Lent 5a
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Can we talk about hope? When I say ‘hope’ I don’t mean passive wishful thinking. I don’t mean hope in being naively optimistic. I mean a spiritual hope, rooted in the promise of a loving God.
To hope doesn’t mean we can expect to get what we want and to hope doesn’t mean we can expect to go back to the way things were before.
Hope is an embrace of the unknown knowing God is in fact present.
We just heard the story of the prophet Ezekiel being led to a valley of dry bones. Ezekiel says that the Israel people have lost hope. They see the suffering and they can only conclude that their best days are behind them. But God has the power to give life to the driest and deadest things imaginable. Of course it’s not just God- it’s God through Ezekiel, and Ezekiel has that hope that God’s not done here yet and he prophesied as much. That’s when we hear about sinews and flesh reanimating these dry bones- it’s a scene you can imagine a special effects team in Hollywood having a field day with.
Likewise in the Gospel of John we heard about Jesus raising to life his friend Lazarus. Of course this miracle doesn’t come quickly or easily. When Jesus learns about the death of Lazarus, he weeps.
But that story isn’t over yet. He stands before the stinky tomb and tells Lazarus to come out. It’s a pretty audacious request to ask a man who died 4 days ago to do something. But like Ezekiel, Jesus has confidence that God is truly present and capable.
St. Julian of Norwich was a woman who lived in the middle ages in England. She authored the oldest known book written in English by a woman called “Revelations of Divine Love.” She lived a lot of her life as an anchoress, which means that for years, she chose to live all day, every day, 24/7, alone in a room set up on church grounds. This room had two windows. One window looked into the church, so she could participate in worship. The other window faced the street where she could interact with the public, pray with them and offer them spiritual guidance.
It was early in Julian of Norwich’s life, 1348-1349, that the Black Death ravaged England. Julian watched as this disease brought death to her community. Modern scholars, studying records from the time, think that the Black Death killed between 30 and 60 percent of the population of England during just that two-year period.
Just imagine that for a second. Imagine that kind of plague sweeping through Lebanon, leaving 6 in 10 people dead. Imagine the grief, the social and economic upheaval, the sheer chaos of a plague that swept through town like wildfire and killed more than half of the population within the span of weeks or months.
Julian herself fell ill in 1373, probably not from the bubonic plague, but from a sickness that was so terrible that a priest was sent to her room to administer Last Rites. And it was as she was in the room, nearing death, that she received a series of visions from God — and then miraculously recovered from her illness. She wrote down the visions she had received, including her most quoted line: “All shall be well. All shall be well. And all manner of things shall be well.”
Think about that. Julian had every reason to curse God, watching the world fall apart around her, watching her own health fall to pieces.
Keep in mind that in the 14th century they didn’t really understand the cause of disease… and there was no shortage of preachers who claimed that the Black Death was God’s punishment for the world’s sins: for worldliness, or fornication, or heresy or even left-handedness. And as people dropped like flies, that seemed pretty easy to believe. Even decades after, it’s pretty easy to imagine people’s fear that God wasn’t finished punishing them, that any year now he would send another plague to finish off the ones that managed to survive the first one.
And yet, there sits Julian, alone in her anchorite’s room, writing that “all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
This wasn’t pie in the sky. She wasn’t wearing rose-colored glasses. She knew, as much as anyone ever has, that for a lot of the people around her all wouldn’t be well. Just like Ezekiel, she had watched her town turn into a valley of dry bones.
But she still knew that God is faithful and just, that even as sickness and death surrounded her that God was with her.
That’s what hope is.
God’s not done with us yet. God is finding ways to breathe life into these dry bones. When bones are so dry, maybe the thing they need is some wetness through tears. Remember that detail when Jesus saw that Lazarus was really dead: Jesus wept. He wept so much that those around him saw it as clear evidence of his love for him. Those must have been some tears.
That’s significant. John’s Gospel goes to great pains, throughout the Gospel narrative, to portray that Jesus knows exactly what’s coming and exactly what he’s doing. And yet, even knowing that he’s about to raise Lazarus from the dead, Jesus weeps for his fallen friend. He grieves with real tears that I’m sure all of us can relate to.
But with how real his grief is, grief is never the final resting place. Because we are a people of hope. And people of hope live knowing, as Anne Lammott puts it, “grace always bats last.’
One detail we miss because of where the lectionary ends our gospel readings (and it’s a long reading- we’re all grateful is does cut off, but the books of the bible weren’t written to be parceled our): In the gospel of John, there are 7 miracles or signs of Jesus’ divinity. The turning water into wine, feeding the 5,000, healing of the blind man that we heard about last week. Yada yada yada- typical God walking among us acts. The last of these 7 is what we heard about today: Jesus bringing Lazarus back from the dead. With how miraculous and impressive this sign was, it was also the sign that tipped the opinion of the Jewish leaders: Jesus needed to go. Jesus needed to be turned over to authorities or else the Roman empire was going to be threatened by the whole Jewish community and punish them accordingly.
A week from today is Palm Sunday, which kicks off Holy Week. Through all of the services offered that week, starting with our Palm Sunday passion narrative, then Maundy Thursday’s remembering of Jesus’ final commandments to love one another, then to Good Friday where we remember the day Jesus was crucified, we will walk through the days and hours that lead to Jesus’ crucifixion and there will be many points in the story where hope defies all logic. But even Holy Week ends in Easter.
All shall be well. All shall be well. And all manner of things shall be well.
