What can we say March 26? Lent 5

    Psalm 130 strikes me as lovely timing-wise. It’s one of the Church’s historic “Seven Penitential Psalms,” so fitting for Lent. People with zero Bible knowledge can resonate to those depths. I preached on this a while back and told about a friend of mind who went radio silent for about 3 weeks. I texted, called, wondered, finally texted his wife. He called and said “I fell into a deep hole. Sorry I’ve not been in touch.” I said “Next time you fall into a hole, you call me. I’ll pull you out.” After a little thought, I repaired that to say “Actually, I’ll climb down in the hole and sit with you.”

   Sometimes we get too syrupy about perils like the proverbial hole, and think it’s God’s job to yank us out immediately, or church people’s job to assure them they can snap right out of it. Maybe we get down in the hole and just sit with them. The Gospel, after all, is that Jesus was God coming down into our hole, the depths, to be with us, not to fix everything.

   Naturally, when that sermon ended, several reminded me as they exited (too late, right?) of the great scene in West Wing where Leo encourages Josh with a story: A guy falls into a hole, can’t get out. A doctor comes along, hears the cry for help, writes out a prescription and drops it into the hole. A priest comes next, jots down a prayer and drops it in. Finally a friend comes, who jumps down into the hole. “Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.” The friend says “I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.”

   Our Psalm inspired John Wesley’s Aldersgate experience. Dart around the Scriptures and mention dark pit moments: Joseph sold into slavery, Daniel in the lion’s den, Jonah in the fish’s belly, Jesus in the dungeon the night before his crucifixion, or lying in the stone cold tomb.

   What are the depths? Leslie Brandt, in his lovely spiritual book Psalms Now, updates the language to “O God, tonight I see You with a heart full of guilt and a mind full of bewilderment and frustration.” 

 Compare this, though, to Ernesto Cardenal, a Nicaraguan priest imprisoned for standing with the poorest of the poor: “From the depths, I cry in the night from the prison cell, from the torture chamber in the hour of darkness, hear my S.O.S.” We know our depths, and are asked to be attentive to the depths of others, the Cardenals of the world. Explore various locations for this Psalm. Invite the pew-sitters to explore their own.

   Important to note: we can’t extricate ourselves. Ours is simply to wait, to watch. Jason Byassee (in his great Brazos commentary) phrased it shrewdly: “Don’t do something. Just stand there. The Lord will act.” No wonder Martin Luther thought this Psalm captured the heart of the Gospel. Byassee goes on to say he can’t think of the Psalm without singing it, mentioning Chris Miner’s “From the Depths of Woe” and Charles Pettee and Folk Song’s “Psalm 130.” I’d add Arvo Pärt’s “De Profundis” and John Michael Talbot’s “Out of the Depths.” We “get” the Psalm when it’s sung, as the music can probe more deeply than words; and it’s the universal agony of it all that then inspires more music.

   Ezekiel 37:1-14 is a vivid, memorable text, although we might miss how utterly shocking it is. Artists started depicting it at Dura Europos (3rd century, in modern day Syria) – and it inspired the catchy “Dem Bones” spiritual. Ezekiel is vouchsafed a vision of a valley of dry bones. My mind flits to those horrific photos of dead Civil War soldiers strewn over battlefields at Antietam or Gettysburg. In Ezekiel’s vision, the death was some time ago, as the bodies have decayed to nothing but the bones. Don’t forget: in Judaism, a corpse was an unclean thing to be dealt with quickly or avoided. This valley isn’t a cemetery, but the epitome of uncleanliness.

   The prophet isn’t like us, presuming upon resurrection as a natural right. It’s utterly impossible, inconceivable; there is zero hope in this valley. Walter Zimmerli’s eloquent assessment is worth quoting at length: “We hear not the man of God who is gifted with special insight, but simply the man who knows about God: ‘You know.’ This has two sides to it: the admission of the powerlessness of man who, faced with such an irrefutable victory on death’s part, is incapable of saying anything about the possibility of life; at the same time, the knowledge that he is replying to the God whose abilities are not curtailed by man’s lack of abilities.” Don’t your people – and you as their pastor – feel powerless?

   Of course, we can rightly discern personal, psychological hope in our text. Ponder the anxiety, depression and discouragement people feel when they simply watch the news - the way the political becomes personal for most. Ezekiel's vision might just suggest that God can even take away such despair, and raise us from the graves that our hearts can become.

   The breath, the wind, reminds us of Genesis, when God blows the ruah, the wind / breath into Adam’s lifeless dust. Impossible, not human determination or skill. How to preach such a text? Can we trust Ezekiel’s vision to be its own illustration? His vision was his preaching illustration; can we improve on it? We can guide people into (hopefully) a dawning realization that on our own we have the ability to break God’s heart and wind up dead. That’s it. As a Church, or if we think of our nation, we cannot fix what ails us. It’s a fallen, broken world. It’s God, or nothing.

   Fascinating: in the book of Ezekiel, God saves, not so much because he adores the people or the nation. Rather, God may save in order to keep from looking bad. What lengths will this God go to in order to protect his own image, and to reveal himself to the world? God uses the very same prophet who pronounced and enacted through signs God’s judgment now to deliver this message of new life. Prophets do judgment; prophets do hope. Prophets “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Too often, preachers and prophets whiff on this; John Goldingay is right: “The true prophet knows what time it is.” In the hopeless depths of exile, it’s time for hope.

   And Israel’s deliverance is utterly unconditional. Nothing in them deserves restoration; they have zero capacity to help themselves. Ezekiel can only stammer “Lord, you know…” Zimmerli’s elegant conclusion? “Only when, as a result of this event, the great awareness dawns and men no longer appear with their own achievements, no matter how magnificently righteous these might be, but when they realize that God reveals himself in the miracle of his free promise of life – only there does God’s action achieve its goal. There all ecclesiastical prerogatives collapse, and there remains only the praise given to the God who in the majestic freedom of his faithfulness has revealed himself.”

   Romans 8:6-11 is (of course!) a fine text, part of Paul’s greatest chapter - but not as picturesque as Ezekiel, the Psalmist or the Gospel. And so:

   John 11:1-45. Such a long reading! And is Lent 5 the time to leap ahead to Easter prematurely? Yet Lent has its Sundays. We feel the mournful ashes in the sorrow of the sisters, and in Jesus’ simple weeping. On this text, I refer you to my blog from the prior lectionary run – with illustrative material from the archaeology of Bethany (as the newly constructed “wall” there now!), N.T. Wright, Frederick Buechner and Wendell Berry. 

   I hesitate to add, but will anyhow, an intriguing thought from Jean Vanier, whose wisdom (I’d shyly argue) isn’t entirely squashed by stories of his wayward behavior? In We Need Each Other, he notes the way John 11 (not to mention Luke 10) speaks of "the house of Martha," Vanier infers that Lazarus "has a severe disability." The Catholic Church has a feast day for Mary and one for Martha but none for Lazarus (which is shocking); Vanier points out "we tend to forget people with disabilities." He riffs on his frequently voiced themes of how the disabled are great gifts to us - and how we all are sick. I wonder how, late in life, he saw himself in his wise words about our shared sickness. Picturing Lazarus in the tomb he wrote: "Our fears, hatred and incapacities to love and forgive are the graves in which we are enclosed. Jesus calls to those parts of us that are dead, those parts of us that are controlled by fear of failure or not being loved. All those fears prevent us from entering into the vision of Jesus: a Church where the weakest people transform us by their presence."