As I have written elsewhere, perhaps the most salient issue raised in the Biblical account of the raising of Lazarus from the dead was, as my New Testament professor in seminary asked us, ‘What now, Lazarus?’ In light of the historic blue tsunami of this month’s midterm elections in the U.S., a literal raising from the dead of our founding national aspirations to be a great, just and loving people, recalling that mandate as it applied to the Biblical story of Lazarus seems apt for just this time.
The Biblical account of the raising of Lazarus from the dead, a portend, if you will, of the Biblical account of the resurrection of Jesus, does not suggest anything about what Lazarus did after he walked out of the tomb. Did he just take a shower and go back to doing what he was doing before he fell dead? If not, then what did he do, and how does that discussion relate to where we stand as a species and our calling moving forward?
When I completed 100 weekly essays in October 2012 that were published in both my Falls Church News-Press and the D.C. publication, Metro Weekly, my last essay’s title was this, “What Now Lazarus?” It was supposed to serve as a summary, a final wrap up, of all that had been talked about before, and as such was the title of the talk I also gave at that time at the First Congregational Church in downtown D.C. on the morning of the Gay Pride festival that day that marked the 40th anniversary of the first ever gay pride march that followed by a year the historic Stonewall Riots in New York.
The essays were compiled into a book that briefly became a “gay studies” best seller on Amazon entitled, “Extraordinary Hearts.” The title was chosen to relate to but also distinguish from what the late Larry Kramer identified in his award-winning play, “The Normal Heart,” which was being turned into an HBO special at the time. Larry’s title was designed to affirm that the hearts of LGBTQ people beat the same as those of everybody else, a powerful assertion of our common humanity.
I chose my modification of that title to focus the attention on the fact that many gay people were and are, in fact, better than normal, actually, being responsible for many great and wondrous achievements in not merely the participation in, but also the advancement of our shared humanity. Gay people are by no means the exclusive participants in this advancement, but definitely played and play a major and vastly underappreciated part in it.
What I described as the qualities that gay people bring to the effort uniquely are a gay sensibility that ascribes great value to qualities like mercy and kindness, an alternative perception that looks at justice and the law in a fresh way, and a constructive non-conformity that welcomes innovation and new ideas.
I sought to describe through the 100 essays how this is so, as a way for gay people to internalize their own true identities by construct to the ways that popular society imposes identities and expected behaviors on folks. I waged a war, if you will, against the popular notion of gay culture, against the shallow hedonism that defined so much of the ways in which gays were being told to assimilate into modern society.
It’s an ongoing war, and over the last dozen or so years since “Extraordinary Hearts” was first published in 2013, I can see the impact of some of those ideas. This is why I have seen to the publishing of a third edition of the book with an important new introduction that sets the table in a new way for what the book seeks to address.
Still, however, I do not want to deviate from the way in which the overriding question, What Now Lazarus, is particularly apropos for this particular time, the time of the post-November 3,2026 election.
This election counts as one of the most impactful events in our nation’s history, and especially so given that it comes as our nation’s reaction against and answer to the attempted coup of January 6, 2021.
(To be continued …)
