Bones and tombs and grave clothes, Oh My!

Bones and tombs and grave clothes, Oh My! The Dover Church
April 10, 2010 – 5th Sunday of Lent
Scripture: Ezekiel 34:1-17, John 11:1-45


Biblical stories like this morning’s are paradoxical. On the one hand, if you believe that these stories are true, they’re probably not going to be of any use to you. Let’s be honest. How many of us can relate to the purported facts of these stories: fields of dry bones coming to life? Ligaments here, muscles there? Or a person dead and buried for four days brought back to life? On the other hand, if you believe that these stories are false, as in bogus, concocted, fanciful, a sham, they’re also not going to be of any use to you. Until you hear these stories as something that has happened, is happening, and, more importantly, could happen to you, then you’ll never know what God is trying to get at with you, right now, right where you really are. Let me tell you what I mean.
Not all of you are here every Sunday, so some of you might have missed the one or two times I have referred to my parents’ divorce. They split up when I was fifteen. The actual divorce became final when I was seventeen, the spring I graduated from high school. The process was neither pretty, friendly, fair nor painless. I've mellowed and healed to the point where I can’t be bothered with facts or blame anymore, everything having to do with everyone else involved. All I really know is what happened to me and how I felt about it. I felt abandoned by my father. I felt afraid and vulnerable. My stable, respectable, prosperous family lived in a big house in a stable, respectable, prosperous neighborhood and suddenly we were struggling with stability, respectability and prosperity. I was embarrassed because I knew our neighbors were ducking us, afraid of their own embarrassment for us. Surrounded by friends and neighbors whose parents were not divorced, who were not struggling as far as we knew, I was ashamed, ashamed that something was “wrong” with us, resentful that we were now substantially different from everyone else. I felt betrayed, with my rug pulled out from under me. I felt powerless and, what is worse, controlled by my powerlessness. I saw my mother’s struggles and pain. I saw my sisters’ pain. I tried to bury my struggles and pain, hoping that somehow something good would come out of it. All of this boiled down and occasionally boiled up into a deep anger, which I focused on my father as the culprit, even though my anger was much larger than one man could contain. I masked my anger behind a comic facade, but it was always there, bubbling up, seething, and leaping through its bars, ultimately cutting my feet out from under me, although I only saw this in retrospect.
I say “in retrospect” because I was a young person who had no idea why I was feeling the way I was feeling or doing the things I was doing. But my bones were dry as dust. I was well and truly entombed. If you think Lazarus had it bad for four days, what I am about to tell you was 30 years of my life. There was plenty of happiness and achievement, but for this morning I am going to stick with the stuff I shrugged off, tried to ignore, or downplayed for most of those 30 years. For starters, I drank a lot of beer with my buddies and engaged in excessive reckless and risky behavior. Some of you might chalk that up to “boys being boys” and there was certainly an element of youthful fun and experiment, but I wonder how much of what I was up to was really trying to avoid all those bad feelings and energy with parties and adrenaline rushing stupidity?
Because I felt powerless over the course of my life, I longed to become powerful. In academics, I worked like a demon and excelled, not out of joy in my work but out of an intense desire to get myself to a place of security and stability. Ferociously trying to build myself an impregnable castle, I now know that I was motivated by fear. Authority figures who seemed to hold all the cards, who, in my mind, “controlled my destiny,” were threatening. Life was confrontational and menacing, a series of obstacles and opponents which had to be steamrolled over or driven through. Finesse was not my strong suit.
I had trust issues. I did not want to talk about my life, which meant that new people who had to hear the story if they were going to become friends, were not allowed in close. I did not respond well to the normal give and take of human relationships. All in all, not a pretty picture. I am not proud of myself when I tell you that when my father invited me to his wedding 25 years ago, I threw away the invitation without even sending regrets, because I had none. When my sister called me to tell me that my father had had a heart attack 20 years ago, I laughed and said I hoped it hurt like hell. When my father called me 10 years ago, trying to reestablish a relationship, I told him in very brutal terms to get lost. If that’s not dry bones, in a field or in a tomb, I really don’t know what is.
When I met Marie-Laure, she naturally asked about my family and I had to tell her “the story” if we were going to get anywhere as a couple, but I could tell she was not satisfied. Coming from a large family where permanently broken relationships are unthinkable, my story was bizarre, unsettling, frightening. Occasionally she would nudge me to “do something” about my father. “He’s an old man now. If he dies and you haven’t reconciled, you’ll regret it.” “I know, I know.” “You’ll never be truly happy until you work this out.” “I know. I know.” And then, just before Christmas 2009, she lowered the boom, “you can’t stand up there and preach all this love and forgiveness stuff if you are not willing to try it yourself in the most challenging place in your life.” As the French would say, “touché!” “You will not be able to be the father you always wished for until you try to fix this.” “I know. I know. I don’t want to. It hurts. It’s scary.” And then, without telling her, I made the call.
Life after the tomb, what my dry bones felt like after God breathed into them, is a subject for another morning. Suffice it to say, I have lived these stories. I know that they are true in my life. I have been speaking about my messy self in the past tense, like that is who I used to be, which is not quite true. I’m more like Lazarus who is still wound up in his grave clothes. It takes a while to get all that stuff off you. All that negative energy and knee jerk reactionary way of being is annoying and stays with you, like clinging grave clothes that you just want to get out of, but it doesn't dominate me anymore.
As I have been preaching, you might have been feeling a little uneasy, uncomfortable, embarrassed for me, even sorry for me. Please don’t. I stand before you, resurrected, at least from that tomb. I have other tombs, which can also wait for others sermons. If nothing that I have said this morning touches your life, I am sorry to have wasted your time. If however, you know exactly what I have been talking about, if you are living with abandonment, betrayal, loss, threat, fear, sorrow, grief, all that bad stuff we try to just bury away, downplay, shrug off… hear me now….don’t feel sorry for me. Feel sorry for yourself if you are wasting your time like I did for 30 years. Do not waste another day. The God of the prophets is calling you right now, saying “I will put my spirit in you and you will live and you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act.” God in Jesus Christ is standing outside your tomb right now, calling you by name, “Come out.” You have nothing to lose, except the life that you wasting right now, if you are buried in grief and loss, betrayal and estrangement, fear and anxiety, powerlessness or megalomania, frustration, addiction, workaholism. What is standing between you and joy in the exact circumstances in which you find yourself? What is standing between you and new and abundant life? If your faith is not enough to get you on that phone or into that car, do what I did. Allow your faith to allow someone who loves you, someone who knows the dried bones and buried in the tomb wrapped in grave clothes person that you really are and pretending to the world not to be, allow that person to give you the backbone you need to do what you need to do. Not what you ought to do, but what you need to do. Yes, need, if you really want to know the new and abundant life, what God is trying to get at with you, right here and right now, no matter where you are and no matter what has happened.