The end of Lent

Easter is something that a lot of people celebrate as a thing in itself, that is, they have a party, have a ham, have chocolate and eggs, and all that sort of things.  It's even getting to the point where people give pets and gifts at Easter time, running it as a rival to Christmas.  But the two celebrations aren't the same thing, and celebrating them in the same way really doesn't do what it's supposed to do.

I'll elaborate. At Christmas, what are we celebrating? The birth of a baby in Bethlehem.  In a manger.  But that's a thing that celebrates something new, something that hadn't been there before.  At Christmas, the wise men show up, to offer gifts of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, this is all stuff that happens, and so it makes sense that we celebrate Christmas with gifts, with parties, with celebrations of new thing, new and exciting things.  But Easter doesn't work like that at all.

If you have ever given something up for Lent (which maybe you haven't.  It's not scriptural, so don't worry if you have or haven't), you will have noticed that one of the best things about Easter is not the arrival of anything new, but rather the return of the things that you used to enjoy, but had given up.  And that's a different feeling altogether.  For those of you who have given something up, if you've given up something that you are relatively attached to, something you enjoy, something that has, for a large part, been working as a crutch, that you feel very much like you can't or won't do without.  When you've gone without something for a while (alcohol, meat, sweets, dessert, chocolate, tv, the internet, facebook, whatever), returning to it is a distinct reminder of how great your life, as it has been for a long long time.  Returning to that, to your life as it had always been is a wonderful, semi-ecstatic experience.

It always reminds me of some guys that they had to come in and talk to us in Junior High school (which Saskies don't have) all about why we should stay off of drugs. And something that he said stuck with me for a long time, a long time until now.  He spoke to us about his drug use, his heavy drug habit, and how he'd been taken away and locked up behind bars.  Now, as you know, you can't get drugs behind bars, but depending on what you've been using, you can't just stop using drugs without some serious side effects.  Withdrawal is a real thing that will hurt and affect you, and will damage you from the inside out.  It's a matter of potential dangerous injury, because your body has taken on a dependence to a substance that you have all of a sudden ripped away.  And that dependence will make itself felt as soon as you withdraw the substance.  He couldn't get the drugs that he was accustomed to using while in jail, and so he had to tough out withdrawal, and all the difficulties that came along with it.  But the withdrawal wasn't a permanent thing.  It didn't nor was it ever going to last forever.  And the day that the withdrawal lifted, the observation that this guy had was that for the first time in years, he was 'high on feeling normal.'  Feeling normal, feeling regular, was such a wonderful feeling that he couldn't get over it.

Most of us will never go through that level of withdrawal, we will never experience the nature of drugs leaving our systems, we will never have that buildup or that addiction, nor will have to overcome it.  That's a far cry from most of us in our experience, but you know what is fairly regular, and fairly commonplace? Recovering from a cold.

You know what having a cold is like, where you are suffering, runny nose, aching joints, sore throat, all that stuff. You can't sleep, you can't taste anything ,you don't feel like eating, it's all that all the time.  And while you're in the throes of the cold situation, you start to long for feeling normal.  Feeling like you do everyday is exactly what you want, what you crave, and when you finally get there, it's an amazing feeling.  That morning when you wake up, and you can breathe through both nostrils, when the fever is gone, and you feel overall really really good, that's what you want, it's what you crave, and it's all about feeling normal, back to the way things should be.

Now, I'm talking about this so much because of the nature of the resurrection, of the glorified body, of the defeat of death, all that.  And when I talk about this, I'm talking about the resurrection of Christ as so thoroughly mundane.  The most alarming, most exciting thing about the resurrection of Christ is how easygoing, how dull it all is.  When Jesus appears to his disciples, when he is seen by them, he's not showing up with thunder and lightning, nor with lights and sound.  He is showing up, and says to his disciples 'greetings.'  That's it.  In his other resurrection appearances, he shows up and walks with disciples on the road to Emmaus, he shows up to his disciples and asks them for breakfast, it's a fantastic thing, an amazing story that Jesus is so absolutely commonplace about his resurrection, and how mundane and ordinary it is.

And that's because it is.  The thing about the resurrection, the glorified body, life everlasting, all that, is that it's a return to the way things should always have been, not the addition of anything unusual or out of the ordinary.  It is a return to the way things always should have been, and to the way we all know they all should have been.

On first glance, you may not believe me, but if you're a Christian, you will know that we as human beings were designed for eternity.  When we were formed out of the dust of the ground, it was with the idea that we were forever people, that we would be eternal, with no interruptions.  It was the idea built into us that we were going to last for all time, that we were going to be forever people.  When Adam and Eve sinned, and were cast out of the garden, part of the punishment that was leveled on them was that they were dust, and to dust they would return.  Something had gone wrong, death had entered into the world, and we would, from that time on, be stung by it and tormented by it.  And you know what a sting is, right? It's something that hurts because it's bad, because it's not intended for you to have it happen to you.  Death stings in that way too.  Whether you're religious or not, you feel the sting of death when it happens to you, to someone you love.  That sting of death that tells you that something has gone wrong, desperately badly wrong, that things are not going in the way they were supposed to.  Nobody has children really honestly expecting them to die.  Nobody is ever really truly ready to lose someone from their lives.  Nobody is genuinely prepared for death, especially when it happens to someone else.  To that end, the work of Christ Jesus our Lord is the work that tells us that he has come not to do anything new, not to do anything absolutely shocking or different, but to return us to where things were always supposed to be.

That's what makes his greetings to his disciples post-resurrection so fun, is that they're so mundane, that they're so easygoing.  What does he say to his disciples? Greetings! Hello! What's new? Do you have any breakfast? Can I have a snack? Peace be unto you.  Do not be afraid.

All of his reactions, his greetings, his statements to his disciples are so thoroughly mundane as to be laughable, if they weren't so fascinating in their nature as being commonplace.  Because that's the end goal of the Christian faith, to have resurrection, glorification, reunion with God be completely commonplace.  It's the nature and goal of the Christian belief that glory, through Christ, would come to common people like you and me, that Jesus would bestow his grace on the most ordinary people, the most mundane people you see every day.  The majesty in the 12 disciples is that they weren't majestic.  They were just guys.  A great deal of criticism leveled against the work of Christ was that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, that he wasn't spending his time with the most majestic, most outwardly religious, most well thought of people in the world, and that criticism was absolutely true.  It was accurate, and on point, and that's what makes the work that he does so wonderful and so compelling.  Christ's work, his resurrection work, his work of making all things new, is what applies to all of us, you and me, people who aren't perhaps the most majestic, most well though of, most spiritually well assured.  The great gift of the Gospel is that when God looks at us, he sees Christ, and therefore even the mundane is robed in glory everlasting.

So commonplace, but what was always intended is what is actually good. 

Lazarus

The Gospel reading we had for Sunday was one of the best known readings in the entire scriptures, which seems to happen a lot at this time of year.  That is, we had the raising of Lazarus from the dead.

Lazarus is sort of like Thomas, in that his name has become a short form for his defining characteristic.  That is, Lazarus is to resurrection as Thomas is to doubt.  And the raising of Lazarus is so well known, obviously, that we aren't taking into account the mundane truth of it all.

For at its core, death is phenomenally mundane.  You know that it is, though you don't think about it. We are people who think about death as a big event because we're not really used to seeing or experiencing death of humans, of people we know and love as a daily part of life.  Unlike in the time of Christ, people die at hospitals, at hospices, far far away from the hustle and bustle of home.  In the time of Christ, people both lived shorter lives, and died at home. If you were sick, you were sick at home. If you were sick to the point of death, you died at home.  It wasn't unusual to have a house that someone had died in, it was incredibly common.  Common as death.

Now, though we are distant from death of humans that we love and care about, we are actually closer to death of certain other things than we think about on a regular basis.  We don't think of meat as death, but it sure is.  But in our homes, even meat stays fresh, fresh for days.  It's not as though you could go to the Zebedee brothers in the first century, buy some tasty tilapia on Monday, and then fry it up on Thursday.  If you were to wait that long, without refrigeration, that tilapia wouldn't be quite so tasty anymore.  Meat doesn't really stay fresh that long when it's dead.  We are people of the fridge, people of the freezer, people of the dehydrater, people who have worked out ways to keep meat fresh for a long time.  But if you leave it for long enough, you'll still find out something about death, and how mundane it is.

Jesus said, Take ye away the stone. Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days.

This little bit from the book of John, from the account of the raising of Lazarus, tells you something mundane about death.  That if you leave a human being out for a few days, then they become, well, dead meat.  They stink.  This simple mundane fact of death, that things spoil, that they go bad, that bacteria gets in and ruins and corrupts, that simple fact is something that we need to know and wrap our heads around, for your fridge is frequently as close to the tomb of Lazarus as possible.  Sometimes, when you open your refrigerator, you will find that it stinketh, for something has gone bad.  And not only has it gone bad, it will stay bad. I know, I know, many of us, upon opening the refrigerator will have a similar reaction to that in the Gospels, saying 'it stinketh,' but then will close the fridge to prentend that we didn't smell anything, and let someone else clean it up.  But when you finally confront the content of the refrigerator, when we find the mouldering pork chop, the rank sausage, the toxic tilapia, you know a simple truth.  If it has spoiled, you're not bringing it back.  There's nothing you can do about it. Once it has started going bad for four days, then the slimy meat that has begun to putrefy, you're not going to serve that to your guests anymore.  It stinketh.

Lazarus was no different. This is the mundane, everyday fact of death.  Lazarus had died, he had turned from a living, breathing human being into meat.  And dead meat at that.  He had become expired meat, past its best before date, and had begun to rot.  And as you know from your own fridge at home, once things have gone bad, once they have begun to rot, they're not coming back.  Lazarus wasn't just dead for a minute, for an hour, for an afternoon.  He had been dead for four days, and now stinketh.  And that's when the raising happened.

Jesus waited for the fourth day for a reason.  We know from the scriptures that he didn't rush over to the home of Lazarus as soon as he heard that his friend was sick.  Rather, he waited until Lazarus was dead, and had been dead for a few days, before moving in to take care of things.  He waited until things were done, over, until things had turned from concern to mourning before doing something about it.  But this is how God operates.

If you know about the concept of 'festivus' from Seinfeld (I have never seen the episode, but I understand it exists), then you'll know about the concept of 'festivus miracles.'  That is, mundane things, not even really coincidences, that people would say are miracles of the festivus season.  Well, in the case of Christ our Lord and Savior, he tends to wait until things are impossible before acting.  He tells us as much when he talks about Lazarus and his illness, saying

And I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, to the intent ye may believe; nevertheless let us go unto him.

Do you see that?  Jesus is telling his disciples, and anyone who would listen that he is glad that he missed the illness of Lazarus, that he did so on purpose, in order to make what was to happen meaningful, or even possible.  In other words, the God shown at that moment is and remains the God of the impossible.  Sure, Jesus could have shown up and healed a dread disease, but how much more impressive is it to raise the dead, the dead meat?

And this is the good news of the Gospels, which is that Christ is able to take what is dead and gone, and to give it life.  We know that we were dead in our trespasses, and that is where Christ decided to step in and give us new life.  Understanding this is key and critical, that Christ doesn't just encourage you, or give you a pat on the head, forgiveness of sins isn't that simple.  We think that it is, because we think of ourselves as being sort of okay, doing alright, but we aren't.  We are dead meat, and we stink.  If Christ is going to do something with us, it's got to be more than just walking a corpse around.  It has to be making new life, working the clock backwards to a time when things were genuinely good, when things worked.

This is the Gospel promise.  And if you're someone who believes that Jesus can raise the dead, those who have gone bad and are rotten, from the grave, then you should believe the same about those who are dead in their trespasses too.  What Jesus tells you at the grave of Lazarus, dead for four days, stinking and rotting, is that nothing is too late and too far gone for him.  He is the one who makes all things new.  He is the one who creates, who restores, who makes whole. That is his job, his calling, his work, is to work with and grapple with even the impossible, the lost causes, to restore, to renew, to give new life even to that which has gone bad.

You know, to you.