Yeah, right, Jesus loves me. The Bible's full of crap.

The Lessons for the Fifth Week in Lent
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Romans 8:6-11
John 11:1-45
Psalm 130 

Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, "See how he loved him!" But some of them said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?"

`Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.' 

When I was reading the passages this week, there were so many different things to notice. You could write a sermon about any one of them:

• Why does Jesus weep outside of Lazarus's home? I wonder if this is a crucial experience to Jesus' life as a human. Aren't we all transformed by our first experience of the death of someone very close to us? Is this Jesus' first resurrection, as well? Does he come away from his experience of mourning a different man?
• What is life like for Lazarus when he comes back from the dead? There's a great article in Salon.com this week about Near Death Experiences. One of the things it mentions is that people who have them, re-enter their lives radically transformed in very similar ways.
• In both stories, God uses a human make the dead come alive. That has so much to say about how God can use us--maybe even, needs us?--to revive the dead. 

But the thing I kept coming back to all week was a wedding.

I'm sure I grew up hearing the story of the Valley of Dry Bones, but the first time I remember hearing it, I was in my early twenties, attending the wedding of the man that I knew God wanted me to marry.

I'd met Samuel (name changed) in college my junior year, and by the time I graduated, I'd fallen, slowly and completely, in love with him. Samuel was everything I hoped for in a husband--smart, funny, breathtakingly attractive, and most important, deeply engaged with God and living out his faith in the real world. I needed him. He was the only person I knew who could let me question anything at all--anything--without feeling like God would break if I kept pushing. I knew that we were supposed to be together. Samuel did not seem to agree.

I would often bring our relationship up with God--one day, when I was lying in my dorm room, alternating between crying and praying, I had one of those moments preachers talk about right before they ask you for money. I felt more than heard a message from God in my head. God said, "Wait. You will be together, but now is not the time."

So I waited. I stopped fantasizing about marrying Samuel, and faithfully left it in God's hands tried to remind myself, when I was questioning my future with this man, that now was not the time. I considered, but ultimately decided against, joining the organization that he worked for. The summer after I graduated, during the training session I was to have attended, he met the woman he ended up standing beside at the altar while someone read the story of the Valley of Dry Bones.

I remember thinking that the reading was appropriate for any child of divorce. My own parents' marriage was in the throes of a painful and protracted death. It made me question everything I thought I knew about love. Their impending divorce made me feel defective, incapable of love, and destined to a life of singleness. A happy marriage seemed as impossible as getting bones to knit together, enflesh themselves, and walk, just because God tells a prophet to give the command. Being at the wedding of the man God had promised to me didn't exactly mitigate those feelings.

But I was putting on a cheerful face. I didn't think anyone knew I was at a funeral. Sure, I was wearing a mostly black dress, but it had lots of floral patterns on the skirt, and anyway, I was from the East Coast where people wore black all the time. I was happy for him. For them. Yes, I was wandering in the wilderness, watching the promise that God had made to me fall from my hands and dry up my future, but I think I was doing a good job of faking it.

I was watching, smiling, while the couple had their first dance, when my best friend came up behind me, put his hand on my shoulder, and asked how I was doing. It was like the touch of his hand pressed a button that released all of my emotion at once. The tears just sprang to my eyes. I may have even allowed a sob to escape, before he guided me from the reception hall. I don't remember anything else, except shame, embarrassment, and a burning need to keep this from the couple. I didn't want my feelings to be part of the story of their wedding. I think we went outside. I think I eventually went back to the reception and visited with friends. But somewhere in between leaving and going back in, I wept.

It's tempting to fast-forward to the present. Here I am now, in a marriage that is, at its core, exactly what I was asking God for during those confused and desperate prayers in college. I see that God fulfilled the promise so much more fully than I, in my funereal dress and plastered on smile, was capable of imagining. So God's promise was eventually fulfilled. For me. In this case. In a very different way from what I had imagined.

But it wasn't true for some ten or fifteen years, while I struggled, trying to understand if that promise was real, trying to understand if God was real, and if so, what was I getting right and what was I getting wrong? I spent at least a couple of years worrying that I'd been the one to blow it on the promise--if I had been part of the organization, maybe I would have been the one he fell in love with during summer training, maybe it would have been me up there at the altar, dancing to Etta James. (Well, OK, there's no way the Etta James part would ever have happened. I had a different song in mind.) But the reasons didn't matter. As far as I was concerned, the promise was dead. Dry bones. Rotting and stinking in the tomb.

This contributed to and coincided with a major crisis of faith, in which I spent a great deal of time wondering whether God listened to our prayers, or cared about us, or even existed at all. (You could make a case that I'm still in that crisis, but that's a discussion for another day.)

When you are stuck in the Valley of Dry Bones, it's very difficult to see any way that anything could be alive again. We've all been there. Whether it's the death of a marriage, a career, a friendship, or a dream we've given our lives for, we've all walked through the Valley of Dry Bones, with nothing alive for as far as the eye can see. It's easy to get stuck there, and very difficult to pick up the pieces. Only the most valorous of us are able to say to the broken, dead, dross of our lives, "God is going to make this good. You will live again."

Most of the time, most of us can't find the breath to say the words. We just can't believe anything will be alive again. So we bury our hope for the future and our belief in a God that cares. We hide away our dead relationships and our murdered dreams back behind a stone, where we imagine them rotting and stinking things up so bad that we don't ever want to look at them again.

Sometimes, the most we can do is to get up from where we are mourning our losses, and say to Jesus, "Where were you? How could you let this happen?"  And Jesus says, "show me." So we take him, never daring to believe that even Jesus can make things right. And when we show him, Jesus weeps.

He sits there at the tombs of our greatest failures, our murdered dreams and shattered hopes, and before he gets about the business of transformation, he sits there with us, deeply moved, and weeps. We don't know how long Jesus wept. John 11:35 has enjoyed notoriety as the shortest verse in the Bible, but as any writer will tell you, you can cover an eon with two words. I think we can assume the crying went on for as long as necessary.

It's not until he has mourned with us what we have lost, that finally, we are able to hear his voice above our own sobs: "Take away the stone," he says. Like that's going to make any difference. Some time much later, after we have exhausted our own protests against getting what we say we want, Jesus calls to what was dead in us, and we watch it, dressed for the grave, lurching out into the light. The whole scene is so completely unthinkable, we just sit there, frozen, until finally, Jesus comes up behind us, puts a hand on our shoulder, and says, "Unbind him, and let him go."
 

Some program notes

Hello, friends. Here we are at the fifth Sunday in Lent, so it's time for a few program notes:

Next week, everything gets very intense. And not just in the lectionary, but also for me. This time next week, I will be blogging to you from the Festival for Faith and Writing at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There are going to be all sorts of amazing luminaries from the world of writing about faith (Rachel Held Evans and Annie Lamott, among others). Several of you have told me that you'd really like to go, so I'm going to post completely non-Lenten updates throughout the week.

From there, we're taking the kids to Disney World. That's right, on Maundy Thursday, we might be watching a parade and fireworks, and on Good Friday, we could be eating with princesses and not even skipping dessert. I'm planning to blog the Holy Week readings, at night. Who knows what kind of parallels there are to be drawn between the Last Supper and Cinderella's Royal Table?

I've added a "Subscribe by email button" to the right of this page, for those of you who don't want to miss a single post. (I won't be linking to the posts via Facebook, except for Sundays, so be sure to check back if you're interested, but don't want email alerts.)

Also, I'm planning to continue this blog after Easter, so I hope if I've been part of your Lenten discipline this year that you'll consider checking in a few times throughout the year. I'm not sure how the blog will change. I guess we'll find out together.

Holy Spit and the Holy We

1 Samuel 16:1-13
Ephesians 5:8-14
John 9:1-41
Psalm 23


"...for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart."

"If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, `We see,' your sin remains."


What kind of a person sees a man, blind from birth, have his sight restored, and claims it's the work of the devil, because of the day of the week it happened on? The kind of person who sends $35 a month to a charity in order to assure that a hungry child can eat, but then decides she can't support that charity because some of the people who work to feed the child are having gay sex? I'm thinking yes.

What kind of a person sees a man, blind from birth, and decides that the kid's parents must have done something so heinous that God decided to punish them with their child's blindness. The same kind of person who would claim that Hurricaine Katrina was a punishment from God, and protest at funerals to "prove" it? I'm thinking yes again.

At the beginning of the week, when I first started reading the lessons, I thought to myself, "Well, it's good that we've progressed beyond thinking that God would punish parents for their sinfulness by sacrificing a child's sight." But then I started thinking about how every time we have a storm or some other tragedy, some fame-hungry religious blowhard is happy to pin the misfortune on the perceived sins of some group of people that he thinks is completely unlike him.

About then is when I started thinking that when Jesus said, "The poor, you shall always have with you," he might as easily have said, "The blind self-righteous douchebags, you will always have with you." It would have been just as true. And I haven't really come down yet from feeling like religion attracts the opinioinated, self-righteous, condemning and insincere powertrippers who are more about being in an exclusive group of The Elect than about helping to grow the Kingdom of God.

But, of course, Jesus famously said, "Suffer all the assholes to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is kingdom of heaven." Or something close to that, anyway, right? Because when I look at people who decide, based on their own limited knowledge of God's Word, who gets to be in the group and who gets stuck outside, it brings me right back to fifth grade.

You know how a lot of the time in the later years of elementary school, there's one kid who gets singled out as the weirdo? Through some strange pre-preadolescent, group ESP, it's agreed that it's always okay treat this one kid like garbage, because that kid is so different she isn't even really a person, as we understand people at that age. Maybe she's got a little mild autism--not enough to really be different, because making fun of that would be cruel--but enough to be not quite the same as the rest of us. Maybe she's just a new kid, with skin that's slightly browner, or not brown enough, who pronounces her R's in a weird way. Who was that kid at your school?

Maybe you're thinking I'm going to tell you that I was that girl in fifth grade. If so, you've got another think coming. That role belonged to a girl, lets call her Jane, who usually came to school with her greasy bangs sticking to her forehead, looking kind of rumpled. I still remember the time she came to school on picture day, hair washed, in two pigtails with ribbons, in a lovely, clean, pressed dress. I had the nerve to say to my friend, "I thought Jane looked really nice today," and my friend said something like, "Well, I didn't. She looked like she was trying too hard. And now she's shown that she knows how to look good, so it just proves what a scrub she is for not trying the rest of the time." (Scrub was a big word back then.) That quote sums up the catch-22 that the Janes of the world are in: If she showed up being herself, greasy hair and all, she was a scrub. If she tried to conform, wearing dresses and doing her hair, she was a loser for trying too hard.

Back then, teachers still let you get away with taunts in the schoolyard, so when we would line up to go in from recess we'd play a "game" called "Blackout." It was basically an excuse to slap and insult each other. If a kid touched another kid, the second kid would slap his neighbor and say, "So-and-so's germs, blackout!" And that shout would travel up the line as each child loudly emoted the horror of getting stuck with so-and-so's germs. If you cared about a person, you could save her from mortal humiliation, keep her germs, and the game would be over. Mostly, people called Jane's name. Jane's name was one of the only ones that would travel all the way down the line.

It was one of the names that went the whole way down the line, but not the only one. There was a boy, who was basically the male counterpart to Jane. He was necessary for expressing something about the heinousness of boys, and also so that we could make fun of Jane without insulting a "real" boy, when we wanted to have her sitting in a tree with someone. And then there was me. I was the alternate Jane. I was very aware that I was, not the least popular girl in my school, but second-least. The other girls, especially the tight little knot of opinion-makers that, even in fifth grade, wielded enormous social power, would call out my name for a little variety.

I was new to the school, which had a very different culture from the school I had come from, and I was used to being in the knot. So when The Knot made fun of me for not shaving my legs, I told Mom I needed to start shaving my legs. She said no. When I told The Knot that Mom wouldn't let me shave, they made fun of me for not wearing pantyhose. I told Mom I needed pantyhose. Mom was flabbergasted: "In fifth grade?!! No. If you really want to, you can wear nylon kneehighs." So I tried the kneehighs. The Knot pointed and laughed. The Knot mostly wore Levis cords anyway. I told Mom I needed Levis cords from the expensive store downtown. Out of the question. "Well, I need something. Nobody wears dresses at this school." My mother, who didn't really get it, because she couldn't see that there was anything wrong with me in the first place, went to Zayers and bought me two pairs of polyester stretch pants. And of course, then the Knot left me alone after that, because they had nothing more to make fun of. Not.

But I kept wearing the stretch pants anyway, partly because if I didn't, I would have gotten in trouble for wasting money, but mostly because I gave up trying to get along with the Knot. I got used to hearing my name called with horror as it moved up and down the recess line. I got used to being picked second-to-last for kickball. And anyway, it wasn't so bad. At least I wasn't Jane.

Comparison is an insidious thing. I have seen it keep strong women in soul-crushingly damaging relationships, as they think, "He can be cruel, but at least he doesn't hit me, like the last guy did," or "Well, yeah, he gets drunk a lot, but at least he's holding down a job. He isn't a raging alcoholic like my dad." I have seen it rob women of their accomplishments: "Sure, I published my novel, but only with a small house. It's not like I'm at a good publishing house, like So Andso." And I have known it to trap people in a system that nobody deserves: "I may be a loser, but at least I'm not as much of a loser as Jane."

Because, I don't know whether you noticed, but when I was describing the way Blackout is played, I didn't use the word they. I used we. Because, make no mistake: I played. I didn't really like the game, but I certainly played. In a way, I loved it when people would play Blackout with Jane's name, because for those few second, when I could slap someone's hand and cry, "Jane's germs, blackout," I could pretend that I was just like everyone else. I could believe that maybe this time, finally, they were going to let me in.

So imagine what it must be like for a man, blind from birth, to hear a bunch of religious people talking about his condition as theological puzzle. Here's a guy who is known by everyone in the community as the blind guy. At first, it might seem like a regular day. Probably he's used to people talking about him as if his broken eyes had broken his ears as well. So they're just completing the job by breaking his heart: "Whose sin caused this man to be blind?" Whose fucking sin caused this man to be blind? Seriously? Because you need so badly to cling to your belief that God only creates things that you deem perfect and good, that you'd rather believe in a God who punishes people by disfiguring their children? What the kind of a hellish religion is that?

And what does our beloved Jesus do? He says this: "Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world." At first, this seems like an equally dickish move. God makes a man live his whole life until Jesus stumbles across him (hopefully not literally) so that His glory can be revealed? A lot of sources go with this interpretation, but it has problems. For one thing, it's ignoring all the other people who are born blind, and yet not healed by Jesus' spit.

I think that interpretation might be limited by our tendency to apply causality to things that happen right before and after each other: Jesus says the guy was born blind so that God's works could be revealed in him. Then he heals him and that's miraculous, so that must be the work of God that he's talking about. Except that Jesus says "we all,"--so, everyone present, including the blind man--need to do the work of "him who sent me" for as long Jesus gives us light to see by.

What was that like for the blind man? First, Jesus says, "Nobody sinned to make this happen." Imagine that. It could very well be the first time the man ever heard from anyone that being blind wasn't his fault. Oh, the kinder ones might have come along and said something like, "It's not your fault that your parents sinned, but just try to remember that you are living out their pennance for them." But it's possible that nobody had ever said to him, "You were born this way, just because it is who you are. God will use who you are to reveal his glory in the world." Most important, Jesus makes him part of the "We."

Then he spits in the dirt and covers the guy's eyes with Jesus mud, and the guy doesn't go, "Jesus' germs, blackout!" Even though it's kind of gross to have someone else's spit in your eyes, people have been spitting in this guy's eyes for a long time. In fact, I don't think it's so completely outside the realm of possibility that the mud is there because the guy is so moved by finally being included in the Holy We that his own tears are already leaking out of those maybe-not-so-useless-after-all eyes of his. So Jesus covers up the tears and sends him off for a little alone time until he can get himself together.

The rest of the story is Jane on picture day. People are so resistant to letting this guy in that they do all sorts of mental gymnastics: It's not really him. He wasn't really blind from birth. They harass the guy with questions, then they harass his parents, and then they bring him back again, and this is where the blind man truly gains his sight. Because finally, after a lifetime of just wanting to be part of the group, of wanting, just once, to be called sinless and clean, he sees what Jesus states at the end of the story. These people who have spent their lives calling him a sinner and ignoring him as something less than fully human? They still can't let him in. They can't see how blind they've been. So he has the joyous luxury of rejecting them, and going back to the guy who never thought there was anything wrong with him in the first place.

Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelp died recently, having personally condemned numerous soldiers and gay people to his own personal hell. This week, international charity World Vision announced that they would let married gays and lesbians work there. That lasted twenty-four hours, until a ton of Evangelicals accused World Vision of siding with the devil. It's easy to think we know who the blind ones are. But we need to remember: all of us think that we're the ones who can see.

Sometimes when we think someone needs healing, it's our eyes that need opening. Sometimes, we think Jesus is making someone whole, when he's trying to tell us they've been whole all along. We have all been guilty of standing in the recess line of the Kingdom of God, calling, "Fred Phelps' germs, blackout!" "Blind guy's germs, blackout!" "Gay guy's germs, blackout!"  We call people names like "fame-hungry religious blowhard," and we blind ourselves from seeing the whole of Christendom--no, not Christendom, the whole of humanity--and the whole humanity of Christendom, for that matter.

But one thing is certain. As we stand on line, calling out names with horror and revulsion, unable to face what it would say about ourselves if we included our own personal Janes in our own personal Knots, there is one place in the line where the shouting grows silent. Fred Phelp's germs? Bring them on. Gay guy's germs? He'll take them too. Fame-Hungry Religious Blowhard? Blind, Self-Righteous Douchebag? Got you covered. He's not saying that many of us can see more than a few inches in front of our faces, and, frankly, he'd like us to work on that, but make no mistake, we're in. We're all in.