Last Sunday, as I stood here and looked out at your faces for the first time, I felt a little bit like Lazarus walking out of his tomb. Suddenly, there was the dazzle of life in the rows of pews that had been empty for so long. It was amazing to feel your light soaking slowly into the dead and lonesome silence of this room, soaking into my own body and soul. And yet, as my heart met all of yours, I could also feel the heavy burial cloths still weighing us down.
These days, it’s hard sometimes to remember what it was like to be fully alive and free. Even when happily reunited, we reach for once-familiar words and gestures as if through a long, misty tunnel. We are often still bound and bewildered: We feel weighed down by rules and masks, yes, but also by heavier things: by fear, by exhaustion, by disillusionment, by anger, by frustration, and certainly by soul-crushing grief for all those who have lost their lives. I think that there is a bit of Lazarus in all of us these days, as Jesus calls us back out into a changed world.
The social scientists call the bewildering threshold in which we are now standing a “liminal time.” “Liminal” actually comes from the Latin word for “threshold.” A liminal time is one in which something old has ended, yet the new thing hasn’t yet begun. We don’t even know yet what the new thing will be like. We are in between, like Lazarus, still wrapped in the trappings of the dead thing and blindly blinking in the sunlight of the new. Human beings don’t like being in liminal spaces, but God does. God uses them in God’s constant, creative remaking of the world.
God didn’t just make the world once upon a time and sit back to watch; God is continually making and remaking us and all that surrounds us, making all things new, pouring Godself out into God’s beloved Creation, somehow creating life from death, over and over again. Remember the beautiful words from Revelation that we heard today: “See, I am making all things new.” What God is making new isn’t just the material creation. Neither is it only the realm of the afterlife that is being renewed. Instead, it is the totality of the universe that is being transformed; the things that we know, and the things that are to come. On the other side of the threshold, God joins us in community, in a city of all places, the New Jerusalem, in a conglomeration of human beings, in a mix of all that human civilization has to offer. We might look for an escape from the present world in God, but God keeps showing us that we find God wherever we are, especially in the creative uncertainty of liminal human spaces.
Where do you see God in our own liminal space? Like Jesus, our God shows up when we least expect it, sometimes after we think it’s too late. Like Jesus, our God weeps with compassion, lamenting death and sorrow and hardship with us, allowing us our own time of grief, modeling the necessity of lament. And like Jesus, our God commands us, after the weeping, to allow the new life to emerge. As Lazarus stands on the threshold of a new and different life, Jesus commands Lazarus’ family: “Unbind him, and let him go.”
The combination Feast of All Saints’ and All Souls’ in which we participate today is a celebration of unbinding. We call out the names of loved ones in heaven, unbinding them here in our assembly. We celebrate the Saints (with a capital S)-- the holy ones whose life stories teach us how God’s liberating power can work to bring about healing and justice. We also encourage one another in living “saintly lives,” lives of holiness, lives of love for God and neighbor. To be holy isn’t to be perfect. It’s to let God’s presence be unbound in us, to let it shine through us, like light shines through a window. To be holy, to be a “saint” if you will, is to stand in relationship with others while standing in relationship with God.[1]
Author Susan Beaumont talks about the blessing of “communitas” in liminal times. The Latin noun communitas refers to an unstructured community in which people are equal.[2] It’s a state of relationship, a spirit of community that can emerge when the old identity and structures die. I’ll bet that you all at St. Ambrose have experienced this blessing before in your history: Perhaps when you all worked together to build this church building with more dreams than money in your bank account, each person lending a hand to do what was needed, standing at the threshold of something new and daunting? Perhaps on your mission trips to Remar in El Salvador, when you worked together in a new place, in a new culture far from home? In communitas, we are free from the old bonds. We become energized as equals in new and vibrant relationship.
My daughter, who spent six months in Peru as a college student, once wrote in a blog post that she never really understood All Saints’ Day until she spent it with her host family in Chijnaja. There, high in the Andes mountains, families would prepare all of their departed loved ones’ favorite foods and gather, not in the church, but in the cemetery. Then, beside the graves of friends and family, they would drink lots of beer, pray, mourn, play, celebrate, and then share all of the food with one another, in a communitas of the living and the dead. The Peruvian Christians seem to understand that, in order to remain in relationship with heaven, they must feed one another on earth.
“Unbind him, and let him go.” What binds us today to the past? What drags us down? What keeps us from the new life that God wants for us? Here on the threshold, Jesus invites us to new relationships, new sharing, a new fellowship of equals, a fellowship of saints, letting God’s light flow through us into the world. After all, only God in Jesus Christ was able to discard his own burial cloths in the darkness of the tomb. The rest of us, like Lazarus, need a community to unbind us.
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