Believing is Seeing

The Rev. Sara Warfield

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

Admiral Jim Stockdale was the highest ranking American prisoner during the Vietnam War. He was captured in 1968 and spent the next seven years in the Hanoi Hilton, as the notorious North Vietnamese prison was called. In those seven years, Admiral Stockdale was tortured over 20 times. Every day he woke up not knowing what pain or isolation or degradation would be forced upon him. He wasn’t the only one. Over 500 American POWs were sent to the rat-infested cells of the prison. Over 100 of them died.

Long after he was freed, a writer asked Admiral Stockdale who didn’t make it out of the Hanoi Hilton.

“Oh, it’s easy,” he replied. “I can tell you who didn’t make it out. It was the optimists. They were the ones who always said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ Christmas would come and it would go. And there would be another Christmas. And they died of a broken heart.”

Then he grabbed the writer by his shoulders and looked him dead in the eye. “You must never ever ever confuse, on the one hand, the need for absolute, unwavering faith that you can prevail despite those constraints with, on the other hand, the need for the discipline to begin by confronting the brutal facts, whatever they are.”

—

It can be easy to think of the Lazarus story as a resurrection story—and it is, obviously. But it is also a death story. A story of sickness and sadness and stench and suffering. It is a story of brutal facts. The story of the valley of the dry bones starts in the brutal fact of an enormous battle where thousands of people died, and where their bodies were left broken and unburied to become the bones sprawled across the barrenness of the land.

But the place of brutal fact, Jesus is telling us in today’s gospel, echoing Admiral Stockdale, is the only place where belief can really be born.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, belief is “the mental act, condition, or habit of placing trust or confidence in another.” What I’m interested in here is the difference between act and condition and habit. I think a lot of us were raised in the habit of Christianity. “Jesus loves me, this I know.” “For God so loved the world…” Noah’s ark, David and Goliath, Christmas and Easter. And that habit became our normal condition, belief that is mostly in the background.

But I have a feeling that most of us here have had a moment or a time in our lives of utter helplessness, utter brokenness that moved us from habit and condition into act. Maybe the brutal fact of loss or violence mowed you down out of nowhere. Or maybe your child was born and you suddenly realized that that baby was both a miracle and a vast vulnerability, a creature whom no matter what you did you could not protect forever from the brutal facts of this world.

Something forced you from this habit, this condition of belief that required very little attention or effort, and indeed only the performance of trust, into the terrifying act of belief, of handing over all your trust, all your power, all your control to something or someone else.

It was a time that asked you, “Can these bones live?” and there was no other response you could give but, “O God, only you know.”

Belief is saying, “I don’t know, God, but I trust you.” And when we do, when we really hand ourselves over to God, that’s when our eyes are opened.

So I’m brought back to Admiral Stockdale’s plea: “You must never ever ever confuse, on the one hand, the need for absolute, unwavering faith that you can prevail despite constraints with, on the other hand, the need for the discipline to begin by confronting the brutal facts, whatever they are.”

Belief allows us to see suffering, death, the brutal facts of life in these bodies on this earth, in a new way.

When Jesus says he must return to Judea, a place he had just fled because the Judeans wanted to kill him, belief is what allows Thomas to say, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

When Martha first says, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” belief is what allows her to then say, “But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask.”

Both Thomas and Martha bravely confront the brutal facts of fear and despair, of death, which allows them to open their eyes to what death really is, what suffering has the potential to be.

We’ve all heard the saying, “seeing is believing.” But I think it’s the reverse, believing is seeing. Believing opens our eyes to recognize death for what it is: a seed. Seeds scatter when the blossom withers and dries out, when it dies, and the wind takes what is shaken loose. They scatter when an animal eats, when it destroys, the fruit that holds those seeds and, without getting into the details, releases them elsewhere.

Believing means seeing an acorn and recognizing the beautiful oak it could become. Believing means seeing the dead leaves scattered across the yard and recognizing that, if left there to decay and decompose, the flowers there will be brighter come the spring.

Now this doesn’t mean that the suffering isn’t real, that death isn’t painful. Even as Jesus knows that he will bring Lazarus back, he still sees Mary weeping, and he weeps with her. Though Jesus knows that Lazarus is a seed, he still recognizes that he died a painful death, that he suffered, that his loss caused deep despair for his sisters and his community.

Jesus doesn’t brush aside the suffering, he doesn’t tell the people around him to “Buck up, don’t be sad! Everything is going to be fine!” No, Jesus feels the loss with them, he takes it in, he weeps. The death is profound, and the suffering it causes is deep—and they are part of the life of the seed.

Belief helps us to recognize resurrection in the midst of suffering and death. And recognizing resurrection makes us resilient.

Admiral Stockdale said of his time at the Hanoi Hilton, “You realize I’m the lucky one.”

The writer responded, “No, I don’t.”

And the admiral replied, “Yes, because I know the answer to how I would do [in that situation], and you never will.”

I don’t think the admiral meant to put down the writer or question his strength or courage. I don’t think he thought of himself as better than others. He just doesn’t seem like that kind of person. I think he simply meant that because he was forced into a cruel situation, because he had to confront the brutal facts of his imprisonment, because he had to learn to choose belief over optimism, that he was now transformed. And he felt lucky for it.

Admiral Stockdale learned that he is a seed, that suffering and death aren’t things to be bypassed, they are opportunities to transform, even if that transformation is the mystery of whatever comes after these bodies die.

“I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

Amen.