5 Lent A 2011
Ezekiel 37:1-14; Ps 130; Rom 8: 6-11; John 11: 1-45
I could not even find his room.
A few blocks north of here, an old nursing home has been transformed. Baptist Manor was closed a few years ago. I visited there frequently to see Lee and Florence Haile, a gentle childless couple. Lee was a kindly man, a retired high school teacher. He stayed on at Baptist Manor after Florence died, moving over to the wing where they cared for very infirm residents where he died as well.
Baptist Manor is now Milepost 5, a community of artists who live and create in a space designed for them. The grand opening of Milepost 5 is this weekend, complete with display galleries of residents’ work.
Diane and I went yesterday. We had a great afternoon chatting up artists and seeing their work. Baptist Manor had been a run-down and very inadequate place for seniors although the staff was kind, and it was good to see the old place had new life.
I wanted to show Diane Lee Haile’s old room where he ended his days. Entering that wing, we discovered that the renovation had been radical and complete—they had gutted the building down to the foundation and the studs and nothing else was left. I stood in the place where I guessed Lee’s room might have been. There in that wide, industrial-chic hallway, I was filled with sadness. A man I had known and liked and cared for had lived his last days there, and there was nothing to show that he had ever existed.
“To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.”
For years I assumed that “setting the mind on the flesh” had something to do with sex, an old-fashioned Roman Catholic instinct. But I hear that word very differently today. Standing in that empty hallway, I realized that what the flesh wants is endless life on its own terms. The flesh, the body wants to go on and on just like it is, no change, no age, no illness. Egyptians built elaborate tombs and filled them with stuff to assure that life for the dead would just continue with very little change. Sometimes in churches we act in similar ways when it is time to change something that is associated with a deceased member—“Agnes worked for days to decorate that room, back in 1959.” These kinds of instincts are understandable—I have them increasingly as the years go on—but they have nothing to do with what God promises.
Paul says “set your minds on the Spirit.” Ezekiel’s dry bones have new life and promise when the living Breath of God is spoken over them. And when Martha in the Gospel speaks aloud her pious belief about death, in words that would sound familiar today, “I know that my brother will rise again, in the resurrection on the last day”, Jesus responds with something radically different. We have gotten used to his words since they are repeated so often, but they are still shocking. Life is not promised in the future, or in some spiritual place far from our own. Instead, “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” Here, and Now.
We have no permanent home in this life—we are caretakers and blessed tenants. We have no permanent home in our bodies as we now know them, although we care for and honor them as gifts of God. To walk a Christian path is to entrust ourselves to the astounding manifestation of God in the One whom God has sent. Our life is a life lived bathed in the Fountain of Life, abundant life, Life streaming from the eyes and the hands and the words and the wounds and the heart of the One who is life itself.
Standing in that hallway, I remembered how old Lee loved to receive Communion, the sacrament of the Crucified and Risen Lord. Suddenly, I smiled. In that moment I thought that Milepost 5 is a far better remembrance of Lee that a desolate empty room: new and astounding life, rising from the barely-recognizable husk of the former life. That new life points to the ever-new Life in whose presence we all live. There is where we can find Lee. There we can find all those quiet lives that have vanished from before our eyes. There we find our own true selves, in the presence of the One who is the Resurrection and the Life.
