March 9, 2008 Message

Romans 8:6-11; John 11:1-45
“God Living and Breathing In You”
_________________________________
"Do you believe in life after death?" the boss asked a new employee.
"Yes, Sir. I do." the woman replied.
"Well, then, that makes everything just fine," the boss went on. "After you left early yesterday to go to your grandmother's funeral, she stopped in to see you."
_________________________________
When we ended last week, I said this: A ‘life from above’ – one based upon trusting God – can be ours. We don’t need to feel alone, abandoned, or sick of everything life has thrown our way. God lifts and holds us close. God is good and right and true. God is life. We can trust God to always be there for us.

The week before we learned what Abraham finally knew in life – God can be trusted to do what God promises. Jesus says, in fact, you must be ‘born from above’ – becoming a new person relying on God rather than yourself – in order to live life to the fullest.

But there is more than being ‘born again’ and ‘living’ from ‘above.’ There is also our ‘rising’ from death – as did Lazarus – in a way that ‘glorifies’ our Lord. The catch here, though, being that death must precede life.

Now rather than apply this on a personal level, I want you today to take a more historical or traditional view of scripture and, instead, hear it on a different level – as a group. Paul’s letters, after all, were written to communities of believers that made up the churches of the day. So listen now as a community of faith – the church.

Paul says, “When God lives and breathes in you… you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ's!” Paul is talking about you – not each of you individually, but all of us collectively (all of us together). He’s talking about God living and breathing in us – a community of believers – the church. And Paul was writing to a church, perhaps like us, that had lost the life it once had.

At one time, this church, to whom Paul is writing, had really been alive. You’ve been there before, haven’t you? People were excited, full of energy and love for the Lord. They wanted others to know Christ as they did, so they shared this love and excitement. There wasn’t a thing they wouldn’t do. There was no stopping them in this church. Then things changed. Their focus was different. The life was gone.

Paul told the churches of Rome, “Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God.” Does that ever happen with us? Sure it does. When we begin thinking more about what we are doing than about God (and what God is doing around us)? Paul would say that’s no life at all! He wanted such a church to be delivered from a ‘dead’ life like that. So his advice to them was to have “God live and breathe in you.”

But how does that happen when you’ve been dead? Let’s try to get a handle on it. (And, by the way, there’s a pun in there if you look deeply enough.) Remember, we’re thinking here collectively, and collectively we are Peace United Methodist Parish – P.U.M.P. – get it? Now consider that pumps have handles on them, at least the old-fashioned kinds do. “Get a handle on it.” Get it? Oh well.

Let’s suppose for a moment theP.U.M.P. (this group of believers known as Peace United Methodist Parish) no longer has the life it once did. We could say it’s a ‘dead’ life, as Paul put it. And maybe we are dead if we’ve been thinking more about ourselves than about what God is doing in this community – more about our worship, our church school, our building, our newsletter, our groups, our vacation bible school, and our part in them. We’ve been confined and limited to this tomb that has defined us.

150 years ago, 500 people died of cholera in just ten days in one London neighborhood, marking the beginning of a terrible epidemic. Dr. John Snow, unlike his colleagues, believed that cholera was not caused by mysterious "vapors," but was instead a disease of the ‘gut’ spread by contaminated water.

With the high number of deaths in this neighborhood, he was convinced that a pump used by the neighborhood was the source of contaminated water and suggested removing the pump handle so no more water could be drawn from that location.

The handle was removed, cholera abated, and huge projects were launched for sanitation systems and clean water across Europe. That pump handle affected all of us. (Steve Loranger [CEO of ITT Industries], "Global Water Management," Vital Speeches, 15 March 20005, 325ff.)

A week ago this past Tuesday (on February 26) Starbucks got a new pump handle. Starbucks locked their doors. 7100 Starbucks in North America shut down for three hours - no customers at all. Why the coffee break? They closed down to clean up their original ‘pump handle’ that had been so changed that the company needed a new one.

Or in the words of CEO Howard Schultz, “We are passionate about our coffee. And we will revisit our standards of quality that are the foundation for the trust that our customers have in our coffee and in all of us.” "This is not about training," he insisted when talking to his employees about the need to reconnect the company to the "soul of the past." "This is about the love and compassion and commitment that we all need to have for the customer."

It is a concept that sounds like a contradiction. Shut down your business in order to open up your business. And yet doctors do it all the time when they induce comas in patients with life threatening injuries. Without going into all the details, they "shut down" the patient’s body in order to help it come alive to health.

Maybe our churches should take our own "coffee break" to rediscover our love and compassion and commitment for God and neighbor. Maybe we should think about a 3-day, or 3-week, or 3-month shut-down of our churches to revisit and reconnect with our own “soul of the past.” Maybe we need to find our original handle as well, to insure the living water that comes out of thePUMP is, in fact, healing and ‘thirst quenching’ to all who come to the well.

Perhaps our handle has been corroded and is in need of replacement. Maybe it has something to do with our busy-ness. Just look at how busy we are. Check out the bulletin or the newsletter... all the things going on in our churches each week, our Lenten services, our programs, our missions, our Sunday schools, and all the committees. We may feel good about our busyness. But has it taken over our identity? Have we forgotten why the church exists at all?

Starbucks closed down to find the "soul of its past" – to rediscover its beginning. Maybe our church needs to "close" itself off from its programs and meetings and activities in order to rediscover why we are what we are? And who are we? And why are we here? What was our original identity – what people knew us by – what was our PUMP ‘handle’ in the beginning? Perhaps this spring or summer we might try to find out.

And it could very well take our dying to find out. And dying is not easy for anyone. Lazarus had died. He was gone. Although he would be missed, he wouldn't be back. His sisters, Mary and Martha, were sad. They were angry. They were frustrated. They were all these things at the same time. But then Jesus came and called Lazarus forth to renewed life – a life rising from death in order to ‘glorify’ God. Just think… might it have been different had Lazarus not died at all? Or was death necessary for him to truly live?

Sometimes, life comes from being born. Sometimes, life comes from living. And sometimes, life comes from having died. May you all find God living and breathing life in you today. Amen.