Rev. Dr. David Williams; 10.01.2015
Scripture Lesson: John 11:32-44
LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:
Every other Thursday, I travel into my future.
There aren’t flying cars and hoverboards. You don’t see Marty McFly and Doc Brown rushing about trying to solve yet another inadvertent space-time continuum paradox.
It’s a little more subtle than that. I encounter, through the faces of others, what it might mean when I am older.
I start up my van, and drive to the Baptist church at the heart of scenic downtown Annandale, during which time I get nowhere near hitting 88 miles an hour. I’m there to pick up meals for Meals On Wheels, run by the county and Annandale Christian Community for Action. In two large insulated containers, I have sometimes eight meals, sometimes six, sometimes seven, which I spend the next hour and a half or so shuttling around to human beings who are homebound.
I bustle through the halls of a huge retirement home, one that has through a peculiar mix of fate become populated entirely by elderly Asian Americans. I smile politely and bow slightly at the waist as I deliver the meal, which seems the thing to do. On occasion, I’ll try out the few words of Korean I know. Anyanghaseo, I’ll say, and they’ll smile, and wonder why that delivery man keeps saying he’s a happy donut.
I’ll stop at the homes of others, and stand patiently by the door as they move to it, as quickly as they can. Or I ring, and I knock, and then I call, because hearing that door isn’t as easy as it once was. Sometimes, I am the only soul they see that day. I linger, if they want me to, and pass pleasantries.
It’s sobering, because it means I’m seeing what the future may have in store for me, and I’m not sure I’m all that excited about it. Our consumer culture struggles with the idea of aging, because of course it does. In a society that attempts to keep humankind in an endless adolescence, no longer children but never adult, aging is an inconvenient reminder that we’re not always going to fit into that perfect marketing sweet spot. Because old people are old.
And when we are young, we don’t want to think about that, about how it is coming, about how swiftly the years fly.
It’s why most of us don’t prepare for tomorrow, why...as a study showed this week...the average non-billionaire American approaching retirement only has about $110,000 set aside for their future, which might seem like a lot, but given that the average one bedroom in an assisted living facility runs $3,500 a month, means we can manage that for just about half-a-decade before the cash runs out.
But in our culture of the now, we don’t want to look to what’s coming. In our demographically divided society, all we are expected to encounter are others like us, those who fit neatly into our pre-assigned category. In our culture of immediacy, we’re perfectly content to leave the future locked away, sealed conveniently behind a stone.
The products and media we encounter point us only to our hungers and our fears, showing us not reality, but only more of ourselves.
And against that, today we hear from John’s Gospel a story of a sign.
Unlike the three other Gospels, the fourth Gospel is not set up like a travelogue. Mark, Matthew, and Luke all share the same fundamental storyline, beginning with Jesus in Galilee and traveling down towards Jerusalem, with the physical movement towards the sacred city framing the narrative.
The structure of John’s Gospel is intentionally different. What is important to John is telling the story of a series of seven signs. Those signs, or semeion, are holy events, moments of miracle and meaning that speak to something beyond themselves. In telling us their story, John is laying out not a movement through space, but a moving into deeper meaning. Their task is to open us up to the reality of what Jesus is doing in the world, and to bring us deeper into relationship with him.
There are seven of them, because, well, seven is a number that in the ancient world is charged with meaning. For both the ancient Jews and the ancient Greeks, it was the perfect number, the number of completion and wholeness. To be honest, I don’t totally buy that, because, well, it’s totally random. Why not three? Like Schoolhouse Rock put it, three is a magic number. Or why not eleven? Aren’t things at their most amazing when Nigel Tufnel has turned them up to eleven?
But honestly, what matters for the unknown author of this Gospel is this: it’s the right number. It’s just as much as is needed.
Each of those seven events reinforces the character and nature of Jesus. One, there’s the miracle at Cana in John 2:1-11, where Jesus turns water into a nice rich cabernet sauvignon, with just a hint of oak, peat, and elderberry. Two, there’s the healing of the child of a royal official in chapter 4, and then three, the healing of an indigent lame beggar in chapter 5. Four, five thousand folks are fed in chapter six, and then, because miraculous catering isn’t intense enough to fill one chapter, five, Jesus walks on water in chapter 6. In chapter nine, we get number six, as a blind man is healed. Finally, the seventh sign comes as Jesus journeys to visit Lazarus, Mary, and Martha, in the full knowledge that he’ll arrive shortly after the death of his friend Lazarus.
The story as we encounter it today begins with tears, begins with a household shaken by loss. Family and friends have gathered, and there’s Jesus. He’s come with the intent of changing the direction of things, or so the story has already told us, but he cannot help but be moved by what he encounters. Here, human beings standing in encounter with death, shattered by loss, and here John does something odd with Jesus. The Jesus of John is the most potently close to God. John’s Jesus is the Jesus who was there in the beginning as the Word. John’s Jesus is always on top of things, aware of who he is, completely in control with a peculiar mystic certainty.
And yet, in the face of sorrow, it is John’s Jesus who breaks down. It is John’s Jesus who weeps, and who is greatly disturbed.
And it is this compassionate, brokenhearted Jesus who finds his way with the mourners to the tomb, and it is there that he says: take away the stone.
Practical Martha, always aware of the reality of what is happening, suggests maybe that isn’t the best idea. Four days dead in the Judean heat, locked away in the earth? “Jesus,” she says, “it’s going to smell.” It’s not an irrational response, and it makes sense emotionally. Best to leave that stone untouched.
But Jesus will have none of that. Believe. See this thing that must happen.
And so the stone is heaved out of place, and reality is made different.
There are things about our lives that we may or may not want to know. Things change, and change is hard. We get older, and getting older ain’t easy. People move on, and people pass across the mortal veil, and our love for them means that hurts.
We are afraid to stand in honest encounter with that reality, to see it, to smell its stench. We’d rather hide away from that reality, in the dreams of our past, or in the magical screens that show us everything we want and desire in the now. We want them sealed away, behind that stone.
But the Jesus who walks with us and weeps with us asks us not to shy away from turning aside those stones, from standing in encounter with those realities.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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