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Yesterday,
I noticed the day lillies and daffodils were sticking their heads out
from beneath the soil. That can mean only one thing: the golf
season is just around the corner! For those who
enjoy the game, fantasies inundate the mind about what the upcoming
season may bring.
As I think about
the season that lies ahead, however, I’m thinking not so much about the
future as I am about the past. Not because my exploits on the course in
the past have been so glorious, but because during the past several
months two members of the foursome I have played with regularly over the
past few seasons have died. That’s a fifty percent kill ratio
anyone who plays in a foursome with me!
Now, only Charlie
and I survive.
At the wake of the second member of our foursome
several weeks back, I
told Charlie that he’d better start preparing to die.
Charlie responded by telling me that he’s never going to die. “Me?” Charlie asked.
“Nah. I’m never going to die. You’d better get yourself ready.”
Both partners,
Eddie and Steve, used to joke with me at the beginning of each round.
While they’d be standing at the tee box and awaiting the preceding
foursome to get to the green, I’d always ask: “So, how are you this
morning, Eddie?” and “How are you, Steve?” Both would reply, “Not bad,
I guess.” Then, one would say, “You know, I didn’t read about myself in
the Times Herald obits this morning, so I guess that I’m okay”
and the other would chime in, “Well, I didn’t wake up with a tag
attached to my big toe, so I guess that I’m okay, too.”
While both were
kidding around about the fact that they hadn’t died, both were aware
that one day they would die. Both were wise in that regard because that
awareness forced both of them to begin their days with the attitude of
extracting as much as they could from each day, however many were left.
That’s one tidbit of important information nobody knows. Knowing how
frustrating the game of golf can be, one does have to wonder how Eddie
and Steve were doing that by starting the day at the golf course. But,
that’s another story best told on another day.
In contrast to Ed
and Steve, it is not at all unusual for very busy people like you and me
not to think about the fact that one day each of us―like Lazarus―will
die. But, the death that all of us should focus upon each day is not
physical but spiritual. In fact, it’s a death that many of us might
have already experienced but have yet to realize! After all, there are
many types of graves and most of them are located not in the ground but
above the ground. The majority of these graves are found all around us in the type of lives
we lead. To borrow the title of a New York Times bestselling
book and subsequent movie, many of us are “Dead Men Walking.” We
think that we’re alive. Everything around us makes us feel that we’re
alive. And yet, we’re not even aware that we’re bound hand and foot,
like Lazarus laying dead in a tomb of our own making. We need Jesus to order us, “Come
out!”, and to tell people to untie us so that we might be freed from
spiritual death.
Last week, I
spoke about blindness in terms of how we see people not as God does but
as we’ve decided to see them. This week, I’m focusing upon another
type of blindness, namely, how we don’t see ourselves as we truly are
and, in particular, how we don’t see ourselves as spiritually dead.
In his letter to
the Romans, St. Paul sets this up by asking: “What is it that you build
your life around?” Or, another way to think about St. Paul’s question
is, “What do you think you could never live without?” Think about
it….what is it that, if you didn’t have it, would you know whether you
were alive? There are the usual suspects: work, television, food,
drugs and alcohol, pornography and illicit sex, and one that we don’t
oftentimes recognize, our daily routine. If we didn’t center our
daily lives in these things, we wouldn’t know that we were alive!
St. Paul teaches
that anyone who looks at one’s life from this strictly human point of view
is not really and truly alive. Instead, St. Paul tells us, only those
who center their lives each day in God are truly alive. Without God as
the center of each day, we may be very much alive physically, but we are
very dead spiritually. Borrowing the prophet Ezekiel’s phrase, we’re
nothing more than “dry bones,” people who live solely for themselves by
making themselves the center of their lives.
So, the question
scripture challenges us to consider today is whether we’re already dead
before our time and so dead, in fact, that we’re blind to it. Not
physically dead; after all, we’re gathered here today. No, what
scripture is talking about is being spiritually dead, that is, so dried
up and withered that we’ve already interred our souls in a spiritual
grave and we’ve grown so eccentric―that is, not centered in God―that
we’re not even aware of it.
What is a
spiritual grave and what does one look like so that, if we were to come
upon one―especially the one into which we’ve already interred our
souls―we’d know what it is?
One of those
spiritual graves is that which the sociologist Emile Durkheim called “ennui.”
It’s a form of listlessness, boredom, and lifelessness where all we do
is simply exist. Each day, all we do is to go about the business of
existing. “Yada, yada, yada,” sort of like the characters
in Seinfeld. That is what a spiritual grave is. Sounds pretty
awful, no? But, superadd to that sense of ennui having no
awareness of God so that it is impossible to even consider how making
God the center of our lives could be the remedy to “ennui.”
That’s what a spiritual grave looks like.
Let me share with
you a story that paints a rather vivid portrait of one spiritual grave:
A woman’s
husband came home one late afternoon from work and said, “Honey, let’s
go out to a really nice restaurant tonight and just enjoy ourselves.”
Having already begun to prepare dinner, the woman told her husband
that she’d prefer to stay home. Her husband protested, telling his
wife that the meal would keep until tomorrow. He said, “Let’s just
live a little tonight.”
Despite her
husband’s protestations, the woman insisted that they should stay home
and eat. “Going out to dinner can wait,” she said, “dinner is almost
ready.” In the end, she won.
At the dinner
table, the husband said to his wife: “You know, it’s a real shame that
the woman I married died. We used to have a love that was like a fire
that lit up the day and night. The sparks are snuffed out.”
This confession
caught the woman’s attention. So, she asked her husband, “What’s
wrong with you?”
“Somewhere and
somehow,” he responded, “we’ve put our marriage into a grave. I was
just hoping that at least for one night, we could crawl out of that
grave and live again.”
After dinner,
they cleaned up the kitchen, sat down on the couch and watched
television. After the news, they went to bed. The husband died in
his sleep that night.
We inter
ourselves in spiritual graves when we allow our lives become nothing
more than going to work, coming home and flopping down on a couch,
moving only to eat and, subsequently, to go to bed. And, then, we
repeat the same routine, day after day, week after week, month after
month, and year after year. We allow ourselves to become so bored with
our lives that we convince ourselves that this is what living is really
all about!
Perhaps spiritual
death has affected your marriage and “the romance is gone.” When was
the last time you did something together—like walk through the woods or
along a river—that may you feel like you did when you were dating.
Remember how it felt when you believed this was what would make your
entire life worth living?
Perhaps spiritual
death has affected your parenting and all your kids can say is that
you’re an “old fuddy duddy” who doesn’t do anything fun. When was the
last time you did something with you kids where you saw them aglow with
life? Can you remember how it felt when you dreamed of having fun
with you children, how you hoped this would be the case and, when you
did, that this was what was what made life worth living?
Perhaps spiritual
death has also affected your relationship with God. When was the last
time you experienced God’s presence in your life, an experience that was
so overpowering that you felt totally overcome that words couldn’t
possibly express what you were feeling but, in retrospect, you now
realize that God was with you? Can you remember how it felt when
you sensed how everything fit together and your life was filled with
meaning, purpose, and value?
Spiritually
speaking, it is very easy for us to end up in spiritual graves and not
to even know it. All we do is exist and go about the stultifying and
deadening routine of existing. That is the point that the prophet
Ezekiel was trying to make to the Israelites in today’s first reading.
As a people, they had become spiritually dead. But, they could rise
from the grave if only the Israelites would once again center their
lives in God. Loosening the grip that spiritual death was exerting upon
the Israelite people by being obedient to God’s law, only this is what
would enable them to live once again in freedom.
But, in today’s
gospel, Jesus goes even further.
Lazarus had “died
before his time,” a spiritual death caused by Lazarus as he allowed the
flame of life to die out and, as Lazarus increasingly made God less
central to his daily life, Lazarus―through his own free choice―snuffed
out the flame of God’s life present in the soul of Lazarus. Now bound
head to foot by the awful choices he had made, Lazarus was spiritually
dead, so spiritually dead in fact, the gospel tells us, that he stunk.
Locked in that spiritual tomb and bound from head to foot, there was no
way Lazarus could free himself from the rotten, stinking spiritual death
he had chosen.
That’s what
happens to us when we allow the flame of God’s life present in our soul
to die out and as we make God increasingly less central in the people
and events of our daily lives. We imperceptibly grow spiritually dead
and eventually become so spiritually dead, that we stink. Alone, cold,
locked in the darkness of our spiritual tombs and bound from head to
foot, we are incapable of freeing ourselves from the rotten, blind to
our situation and stinking from a spiritual death we freely
choose.
But, Jesus issued
an order, saying, “Lazarus, come out!” And, he did. Then, Jesus
ordered Martha and Mary, “Untie him and let him go.” And, they
did.
Jesus issued that
order not merely for Lazarus. Jesus issues the same order to us. “Come
out from your spiritual tomb!” Jesus orders us. “Let go of that which
you are allowing to kill your soul.”
Jesus is calling
us―as he called Lazarus―to conversion. “See those things binding you,”
Jesus says, “your personal and spiritual inadequacies, your
inconsistencies between what you believe, what you say, and what you
do. Look at your divided self. See your sinfulness. Now, come out
from your tomb!”
Darkness rather
than light characterizes the season of Lent. The darkness is our
blindness, the consequences of the choices we’ve made to center our
lives in ourselves rather than in God. Then, as we’ve grown
increasingly eccentric, how we’ve grown comfortable in the darkness of
the spiritual graves into which we’ve interred ourselves! But, Jesus is
ordering us to “Come out!” He is stirring us to leave the life of
darkness behind and to allow his ministers to unbind us from our burial
bandings and cloths. When we respond to Jesus’ order, we will be
healed. We will see ourselves in the light of the Resurrection
where, raised from the spiritual death because we’re healed of our sin,
we once again can root ourselves in and make God the center of our daily
lives.
Like Lazarus, all
of us have died “before our time,” spiritually speaking. Faith in the
resurrection of the dead offers us hope that we not only will be healed,
but that we also can develop the strength and courage we need, as Jesus
did, to make God the center of our lives.
That is how we live life and live it to the full.
The irony of this
life-giving miracle that Jesus extended to Lazarus and continues to
extend to us is that this miracle resulted in the decision by the
Sanhedrin to have Jesus killed. Yes, the members of the Sanhedrin were
threatened to their souls that Jesus could free people from their sin
and raise them to new life. So, the members of the Sanhedrin took
his physical life. But, they could not kill Jesus spiritually as his
resurrection from the dead attests. Our only hope is that one day,
we will pass through a physical death—as Jesus did—and rise with him to
a new spiritual life where God—not ourselves—is the center of the
people, events, and concerns of our daily lives. |
HOMILY
