A reflection on the lectionary readings for the fifth Sunday in Lent.
The prayer for today always makes me chuckle a little, not in a disrespectful way but in a ‘what a clever way to describe our humanness’ way. Unruly wills and affections. Yep, most days I can say I have moments where my will and affections can be described as unruly. This is one of my favorite prayers of the church year. Today, however, this prayer stuck me even deeper. When I got to the part ‘among the swift and varied changes of the world’ I felt in the depths of my soul.
The world around us is coming apart at the seams. We are in a war that no one can explain the reason for and no one but a handful of power hungry people seem to want. We are being led by a man who cheers at the deaths of those who stand up to him, who describes the death of people in war as merely inevitable, who tells another world leader that he didn’t owe them any heads up for attacking Iran because back in 1941, Japan attacked the US without warning. Oil prices around the globe are increasing dramatically causing hardship and death. The US is effectively blockading Cuba and causing great pain and suffering there for no reason. The president would rather fund suffering around the world than spend a penny to help people here in the US. The changes are dramatic and coming so rapidly I keep thinking what else can go wrong and then something else does.
Unruly wills and affections is no longer a quaint way of describing the human condition but a graphic description of those in power who are out of control and we are all paying the heavy toll of their dangerous choices. And I cry out in desperation, “please, God, fix our hearts on your love so that we can learn to love as you love. Only you can bring this chaos into order.”
I wonder if this is similar to what Mary and Martha were feeling when their brother died. Their world felt chaotic, swift changes out of their control. With Lazarus gone, how would they survive? Neither Mary nor Martha were married and there’s no mention of their father so without a male relative, their options for survival were limited.
Mary and Martha believed that Jesus had the power to heal their brother and even, perhaps to bring him back to life but only immediately after death. The other Gospel writers give us two more examples of Jesus bringing the dead back to life – the young man of Nain and a young girl whose father was a Synagogue leader named Jairus. Neither had yet been placed in their tombs and Lazarus had been dead and in the tomb for days.
Death brings chaos to our lives. There’s arraignments to make, people to notify, stuff to be sorted, lives rearranged, all while in the depths of grief. We feel our world spinning out of control. And Jesus shows up. Perhaps, like Martha, we want to point out to him that if he’d been and done what we expected of him, this thing would not have happened.
But Jesus doesn’t do what is others expect of him. Jesus does the work of the Father’s Love. He shows us what life lived in the Way of Love looks like. He shows us what the life we are made for looks like.
We don’t know why Jesus restored physical life to these three individuals and not others. For Lazarus and the man from Nain, perhaps it was so that the women who society forced to be dependent on men wouldn’t be shoved to the margins and forgotten. For the young girl, perhaps it was to upend the cultural idea that girls were not as valuable as boys. What we are given in each case is that Jesus raises them with the invitation back to life: get up, come out, live.
And Jesus offers us this same invitation. In the midst of the chaos Jesus says to us get up, come out, live. Don’t let fear bind you and paralyze you. Don’t let the chaos stop you from living. Don’t let our expectations blind us to Jesus’ presence with us.
It is ok to speak our doubt out loud – Jesus if you were here this would not be happening. Doubt isn’t the same as unbelief. Doubt is what breaks open the certainty of our own expectations so that we can experience Jesus as he is. And when we become aware of Jesus’ presence with us, we know that he feels deeply the same grief and sorrow we do. Our pain and suffering does not please God, it makes God weep with us.
I don’t have the answers to why the chaos caused by the leaders of our country continues. What I do know is that when we cry out to God ‘if you’d only been here’ God reminds us that God is always with us. Sometimes, most of the time, we have to set aside the wrappings of our expectations of how God should handle something and look for the presence of God within us and our community.
When Lazarus came out of the tomb, Jesus tells the people around him to unbind him. When he brings the man from Nain back to life, he gives him to his mother. When the daughter of Jairus is restored, Jesus tells those present to give her something to eat. We aren’t called to life alone but to live interdependent on each other, to be aware of how all that we think, say, and do impacts everyone around us regardless of the size of our circle of influence.
I was reminded this past week of the quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “In those days the Church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.” In our days Jesus stills calls us out of the tomb of fear into life in the Kingdom-on-earth-as-in-heaven.
The awareness of our interdependence is one of the ways God brings order to chaos. God chooses to work in and with and through God’s people. We may not have the power to stop all of the chaos in this world but we can help others know the presence of God; we can set the thermostat to Love. This is how we live as Resurrection People, saying simultaneously “If you had been here” and “I know that you are the Messiah”. Lord I believe, help my unbelief. It is who we are called to be. This is how we are shaped and transformed to love what God commands us (to Love everyone, even our enemies) and to desire the life that God promises as we follow Jesus. This is how our unruly wills and affections are tamed.
Keep lovin’ louder than the hate, Y’all.
Mother Nancy's Coffee Thoughts 