Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
This is my final sermon as a pastor, my “swan song,” and the final in a three week series closing out my ministry. In the first of the three sermons, I explored the bigness of God and why we must not shrink from what I call the “heretical imperative”—that is, the freedom to break the dead chains of orthodoxy when they hold us captive to lesser views and experiences of God. In the second sermon, I meditated on the truth of our common and sacred humanity, its relation to the Christian tradition of the Incarnation, and how, in the immortal words of Victor Hugo (Les Miserables), “to love another person is to see the face of God.”
This final sermon is based on the Gospel of John 11.32-44 and imagines what religion and religious communities need to become in the future if they are to be relevant. If they fail to live into a vision like this, not only will religion become increasingly irrelevant and harmful to humanity, but the human race will be bereft of the perennial wisdom humanity needs to be a benevolent presence on the Earth rather than an malevolent one. A video of the sermon can be found here.
1.
Today’s sermon is my last sermon. It may not be my last sermon ever, but it’s my last sermon as a pastor and my last sermon as your pastor.
Someone asked me this last week if I thought I’d ever pastor another congregation. I said, “Where would I go? This congregation is a crown jewel. This time with you has been the pinnacle of a career that’s spanned over thirty years. There is no other congregation I would want to serve—no other congregation I think I could serve after having been your pastor. So, no. I’d like this to be my last church. I want to remember this experience with all the fondness and wonder and sense of accomplishment that I now feel. I am immensely grateful to have been your pastor.”
Today, then, is probably my last sermon as a pastor. But once a preacher, always a preacher. In my new calling as the manager of the Center of Loss and Hope for YoloCares here in Davis, I’m sure I’ll speak publicly, educating people about the experience of loss, and encouraging people to participate in the sacred work of grief. I’ll use my body and my mind, my soul and my words to guide people through the courageous and vital journey we all must walk whenever we lose those we love, those who matter most to us.
If we face the suffering that is inevitable in life, if we don’t hide from pain that is unavoidable, if we find companions and walk together along the challenging road through the grief that doesn’t have to bind us permanently, we will find our way into what matters most to all of us:
a life lived well
love in abundance, and
community that transforms us
Life, love, and community: these three themes are the same themes Jesus preached about and that I’ve spent a lifetime preaching about.
a well-lived life
abundant love, and
transforming community
These are also the themes that occupied the mystics, saints, and teachers of every great religious and philosophical tradition—from the Buddha to Empedocles, Confucius to Moses, Hildegard of Bingen, Chief Seattle, and Pema Chodron. And if religion and philosophy can return to these great themes and reimagine them for the twenty-first century, there just might be hope for the human race; religion might be able to turn us from the divisive and exploitive ways of life that harm both humanity and the planet around us.
Humanity probably won’t outlive religion. And we probably won’t escape bad, hurtful, and ugly expressions of religion. Religion, for better or for worse, is here to stay. So it’s up to religious communities like this one to live into the best gifts religion can offer humanity.
I believe that if religious communities are courageous and creative enough, daring and determined enough, people like you can offer an evolved and intelligent and soulful religious experience that can help humanity become a more benevolent presence on the planet rather than a malevolent one; a community like this one could point the way for humanity to become a more cooperative species rather than a competitive one.
But if religious communities don’t evolve, if they’re not intelligent and soulful, if they’re not compassionate and wise, then humanity will lurch into the future without the ballast of the perennial wisdom—spiritual and psychological—that’s necessary for humanity to create a sustainable and flourishing future for life on our planet.
2.
So, today, I’m exploring what a community like this one will need to do and be if you are to help create a better future for us all. This is the third in a three-part series of sermons. One of you has called this series my “swan song,” and maybe it is. According to folklore, swans sing most beautifully before they die. Maybe they do, and maybe there will be something beautiful or at least meaningful in my final words. But I’m not dying and I have no intention of doing so. I intend to live well, love abundantly, and help communities thrive.
In the first sermon of the three, I answered the question: “What was I looking for when I came among you over seven years ago?” I told you that I came here looking for theological, intellectual, and spiritual freedom; I was looking for a community that was not bound uncritically to the past, but was daring enough to seek the bigness of God who is always working to break down the false and harmful barriers to equality, justice, goodness, and beauty—no matter what those barriers might be. I had no interest in blindly following a hidebound dogmatic tradition; I didn’t want to merely perpetuate a religious institution; I didn’t want to guide a community that would promulgate an old sectarianism that would continue to divide humanity and wound the planet.
I was looking for a people with whom I could experience the vastness of all that we mean when we use the three letter word, “God”: God, who is at the same time intimate with, one with, and yet cannot be contained by this colossal cosmos of billions of galaxies, trillions of stars, and zillions of planets.
I was looking for that freedom and I found it. Together, we experienced that kind of freedom. And I am profoundly grateful. And I am confident that you will continue to grow into the bigness of the experience we call “God”—for God is, ultimately, an experience.
A Christianity fit for the future will remember all this; it will live into the vastness of the divine which is always intimate with us yet beyond what we now know. A church like yours that helps people experience the freedom of God will help people live well, love abundantly, and participate in a transformative community.
In the second sermon, I explored the question: “What did I find among you?” And I told you that among you I’ve found the sacred gift of our common humanity, which is what the Christian vision of the Incarnation of God in Jesus is all about.
I talked about the ways you and I have learned to live from the humus of our lives, the fertile soil of our authentic selves. When we use the word, “humus,” we’re talking about decomposition and death and all the organic material that interacts and creates the remarkable fertility of this planet called Earth. But humus is also about re-composition; it is the stuff from which new life rises out of the old, born from death and decay.
Together, we’ve learned to be real, raw, earthy, and unpretentious. We’ve learned to be more vulnerable, to allow mistakes, to heal the hurts that haunt us, to transform our pain so that we don’t transmit it, to recognize the ways our fears too often waste our lives, and to live with more wonder, curiosity, playfulness, and courage so that our lives will not be squandered by remorse and regret; so that, instead, we can live well until our last breath.
And I also said that love is what makes the humus of our humanity fertile, capable of new and flourishing life.
So, a Christianity fit for the future will create safe spaces where people can risk the humus of their humanity. Create safe spaces, then, where none of us have to live in fear, spaces where we can fail, spaces where old patterns can die and decay, where we can find help to unfold our lives toward the exquisite, blossoming beauty which is the birthright of each and every one of us, no exceptions.
Here’s a little summary of my swan song so far:
To help us find our way into a future where all of us, and all that dwells on and in this planet, can flourish, you as a congregation will want to 1. tend the “freedom of divinity” (the theme of my first sermon in this series), and 2. cherish the “divinity of humanity” (the theme of my second sermon).
And here’s a third, the final theme in my swan song: work for the “wellbeing of the world.” Above all, be a healing community.
3.
In today’s reading, we listened to a short section of one of the longest stories in the Gospels. The whole thing is a story about divinity and humanity working together for healing, wholeness, and wellbeing.
The story tells us that Lazarus has died. Lazarus was one of Jesus’ closest friends. When Lazarus died, Jesus was far away. Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus, are plunged into grief. So, when Jesus arrives four days after the death of their brother, Mary’s grief has turned to fury. She holds Jesus responsible.
“If you had been here,” she tells Jesus, “my brother would not have died.”
She knew Jesus had divine power to heal. She’d seen Jesus heal. And so, she blames Jesus for not coming soon enough. But Jesus doesn’t defend himself nor does he shame her for her anger. Instead, Jesus embraces her fury. He feels her grief. In fact, he descends into grief himself. Jesus suffers too. And as they lead him to the tomb where his friend lies dead, Jesus stops and is overcome with emotion. And we read the shortest and perhaps the most intense and profound passage in the whole Bible: “Jesus wept.”
Those two words carry us to the deepest part of the story; they reveal the descent of divinity into our humanity. But that’s not the end of the story. We are not to stay in grief and suffering and despair. The descent of divinity into our humanity has healing as its goal.
The story ends with Jesus telling the community to open the entrance to the tomb. They resist him saying, “Jesus, it’s been four days. He’s dead. It’ll reek like the stench of a rotting animal.”
“Open it anyway,” says Jesus. This is humus, right? That creative material where what’s rotting and decaying can be transformed into something fertile, new, and life-giving.
They open the tomb and Jesus calls Lazarus out of the place of death. But as Lazarus appears, we’re told that “his hands and feet [are] bound with strips of cloth, and his face [is] wrapped in a cloth.”
Lazarus is alive but not free.
“Unbind him,” says Jesus, “and let him go.”
Lazarus is a symbol of our humanity. Jesus is a symbol of divinity.
The purpose of the story is to summon humanity to join divinity in the sacred work of healing, wholeness, and wellbeing, of unbinding.
Loneliness. Economic disparity. Climate emergency. Illness. Hunger. Homelessness. Marginalization. Victimization. Injustice. Prejudice. Cruelty. Intolerance. Bigotry. Tyranny.
These are the kinds of problems that plague human life. And when they plague human life—
they wound the world
they cause immense suffering
they bring death and grief
they bind us all
Stand at the threshold of decay, summon the power of life on behalf of those captive to death, and then “unbind them.” All of them. Any and every Lazarus, Mary, and Martha you meet who finds themselves broke or broken, lost or lonely, thrown out, counted out, down and out, or whose voices have been drowned out.
Maybe all this sounds risky, maybe even crazy. But if you’re going to be relevant in the future, if you’re going to embody a Christianity that’s not some hackneyed version of a bygone religion, you’re going to have to risk something, you’re going to have to be a little crazy. Crazy like Jesus. You’re going to have to be a little rebellious. Rebellious like Jesus. You might have to make some trouble. Trouble like Jesus. You’re going to have to love like it’s the only thing that really matters. Love like Jesus.
So, here’s the last thing I will say to you, the final chorus of my swan song. They’re words adapted from Jack Kerouac’s words, that edgy poet of a bygone generation who saw so clearly then what we must become now:
“Here’s to [you] the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. [Don’t be over-] fond of rules. [Don’t have too much] respect for the status quo. [Others] can praise [you], disagree with [you], quote [you], disbelieve [you], glorify or vilify [you]. About the only thing [they] can’t do is ignore [you]. Because [you] change things. [You] invent. [You] imagine. [You] heal. [You] explore. [You] create. [You] inspire. [You love lavishly, daringly, unconditionally.] [You] push the human race forward. . . . While some may see [you] as the crazy ones, [I] see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”