What Kills You Makes You Stronger

Kelly Clarkson’s current #1 song is called “Stronger”; its catchy hook revolves around that common but somewhat peculiar phrase, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

This song has recently come to the attention of my daughter Sarah. We were discussing it over dinner the other night, and I joked about a line from the TV show Modern Family, in which the character Manny points out that this phrase simply isn’t true: “Many diseases leave people permanently disabled without killing them.” It’s a comic line in the show, but it’s a good point. Many of our common phrases, while they may have some basis in truth, aren’t at all universally applicable.

Then Sarah said, “What about Star Wars? Obi-Wan Kenobi said, ‘If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.’ And that was true!” I smiled, because I remember my parents comparing Obi-Wan Kenobi to Jesus when I was Sarah's age. (I don't know if she has made that connection yet, but I'll let her put it together herself.)

Sarah helped me understand that this common phrase has it backward. From a Star Wars perspective—and, by extension, from a Christian perspective—the phrase should be “What kills you makes you stronger.” You can’t get to resurrection without going through death first. To cast it in another mythological image, the phoenix rises from the ashes—not from a third-degree burn.

“What kills you makes you stronger.” This doesn’t need to refer merely to bodily death. Every day somebody’s hopes fail, something precious ends, and life goes on, with God always creating new possibilities we just can’t imagine yet. The death of anything we love really, truly, deeply hurts. But it's not the end.

This is why the Christian call is never to give up on anybody, ever, no matter what—and never to give up on our own lives, either. Even when we, in our fallibility, give up, God does not. God keeps hoping; the Holy Spirit prays the prayers we cannot.

Living a Saved Life

LIVING A SAVED LIFE
sermon preached at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Medina, WA
by Josh Hosler, Associate for Christian Formation
The Fourth Sunday of Easter/ May 15, 2011

When I was in the 7th grade, I had a fabulous Sunday school teacher named Mrs. Nielsen. She did something very simple one day that I will always remember. She drew a stick figure on a piece of paper. The stick figure was climbing some stairs. It looked just like this, except that I’ve blown it up bigger so more of you can see it in this large space.

Mrs. Nielsen showed us her primitive little drawing and said: “Some people think Christianity is like this: that the more good things we do, the more God will love us, and that if we do enough good things, we’ll get to heaven. But this is NOT Christianity! We don’t earn our way to heaven with brownie points! God’s love is a gift, and it has nothing to do with how good we’ve been. God loves you … NO MATTER WHAT.”

I will never forget that Sunday school lesson. Would that every Christian had had a teacher like Mrs. Nielsen! Her simple drawing cuts through all the clutter of popular opinion about Christianity. You can’t earn your way into God’s good graces. You are already there. There is nothing you can do to make God love you more.

This theological point is central to nearly every form of Christianity, at least officially. Whether the average Christian on the street believes it is another matter entirely. Even those of us who have intellectually absorbed it don’t always act as if we believe it. But it’s Good News, and it makes me want to share the news, not just in words that people might find hard to believe, but also in actions that make the words real.

This is what the Jewish Christians did in the earliest days of the Jesus movement. They were coming to understand that the God they had followed and worshipped so faithfully was even more loving and more powerful than they had dared to believe! With fear banished from their lives, they went wild with love. Our reading from the Acts of the Apostles tells us that Jesus’ disciples formed a commune: they pooled all their money and resources to make sure that nobody went hungry. They spent more time in the temple than ever before, and their time in their homes was marked by gratefulness and generosity. Their joy was contagious: “Day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.”

When I hear “being saved” in this context, it’s worlds away from the notion of “going to heaven after you die, if you’ve only been good enough.” The people’s lives in the here and now were saved by the immense depth of joy and grace that Jesus had shown them. Jesus had gone to the mat for his friends, his people, and the world. Had he merely died, he would have left only hopelessness and fear; there would have been no explanation for this sudden explosion of joy. But instead, Jesus showed himself to be more alive than he had ever been before—a state he only could have achieved by going through death first. So the people began to live saved lives, and by living in love and generosity, their joy spread to more and more people.

This leads us to today’s reading from the First Letter of Peter. Did you know that a sentence has been left out at the beginning? It’s this one: “Slaves, accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also those who are harsh. For it is a credit to you if, being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly” … etc. Whoa … the audience here is slaves!

Now, I think I understand why this verse has been left out of our lectionary. It was used by the Confederacy during the Civil War to justify the institution of slavery: If the early Christians didn’t specifically say slavery was wrong, then it must be OK. Well, no. Actually, the earliest Christians honestly believed the world was ending. They thought Jesus would be coming back any day or any month now to gather everyone into God’s heavenly Kingdom, so they didn’t see the point of making any big changes. As it turns out, they were mistaken. If the billboard in my neighborhood is to be believed, Jesus will actually return this coming Saturday! Hmmm … that’s the day St. Thomas is throwing me a pre-seminary fundraiser dinner. I trust that’s not significant!

But where were we? Oh yes: in a way, it’s too bad that the verse addressed to slaves has been left out of our lectionary, because it removes the passage from its context. We can all too easily assume that the intended audience is us. Now, if we believe that the Bible is in some way the Word of God, we do need to wrestle with the possibility that it is addressed to us. But that doesn’t mean that every word of every passage of scripture is applicable to our own personal situation all the time. Slaves in this time period had no legal recourse at all. There was no way they could possibly improve their standing in society. The writer’s advice to them, then, is to make the most of a hopeless situation—to draw their strength from God, since clearly they had no other source of strength.

In a more subtle way, though, these words can apply to us today. The appeal to treat abusers with respect is very difficult, and yet it is a necessary part of living a saved life. Most if not all of us have had some experience of being abused by someone in a position of authority, whether it was a parent, a teacher, a boss, or a priest. People aren’t perfect. People abuse other people. And when the abuse happens to us, we need to decide on an appropriate reaction for a person living a saved life.

There are two obvious ways we can deal with being abused: the basic biological urges of fight or flight. We could strike back in self-defense. Or we could avoid conflict as much as possible, hiding ourselves away or building defensive walls to keep the abuser out. Either approach might save our mortal lives, or at least our pride. But neither is likely to lead to anything transformative.

Now, Jesus did use both fight and flight from time to time in his ministry. The moneychangers in the temple made Jesus so angry that he started a riot. But on another occasion, when a crowd tried to throw him off a cliff, Jesus escaped. He challenged the Pharisees directly, thus endangering his life. But when even an adoring crowd got to be too much for him, Jesus slipped away to a quiet place to be alone. Fight and flight are good tools; we are not called to live our lives as doormats. To fight an abuser in court is one possibility for us. To leave an abusive spouse is very often the best course of action.

But when the time came for Jesus to really make his mark on the world once and for all, to transform the entire situation, he didn’t use fight or flight, because preserving his mortal life was no longer his top priority. The time came to step into a much larger picture in which death became the pivotal scene—by no means the final scene.

Yet Jesus didn’t come back and wreak vengeance on those who made themselves his enemies. As far as we know, the Risen Christ didn’t engage with his enemies at all. He sneaked back into the picture just for a little while, just long enough to light some kindling, and then he moved on. It was enough. The flame spread, beginning at the tomb, continuing on the Road to Emmaus, out from Jerusalem at Pentecost and into the world.

Jesus showed us how to live a saved life. He died not so we would never have to, but so that we might know how to follow in his steps. Many people have done so: in our own century, I might name Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero. I didn’t create or save my own life. It was a gift from God. So, like Jesus, I am called to use my life well, to use it abundantly, and if and when necessary, to surrender it, either because (God willing) it has run its course, or because surrendering it will help save others. I am also called never to stoop to the level of the abuser. Revenge is not a Christian virtue. It never has been, and it never will be. But revenge and self-defense are clearly different from each other.

Most of us won’t have to lay down our mortal lives for others. But as Christians, we are called to realize that we have enough, and that giving from what we have will not destroy us. We are called to be non-victims, and this means getting real about what hurts us and what doesn’t. When people slight us in little ways, perhaps our pride gets injured. But living a saved life, we can develop an inner core of self-respect that we know comes not from our own actions or our own perceptions, but from God. If God loves us infinitely, who can take our dignity away from us? This kind of strength means experiencing pain without allowing it to control us. It means knowing that our store of riches is bigger than we or anyone else might imagine. It means knowing that we are supported not just by ourselves, but by God.

Last week on the NPR program This American Life, reporter Nancy Updike took to Tahrir Square in Cairo to ask people about their reactions to the news of the death of Osama bin Laden. Her most common answer was this: “I’d love to talk, but I’m on my way to a meeting.” What meetings were people in such a hurry to get to? Not corporate business meetings, but something bigger: people getting together to decide what kind of country Egypt will become.

Ms. Updike sat in on a number of these meetings. One of them included two very different parties: a secular group of writers, actors, artists and intellectuals who want to keep Egypt secular. The other group was made up of former members of the Gama’a-Islamiyya, an Islamic group that was responsible for or linked to many murders, including the assassination of Anwar Sadat. Some of the secularists in the room with them may have been former targets. The Gama’a-Islamiyya publicly renounced violence fourteen years ago and continues to do so, even going as far as trying to talk Al-Qaeda over to their side.

Now these Islamists and these secularists are sitting down together to get real: to discern whether they can work together to help build a new, more democratic Egypt. If they continue to talk and work together, doubtless people on both sides will experience slights little and big, hurt pride, disappointments, and events that may feel at first like deal-breakers. They may feel that people on the other side have abused them.  But their willingness to talk at all gave me a thrill of hope for the future of Egypt.

I believe these non-Christians have caught a glimpse of the Kingdom of God that Jesus witnessed to. Like Christians, they have been called not to fight, not to run, but to step into the conflict in faith. These Muslims, in renouncing violence, understand that they are called to allow God’s agenda, not their own, to win the day. The secularists may not speak of God, but I believe God is also at work in their desire to create something bigger and more transcendent than their own partisan ideas. God’s agenda runs on reconciliation and resurrection, not on our own human steam, but through divine love and understanding. That agenda runs in and out and through all human communities, breaking into the world in surprising places.

When we can find it in us to rely on the dignity given to us by God, when we can recognize the voice of the Good Shepherd calling us through the gate and out to the good grass, when we can allow God’s rod and staff to redirect us away from the wolves of hate and vengeance toward nobler deeds, we are living life abundantly. We are living on God’s agenda and not our own. We are living saved lives. Amen.

Resurrection Today

sermon preached at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Medina, WA
by Josh Hosler, Associate for Christian Formation
The Fifth Sunday in Lent/ April 10, 2011
Listen here.

My great-grandfather, Samuel Lichtenberger Hosler, lived to the age of 96. I remember visiting him and my great-grandmother a number of times at their home in Sedona, Arizona. He was the first person I knew who died, and my family traveled from Idaho to Arizona for the funeral.

When we arrived at the funeral home, his casket was open. My Granny took my brother and me up to see Great-Grandpa lying there in his best suit. I looked him up and down, and then I announced, loudly, with all the self-confidence of a precocious 8-year-old, “He looks like plastic.”

Now, in general, I don’t remember my Granny being all that understanding about children’s capacity for bluntness. But she must have been in the zone that day, because she smiled and said, “You’re right! He sure does.”

I went on. “His hair is too neat. He never combed it like that.”

So Granny reached into the casket and messed up his sparse white hair a bit.

But I wasn’t finished yet. “Where are his glasses?”

They were in the pocket of his suit jacket. Granny took them out and put them on him. “Is that better?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I said. “But he still looks like plastic.”

It used to be commonly believed that the souls of the dead waited for the resurrection, lying in patient silence until the end of time, when Jesus would call us all out of our graves at once. In more recent centuries we have developed the idea of the dead immediately going to heaven, as if heaven were a faraway place we could be teleported to, zillions of light-years away, but on the same timeline. Indeed, I remember saying to my parents, “I bet Great-Grandpa is sitting down right now at a big banquet table in heaven for his welcome dinner.” Either way, when someone dies, we can see that our loved one just isn’t there anymore and isn’t coming back. We don’t see resurrection happening … or do we?

Today’s Scripture readings are all about death and resurrection. The Psalmist feels dead. He is waiting like a body in the grave for the Lord to redeem his people. For him, redemption and resurrection will come with forgiveness.

The famous Ezekiel story of the dry bones is a vision—an unusually vivid, waking dream. God asks, “Can these bones live?” And the prophet’s answer is very wise: “Oh Lord, you know.” Ezekiel understands that we can never assume we know where there is hope and where there is not; who is worth saving and who is a lost cause. Let us always leave that judgment to God, who is always about to do a new thing.

So, then, on to the really new thing that God is doing in Jesus. In our Gospel reading, Jesus’ disciples are playing their usual game of treating metaphors literally and getting very confused as a result. In this case, the subject is a dead man, not an entire dead nation, so we can hardly blame Jesus’ friends for planting themselves firmly in literalism and refusing to budge. After all, death is so undeniable when it stares us in the face. It can seem indecent, nightmarish … too real to bear. Jesus tries to explain Lazarus’ death to them in metaphor, first telling them that this disease isn’t fatal, and then telling them he’s only sleeping. Finally, when it’s clear that the disciples don’t get it, he gives in: “OK, OK! Lazarus is dead. Is that what you want to hear?”

They’re already annoyed with him, because Jesus has been quite unhelpful. Everyone knows he can cure the sick. Why, then, did Jesus wait for two extra days to come to Bethany? I can understand Martha and Mary, in their grief, trying to shame him: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Those of us who have lost a loved one, especially one who was still young, may have prayed something very similar: “Lord, where were you? Why didn’t you keep this from happening?”

Martha deals with her grief in a very human way: “Everyone says to me that my brother is in a better place, that he will lie in wait patiently and then be called out of his grave at the end of time. But it doesn’t help. Today is the day I miss him. Today is the day I want him back. What are you going to do about this today?”

“But today is what it’s all about,” Jesus replies. “I am the resurrection and the life today, in your life, not just at the end of time. Do you believe this?”

Then Mary shows up, and Jesus gets emotional. We hear that he becomes “greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” The original Greek words, etaraxen and embrimOmenos, carry connotations of angry indignation as well. Is Jesus angry with his friends for not understanding? Is he angry with death? Is he angry with the whole situation?

And then, on the way to the tomb, Jesus begins to cry. At the reality that his friend Lazarus is truly dead and was laid to rest four days ago, Jesus becomes angry, frustrated, offended, and sad all at once—just as any of us might. But why? If he’s trying so hard to be reassuring, why isn’t Jesus himself reassured? I wonder if he knows what might happen as a result of this miracle—what plots it will set in motion. I wonder if he knows that his own entombment is not far away.

“Roll away the stone,” Jesus commands. Now in her usual way, Martha jumps in here with a practical consideration: “Jesus, there’s a decaying corpse in there! Are you sure about this?”

But this is the same Jesus who has touched lepers and chatted with Samaritan women; he’s the last person to worry about becoming unclean. He’s doing away with all the purity codes that divide us and enslave us. “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see?” There it is again: sometimes you have to believe something to see it. That’s how Stone Chorlton put it in our Lenten reflections booklet.

And then Jesus prays out loud, and this is what I hear in his prayer: “God, I know you always hear me. But I thank you anyway for hearing me. I know you’re always with me, yet still, I invite you to come in. I know that Lazarus is held in your eternal embrace and that death is nothing to fear. But my friends are still stuck in literalism, and they could use a little convincing … Lazarus, come out!”

And Lazarus comes out. And Jesus’ next command to the people is this: “Unbind him. Unbind him and let him go.”

God is always doing a new thing. Don’t see it yet? Let’s take a quick glance back at the scope of John’s Gospel.

1)    Jesus has turned water into wine.
2)    He has healed a dying boy.
3)    He has made a lame man walk.
4)    He has fed 5000 people on five loaves of bread and two fish.
5)    He has walked on water.
6)    He has given sight to a man born blind.
7)    He has brought Lazarus from the grave.

These are the seven miracles John built his Gospel on, all the while acknowledging that this is only a small sampling. In the last verse of the Gospel, he writes, “There are many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”

Do you see? We’re not just talking about whatever works the man Jesus happened to accomplish in 30 short years in Palestine. Every time we hear the Gospel read, Jesus is reaching into our own lives, shaking us loose from dry literalism and doubt. We don’t need to wait for the resurrection. Despite all of human nature, we don’t need to worry about death at all. Not even in death is there a place where Christ is not—even if we can’t see it right now. And as for our beloved dead, we, too, can unbind them and let them go.

In the meantime, Jesus’ other miracles point us to millions of little resurrections we can see!

1)    A dead party comes to life.
2)    An illness passes, or an injury heals.
3)    We think life has passed us by, and then new opportunities and renewed abilities surprise us and excite us.
4)    We don’t think there will be anyone to help us, and then there is.
5)    We don’t think there will be enough to go around, and then somehow there is.
6)    We discover perspectives and ideas and light we never could have imagined before!
7)    Resurrection is happening today, all over the world, wherever people love and care for each other. Because that is God’s Kingdom, always breaking into the world.

In next week’s story, the people will proclaim Jesus king—a new kind of king—a king with no army, no palace, no money—but a king who possesses everything in the universe because he trusts God completely.

Don’t miss the next chapters. Come next Sunday, and then join us for all of Holy Week! This is the Christian story, our family story, the reason we’re all here in the first place. This is high drama, and it is Good News. It is Good News for my great-grandfather and all our beloved dead. But it is also Good News for us. Christ is the king of the living. Jesus is the resurrection and the life today! Amen.

Some say we're born into the grave

The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.”

So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them.

Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.

Then he said to me, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. 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.”

- Ezekiel 37:1-14

This is one of the great stories of the Bible. One year at a church Halloween party, I heard someone tell it to a group of kids, sitting in darkness, complete with sound effects (a bunch of drumsticks in a box rattling around). And, of course, we all know the old spiritual about “dem dry bones”—not to mention the bleak, hard-rockin’, excellent Alice in Chains song.

But what is the main point of this story? To what does Ezekiel’s vision point? Well, the story isn’t actually about physical death, for one thing—it’s about spiritual death. It’s about a whole people feeling cut off and hopeless. And there’s a promise here that all is not lost—God will restore their hope. But when?

The Gospel reading paired with this one is the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. I’ll go out on a limb and say that this story isn’t about physical death, either—at least, not exclusively. There are a million little resurrections happening in our lives every day, from a healed injury to a rekindled friendship to a new perspective. Sometimes these resurrections may seem to take too long—but they do come. Even when everything seems hopeless, hope is on the way.

And so the story goes ...

Again he said to them, "I am going away, and you will search for me, but you will die in your sin. Where I am going, you cannot come."

Then the Jews said, "Is he going to kill himself? Is that what he means by saying, 'Where I am going, you cannot come'?"

He said to them, "You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world. I told you that you would die in your sins, for you will die in your sins unless you believe that I am he."

They said to him, "Who are you?"

Jesus said to them, "Why do I speak to you at all? I have much to say about you and much to condemn; but the one who sent me is true, and I declare to the world what I have heard from him."

They did not understand that he was speaking to them about the Father. So Jesus said, "When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I am he, and that I do nothing on my own, but I speak these things as the Father instructed me. And the one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what is pleasing to him."

As he was saying these things, many believed in him. Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free."

- John 8:21-32

It sounds to me like Jesus is saying, “As hard as I’ve tried, I can tell you’re just not going to get it.” He sounds desperate, resigned, and exasperated. He tells them, “You will die in your sin.” What does that mean? Is it as hopeless as it sounds?

The longer we live, the more likely we are to encounter people who seem to have no hope at all. Here’s a song that sketches just such a person: a young woman who is angry, hurt, and broken. “And so the story goes/ That’s the way she chose to live her life.” We are told, “Her salvation came too late/ And on that day she died/ And no one even cried.” The song is “Veil of Deception,” by the Filipino-American metal band Death Angel.

But the road to resurrection leads through total hopelessness. I thank Jesus for going ahead of us into the hopelessness of death and returning to show us it is actually the way to eternal life. All those who have gone before us, no matter the circumstances of their lives, are held in God’s loving embrace. They have access to infinite wisdom: the truth has set them free.