5th Sunday in Lent Year A 2020

The 5th Sunday in Lent-Year A March 29, 2020 Today, it seems that our lectionary insists that spend some time dwelling with death. From the image of the prophet Ezekiel standing in the middle of a valley of dried out and scattered bones to the story of Lazarus, dead in the tomb and called back to life by Jesus, on this 5th Sunday of Lent in which we find ourselves scattered and sheltering in place, watching the numbers of the death toll rise, we are invited to think about death within the context of our faith. If you’re like me, you’ve tried to avoid it. Now, I’m not talking about hunkering down, sheltering in place. These are ways that we are caring for one another in this unprecedented time. I’m talking about all the ways I fill my time, the busyness, the “projects,” the almost-obsessive watching of the news and social media. What I’ve discovered this week is that in my avoidance of thinking about and dwelling with the reality of death which is all around us, then I am also missing out on the ways that God is working in and through and among all this. Our readings and their insistence upon making us dwell with death for a moment reveal to us that our God is a God who takes things that are dead and dried out, stinking and scattered and chooses to breathe God’s breath and new life into those old, dead things to make them new and alive in different ways. Our God calls the scattered and exiled home. Our God mourns with and then restores the broken-hearted. Even now, we see glimpses of the resurrection that is to come, perhaps not in the way that we would like it to come, but resurrection and new life will come none-the-less. But in order to see resurrection when it happens, and it will happen, we cannot hide our faces from death. This past week, I have continued on my quest to discover or rediscover the spiritual practices that give me life. I went from staying up too late watching the news, to trying to go to bed at a decent time and setting an alarm and waking up earlier than the rest of my house, so I could sit out on our screened porch and drink coffee, listen to the birds and pray and journal. About half-way through the week, I read a meditation from the daily email by the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr through his Center for Action and Contemplation. This meditation helped me sit with the aspects of death in my life and in that process to find new life, resurrection. I’m going to share aspects of this meditation with you this morning, and if you find it helpful, then I invite you to pick it up as a prayer practice this week. But at the very minimum, I invite you this week, as things continue to shift rapidly around us, to spend some time reflecting on how you may be avoiding death and at the same time, avoiding the possibility of encountering resurrection as it is happening all around and inside of you. You may close your eyes if it helps you focus. “When we call out for help, we are bound more powerfully to God through our needs and weakness, our unfulfilled hopes and dreams, and our anxieties and problems than we ever could have been through our joys, successes, and strengths alone. . . Anxieties can gray the whole sky like cloud cover or descend on our whole horizon like fog. When we rename our anxieties, in a sense, we distill them into requests. What covered the whole sky can now be contained in a couple of buckets. So when we’re suffering from anxiety, we can begin by simply holding the word help before God, letting that one word bring focus to the chaos of our racing thoughts.”i ii I invite you, now, to be still and breathe, and to ask God for the help that you need, focusing on the general word “help”. (silence) “Once we feel that our mind has dropped out of the frantic zone and into a spirit of connection with God, we can let the general word help go and in its place hold more specific words that name what we need, thereby condensing the cloud of vague anxiety into a bucket of substantial request. So we might hold the word guidance before God. Or patience. Or courage. Or resilience. Or boundaries, mercy, compassion, determination, healing, calm, freedom, wisdom, or peace. . . .iii I invite you to sit in silence, and breath, and to name before God what you specifically need. (silence) “Along with our anxieties and hurts, we also bring our disappointments to God. If anxieties focus on what might happen, and hurts focus on what has happened, disappointments focus on what has not happened. Again, as the saying goes, revealing your feeling is the beginning of healing, so simply acknowledging or naming our disappointment to God is an important move. This is especially important because many of us, if we don’t bring our disappointment to God, will blame our disappointment on God, thus alienating ourselves from our best hope of comfort and strength. . . .” I invite you to take a moment to breath, and name your disappointments to God. (silence) “Whether we’re dealing with anxieties, wounds, disappointments, or other needs or struggles, there is enormous power in simple, strong words—the words by which we name our pain and then translate it into a request to God.”iv Our God is a God who takes things that are dead, and dried out, stinking and scattered and chooses to breathe God’s breath and new life into those old dead things to make them new and alive in different ways. Our God calls the scattered and exiled home. Our God mourns with and then restores the broken-hearted. Even now, we see glimpses of the resurrection that is to come, perhaps not in the way that we would like it to come, but resurrection and new life will come none-the-less. But in order to see resurrection when it happens, and it will happen, we cannot hide our faces from death. i.The Path of Descent: Praying in Crisis. Wednesday, March 25, 2020; https://cac.org/praying-in-crisis-2020-03-25/ ii.Brian D. McLaren, Naked Spirituality (HarperOne: 2011), 104. iii.Ibid., 116–117. iv.Ibid., 119–120.