This Nearly Was Mine

HABAKKUK 3:17-19 PSALM 13 JOHN 11:17-27

Although I am not a great lover of musicals, the words a song from Rodgers and Hammersteins’s classic musical, “South Pacific” sticks with me:

“One dream in my heart

One love to be living for

This nearly was mine

One girl for my dreams

One wonder in paradise

This promise of paradise

This nearly was mine

Close to my life she came

Only to fly away

Only to fly as day flies from moonlight

Now I’m alone

Still dreaming of paradise

Still saying that this paradise

Once nearly was mine.

There are little in breakings of heaven into our lives which make us crave for more.

A time when we were suddenly freed from physical pain.

A time when we laughed with such abandon we thought we would never know fear again.

A time when love felt so powerful we felt we could conquer the world with it.

Such moments come so fleetingly that rarely can we hold on to them and make them our own – instead the pain comes back, the fear looms again and perfect love is torn from us and all we can cry is that of the singer.

This nearly was mine.

It is right for us to dare to draw near to God at a service such as this and ask why this needs to be so and to pray that through the ministry offered faithfully and quietly tonight ,we may be granted a little sliver of heaven which is here to stay for us and does not slip through our fingers.

In our reading, We find Martha daring to confront Jesus about the way He has treated her in relation to her brother’s death.

She had heard Jesus speak of health and wholeness. She had perhaps witnessed great moments of healing at the hands of her Lord, but at the moment she needed him to be there for her brother, he was strangely absent and Lazarus had died.

Resurrection and the reality of it – this nearly was mine.

This is a moment of lament with which scripture is full.

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died”

The way we respond when faith and experience collide painfully with one another. The willingness to give words to our sorrows and yet, not let the power of it overwhelm us. As the Psalmist puts it:

“How long will you forget me O Lord, forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

How long shall I have anguish and grief in my soul, day after day?

At the heart of our healing prayer, the questioning of God as to why it has to be like this and yet the faith to see life as no relentless treadmill:

(Ps 13:1-4)

“But I put my trust in your steadfast love

My heart will rejoice in your salvation”

(Ps13:5-6)

In the funny little Old Testament book of Habakkuk, the determination to see that if we approach God honestly, the results can be beyond our imagining:

“Though the fig tree does not blossom and no fruit is on the vine

Though the produce of the olive fails and the fields yield no food

Yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will exult in the God of my salvation”

Back and forth it goes through the whole of scripture lament and praise, anguish and healing, the perceived absence of God and then suddenly His presence. Just like the way our small lives bob about between hope and despair.

The song of lament, the prayer of protest is not some mournful outcry to show to what a pitiful state we’ve become. It is from lament and protest that God can draw meaning and purpose from the very depths of personal despair and turmoil, if we will not share that with Him, we are not permitting Him to act.

This requires spiritual bravery, but we can do this knowing that in his creation of us , he declared that we are not to think of ourselves as just creatures of a creator but as children of a loving parent with an inborn right to challenge and question that parent when faith and experience collide painfully.

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died”.

This nearly was mine and I still dream of paradise because I accept that the Father’s love is not hedged about with regulations – but that he loves me unconditionally.

Martha’s brave lament led her not into disbelief but a strengthening of her faith

“Yes Lord” she cries when she has let it all out “ I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming in to the world”

Read on in the chapter to discover that her brother lives – the gift was hers to keep.

The way God works and heals was brought home to me in the wonderful poetry of Nazik al’Malaika an Iraqi woman poet who has known the bitter experience of the British rule of her country, the years of the Saddam regime and now the Gulf War. A life tossed this way and that by the political

climate she wrote these words to God in 1973:

I found you standing in the essence of a song

And in the sadness of the gloom of autumn

I found you in the wound of a thirsty flower

I found you in the nighttime recitations of the Quaran

And you built a nest under the veil of darkness

For a frightened lark and a homeless turtledove

Their bones folded in sadness

For a refugee woman whose bones are folded on sadness

For an emigrating caravan, expelled from their homes

And you hang a moon in the sky of our being

And you give it to the misty night of sorrows

And you give it to a thirsty grove

It’s plantings forgotten by the rain.

This nearly was mine – we say.

Remain in my love – says the lord – for its still not beyond your reach and I will stretch out my healing hand to you – that it may be so.

R 11.2.07