lazarus from illness back to his mixed life.

Sigmund Freud said the goal of psychoanalysis is to cure mental illness

            so the patient can resume a life of “ordinary misery.”

Mary and Martha wanted Jesus to restore the balance,    

            to put Lazarus back the way he was.

That is what a lot of religion is for.

We have gotten used to life as it is,

            settled into our ordinary misery,

            and when that balance is threatened

            we want Jesus to set things back the way they were.

We don’t harbor much hope that things can be dramatically better

            than they have always been.

We are a bit like the righteous pagans

            in Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Dante had the greatest respect for the great pagans like Virgil

who lived before the time of Jesus.

They were good. They were even noble,

            but in the Divine Comedy, Dante consigned their souls to limbo

            – neither the punishments of hell nor the joys of paradise.

They got a neutral afterlife because,

though they were righteous,

they had lived and died with no  concept of heaven,           

            no idea of union with  God,

            no hope for the beatific vision in which we will be lost

                        in wonder, love, and praise.

So Dante relegated them to limbo, the mixed state,          

            because they failed to imagine anything better.

I don’t know where righteous pagans go when they die

            and neither did Dante

            but he was making this spiritual point:

It is impossible to achieve what we cannot first imagine.

 If we cannot imagine that life might be utterly new,         

            if the best we hope for is the way things were,

            then we erect a barrier to what Jesus wants to give us. 

So Mary and Martha called Jesus to come quick

            and set things back the way they were.

But he didn’t do it.

He waited for two days until Lazarus had died

            and all hope to put things back the way they were

                        was gone.

That’s when Jesus finally showed up with something better.

He replaced Lazarus’s ordinary life with a miracle.

What happened to Lazarus after that?

We don’t know for sure.

His name is not said again.

But there may be an answer – at least a theory.

No one knows who wrote the 4^th Gospel.

Tradition gave it the name of John,

            but it pretty clearly wasn’t John the Son of Zebedee

                        and brother of James.

We don’t know who wrote the 4^th Gospel,

            but there is a respectable group of scholars

                        who think it was Lazarus.

It may be that the mystical Gospel,

            the loftiest poetry and the truest knowledge of Christ,       

            came from this man who had seen the other side.

We don’t know that.

But I cannot imagine that Lazarus resumed his ordinary life.

From that day forth, he knew the life giving power of Jesus

            -- not as an idea, but an experience; not as a theory, but as a fact.

Lazarus knew what Paul meant when he said,

            “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.

              The old has gone. The new has come.”

But is that what we want?

The self-help books and the psycho-pundits on the talk shows

            all have techniques to tinker a little with our lives

            -- countless ways to make a little adjustment here

                        or there so we might, with luck and hard work,

                        make ourselves 3% happier -- 

but without changing anything too much.

On any given day, 3% happier may be

            about as much as we think like we can stand.

So we pray for that, and many a time

            that’s what Jesus does for us.

“I’ll have a Grande grace, medium roast, not bold,

            with room for cream.”

But sometimes Jesus may have a venti grace in mind

            and our cup won’t hold it.

We need a different cup.

Jesus wants better for us than we want for ourselves.

Jesus wants a better life for us than we can imagine,

            but it’s natural for us to be afraid of it.

Room has to be made to hold so much grace.

The ordinary things that make is feel safe,     

            the things that give us our hints of well-being,

                        have to fall away to make room

            “for the glory which is yet to be revealed

Holy Week is the story of that falling away.

It is a story of death – like the death of Lazarus

             – the kind of death that opens the way to new life

            – not to the old life refurbished, buffed and refinished

                        – but an utterly new life – a new creation.

This makes a difference for how we understand

            what happens in our life all the time.

It changes how we understand what is happening

            when the ordinary things that make is feel safe,      

            the things that give us our sense of well-being,

                        fall away.

And that is all the time.

As Joni Mitchell so wisely said,   

            “Something’s lost and something’s gained

                        in living every day.”

When life is falling apart,

            in big ways or in little ways,

            how do we understand it?

It’s hard to lose the things that make us happy

            -- jobs, homes, people, relationships.

Even though he knew about resurrection,

            Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus

                        because the Lazarus who came out of the tomb

                        would not be the same man who went into it.

Even Jesus missed the old Lazarus.

So naturally, when we lose what we love, we grieve.

But we do not suffer without hope.

Peter says,

            “After you have suffered for a little while.,

             the God of all grace who has called you

                        to his eternal glory in Christ

                        will himself restore you, support, and strengthen

                        and establish you.”

Paul says,

            “. . . (T)he sufferings of this present time are not worth

             comparing to the glory about to be revealed . . . .”

There is a Zen adage that goes,

            “The barn has burned.

             Now I can see the moon.”

That’s a new meaning for a barn burning.

When the barn is burning in our lives,

            we do our best to put out the fire.

But when the barn has burned, we look for the moon.

When Lazarus has died, we look for the resurrection.

When we lose the things that make us happy,

            we look for the glory of Christ to make us ecstatic.

ME OR A STUPID DONKEY

The blind man in today’s Gospel lesson

            is one of my favorite characters in the Bible.

If the American Academy of Religion gave out Oscars,

            I’d nominate him for best supporting actor.

He gave us the immortal line in Amazing Grace,

            “I once was . . . blind but now I see.”

But that doesn’t quite catch the feel of what he actually said.

We translate his words as “I once was blind but now I can see.”

But in the Greek, that last clause is just one word – Vlepo.

I once was blind. Now: vlepo.

It’s a word with sharpness of insight,

like the French Voila’ or the Spanish Claro.

Vlepo doesn’t mean quite the same thing

as Voila or Claro – but it has that feeling.

I once was helpless. Now voila.

I once didn’t have a clue. Now claro.

I once was blind. Now vlepo.

It’s a pithy rejoinder shot out in the middle of an argument.

The religious authorities didn’t like it one little bit

that Jesus had restored the man’s sight.

They were smart theologians and scholars.

They knew charismatic healing was just hocus pocus

            by charlatans to fool the hicks in Galilee.

Now Jesus had healed someone in the city.

Something had to be wrong with this picture.

So they interrogated the man’s parents

to find out if he had really been blind at all.

Then they interrogated the blind man himself,

and when they didn’t like his answers,

they confronted him with undeniable religious truths.

“We know this Jesus is a sinner,

so how can you claim he has restored your sight?

Just answer us that.”

He replied. “You say he is a sinner.

I don’t know whether he is a sinner or not.

All I know is I was blind. Now vlepo.”

Do you see what I like about this guy?

He is so Zen. So simple. No interpretation. No fuss.

Having spent his entire life in darkness,

            he is used to not knowing things.

He knows what he knows, and beyond that

            he doesn’t speculate.

He doesn’t argue that Jesus must be the Son of God,

or the Incarnation of the 2^nd person of the Trinity.

He’s no theologian.

He’s just someone who was blind and now he sees.

The first thing we see here is that grace is just that.

It’s grace. It isn’t something we have to earn

by believing anything in particular,

not even believing in Jesus.

The blind man didn’t believe any doctrines.

Grace just happens.

We didn’t conjure the sun to rise with our positive thinking.

We didn’t make the flowers bloom with our sound doctrines.

We didn’t make the river flow with our moral living.

Creation is gift. Life is gift.  Healing, beauty, and goodness are all gift.

When we acknowledge that so much is just gift,

            we can relax and open our hands to receive more of it.

The second thing we see in this story

is that faith doesn’t begin with doctrines.

They come later and sometimes they can help,

            but they can get in the way too.

The religious authorities in our Gospel lesson had doctrines

that made what they were seeing impossible.

So they could not believe what they saw.

There is a Sufi story about a joker sage named Mullah Nazradin.

One day a neighbor came to borrow Mullah Nazradin’s donkey

to haul some goods across the village.

Nazradin said, “I am sorry friend,

But I have already loaned my donkey

to my cousin in the next village.”

“Ok,” the neighbor said, but as he walked away

he heard braying in the back yard.

Curious, he went around to the back and voila, claro, vlepo!

There was the donkey.

So he went back to the door and said,

“Mullah, what is this?

            You said you had loaned your donkey

            to your cousin in the next village.

But I hear your donkey braying in the back yard.”

Nazradin snapped back indignantly,

“Well who are you going to believe --

            me or a stupid donkey?”

The first cardinal virtue, the mother of all virtues

            is the just seeing things as they are

                        unfiltered through fixed concepts.

Faith and wisdom both begin

            with looking life in the face

            and telling the truth about what we see.

The final thing we  see in our story

            is that seeing the truth, especially telling the truth,

                        can stir things up.

In our families, in our jobs, in our churches,

            wherever we organize ourselves into groups,

            the groups adopt certain agreed upon ways of looking at things.

This person is a hot head; that person is a saint.

People of this race are a certain way.

People of one religion are greedy

            while people of another religion are  violent.

We have unquestioned beliefs about ourselves

            and about each other.

We dare not question them because loyalty to the group

            means living in the group think box.

But it's pretty dark inside those boxes.

 Living in a group think box of fixed concepts

            is a form of blindness.

We cannot see the simple truth of things as they are

            because we are wearing blinders of prejudice

            and unquestioned beliefs.

In this story, Jesus takes the man’s blinders off.

He gives him sight, simple sight.

And he accepts it. “Vlepo,” he says. No interpretation.

In the 15^th Century, church leaders refused to look

            through Galileo’s telescope for fear

            they would see something contrary to the accepted beliefs

                        of the time.

They had not gotten the point of today’s story.

Nothing that is true is foreign to Christ.

Ironically, some scientists like Richard Dawkins

are blinded by their group think box.

They are unwilling to look a the truths we see

            through our telescopes of ancient stories, poetry,

            rituals, songs, and prayers.

They are even unwilling to look at the interpretations

            of other scientists, like physicist Robert Russell who explains

that time is a construct restricting our possibilities,

that eternity plays by completely different rules

and that sometimes the threshold between time and eternity opens.

Jesus invites us to look at things as they are.

He invites us outside our group think box.

He does that for the same reason now that he did then

He’s lonely out there.

Jesus doesn’t fit in our group think box

            so we can’t see him.

It’s a kind of blindness.

But if we dare to look through our spiritual telescopes,

            if we dare to read the old stories,

            perform the sacred rituals and sing the songs,

            if we dare to pray,

                        we might just see Jesus.

I have seen him in those forbidden ways         

            and he has blessed my life beyond measure.

The joy and splendor of reality

                        are always outside the box,

                        like the stars the men of old refused to see

                                    through Galileo’s telescope.

They are in the hand of the same man who opened

the blind man’s eyes.

And the price is still the same. It’s a gift.