Unbind Him and Let Him Go!

 “Unbind Him & Let Him Go”

Ezekiel 37:1-14    John 11:1-45                                                            

“Unbind him and let him go.”  These are the instructions that Jesus gives to loved ones of Lazarus, after calling him from imprisonment from four days in a cold, dark grave.  “Unbind him and let him go.”   Lazarus’ family and faithful friends surround him with love and care, peeling away his grave-clothes, to restore him to fullness of life.   Lazarus is released from death into life. 

Sometimes in our experience the reverse happens: we seek to help those who are alive to be release into death.  Sometimes the suffering of a terrible illness or the ravages of aging or dementia cause us to cease praying for healing and restoration.  We pray instead for letting go, for rest, for an end of agony.   We long for our loved one to be released into the peace and natural calm of death.   Too often our modern way of dying denies that ability to let go, and our loved one becomes trapped in a seemingly endless prison of tubes, wires, oxygen masks, beeping machines, medications, and relentless suffering, without hope of resolution or rest.  Our faith is not afraid of death.  

         I just read a beautiful article by the Australian author, Katy Butler, about her father’s dying in a hospice unit in a hospital.  Hospice has excellent knowledge of the process of dying, like labor at birth, that is taxing and terrible, and has an expected outcome.  This story reminds me of so many experiences I have seen of ways we deny death: with medical over-functioning, but with little attention to spiritual care or nurture.   In Katy’s father’s case, his pacemaker kept going relentlessly; this life-saving device prevented her father’s body from finding rest and peace.   She writes:

         “The hospice unit was homey and peaceful.   Pamphlets told us that my father’s hearing would be the last sense to go.  They suggested we read aloud to him, play his favorite music, and say whatever in our hearts was left unsaid.  At the end of the hall was a carpeted living room with a phone and a comfort-table couch and videotapes for the families.   There was a non-denominational chapel about the size of a walk-in closet, a kitchen, a coffee machine, and a refrigerator full of sheet cake.

         “My mother knelt by his bed, holding his hand and stroking his hair, weeping and begging for forgiveness for her impatience.  The beginnings of a tear oozed out from under my father’s eyelid, and a nurse said to my mother, ‘Stop.  You’re making him cry.’  I was again ambushed by their love and my continuing failure to understand it.

         “My mother sat by him in agony.  She beseeched the doctors and nurses to increase his morphine dose and end his suffering.   She kept asking about turning off the pacemaker….and so followed five days of hard labor.

         “Love can look heartless.  We did not give my father oxygen or food or an IV of saline or a cup of water.   If we had, we would have only slowed the shutting down of his organs and the drawn-out process of his death.  The nurse told us that dying from not eating or drinking is not painful…but I could not forget the Gospel of Matthew, in which Jesus says, ‘For I was hungry, and you gave me no food; I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink.’…We would not treat a dog this way.” 

         Dying is terrible.  It happens in our day most often behind closed doors of Intensive Care Units in hospitals or on hospice wards, seldom at home anymore.  No matter where, it can be agonizing.  Consider the cross and its agonies. Consider Jesus’ crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” We hear an echo of that torture in the sorrow and beaten-down quality of Martha and Mary’s words to Jesus – expressing faith, but with the dreary monotone of deep grief.   Lazarus had suffered, and they had hoped that Jesus would arrive in time to save him. They finally let go of their hope and allowed him to succumb to the grave, as many of us have with loved ones.  But notice in the scripture the way relatives and friends gathered to sit, to comfort family, to weep, to share stories, to express unity and comfort in the desolation of loss.   Too often in our era we do not have rituals and sacred traditions to grapple with the harsh emptiness and anguish of grief. 

         Katy Butler talks about ways our traditions used to help us on our journey toward death in the past:  “In the fifteenth century, when Europe was so decimated by the Black Death that there weren’t enough Catholic priests around to give last rites, our ancestors created road maps for the death-bed.  The earliest Latin versions, written by priests, were called, simply: Ars Morendi, or The Art of Dying.

         “The Ars Morendi did not sugar-coat the death agony, and they described scenes foreign to us now.  Relatives and friends gathered at the bedside at home and followed the script of the Ars Morendi, asking the right questions and saying the prescribed prayers, giving the dying person reassurance and hope.  The hallmark of a good death was not an absence of suffering but the ability to meet it with faith, courage, and acceptance. Stoicism was not required: in 1651 the Anglican theologian Jeremy Taylor wrote in his Rules and Exercises in Holy Dying that it was OK to groan on the deathbed.

         “The Ars Morendi did not pretend that dying was the pinnacle of lifetime of meaningful growth experiences.  Their authors lamented, even in 1491, that ‘people seek sooner and busier after medicine for the body than for the soul.’  

They portrayed the deathbed not as a lowly place of helplessness and meaningless suffering, but as a mighty, transcendent battleground, where angels and demons struggle for control of the soul.   The dying person, not the doctor, was the star of the show…Dying was not merely a physical agony; it was also a spiritual ordeal.  Its suffering had meaning.  The brave person did not battle Death but regarded dying as a test of one’s trust in God, an earthly purification to be followed by heavenly reward, a sacred rite-of-passage as profound and familial as a christening or a wedding.”

         In our story of Lazarus, Jesus says that Lazarus’ death is an opportunity to show God’s glory.  And so dying can be like this, a way to affirm faith and to bring the living into closer bonds of love and care.  We draw closer to God through faith and sorrow. But that is often not the case.  A ‘good death’ or dramatic deathbed scenes of reconciliation and love are not the norm.  Mostly what we find is silence and agony to the end.   Katy continues:

         “My father did not die that way.  He did not say three times, as The Boke of the Crafte of Dyinge recommended, ‘Into thine hands, Lord, I commit my soul.’  I did not ask him, as I would later learn that the Ars Moriendi recommended, if he asked for God’s forgiveness, if he forgave those who’d harmed him, if he forsook all the goods of the world, and if he thanked God for Christ’s sacrifice.  I held his hand and said almost nothing.

         “All I could see were his closed eyes and his labored breathing…He was doing the long, hard work of his dying in a small, windowless interior room within his own body, his once booming and argumentative voice stopped by dementia and deafness, stroke and brain damage, pneumonia and morphine.  If he cried out inside that small interior room, if he yearned for reconciliation with his estranged son, Michael; if he desired Jonathan’s forgiveness for having been a neglectful father, if he forgave my mother, if he saw white light or his dead brother Guy welcoming him to paradise, I will never know. 

         “The well-known hospice and palliative-care doctor Ira Byock counsels the dying and those they love to say to each other some version of these words: I love you.  Thank you. Pease forgive me.   I forgive you.  Goodbye.  My father and I said none of those things.  My father just breathed, a terrible, loud, ever-louder breathing, like someone working very hard at something, like someone building a wall, like someone delivering a baby.”  

         The message we receive in our scripture this morning is that death is not beyond the love and grace and power of Christ.   It is not foreign or dreadful.  It is what it is, and God is present and has power.  By facing death we discover not only our own mortality; we recognize dying as a sacred act, a spiritual battleground, a mystery that borders on the mystery of God.  It is to be treated with prayer, not just with morphine drips and antibiotics.  It is to be ushered in with ritual, sacred song and words of wisdom and faith handed down through the ages.  We are to witness to death with holy awe and loving grace, and not only with hospital gowns, pills, and rubber gloves, as valuable as those are.

         We can relearn ancient ways of caregiving through sacred rituals and holy acts.   Our Protestant tradition threw out many of the Catholic rituals after the Reformation; we favor our scripture straight up, not diluted by traditional hocus-pocus.  But some rituals were created for a purpose, for human ceremony and grace.   Journeying with those with love into death is a holy act; and we can use the help of sacred rites to do this with integrity.

         Katy Butler tells of a chance meeting in the hospital: “A gentle woman in a blue dress introduced herself: she was Elizabeth Miel, a volunteer Episcopal chaplain.  We sat together, one on each side of my father’s bed….The chaplain offered to give my father last rites.  I looked over my shoulder, worried that my mother might walk in.  I said yes.  The chaplain opened a little stainless-steel canister containing cotton batting soaked with olive oil, and make the sign of the cross on my father’s forehead with her thumb.  Opening her Book of Common Prayer, she began reading from the Ministration at the Time of Death.  “Look on this your servant, Jeffrey, lying in great weakness, and comfort him with the promise of life everlasting,” she read.   My shoulders let down.  I didn’t think my father would mind.  It might comfort him.  It was comforting me.  “Set him free from every bond, that he may rest with all your saints in eternal habitations… May his soul rest in peace,” the chaplain said.”

          “Unbind him and let him go,” Jesus tells the community gathered around Lazarus.  They unwound his grave clothes with love and care.  We need ways to unbind souls to allow a graceful death. In our era we need ways to unbind the body from fetters of medical over-practice, to offer release, rest, peace and grace.  We can surround our living and dying with sacred rituals that remind us how to let go, to forgive, to have faith, to trust God, and to resolve divisions.  And then we discover glimmers of love and spirit beyond this life extending to God’s life-eternal.  Amen.