Lent 5 A 2014 Coming Home after Conflict

Out of the depths have I called to you, O Lord.

Now that we are poised on the cusp of Holy Week, about to commit ourselves and our souls to the great mystery of our tradition, it is worth asking ourselves what our waiting and preparation for these last weeks of Lent has meant to us. It is unlike the waiting we are accustomed to, the waiting of the everyday, for the visits and appointments with which we mark time. We have embarked on a kind of holy waiting, a sacred preparation, one that transforms us if we allow it the opportunity on this, the eve of our great homecoming. To wait in this way is hard, to give God the chance to let us speak out of the depths of ourselves; it is much easier to fill the air with what is easy and what costs us little. The theologian Paul Tillich calls us hit-and-run drivers with the speed we travel on the surface of our lives, injuring our souls as we move, eventually rushing away, leaving those souls to bleed. We accept who we are as we seem to ourselves, until the great events of our lives and our faith shake our world and cause us to look into the depths of our own hearts. Standing now at the gates of Jerusalem, we have waited for weeks to see how this story will end for each of us, how the reading and the prayer have changed us. We have waited, like Mary and Martha at the tomb of Lazarus, for our worlds to change, for the assurance that death does not have the last word with us. That is the promise toward which we have been moving on our own journeys home. But it is the living God, the one who loves us and who lives deep within us, that pulls us out of the cave where we have been lying and tells us to take off our bandages and to live, not on the details of our lives that but out of the prayer and suffering and knowledge that we are with the one who gives us the only value that our lives have Our companion this Lent has been Private John Bartle, from Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds, whose own soul has been bleeding from the events of the conflict he has been fighting in Iraq and the struggle to give them meaning on his return home. Even on the airplane, the image of home is a difficult one. The desert was “where it seemed I had left the better portion of myself as one among innumerable grains of sand”, he says. His frayed relationship with his mother, his isolation from his friends are his own tomb, where he says he is “afraid of nothing in the world more than having to show myself for what I had become”. Ironically, it is his own incarceration that allows him an opportunity to live, to take away the stone that separates him from the world; time allows him to “feel ordinary again”, where the smell of the Tigris is “replaced by the cold clear air coming down the mountainside”. Like Lazarus, Bartle is raised but it is to a different life than he had known, one transformed by memory and the questions that his long time alone have asked of him. It is out of the depth of our questions and the deliberate time it takes to respond to them that we all are able to live; it is where we discover how deep our own faith is, what our own homecoming means. When Jesus tells Mary that those who believe in him, though they die, will live and those who believe in him will never die, he asks her, “Do you believe this?” It is a question that Jesus asks all of us, a question that he will ask again and again throughout Holy Week and it is something we will have to reach deep inside ourselves to answer. If we listen closely, we can hear the pause, the catch in Mary's throat, before she tells him that she knows he is the Messiah, the one coming into the world. If we are honest, we too have to wait, to avoid answering too glibly or too quickly. It is a question that will have to work on each of us, on all of us, because we are all in this together. Tillich calls this waiting hope, because it is hope that unites us with the prophets; it is out of waiting, he says, that trembling and contrite hearts receive the strength of hope and truth. Coming home means something different for each of us. For Private Murphy, it is a release from the soul-searing violence that meets him each day. “ He wanted to choose.

He wanted to want,” says Bartle; “He wanted to have one memory he'd made of his own volition to balance out the shattered remnants of everything he hadn't asked for”. In our terms, it is joy, the desire for desire, a place of wholeness, where happiness and grief can co-exist. It is when that vision is destroyed by a mortar shell that Murphy's own world begins to come apart, where the randomness of violence, like the chalk marks on the wall of Bartle's prison cell, ask the question of whether the dried bones of the dead can live. But through the lens of time and memory, Bartle ends his account with an elegiac vision of Murphy's body floating down the Tigris, “his disfigurement transformed into a statement on permanence”, even as his bones drift apart. In this paradox is a vision of hope that only time can provide, where even the deepest grief can be redeemed. And we too are coming home. All homecomings are difficult, especially ones accompanied by the pain we have felt and witnessed this season; like Bartle, we are returning different people from when we began. But in the rough-and-tumble of our lives, grief and joy are always present and we simply have to open our hearts to them, as we will in earnest beginning next Sunday. It is worth the wait, because the moment in which we reach the last depth of our lives, the time we remember with someone who has shared our journey, is the truth on which death and life and faith are built. Holy Week will remind us of this, but it is out of our own depth that we will recognize it, both the wait that pulls us apart and the joy at its end.