(This homily was slightly less scripted than my usual ones. The general notes I followed are below. -EML)

Grief + Mystery
John 11.1-44
Rev. Elizabeth Mangham Lott
March 29, 2020
Fifth Sunday of Lent

Harvard Business Review: That Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief; March 23, 2020 
by Scott Berinato

Interview with David Kessler who co-wrote with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss. 

HBR: People are feeling any number of things right now. Is it right to call some of what they’re feeling grief?

Kessler: Yes, and we’re feeling a number of different griefs. We feel the world has changed, and it has. We know this is temporary, but it doesn’t feel that way, and we realize things will be different. Just as going to the airport is forever different from how it was before 9/11, things will change and this is the point at which they changed. The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air.

HBR: You said we’re feeling more than one kind of grief?

Yes, we’re also feeling anticipatory grief. Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain. Usually it centers on death. We feel it when someone gets a dire diagnosis or when we have the normal thought that we’ll lose a parent someday. Anticipatory grief is also more broadly imagined futures. There is a storm coming. There’s something bad out there. With a virus, this kind of grief is so confusing for people. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it. This breaks our sense of safety. We’re feeling that loss of safety. I don’t think we’ve collectively lost our sense of general safety like this. Individually or as smaller groups, people have felt this. But all together, this is new. We are grieving on a micro and a macro level.

To face this grief:

1. Come into the present

2. Let go of what you can’t control

3. Stock up on compassion

Holding today’s texts before us, I want to add some of my own notes to Kessler’s:

1. Show up for yourself and for others.

2. Feel the full range of your emotions.

3. Listen for the Divine.

4. Act from Love.

The story of the death and raising of Lazarus in John 11 is one of my favorites not because it makes sense but because of the wide range of human emotions. Mary, Martha, and Jesus are all over the place in this gospel text.

1. Martha: pure anger followed by intellectual discourse to try and make sense of what is happening, what she has lost, and what she anticipated would happen but didn’t

2. Mary: tears, weeping—and Jesus meets her with such empathy that he weeps with her

3. Jesus is not shocked by Martha’s anger. He is not offended by Martha’s pushback and questions. He doesn’t tell Mary to stop crying and get control of herself. He shows up and holds space for the anger. He listens and responds thoughtfully to her questions and theological considerations. And when Mary has tears and not words, he joins her.

4. Then, Jesus acts from a place of Divine Love.

Krista Tippett—Becoming Wise; pp. 161-162, 176
Tippett is talking about the music of the church of her childhood. She writes:

“I wouldn’t have said it this way then. But I would feel all the cells in my body as I sang hymns that connected my little life with the grandeur of the cosmos, the Christian drama across space and time. This was my earliest experience of breath and body, mind and spirit soaring together, alive to both mystery and reality, in kinship with others both familiar and unknown. That’s one way I’d define the feeling of faith now.

Who am I to speak for God? But this I believe:

If God is God—and that in itself is a crazy shorthand, begging volumes of unfolding the question—he/she does not need us craven.

He/she desires us, needs us, grateful and attentive and courageous in the everyday.

To invoke some of my favorite classic approaches to a definition, if God is the ‘mind behind the universe,’ God honors our minds. If God is the ‘ground of being,’ God blesses our wholeness…

Once upon a time I took in mystery as sensation best left unexamined. Now I experience it as a welcome. I’m strangely comforted when I hear from scientists that human beings are the most complex creatures we know of in the universe, still, by far. Black holes are in their way explicable; the simplest living being is not. I lean a bit more confidently into the experience that life is so endlessly perplexing—taking it seriously, searching for its purpose as well as its perils, its beauty as well as its ravages.

In this sense, spiritual life is a reasonable, reality-based pursuit. It can have mystical entry points and destinations, to be sure. But it is in the end about befriending reality, the common human experience of mystery included. It acknowledges the full drama of the human condition. It attends to beauty and pleasure; it attends to grief and pain and the enigma of our capacity to resist the very things we long for and need.

Professor of New Testament Osvaldo Vena notes: “One of the reasons why the Gospels were written was to motivate the believers to the imitatio Jesu (the imitation of Christ). I am convinced that discipleship is better exemplified by Jesus than it is by the disciples themselves.”

What are we to imitate of the Christ we read in this text? We see in this story a “huff” of anger when Jesus receives the request to go to Lazarus before his spirit has left his body (a three day window, according to early 1st century thinking). Is Jesus annoyed by the call to go? Bothered by the interruption? He has a knowing about him that it is not time for him to respond, and he trusts that intuition. He waits even though it means certain death for Lazarus. When he does finally arrive on the fourth day, a day too late in Mary and Martha’s eyes, we witness the heartache of friendship—boldly stated disappointment, publicly shared grief, and we linger a little while in this tension of these feelings. Jesus doesn’t show up to put on a flashy show. He walks in as though he has no plan at all. He listens and connects with the arguments of Martha and the deep emotions of Mary. He is changed and moved by them. He is “greatly disturbed” as he approaches the tomb of Lazarus, and he calls out to God for the strength to change the story before them calling out to Lazarus to come out from the tomb. Then the friends of Lazarus follow the commands of Jesus and unbind Lazarus that he might return to his own life.

We know that life is not without heartache. The way of Jesus doesn’t make us impervious to that, and it certainly doesn’t act as a giant Lysol wipe that is going to protect us from a virus! The way of Jesus shows us the model of one who is with us,  hears us, weeps with us, and calls us to do the same with and for each other. He calls us to believe in miraculous transformations of relationships and of self. He invites us to a life we can only imagine, unbound and fully alive. Like in Ezekiel’s prophecy, the mystery of God allows us to look even into death and see the possibility that life will exist on the other side.

These stories we hold so tenderly today show us a God who will make all things new some day, and the discipleship of Jesus is modeling for us the example that belief in the ways of God must shape the life we are living now. The disciples may not fully understand what it means to be students of their rabbi and enactors of the God story, but Jesus does. And so he shows us the way in a way only he can—open-heartedly present to the people he loves, fully experiencing the life around him, trusting his connection to the Divine, and open to the twists and turns of the path no matter where the path takes him.

Friends, these are our steps on the path of Christ this week:

1. Let go of what you can’t control

2. Stock up on compassion

3. Show up for yourself and for others.

4. Feel the full range of your emotions.

5. Listen for the Divine.

6. Act from Love.