LAKE JAMES

NORTH CAROLINA

 

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Lent 5, March 13, 2005

 

     On Thursday the 17th we will remember a young man who, some 1600 years ago, was captured by pirates and sold into slavery. The young man was a Christian, the son of a deacon, the grandson of a priest, a 16 year-old who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. His captors set him to herding sheep, a lonely job, with lots of time to rage at his captors, to mourn his loss of friends and family, and finally time to reconnect with his faith and to turn his life over to God’s care and direction.  He may have remembered St. Paul’s writing to the church at Rome about being slaves to sin or slaves to righteousness. The accounts we have of this young man don’t tell us much about his spiritual growth, and we have to fill in the story from our own experiences of anger and loss and despair and surrender to God’s will for our lives.

 

     Today’s collect asks God to give us “grace to love what God commands and desire what God promises; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found.” Herding dumb sheep, outside alone in winter cold and summer heat, in beating rain and blazing sun, and lots of fog, is hardly an ideal place “where true joys are to be found.” After six years the young man, now grown, was able to escape and come home. But he didn’t stay. After a little while he set off again, this time to France, for more education and eventually ordination. And then Patrick was sent back to the people among whom he had been enslaved, sent back to preach the free grace of God’s love in Jesus Christ.

 

     The prophet Ezekiel knew about being a slave in a strange land. He was one of the Jewish exiles taken some 2600 years ago from the comforts of Jerusalem across the desert to Babylon – modern Iraq. “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept.” But there in his experiences of anger and loss and despair came God’s vision, a vision of God’s triumph.

 

     Three and a half years ago we experienced an attack on New York and Washington. The attacks roused in us similar feelings of anger and loss, and some level of manageable despair. We will never be totally safe from fear of terrorist attack, never completely free of danger. But along with the feelings of anger and loss comes the opportunity to see God’s vision and to recommit our selves to his love and service.

 

We see the some of the same feelings in the Gospel account of the raising of Lazarus. We hear Mary’s anger, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” But in the same verse we hear also her faith and trust, “But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.”

 

Back in 1927 Eugene O’Neill wrote a play, “Lazarus Laughed.,” in which the risen Lazarus proclaims, “There is no death.” The risen Lazarus attracts a great following, and then come the persecutions. O’Neill’s Lazarus is not the Biblical Lazarus, for the Lazarus of today’s gospel did indeed die again. So also did Jairus’s young daughter whose resuscitation we read of in St. Mark 5. So also did the only son of the widow of Nain, raised in St. Luke chapter 7. So also did the son of the widow of Zarephath raised by the prophet Elijah in I Kings 17. So did the son of the Shunammite woman raised by the prophet Elisha in 2 Kings 4. So will we all die, in God’s good time. For “the wages of sin is death.”  And we are all sinners, all dry and disarticulated bones, all wrapped up in our shrouds of pride, and envy, and anger, and sloth, and avarice, and gluttony and lust. We can no more save ourselves than the bones of those murdered in Iraq, or the Sudan or Rwanda, or Sebernicia, or gassed and burned at Auschwitz, or killed in the World Trade Towers or at the Pentagon, no more than any of them can we come back to life.

 

We live in a sin-filled world, and we have all benefited from that sin, and we’ve all contributed to that sin. We have a right to the same feelings of anger and loss and despair that Patrick felt enslaved in Ireland, that Ezekiel felt exiled in Babylon, that Mary felt when Jesus came a day too late.

 

But we also can receive “the free gift of God” which “is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Like Patrick we can hear the call to proclaim the free grace of God’s love in Jesus Christ to the people where we have been enslaved. Like Ezekiel we can hear and proclaim the Lord’s promise to his people in exile, “I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the LORD, have spoken and will act, says the LORD.” We can obey our risen Lord Jesus and when the dead in sin are raised, still with hands and feet bound, face wrapped in a cloth, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

 

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners:  Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

 

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