Nov 7, 2021
Near the start of the pandemic, I purchased this original painting by Hannah Garrity, I find its colors and textures beautiful, and its theological significance profound. The painting has hung for the last year in the front of the church office so that everyone who enters might see our common call. The painting is called “Unbound” and it represents the linens left behind from a body that has risen from the grave and been unbound. Strips of cloth that once bound hands and feet and wrapped the head of the dead. I see in this painting, grief and hope. I see God’s glorious power and love glimmering among its folds reminding us of the new life that awaits for the unbound.
Death has a way of reminding us of our humanity, and when not bound, also the meaningfulness of life.
Today is All Saints’ Sunday. It is a day that we remember and celebrate the saints of God: those who had died in the faith, and those who died whose faith is known to God alone. And the hallow-ness of all the saints and all the souls invites us to be introspective about to our own relationship with God, and with death ever before us, also meaningfulness of our life.
Why are we here? What is the meaning behind what we do and how we gather as the saints of God? How and why are we to participate in God’s way of love?
Amongst the grief and the hope, our Gospel has some insights for us. The power of God in Christ Jesus resuscitated Lazarus after he have been dead for four days— a wondrous miracle and testimony to the power of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God. And much art of these story depicts the resuscitated Lazarus as a wrapped up mummy. If God can resuscitate Lazarus— for that matter if God can create the very cosmos and raise the dead to life—then God can also unbind him from his grave clothes. It is not a question of God’s power. And, it is not a question of God’s loving nature. The Jewish people present at the event seeing Jesus’s grief, testified saying “See how he loved him!” In the words of Marvel’s Vision: “What is grief, if not love persevering?” So why then is it the community gathered who asked to roll away the stone? Why then does the all-powerful, all-loving God incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ tell those present to unbind Lazarus and let him go? What morsel of meaning might be broken open for us here?
After delving the depths, wrestling with some gremlins, and studying this passage with several of you, we came to a realization. Liberation requires us to be intimate with death and it is a group project. God invites us to be active participants in God’s liberation. We are made in the image and likeness of a liberating God and we too are co-liberators.
Here’s the thing, liberation is not clean easy work. It is hard as Hell. There are reasons that ancient Jewish purity laws had boundaries around people handling the dead. There are reasons we put fake grass carpets over the dirt at a graveside committal service. There are reasons we use euphemisms like “passed away” or “repose” instead of death and died. The denial of death is a popular coping strategy as we attempt to wrestle meaning from life.
Y’all— as a culture we have gone so far as to rename the main gathering place of a house the “living room.” In the United States, these main gathering places in the home used to be called a “parlor,” which was derived from a French word meaning to speak for it was the place that people gathered to sit and speak with one another. And for most of 1800s until World War I, the parlor of the home was also the place where the dead would lie in state wrapped in their burial clothes for people to come and pay their final respects. And we would speak around them and over them and about them often offering good words, eulogies.
Now we have more distance and institutionalized regulations between us, and we go to a funeral parlor. And in our homes we have living rooms. It is as if we are banishing death from our midst and filling the void with staring mindlessly at death on screens for hours as we wonder if we are using our precious lives in any meaningful way.
Often we try to keep our distance from real death, especially at this stage in a pandemic. We don’t want it in our living room. We don’t want to talk about in a grief group. We don’t want it ever before our faces. We just want to keep living as if it does not come for us all and so we fill our lives, often with self-hyponotic practices.
… Lazarus looks a lot like death. He has been dead, for four days. And Martha is clear that he smells a lot like death too. There is stench. The King James Version is more poetic: “he stinketh.” And, Jesus said to those gathered, “Unbind him, and let him go.” Honestly? There is a very real part of me that would say aloud— or at least in my head— You want me to do what?
And, Jesus [says] to those gathered, “Unbind him, and let him go.”
Death is real and present and in order to participate in the work of liberation, we do not get the luxury of denying it. We do not get to cast it out of our living rooms. Jesus is asking us to get up close and personal with death. We are wrap our arms around what was a dead body so that we might unwrap Lazarus. “Unbind him and let him go.”
The first instruction is liberation.
Do you remember learning —or trying to learn— to speak a new language? I learned Spanish in middle school. They started us off with the verbs to be (estar/ser), to have (tener), to go (ir), and to be able (poder). When one is learning English verb conjugation for the first time, they use similar verbs like eat, sleep, think, take, speak. When one is learning ancient Koine Greek, the language of the New Testament, verb conjugation is taught using the verb λύω. I λύω. You λῡ́εις. She λῡ́ει. We λῡ́ομεν. Ya’ll λῡ́ετε. They λῡ́ουσῐ(ν). And then for nine inflections and compounds and derivatives. You get the gist there is a lot of λύω going on in your mind. You eat λύω. You speak λύω. You dream λύω. You start to see the whole of the New Testament through the lens of λύω… λύω means to loose, to free, to break open, to unbind. It is the action of liberation. The first instruction is liberation. A lens through which we read the Gospel is liberation. Our liberating God invites us into being co-liberators.
“Unbind him, and let him go.” The word here — unbind— is the aorist active imperative λύσατε — in other words it is Jesus’ command to a group that means y’all unbind him. And what is important here is that Jesus doesn’t say you— and only you—unbind him. This is not work to be done alone. Along those lines Jesus does not call out only Mary and Martha to do this work…And Jesus doesn’t say they will unbind him. This work is not done by someone else. We do not just get to be the spectator cheering them on. No, Jesus says y’all unbind him. And as we like to say here, y’all means all. Liberation — as much as we might cringe— is a group project.
Writer Kate Bowler, a seminary professor, young mother, and person living with stage-VI colon cancer, articulates in her book the simple and profound truth that “there is no cure for being human” (188). Rather than choosing denial, knowing that we will indeed die, the question then becomes, “How do we live now?” (193).
For many of us, the instinct is to respond to this question in an individual personal way. And that response is, of course, important. So too is how do we respond communally, as a church, as Trinity. Unbinding is a group project. Liberation is not something done by God and an individual or a priest or a staff or even small group of dedicated leaders while the rest of us come and see and receive and leave. Y’all means all.
God brings the dead to life. Together, the work we have to do is to loose bonds so that we might be free to live meaningfully as God’s saints in this place here at Trinity.
Why are we here? Why do our gatherings matter? What is the reason and the meaning behind how we gather as Trinity? The new year will bring a new vision cast by all of us. We are not what we once were. And there is grief in this for there is love persevering. And, there is a meaningfulness to our life together as Trinity. My hope and my prayer is that we come together, all of us together— and tenderly wrap our arms around what once was in order to unwrap what will now be. New life…
Every year at this time, we are invited to be introspective about our communal responsibility as the saints of the church. Toward this, soon we will be invited to renew our baptismal covenant.
Beforehand, I invite you into a call and response grounded in the questions that we typically ask to baptismal candidates and our own part in God’s liberating work of meaning making:
Your response to these first three questions, I hope, will be “I renounce them.”
Do you renounce the meaningless suffering and pain which is not of God which plagues our world?
I renounce them
Do you renounce the ways in which the powers of this world corrupt death and render meaningless the lives of God’s saints?
I renounce them
Do you renounce the desire within yourself to deny your own death and the meaningfulness of your life?
I renounce them
Your response to these next three questions, I hope, will be “I do”:
Do you look to Jesus Christ as your liberator?
I do.
Do you put your trust in his power and love?
I do.
Do you promise to do your best to join him in the work of liberation?
I do.
The service for All Saints’ Sunday continues with the Renewal of Baptismal Vows.