“Jesus Wept” based on Revelation 21:1-6a and John 11:32-44
It has been a while since I’ve stood in the pulpit to preach. Over the past three weeks, this space has been filled by profound and interesting men, whose willingness to share of themselves gave me space to focus myself elsewhere. I went on vacation. I soaked up the goodness of people I love, who make me whole, and it was grand.
Over the course of my adulthood I’ve used my vacation time to do two things: to see people I love, and to ski. The skiing has always happened with people I love, which makes winter vacation trips all the sweeter. I’m told that there are people who go vacations to do other things – like sit on a beach, or meet a new city, or hike an amazing part of the world that they’ve never hiked before. Those options have always seemed wonderful to me, but they have never become a priority because I have too many people I love and want to see, and they are always a bigger draw than anything else could be. There are a lot of people I love that I wish I had more time with – and they’re all over!
This week I came across an article that substantiated my vacationing choices. It is entitled, “How Our Housing Choices Make Adult Friendships More Difficult”1 and it was a response piece to an article in the Atlantic entitled, “How Friendships Change in Adulthood.”2 Both pieces were both interesting, discussing the importance of friendship to happiness and the challenges of making and maintaining friendships during adulthood. The Atlantic article discussed the challenges related to work and family – the demands of life that take away the time for friendship.
The housing article added some important perspective on American society, and what we think is normal. It points out that making close friends comes down to “ proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other.”3 Or to put it more succinctly, “The key ingredient for the formation of friendships is repeated spontaneous contact.”4 For many of us, the way we life doesn’t make a lot of space for that. Cars don’t help. Walkable neighborhoods do help, but not everyone lives in them. Houses don’t necessarily help! People are more likely to run into each other in apartments or in intentional co-housing. (The articles points out that this explains why so many people make such important friendships in college.) That is, we don’t just run into all that many people!
Interestingly, whenever I am walking around in Schenectady, I do run into people I know. Because of poverty levels in Schenectady, many people are not isolated by cars (they don’t have them) or housing (it is intermingled). It strikes me as strange that as people move up the socio-economic ladder in our society, they end up being more isolated from others. This seems to support the article’s argument that what we think of as normal in the USA isn’t normal and likely isn’t good! Why can’t we build a society where people interact AND have food security? The truth is we can, but we have to dream it.
The article, which was really advocating for thinking about housing life differently, much like my college friends and I always dreamed, with extended community in co-housing, running into each other in shared spaces, had one passing line that I couldn’t let go of. It was arguing about how isolated people are and said, “Say you’re a family with children and you don’t regularly attend church (as is increasingly common). There are basically two ways to have regular, spontaneous encounters with people. Both are rare in America.” (The two ways are “walkshed” neighborhoods and intentional co-housing.)
But did you hear it? If you don’t regularly attend church, then you don’t have the opportunity to meet people, run into them spontaneously, get to to know them slowly over time, and become friends. But, if you do attend church, that’s one of the benefits. I sort of love it when the value of church IS seen in society, and that is in fact one of the greatest values.
Today is All Saints Day. While we use it as a ritual of remembrance for all of our loved ones, and that is beautiful and important, there is a nuance to it that we often ignore. All Saints started as a way to remember the martyrs of church, and is formally a way to remember all Christians both past and present. Most specifically, today is the day to remember the members of our church family who have passed away in the past year and add them to the collective cloud of witnesses who came before us. The great cloud of witnesses dreamed and shaped our community and entrusted it to us, hoping that we will one day pass it on again. In a celebration of life, we thank God for the life of an individual person. On All Saints day we thank God for all the saints, and the collective gifts they’ve given us.
And THAT is why I’m waxing poetic about friendship today. We are formed by each other, in community, and sometimes the lines of connection and intersection are invisible to us. In my time here I’ve heard stories of people I’ve never met, and yet their lives have shaped mine. Friendships are most important to our happiness and our wholeness, they shape our lives. Most church relationships are friendships.
The honored dead whose names we will read today are people who shaped our lives, whether they were part of this church or not. And by shaping us, they’ve guided us not only into who we are but also in how we understand God and Love. In the Gospel lesson today, Jesus weeps. Trivia fans be aware, in the KJV, this was the shortest verse in the Bible. Theologians have argued since this story stated getting told about why he wept, but I think most of them have been wrong. They have messed up theories about him weeping is just a ploy, or annoyance at the crowd.
I think Jesus wept because his friend was dead.
This is not a particularly difficult interpretation for me to come to. Jesus cared about Lazarus. He was sad that he was dead, and he was also sad that Mary and Martha were hurting, and being present to his own grief and theirs led to tears. Over the centuries this interpretation has been avoided like the plague because it implies that Jesus may not have been: all-knowing, stoic, or immune to emotion. I’m cool with all those issues. I’d rather understand Jesus to be a man who cried when terribly sad things happened.
In our Revelation passage, the acts of creation which start the Bible and continue thematically through it, come to their narrative conclusion. God acts in creation again, this time a creation that exists without chaos, without death, without grief, and WITH the fullness of the Divine presence in all places and at all times. It is a vision of comfort and consolation that has held up to the passing of the ages. As one scholar put it, “It is a vision of the church at the end of time, and, because it partakes of the eternal, it is present and available to us now.”5
That is, in our relationships of love – in our families, in our friendships, in our church family- we get a glimpse of what it is to have the fullness of God among us. The vision of Revelation is one where we’d not only be intimately connected to God, but we also wouldn’t lose each other anymore.
Somehow, and we all understand the how differently, God keeps us connected to each other, even beyond the seemingly firm lines of death. God is the connector, we are connected, and connection is what makes life so wonderful. So thanks be to God – for those we love and have lost, for those we love and have not lost, and for God’s own self. Thanks be to God for friendships – past, present and future. May we continue to learn to give them energy so they can give us life. Amen
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1 http://www.vox.com/2015/10/28/9622920/housing-adult-friendship
2 http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/how-friendships-change-over-time-in-adulthood/411466/
3 David Roberts “How Housing Choices Make Adult Friendships More Difficult” published in Vox Policy and Politics accessed athttp://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/how-friendships-change-over-time-in-adulthood/411466/ on Oct. 31, 2015.
4 Ibid.
5 Ginger Grab, “Homiletical Perspective of Revelation 22:1-6a” in Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 4 edited by Barbara Brown Taylor and David Bartlett (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville Kentucky, 2009) page 233.
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Rev. Sara E. BaronFirst United Methodist Church of Schenectady603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady
November 1, 2015 – All Saints