11-3-2024, Unbinding Lazarus, Unbinding the Ancestors – All Saints

Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

Unbinding Lazarus, Unbinding the Ancestors

Homily for St. John’s Episcopal Church by Lisa Wiens Heinsohn given November 3, 2024

John 11:32-44

My mom sometimes teases me and says, “Lisa, I only want to know the time, not how the watch was made.” Apparently I sometimes overexplain things when I want to make a point. Full disclosure, today is a day I really do need to explain how the watch was made. I promise you I will get around to talking about the Feast of All Saints and to the story of Jesus and Lazarus, but it’s going to take awhile.

I’ve shared with you before that I left Christian faith and the church for twenty years and explored other spiritualities, which was enriching and healing for me. But ironically during those years, I discovered a deep connection with the central cipher of Christian faith, which is death and resurrection. I had experienced my life razed to the ground a few times, and ended up getting a tattoo of a phoenix—that mythological creature which dies in the fire and is reborn from the ashes, over and over again. Each time my life collapsed, I found that I could rebuild, in sometimes new and liberating ways, even if I did have some scars. So the phoenix, this symbol of death and resurrection, was a symbol I wanted to claim as my own. It was a symbol that acknowledged the pain and destruction and difficulty in human experience, but also the hope and promise built into the very cycle of life itself and the power of that transcendent mystery we call God.

I share this with you now because it can sometimes feel as if our civilization is in a long freefall directly into the fire. I’m not talking only about the election in two days, although the stakes of that day and its aftermath are indeed high. I’m talking about the deeper reality of the unsustainability of our global economic and social systems. Simply put, we are taking resources from the Earth faster than she can replenish them, and issuing waste faster than the Earth can detoxify it. Our global economic systems are built on the requirement of continual growth, but continual growth isn’t sustainable—it’s more like cancer than health. Both of these unsustainable systems tend to concentrate wealth and power in a few, while according to a 2024 report from the World, 44% of the world’s population lives in poverty on $6.85 per day,[1] to say nothing of the accelerating extinction of so many species of all kinds. Every empire in history has risen and fallen. Empires tend to fall when the weight of the bureaucracies they have created to solve problems becomes heavier than the system can bear, when the stories their institutions tell no longer make sense. It does feel as if we are living in such a time. I’m sorry to come out swinging today with all this grim doom and gloom talk. I wish it weren’t true, but I am afraid that it is. What do we do with all this, with the time we are given?

One approach is something that has been called “solastalgia”—this is actually a word that means climate-change-induced depression and despair. Sarah Parker asked me to preach about solastalgia more than a year ago, and Sarah, here you go, at long last. It’s really important to name the deep fear and sadness and feeling of powerlessness that can arise from these realities. It does seem that the structure of how things are now will collapse sooner or later. But spoiler alert, I got a tattoo of a phoenix even when Christianity had died for me. If the center of Christian faith is about death and resurrection, birth and death and rebirth, then what is the resurrection we can anticipate, work toward, have faith in? Long term behavioral change requires a change first of the heart. We don’t make lasting change because we feel guilty or scared, because we can’t and shouldn’t live in negative emotions all the time. And that is where faith and spirituality come in. That is where the church is uniquely positioned to make a difference.

Brian McLaren is a prominent theologian who has written many books, the most recent of which is called Life After Doom: Wisdom And Courage for a World Falling Apart. He lays out four potential future scenarios he sees for our unsustainable civilization, all of which include some kind of collapse, and then talks about what we can do about it. Two of the things he says stand out to me. The first is that because our current situation is predicated on our failure to recognize the Earth as alive—because our system assumes the Earth’s resources are simply inert substances available for the taking—we can begin to heal from this by seeking indigenous wisdom. We can seek the wisdom of the people who did not have such a separation from the Earth, which includes all of our ancient ancestors. And second, he recommends that we begin to read the Bible and our tradition from a new lens, as a treasury of ecological, indigenous wisdom, if only we have eyes to see it.[2] He takes a 100,000 feet tour through the Bible through this lens and if you’ve got time to read his book, I recommend it and that chapter especially.

If we were to take that approach and apply it to today’s feast day, the Feast of All Saints, what would we find? On all Saints, the Church has traditionally honored two kinds of saints—the heroes of the past and also our loved ones who have passed on. Some of these loved ones are in photos along the sides of the sanctuary, in the windowsills. Perhaps you relate to this feast day of the Church, or perhaps it has become dead to you. But either way, we are still connected with them, our biological and spiritual ancestors. In real ways, our ancestors have become part of the earth itself—their bodies have rejoined the soil and the air and are nourishing countless new forms of life. Indigenous peoples around the world have insisted that connecting with and honoring ancestors is an essential part of being human. I want to focus on how the ancestors, the saints, nourish us to make different choices, teach us how to create alternatives to the systems that are unsustainable today. No matter who wins the election on Tuesday, we need to find ways to live within the limits that support the entire web of life, and not only ourselves—and if our ancestors have become the earth itself, have become the soil we are standing on, then let us sink roots into them and grow.

In today’s gospel reading—I told you I would get there—Jesus arrives too late to the home of his dear friends, the siblings Mary and Martha and Lazarus. Mary and Martha have urgently sent word to him that their brother Lazarus is dying, but Jesus delays, and Lazarus dies and is buried.  Our new Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe preached a fantastic sermon about them yesterday in his investiture as our Presiding Bishop, and I recommend you listen to it.[3] Jesus eventually does raise his beloved friend Lazarus from the dead, after grieving and weeping with his family and friends. But interestingly, Jesus doesn’t finish the job, as it were. Lazarus emerges from the tomb, still wrapped in graveclothes. As Bishop Rowe pointed out in his sermon yesterday, Jesus tells the people to finish the job and “unbind him.” God brings the life and the resurrection, but it is our job to do the unbinding. It is our job to cut the ropes that wind around our scriptures and our tradition and our understanding too tightly, that don’t allow room to breathe. It is our job to unbind the ancestors, to unbind the saints—to allow their living wisdom to nourish us like the soil nourishes the roots of a tree. We will not unbind the ancestors or change our behavior out of guilt or fear, but because of the deep and unshakeable experience that love and life have the last word, that joy comes in the morning and with every spring. It is our job to re-connect with the living Jesus, our first ancestor, to allow ourselves to re-purpose his wisdom and his dead and resurrected body through us, the incarnation of Jesus on earth today, the Church.

If we will do this, we will find that there is hope all around us. The new is already springing up in shoots from the ground, even as the forest canopy is dying overhead. Ivy and Heidi use geothermal heating and worm composting in their homes. Doug and Ashley walk or bike the few miles to church every week all year, even in winter, instead of driving their cars. A friend of my family works to create sustainable streams for corporate waste. The Reverend Kerri Meyer and her wife Jen have co-founded Good Courage Farm, a ministry of regenerative food and faith on a farm in Hutchinson, where they are replenishing the soil and leaving things better than they found them, teaching us and the world to live and nourish the interdependent web of life we all belong to. Sarah Parker and Mary Corlett and the gardening committee have installed pollinator friendly gardens at St. John’s. My family downsized from a big house to a small townhouse and bought plug in hybrid vehicles. Allen Gooch is a vegetarian because growing plants requires a much smaller carbon footprint than raising cattle or pigs. Small intentional communities who raise much of their own food, who live communally, who are passionately committed to caring for our earth, are cropping up all over the world, including Minnesota. St. John’s shares its bounty with teachers in Haiti, and immigrants in Richfield, and the hungry and homeless at First Nations Kitchen. In all these ways we are being nourished to love God, love our neighbors—to expand the definition of neighbor to include our More than Human neighbors the trees and the animals—and to live more simply.

The original sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden was the failure to live within the limits that God had set. Instead they reached their hand to take more than what had been given. The redemption is Jesus’ radical, self-giving, sacrificial love. What do we want to leave to our children, and their children? How do we want to use the time that remains to us, wherever we are in our life journey? Let us unbind ourselves. Let us free ourselves from the false notion that we can go it alone, and instead lean into the fact that we are one church, together with the rest of the Episcopal Church, and one human family, together with every other person on the face of the earth. Let us cut the stifling bonds of believing we can’t do any better than we are already doing. Let us wake up, open our eyes, and be nourished by the wisdom of our saints and ancestors who have joined the earth and the air and who are still with us. Let us do all this, not out of fear, but because we know in our bones that resurrection follows death, because joy comes in the morning. Amen.

[1] See World Bank, “Poverty, Prosperity and Planet Report 2024”  https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/poverty-prosperity-and-planet#global

[2] Brian McLaren, Life After Doom, page 112 (chapter 9, “Don’t Read the Bible (In the Same Old Way”).

[3] Bishop Sean Rowe, Sermon on John 11:32-44 on November 2, 2024 in his investiture as Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, accessed November 3, 2024 at https://www.episcopalchurch.org/publicaffairs/sermon-at-investiture-of-the-28th-presiding-bishop-of-the-episcopal-church/

10am Service