The Liberator

 

John 11:1-45

I was once a guest at a family’s dinner table, when they were talking about people they knew. And when the name of one particular person came up, the tone became sharply negative, critical. The matriarch of the family looked up with surprise and a little bit of confusion. Apparently, she had not received the memo: this person is on our bad list now.

She looked around and said, “Oh, we don’t like them anymore?” She shrugged. “Okay.” And that was it.

The unwritten rule in the household was everyone had to think alike, because disagreeing led to conflict. And “our family,” they would say, doesn’t have conflict.

To be fair, all families desire agreement, want harmony in the home. Even if we are willing to harbor some disagreement, we pick our battles carefully. We don’t want conflict for the sake of conflict; if we are going to suffer conflict it should be over something worthwhile. Because most of us see conflict as suffering. It becomes more than simply disagreement. It gets personal. It becomes threatening to our sense of who we are.

We talked at our Wednesday study last week about what it is like when your community disagrees with you. When you find yourself standing in the minority, perhaps even alone, you can try to argue your case with the others. You can try to convince them to come around to your position. But when you fail, what do you do then?

You can decide to go along with the others, change your position to be in sync. You can continue to argue, of course. And you could decide to part ways with the community. And that is often the most painful choice of all.

I think of the ways it can happen in churches. There are some churches that are governed by a top-down structure, a type of pyramid where there is one person at the top and levels of authority below, who answer to the top. Other churches, like the Presbyterian Church, are governed by a bottom-up structure. Members are elected and ordained to hold positions of leadership. It starts at the grassroots level and goes upward.

But even in the bottom-up governance style people often feel disenfranchised. They feel that the ones making the decisions that affect them are too far removed from the daily lives of people like them. Some conflict arises as a result.

We’ve seen it come and go in the church. Almost every time our General Assembly meets, some conflict arises because not everyone agrees on the decisions they make. Sometimes, congregations make the decision to leave the denomination because the conflict seems too big to overlook. They may decide to join a different denomination that feels like a better fit. Or they might decide to go it alone. Stay independent.

I met a woman once who told me she belonged to an independent, not affiliated with any denomination. In her words, “We don’t follow anyone else’s rules.”

This fact seemed important to her. I imagined the history this congregation might have had, a history filled with conflict that felt unresolvable. The differences they experienced felt irreconcilable, so they parted ways. They stood alone, formed their own independent church, and made their own rules.

Which, often times, turn out to be much stricter, much narrower, than the rules they walked away from.

In another conversation recently, my sister told me about a friend who belongs to what is called a “free will” church. Maybe you have seen that term on church signs. When my sister asked this person what it meant to be “free will,” they began to list all the rules restricting certain behaviors. My sister listened and replied, “From what you’re telling me, there isn’t much freedom there at all.” The person didn’t disagree.

The Apostle Paul writes, “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” He was writing to a church that was suffering because of rules. When the church moved out across religious and cultural borders, questions and tensions arose about what exactly was expected of these new converts. We know from the book of Acts that this was a period of figuring out who they were as followers of Jesus, what rules defined them. There needed to be a critical re-assessment of the rules they had known.

But that critical re-assessment did not begin with the apostles; it started with Jesus. Much of his teaching we read in the gospels was a matter of questioning the rules and how they were imposed on people. Had they become too burdensome, he was asking. Were the rules becoming more life-draining than life-giving, he wondered.

Very dangerous work he was taking on because people who question the rules are usually seen as a threat by the ones who rule. In Jesus’ day that was the Roman Empire, and the Jewish leaders who collaborated with the empire. Jesus was on their bad list because he wanted to unbind the people, set them free from structures that burdened them, that kept them from living their lives authentically.

His teaching brought a new perspective: that God is love and love does not wish to place undue burdens on us. But neither is love indifferent to how we live our lives. Love’s desire is for us to live into our real identity as the image of God, to grow into the people we were meant to be.

This growth is possible only if there is enough freedom to explore and experience the new.

In this story of the raising of Lazarus we are presented with a climactic moment in Jesus’ ministry. In a rather dramatic scene, he gives new life to someone who was dead. Lazarus, who was four days dead and buried in the tomb, is called out into resurrected life.

Jesus was not supposed to do that.

This marvelous thing he did was a pivotal point for him. It was quickly downhill from there.

The religious authorities still did not regard him as one with authority to do powerful things. They were not awestruck by this act of resurrection. This is like what we saw in last week’s story about the man who was born blind. In that case, the Pharisees seemed angry about the young man’s healing because they didn’t want to believe that Jesus had that power in him. In this case, they seem weirdly underwhelmed. A man has been raised from the dead. But their only apparent thought was that such extraordinary things cannot come from such an ordinary person. He was completely out of his lane; therefore, he should be condemned.

It took little time for those wheels to be set in motion. Soon there was a plan to arrest, charge, and convict him of some unforgiveable sin. Jesus would have to die because he came to set people free.

It’s like this: When Lazarus stepped out of that tomb, he was bound up tightly in his burial clothes. Jesus said to those around him, “unbind him and let him go.” Lazarus was set free. And here is the message:

Jesus came to set us free. He is the Liberator.

There will always be resistance to that notion. There will always be something in us that doesn’t want to let go of the familiar bindings, no matter how burdensome they become. The journey of faith invites us to look at all these things with new eyes, the eyes of the resurrected, and ask: is this life-giving or life-draining?

God is love and love does not wish to place undue burdens on us. But neither is love indifferent to how we live our lives.

Let us hear the call of Jesus to be unbound and freed to grow into the fullness of our humanity, created in God’s image.

 photo: ChurchArt.com

The Shepherd

 

Psalm 23

John 9:1-41        

Robert Jones has been a Christian all his life. He was raised in the Southern Baptist Church – this was something that played an important part in forming his identity. But at some point, he began to have questions he could not ignore. There were things about his upbringing and the church community that he grew uncomfortable with.

He began noticing the implicit racism all around him. He increasingly became aware of the assumptions that were made about people that no one ever seemed to question. Beliefs and preferences were accepted as facts. But, to Robert, they no longer seemed to be reliably factual.

As an adult he pursued a career studying religion in America, particularly the way our religion forms our social and political identity. He founded an organization called the Public Religion Research Institute, which conducts opinion polls to measure how political issues in our society relate to religious values. More and more, he saw that religious values and affiliation are related to people’s views on race.

In 2016 he wrote a book called The End of White Christian America. The title seemed to alarm a lot of people who thought he must be suggesting the end of Christianity in America was imminent. That was not what he was saying. He was simply noting the fact that the Church in America is becoming less white. It is becoming more diverse, just as America is becoming more diverse.

Should the racial or ethnic composition of the church really matter? Probably not. But it does matter because, for hundreds of years, the church has been right in the thick of racial segregation. Martin Luther King once said that 11:00 on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week in Christian America. And it really hasn’t changed much in the sixty years since he made that observation.

It is no wonder that White Christians in America became anxious by the title of Robert Jones’s book. The end of White Christian America might sound to some like an existential threat.

He followed that book up two years later with another one called White Too Long. He delves more deeply into the matter of racial segregation in the American Church, focusing most acutely on White Supremacy, the belief that White people are, somehow, superior to people of other races. Jones has come to the conclusion that White Supremacy is so woven into the fabric of the American church, it cannot be easily removed.

His findings are based on statistics. The numbers come from polling, so take it with a grain of salt if you wish, self-report is only self-report. But here is what he found: the more racist attitudes a person holds, the more likely that person is to identify as a White Christian. And it isn’t just one particular type of church – this is true among Evangelical Christians, Mainline Protestant Christians, and Catholics. These numbers tell us that Christians are as likely as anybody else – actually, more likely than anybody else –to categorize people into those who are acceptable and those who are unacceptable.

Those who belong and those who don’t belong.

Those who are trustworthy and those who are untrustworthy.

We might want to push back on that notion; we might want to get angry. We might resist the very idea with all our being. But it’s important to say, isn’t it? Because don’t we want to understand where our faults may lie?

The Psalmist says Lord, you have searched me and known me…You discern my path from far away…you are acquainted with all my ways. You, Lord, know me better than I know myself.

It is very hard for people to see the things about themselves that they don’t like. Everyone has parts of themselves that they are blind to, yet others can see them clearly. The question we all face at some point is whether we even want to know these things about ourselves.

When I was a seminary intern in a congregation I was excited about everything I was doing, and I asked the pastor who was supervising me to give me feedback. “Tell me how I’m doing, all of it.” He said, “Are you sure about that?” I said, “Absolutely, yes!” By the time he was finished, I was sorry I had asked. I was defensive. I was full of excuses. I was not ready to hear about my faults.

But if I was going to grow I needed to know. If we can never talk about our faults, we cannot repent. And repentance is at the center of our Christian faith. Confronting our sinfulness and turning in a new direction is just what Jesus, our Good Shepherd, invites us to do with him.

The story in John about the young man who was born blind is the same thing – it’s about being able to see what is true about yourself, and how far we will go to avoid seeing it. This is such a rich and full story, we could easily spend a couple of hours talking about it. But for now I simply want to lift out one thing:

The Pharisees, the men who decide who belongs and who doesn’t, have judged Jesus to be one who doesn’t belong. They don’t like him. He doesn’t go with the flow, he doesn’t follow the conventions, he doesn’t parrot the traditional beliefs. He’s different. So they don’t like him, and they have labeled him an outsider.

He is one who cannot be trusted. He is someone who does not belong in their class.

And once they have decided that he is in the category of “Other,” or outsider, they can’t see anything that might contradict that belief.

It is the one who was born blind who can see what the ones with sight are blind to.

The one who has never seen anything in his life can see the one thing that the others cannot see, and that thing is truth.

I was talking to someone recently who is active in Alcoholics Anonymous, a 12-Step Recovery Program. If you are not very familiar with the 12 Steps, it is essentially a process of turning your life over to a Higher Power – God, we would say – to help you heal and grow. The person was getting ready to help someone through the 5^th Step of their program. The 5^th Step comes only after a great deal of self-reflection, and it is this: We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

She said the scheduling of this thing was a big deal. She told me, “It’s pretty much an all-day thing.” That sounds intimidating to me – whether I was on the admitting side or the listening side, it could be a scary thing. 

That is why no one does it alone. No one is expected, no one possibly could, go through the process alone.

Christ calls us to see the things about ourselves that make us uncomfortable, things that cause us to harm others and ourselves. Christ calls us to be honest with ourselves about our weaknesses, our faults, our sin. None of us wants to do that. But the good news is this: when we are willing to do that, when we take a step into that deep, dark valley of self-reflection, of searching ourselves just as God searches us, we will not be alone; our shepherd will be with us.

Even though I walk through the darkest valley…you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

Jesus, our Good Shepherd, will walk all the way through it with us. He will never let us go.

Thanks be to God.

 Photo by Pawan Sharma on Unsplash

Photo by Pawan Sharma on Unsplash

The Helper

 John 3: 1-17

Way back in the beginning, Lent was a season of preparation for new Christians, who would be baptized on Easter Sunday. The typical Lenten discipline was the fast.

It was taken very seriously.  Usually, fasting was observed Monday through Saturday, when they were permitted only one meal at the end of the day – a vegetarian meal.  Sundays were exceptions, because every Sunday is considered a little Easter – a feast day, a celebration of the resurrection.

It is rare now for Christians to observe such a strict Lenten discipline.  When we think of a Lenten fast, we might think of giving up sweets or caffeine.  We consider it optional.  And, very likely, we are not really sure what the point of it is.

This is probably why many Christians now embrace the idea of taking something up rather than giving something up during Lent – that feels more purposeful, somehow.  Yet the Lenten fast is a spiritual practice that still may have much use for us.  We might just need a new angle.  What if instead of speaking about giving something up, we rephrased it as letting something go?

Nicodemus was asked to let go of some things.  He needed to let go of certain ways of looking at the world – this idea of what it means to be born, for example.  He needed to let go of his concepts of truth, of certainty.  He needed to let go of the way he understood God’s actions in the world, and even who he was in relation to God and all of humankind.  Nicodemus was being asked to let go of some really big things. 

And Nicodemus, as we see, was not very successful at it. This conversation we hear between Jesus and Nicodemus is funny, in a way. Jesus is speaking on a level that Nicodemus doesn’t grasp, his words seem to fly right over Nicodemus’s head, and Nicodemus responds with questions that completely miss the mark.

The problem seems to be that Nicodemus wants answers, but answers that fit into his boxes. And Jesus is handing him a whole new set of boxes. But Nicodemus can’t deal with it, he’s drowning in his confusion.

Then Jesus tries to throw him a lifeline: he tells him about God’s unfathomable love. But, maybe it is just plain unfathomable to Nicodemus. He doesn’t say anything more, and we might assume he walked away into the night.

If only he could have recognized the help he needed. If only he could have accepted the love Jesus offered.

We feel sad for Nicodemus, because we certainly know what it is like to be utterly confused by something, like he was confused by Jesus.  We understand how it feels to be losing control of things, the way Nicodemus was losing his grasp on everything he believed to be true. We might even worry about him. Maybe you find yourself wondering: whatever became of Old Nic? 

I can tell you that Nicodemus made another appearance in the story in chapter 7.  Jesus is teaching among crowds of people at a religious festival.  The Pharisees are about ready to have him arrested, but Nicodemus is there and he says something to the others to slow things, calm them down. 

Nicodemus makes one final appearance.  After Jesus is crucified.  Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus take his body from the cross to the tomb.  Nicodemus brings the myrrh for his burial.

Is the jury still out on Nicodemus?  Possibly.  But there is hope for Nicodemus.  He appears to have stepped out into some new territory; he is letting go of some things for the sake of being present to the new things.

What is it in your life that you need to let go of this season?  What is standing in the way of you accepting the help Jesus wants to give you, of receiving the unfathomable love of God?

Photo by Aamir Suhail on Unsplash