Lent 5: Year A
The Reverend Melissa Skelton
I was in college the first time I read Dostoyevski’s novel Crime and Punishment. It was required reading in what was called “World Literature” at the University of Georgia.
As a twenty-something year-old, I remember struggling through it, wondering how anyone could write a story about so many unfortunate people.
The story is about Raskolnikov, a handsome young student who commits a brutal act of murder in an attempt to save his sister from marrying simply to provide for him.
Among Raskolnikov’s friends is a young woman named Sonia who has become a prostitute on account of her family’s own desperate financial situation. In one very memorable scene Raskolnikov is talking with Sonia and asks her to read a particular story from the Bible to him. That story is the raising of Lazarus from the 11th chapter of the Gospel of John
And this is how Dostoyevski describes it:
“Sonia opened the book and found the place. Her hands were shaking; her voice failed her. Twice she tried to begin and could not bring out the first syllable. “Now a certain man was sick named Lazarus of Bethany..” she forced herself at last to read, but at the third word, her voice broke like an overstrained string. There was a catch in her breath…”
Raskolnikov saw in part why Sonia could not bring herself to read to him…He understood only too well how painful it was for her to betray and unveil all that was her own. He understood that these feelings were her secret treasure, which she had kept perhaps for years…and at the same time he knew now and knew for certain that although it filled her with dread and suffering yet she had a tormenting desire to read and to read to him that he might hear it, and to read now whatever might come of it.”
I remember reading this very passage and wondering: What could it mean for this story, the story of Jesus raising a person from the dead, to be a secret treasure, to be my secret treasure? Whatever could it mean?
Was it about being about to bear up through the difficulties of life because you knew that a kind of happier life after death was waiting on the other side—something I had heard in the mouths of Southern Baptist friends and relations all my days? Or did it mean something more, something else?
At that point in my life, of course, I had no idea that there were experiences in life so devastating, so disappointing, that it was possible to be a real live “dead man walking,” so to speak, not because you were condemned to death as in the book or the movie by the same title, but because something had happened to you that had broken your good hold on life. I did not know this in my twenties.
But I know this now: that it is possible to walk and to talk and to eat and laugh, to go to work, to shop, to clean house, to go to church, it is possible to do all these things and to be dead inside, to have a cinder where a heart should be, to inhabit a constricted prison cell where movement and open air should be.
And you know it too. Know that through the loss of a partner, a child, a vocation, through a traumatic event that was just “the way things just turned out” that you can suffer death while you are yet alive, you can inhabit a tomb while you yet breathe.
Central to these experiences, I believe, is our sense that something devastating happened, and we were powerless to prevent it from happening. Right next to this sense of powerlessness stands the cry of the human heart voiced by both Martha and Mary in our story when they declare “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” In other words, we want to know: where was God when this terrible thing happened to me or to us?
Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Senator John Edwards, described such an experience with a startling candidness when she was interviewed this past year about the accidental death of her son Wade, a teenager full of promise and possibility. Her son’s death, she said, was an “AD/BC kind of moment”: that is, she dated everything in her life by where it stood in relationship to Wade’s death. For a while after this traumatic event, she and her husband John withdrew from everything. After this, they threw themselves into a series of efforts that would honor Wade’s memory. But in it all, Elizabeth admitted that deep down, her hold on life, her joy in life had been utterly shattered. I’m paraphrasing here, but she said something like this: When you lose a child, something inside you breaks…no matter what you do, on some level, you simply don’t care about going on.
From the 11th Chapter of John: “Martha said to Jesus, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him." Jesus said to her, "Your brother will rise again… "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.’”
What do we do with our experiences of no longer wanting to go in the light of Jesus words about being the resurrection and the life, the words that meant so much to Sonia, that were her “secret treasure,” but that at times can feel like a treasure we cannot touch?
I can start, I believe, with what the answer is not. The answer isn’t found in pretending that the experience isn’t happening or that everything will only be made right in the by and by. It isn’t found by engaging in behaviors that minimize what it’s like to feel dead while still alive. To make this point, our gospel affirms the reality of the deadly experience through emphasizing what I would call the long-dead experience. “He had been in the tomb four days,” says the Gospel, a phrase repeated twice so we will get it: four days, long enough that the soul thought to hover for a day or two would surely be no where around.
So we are not to duck our death in life experiences.
But what are we to do?
Out of the depths have I called to you, O LORD;
LORD, hear my voice;
let your ears consider well the voice of my supplication.
I wait for the LORD; my soul waits for him;
in his word is my hope.
My soul waits for the LORD,
more than watchmen for the morning
Though it may sound like much, what we can do, I believe, is to wait: to wait, to wait in the quietness of our own hearts, to wait in the poverty of our own ability to make it better or different. We can wait. We can also surround ourselves by those who will wait with us, those who will trust that waiting is not a useless waste of time but is part of what it means to be a person of faith, one who, with God’s help, trusts that the Lord of Life who walked before us into the pit of death will stand at the door of our every tomb and will find a way to call us out one way or another.
And there is no telling how this calling out might occur. In the story of the raising of Lazarus, of course, it does not come as a gentle tap on the shoulder or the quiet whispering of Lazarus’ name in his ear. No, when one is four days dead, the Lord of Life has to shout to get his attention. So all of us who are nursing a death within might ask ourselves where God might actually be shouting at us a bit to come out of the tomb.
But there’s more. For after the waiting for God in the poverty of our ability to make it better, after being called out of our tomb, we will need to go through a process of unbinding, for our experiences of life in the tomb have bound us up—have crippled our sense of freedom and choice. After being called out of the tomb we will need to be unbound and to be set free.
Elizabeth and John Edwards experienced something like this. After dropping out, after feverishly doing things to honor their son, they woke up one morning with what I would call an experience of Jesus shouting at them from the door of their tomb. They woke up with this question: “How is that we can reintroduce joy into our lives?” For Elizabeth it was an easy answer: “Children give us joy.” The results were that within three years at the age of 48, she gave birth to Clare and Jack.
As we prepare ourselves this next week to walk the path of Jesus starting at Palm Sunday to Maundy Thursday, through Good Friday and Holy Saturday to Easter, I invite you to touch the places in yourself that are as yet entombed and to wait for the Holy One who is your secret treasure. For while he does not always come on the timing we would choose, I believe that he will not disappoint us.
