WE'RE NOT STUCK
Author: Fr. Michael Byron
March 29, 2020
On the Mississippi River, not far from downtown St. Paul,
there is a person who has to have one of the most solitary jobs in the world.
He or she is the custodian of the Omaha Bridge. The bridge is a low slung
railroad trestle that spans across the water. It is more than a century old
swing bridge. Most of the time it is open with allows all the barge and boat
traffic to navigate the river, and which prevents trains from moving from one
side to the other. But every once in a while – quite rarely in fact – a train
needs to make a crossing, and so the custodian closes the swing bridge to stop
the boats and to allow the locomotive to pass with its freight cargo. That
person – the bridge operator – sits alone in a small glass booth on one side of
the river and receives radio requests to open and close the bridge, whether
from boat captains or from railroad engineers.
It’s a bit of a stretch, but that person is pretty much the
God of the Omaha Bridge. What he or she decides determines who gets to pass and
who is stuck in place. And everyone who radios in is asking for smooth passage
on their preferred schedule, and is probably annoyed when that doesn’t happen.
But one day the swing mechanism on that bridge is going to
die, and the bridge won’t be able to move, and it’s not going to matter what
the operator wishes to happen – or any boat or any train. At that point the God
of the Omaha Bridge will not be able to fix what’s wrong. He or she will
suddenly become needless, expendable. And everyone else will simply be stuck in
place – especially if the bridge dies while it’s half open and half shut.
Some things not even God can repair, right?
I think that most of us Christian believers would deny that
statement if asked, because surely God can fix anything. Anything. That’s why
he’s God; there is no power or person who is greater, or able to frustrate God’s
will. But often enough it surely doesn’t seem so, and very often enough we don’t think or act as if we really believe it.
That’s why we call despair a sin, because despair is contrary to all that we disciples
profess to be true about God. We never
find ourselves stuck in place or a condition from which God cannot allow us to
escape, if we are patient. We are never simply trapped in place, prisoners of
our circumstances. (Which, by the way, is why the Omaha Bridge operator isn’t
really God!)
In every age of our long Judeo-Christian religious
tradition, believers have been required to confront what seems in the moment to
be unfixable problems, over-whelming threats, and unfathomable disappointments
and fears. For the ancient Israelites it was called Babylonian Exile, from
where the prophet Ezekiel cries out in today’s First Scripture Reading. After
just a few hundred years it looked as though pretty much everything that God
had promised his chosen people had evaporated, never to return.
Freedom from foreign enslavement? Gone.
The lineage of the Kingdom of David’s family? Gone.
The Temple in Jerusalem? Gone.
All those priests and intercessors with the Lord? Gone.
The Promised Land, given to Moses and his descendants? Gone.
They were mostly certain that they had finally run into the
peril that not even God could fix – or perhaps he merely wouldn’t fix. The
broken bridge, the barrier that doomed them to remain forever where they were
rather than allowing them to get where they wanted to go and live how they were
called to live. So they either stopped radioing in to God completely, or they
called in with only words of despair.
And it is to these very people, so bewildered and crushed
and scared, that Ezekiel says this:
“Oh my people, I will open your graves and have you rise
from them, and I will bring you back. I have promised, and I will do it. It is
then that you will know me as your God.”
Perhaps not now in this moment of doubt and apparent doom,
but soon you will know. I have promised to rescue you – and I will. Remain with
me!
To the people of 2020 across the world, that seemingly
unfixable, unstoppable problem/threat is suddenly known by the name COVID-19.
It looks perhaps to be that broken bridge, that dead end, that thing that’s too
overwhelming for even God to make right. We can seem to be trapped in place –
literally. Despair is an easy first reaction – and it’s the wrong one, for the
very same reason that Ezekiel shouted out: the Lord has made a promise, an oath
that you never have reason to fear that God has been outmatched or overpowered.
Whatever seems so absolute and so fateful right now, that’s not how it ends.
Remain with me – even when it’s difficult and when it feels uncertain. Remain.
I have promised.
And as our gospel echoes today, the very same promise and
the very same demands were presented to the beloved Disciples of Jesus. Up in
Galilee, when Jesus and the Apostles got word of the death of Lazarus in the
far-away town of Bethany, Jesus told them to remain with him – even as he
delayed going to see Martha and Mary. That decision seemed like nonsense to his
followers (and perhaps it’s strange to our ears too), but they remained,
clinging to the promise. And once they all finally arrived in Bethany –
apparently four days too late to do anything about the ultimate enemy – death,
still they remained. Wasn’t death the one thing that even God couldn’t fix? Isn’t
it still? Isn’t death that one thing, that broken bridge, that leaves both us
and God hopeless and useless, stuck on one side of the divide or the other? Isn’t
it?
“Lazarus, come out!” And to the man all tied up in the
burial bands, “untie him, and let him go.”
|