Unwrap: Waking Up

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – October 15, 2023

Unwrap: Waking Up – John 11: 38-44

I don’t know about you but I learned to dehumanize people pretty early in life. I remember my first grade teacher made a big deal about this one boy, we’ll call him Dale, and how Dale’s fingernails always had dirt under them. Dale lived on a farm. He got free lunch. His clothes didn’t fit. He had holes in his shoes. He stunk. No one would sit near him.

Where we all could hear, the teacher would check Dale’s fingernails every day to see if they had dirt under them. When they did, she would tsk, tsk, tsk and send him to the sink to wash while berating him for his lack of hygiene skills. We all heard. We all saw. We all learned.

We didn’t learn good hygiene. We learned that Dale was less than the rest of us. He was less than the rest of us all through elementary school and middle school and high school. He was mocked and bullied and ostracized like every other kid whose poverty was visible at school.

The term at my school for those kids was “scruff.” It was the bottom of the bottom rung. It was, socially, worse than death. It was as if those students were invisible to the rest of us.

If I had to give you a definition of sin, I would tell you it was what the students and some of the teachers both did to the Dales of our school. It was what we did to each other. It was a little taste of hell on earth, and though I think picturing God with human characteristics is just what our mortal minds like to do to wrap our heads around a concept that our words can never fully explain, I imagine that kind of sin does “reek in the nostrils of the almighty God.”

That’s how Martin Luther King Jr. once described “peace” that meant a quiet acquiescence to violently enforced racial segregation. He said that kind of peace “reeks in the nostrils of the almighty God.”

“Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, ‘Take away the stone.’ Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, ‘Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead for four days.’” 

There are a lot of places in our world that plainly have a stench. We could, I suppose, point to actual landfills and their toll on the earth. But I’m thinking more about the stench that’s coming off our human hearts.

I’m not talking about people who are poor or who have to go to school still with the manure smell of their family farm on their clothes. I’m talking about all the little ways we make each other less than.

We like to make poor people less than. It makes the rest of us feel a little insulated from the dangers of poverty. But there are a hundred other ways we decide all the someone elses or even our own selves are less than good for anything.

We set up hierarchies and call some people good and other people bad. Then we spend the rest of our time making sure we look good and no one ever confuses us for those less than human bad people or finds out that we are anything less than “good” all of the time.   

The bad news is we’re all the same in the sense that we all live, we all die, we all make mistakes, we all hurt, we all love, we’re all healing from something whether or not we care to admit it. No amount of posturing or hierarchy or money is going to change that, although a minimum amount of money in this life, it turns out, makes it a lot easier to bear a lot of things.

I don’t always see it these days though. I see a lot more hate and a lot more rage. I see people driving like their own lives don’t mean very much to them–let alone the lives of other people walking, biking, or driving nearby.

I have pretty much quit social media because that seems like a place people go just to hate each other.

The news is full of states passing laws to remove healthcare from women and trans people who need it. The news is full of wars and the necessary dehumanization it takes to launch one.

Do you know I actually had someone tell me this week they prayed to God that Israel would kill as many people as possible on the Palestinian side. People of all ages. As many as possible because they are, this person said, “the wrong kind of people.” This person told me those are all people God wants dead.

Meanwhile, I led an online workshop not a month ago with one of the smartest, funniest, most-committed-to-other-people’s-welfare young women I ever met who lives in Palestine. I don’t know how she’s doing. But I pray for her every day.

So, I’ll tell you, I find it very easy to sympathize with Martha in this story. Her brother is dead. There’s not a lot of hope here. If Jesus had come earlier that would be one story. But now it’s too little too late. Why crack open the tomb? Whether it’s a tomb or our hardened hearts, we know what’s inside has a stench.

But Jesus does it anyway.

“Jesus said to her, ‘Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?”

I wish I could say there was a time when I stopped dehumanizing other people. But I’m still guilty of it all the time. Judgment is a hard habit to break. And the thing is it does a lot of breaking to the person doing the judgment, too.

But I can tell you about one of the times I started to learn that even I was doing it. I was working at a church in San Francisco. I was the Christian Ed Director. The person who was running the church’s meal assistance and homeless outreach program was named Megan Rohrer, who would go on to be the first openly transgender minister and bishop in the Lutheran tradition and be profiled by national and international media outlets.

At the time, the people benefitting from this program became famous to me for schooling me in my ignorance. I would maybe stop by and say hi at meals with the Welcome ministry. But I would never sit down, and I would especially never eat. I didn’t want anyone to think I needed the meals. One day they stopped me and invited me in. When I wouldn’t eat and Megan asked why, that’s what I told them, I didn’t need the food as much as everyone else there. One man actually dropped his plate. Megan sighed a deep sigh then looked up at me and said, “You obviously don’t know what we’re doing here.”

What they were doing there wasn’t just dishing up food. It was dishing up dignity. It was breaking bread and sharing a little humanity. I was embarrassed. But I got it. Eventually. Well, I’m still working on it anyway.  

“So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upwards and said [to our shared Holy Parent], I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.’ When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’”

As people living in this current stage of scientific advancement, I think you would be well within your rights to ask me, “Pastor, do you believe this actually happened this way? Did Jesus really raise his friend from the dead?”

And I would have to tell you I don’t know.

I know the world is a lot bigger and more ancient and more mysterious than I know. Any really good scientist will agree. And it’s hard to rule out something that happened so long ago that anyone who saw it has been dead for two millennia.

What I do know is that whether or not it happened just like this would have been of much less consequence to the people who first wrote it down. What mattered most to them was not journalistic veracity but the deeper meaning they were trying to impart with any given story.

You can take your own meaning from Lazarus rising from the dead. You can believe what you will. Today, the meaning that rises to the surface for me is the extraordinary power of one person paying attention to another person. I have witnessed that extraordinary power turn lives around. I would say it has brought many from a dark, stinking tomb. I would call it the love of God and I know that sometimes, inexplicably, we discover it outside of human actions, but very often we need other humans for us to realize that the universe is actually made up of this extraordinarily powerful love.

I have come to believe in the power of that love to meet us and change us in every hurt and stinking place in our lives. I have come to believe that love unbinds us from all the messed up things we’ve done and the messed up things that have been done to us, allowing us to heal and to trust that we can experience wholeness and holiness anyway. I have come to believe that love is big. It is bigger than big.

My mother’s name is Robin. R-O-B-I-N like the bird. They say a baby learns to recognize their mother’s voice in the womb. I would recognize hers anywhere. It used to make me jump when I heard her call me by my middle name. In a crowd at church I could pick out her strong soprano no matter where she sat. If I want to get goosebumps all over, I can still close my eyes and hear her sing, “You are my sunshine.”    

Her father sang her the same song when she was small. Once, I protested when she sang it for my sister. I thought the song was for me alone. (Her only sunshine!) That day she told me that her love was big. She said her love was more than big enough for both my sister and I.

God’s love too, I believe, is big.  Her love is more than big enough for the lot of us--for all her creation.

For Israel and Palestine. For Democrats and Republicans.

For rich and poor. For you and for me.

For the parts of you that you hope no one ever sees.

God’s big love still calls into those tomb places, unbind him, unbind her, unbind them, let us all go.

Let us be together. Loved.

And like those freshly emerged, unbound butterflies, flying free.

May it be so. Amen.