The Elephant in the Room......

John 12:1-11

An elephant is lying the psychiatrist’s couch. It was a strong couch. He turns, slowly to the psychiatrist and says, “Even when I am in a room full of people, it is like know when notices me.”

 

The elephant in the room. The taboos we don’t talk about. Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers, “Don’t mention the war”. It seems in life each one of us experiences an ‘elephant in the room moment’. Or maybe it is more than a moment. The elephant is a permanent resident in the room and people walk around it with out daring to mention that it is there.

 This week a 10 year old girl committed suicide in an aboriginal community in WA, a year or so after her brother had. I spoke to a Maori elder who told me of a 15 year old boy who committed suicide in the same place his Dad did some years before. The Guardian website reported: 'Suicide was the second leading cause of death for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children aged 14 and under in 2014, according to figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Tuesday. Indigenous children in that age group were 8.8 times more likely than non-Indigenous children to take their own life.' An elephant in the room mainstream media have ignored.

Churches and institutions, countries and governments, families and friends, also have large grey object that is never far from the centre of attention in their space but is never actually mentioned. T

 

Our Gospel today we encounter several such moments. Mary and the expensive perfume. Judas and his consternation at waste. Jesus and the poor will always be with you. All raises large grey shaped images. What are they about? Why would someone waste so much money by pouring expensive perfume on someone’s feet? What is the point? Jesus is not dead. It seems a wasteful actJesus not only condones but applauds.

Judas knows the need in society and does not get it. Why such extravagance while people starve, are homeless and unemployed? I could have used that money to make a difference. The elephant of social justice is loose in the room.

 

Jesus’ reply suggest that this is a systemic problem unlikely to solved by the price of a bottle of perfume and, in actual fact, will be with us permanently until the kingdom of God is firmly in place. The number of elephants in the room are growing.

 

And then there is Lazarus. What is he doing here? Is he here or is it just a rumour? He’s dead isn’t he? We went to his funeral. I know I did. How come he is alive? Or is he? How did (could) that happen?

 

And the questions grow and multiply.

 

What was it like to be dead and now alive? It must have been dark in the tomb. What’s like being dead for 4 days and walking out into the sun again? What did that feel like? What was he thinking about while he was in there? Was he able to think? What did he think when the rock was rolled away and he heard Jesus call him out?

 

And I am sure there were many furtive looks his way, trying to make sense of the situation and not blurting out the obvious questions. The elephants in the room were crowding out the guests. The Gospel writer acknowledges the prominence Lazarus takes by noting that “⁹When the great crowd of the Jews learned that he was there, they came not only because of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. ¹⁰So the chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death as well, ¹¹since it was on account of him that many of the Jews were deserting and were believing in Jesus.”

 

And it’s the same problem they face after Jesus rises from the dead. Having put Jesus in the tomb they thought their problems were solved. Somehow he reappears and the impact, over time, rattles the security of the authorised religion.

 

Yet it is not what happens on Easter morning that intrigues me as much as what happens in the darkness of the tomb. Modern day Christians leap straight from Good Friday into a romanticised Sunday morning without giving Saturday, Easter Eve much attention. It is just that moment from which Jesus returns and that is the only moment it plays in the Easter story.

 

Yet what happens in the tomb is the springboard for the future. Without the deep dark abyss of Jesus confrontation with death, there can be no life giving resurrection, in whatever form you may believe that came. In the darkness Jesus confronts the complete loss of the normality of life he had enjoyed as an incarnated man. Like Lazarus, the normal social intercourse was no longer available and he was left in the darkness of no living thing. Lazarus and Jesus were completely disconnected and free at the very same time, free to become the newly created person that was now available to them.

 

Often it seems to me, moderns want to make the leap from their own particular death experience and arrive at their resurrection without doing time in the tomb. When tragedy, errors, failures, loss of relationships or partners, loss of job and career and more occur we are urged to seek closure and to move on as quickly as possible. Death may have arrived but resurrection is demanded almost immediately. Funerals for example occur as quickly as possible so people can get back to normal. All seems to be solved over a quick cuppa after the funeral and it’s onto the next thing on out agenda.

 

Easter Eve is the solemnest day of the Easter festival. It is the day we sit outside the tomb with Mary and the others trying to come to grips with our loss. Like Mary and Martha outside Lazarus’s tomb we try and find a reason for hope. Sometime before midnight on the evening of Easter eve we, as Christians, participate in the Easter Vigil service, in preparation for what is about to occur and that we celebrate on Easter day, the resurrection of Jesus.

 

It is in the darkness we see the light beginning to flicker into life, hesitantly and fragile at first and then growing stronger and more illuminating as we light up the church. That may be what it was like for both Lazarus and Jesus at the moment the stone was rolled away.

 

For Jesus the stone remained rolled away. Unfortunately for Lazarus, if he was in fact alive, that was not to be the case, but they both shared the life empowering experience of darkness and despair, and stepped forward into our world as evidence of a great spiritual possibility. Transformation. Transformation begins in those moments when all seems lost. Easter is the story of transformation, not just of Jesus the Christ, but of each of us who encounter him in the tomb.

 

For Jesus and the disciples this was not an instant event, but a growing realisation of kinship and freedom, experienced together and forever. For us, it is important we do not slip past the tomb without taking the time to sit in the darkness and experience the more that is to come. For us, it is important we do not seek to move to quickly out of the darkness that invades our lives, jumping from Good Friday to Easter Day without taking in what the darkness brings.

 

Lazarus is one of the elephants in the room when Jesus comes to his home, and the darkness of the tomb can be the elephant in the room in the Easter story. Let’s use this time to experience the transformation the whole story of Easter contains and begin to acknowledge the elephants we walk around in our own lives, communities and society. 

Rejoice With Me........

Luke 15:1-32

 

What is our appropriate response to life? How are we to respond to the events of an ordinary or a not so ordinary day? Life is the stuff that happens to us while we are waiting for life to arrive. In this place we often look past what is already here in search for something that is probably not going to come our way.

 

We strive for success, knowledge, power, wisdom, relationship, control and security, and find ourselves over an over again falling short of the goals we set or hope for  our selves.

 

We look around and see others who appear to have more than us and either give up or double up our efforts to achieve. Daniel Kahneman, Noble prize-winner, when asked what the formula for success is answers as follows: “Skill + luck = success”. To be a great success the formula goes this way, “Skill + great luck = great success”. If this is true, and experience and reading tells me, on all probability it is, then what is our response to life as we now experience it?

 

How do we live with the randomness at the centre of all existence? We couch randomness in the language of choice and causality and forget what happens is not necessarily about the choices we make or a cause we can easily identify. A whole range of seemingly unconnected factors come together in a perfect storm resulting in the situation we find ourselves in. Sometimes this is indeed a happy coincidence, other times it is disturbing and/or tragic.

 

We were watching the story of the development of the A380 super air liner recently, and in it they discussed the incidence in which one of the Rolls Royce engines caught on fire. The cause? A small drop of oil had fallen onto one of the rotors in the engine which, when it got hot, caught fire. A random event no one could saw happen. I noticed also that someone is suing Malaysian Airlines over the crash of MH370 because they, and I quote, " failed to ensure the aircraft safely reached its destination". 

 

I find it interesting people perceive life is not dangerous, vulnerable and random, that somehow we can render life harmless, controllable and predictable. Frankly I do not wish to live in such a world. How far have we come that we take the adventure out of life, that we see death as something we can in fact avoid, or at least put off, and not understand that it is death, the loss of life, that gives its essential value to life?

 

In each of the three stories Luke gives to Jesus, there is only one response: “Rejoice with me……….” In each of these stories someone has experienced misfortune. One the bad luck of losing a coin, another a sheep and yet another had a son leave home inappropriately. For those around them, each event would have been a catastrophic experience.

 

A shepherd has 100 sheep and loses one. It doesn’t seem like a big loss, he still has 99 doesn’t he? Why would he not be satisfied with what he had and put the loss down to something that just happens? Everyone loses a sheep now and then don’t they? Foxes, injury, illness or walking off the edge of the cliff? Why would you spend the time looking and leave behind the 99 you already have? Aren’t you putting what you have at risk? Who is watching over the ones left behind?

 

The theme is repeated with the woman, probably a widow, who loses one silver coin and has 9 remaining coins. She stops everything she has to do and pulls the place a part to chase down the elusive coin. She still has 9 but the washing stays unwashed, the kitchen untidied and the meals unprepared as she searches for 1, 1, coin.

 

The prodigal son, or the prodigal father, depending on how you see the story, reminds us that it is not just objects that get lost, but people, subjects of our love and relationships, who go missing. They or we make decisions separating us and leaving us searching for ways to reconnect and rediscover each other. This story is tragic. A headstrong young man demands his independence and embarrasses his father, and family, in the eyes of the villagers. He leaves, and his grand scheme unravels. and he finds himself returning home with his tail between his legs. His father, who has been waiting for his return, comes out to meet him. His brother doesn’t, and doesn’t want the lavish party his father throws. It seem unfair as he has been faithful and not ever had such a party thorn for him.

 

In all three stories, there is only one response to the onlookers, doubters and critics, “Rejoice with me…”

 

If our first response is to rejoice we will

• Embrace and accept the situation. Not all situations end with us finding the precious item we are looking, but if it’s like my office, I always find something else I lost along time ago! This not a frivolous statement. If we reflect on our situation we will indeed find something we have lost, a new perspective on a situation, a greater understanding of what we already have, an awareness of new possibilities hidden in old hurts and frustrations, and more. And we are to rejoice in what we discover.
• Recognise and value others. For those who lose objects, we may be tempted to respond, it’s only 1 sheep? What’s the point? But that 1 sheep is valued and has a value to the farmer and because of that the farmer is compelled to seek it out. In reference to the prodigal father, both son’s are of value and the older son is being challenged to see, not only what his brother means to his father, but what he also means to him, party or no party.
• Shift from self to others. We often judge a situation from the outside, from what we value, from our life experience and dismiss what it means to others.

Rev Ben Gilmour, a friend of mine who is the minister at the Paddington Uniting Church in Sydney, has just returned from a trip to Jordan and writes:

“We are told by the media that refugees are bad people, just money hungry (economic) or possibly even terror agents. What I witnessed was families just like yours and mine, trying to make the best of it in the face of real terror.

The stark reminder that I can't get out of my head is that, I saw my sister in the face of refugees, my mum and my dad, my nephews and nieces, with all the human dignity and love and complexity that family brings here. There was no us and them, it was only us.”

 

Rejoice with me as we reclaim our humanity and begin to live out of the wonder and wealth found in everyday life. Rejoice with each other as we stand together against the random happenings that define and influence our existence. Rejoice with those like the Syrian refugees who are able to find hope in circumstances we often judge and critique without standing where they are standing.

 

Once we begin to rejoice we recognise the sufficiency of God in all situations and begin to see God at work where once we only saw reasons, causes, faults, failures and hopelessness. The power of rejoicing to unlock possibilities lies in its ability to get us to stop looking at I, me, mine; and to give permission for God, others and each other to blossom and celebrate who they, we are, what is possible and what is already here.

 

Rejoice with me…