March 26, 2023, The Fifth Sunday in Lent

            I remember as a kid repeating the apostles and nicene creeds and mentally checking off, yup, ok, got that, God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, trinity,  maker of heaven and earth, came down from heaven, spoke through the prophets.  Until I got to the second to last line.  We look for the resurrection of the dead.  What?  We do??    I had been to a lot of funerals by the time I was 10.  Lots of older great aunts and uncles in my family, and my parents believed that children had their place with the family at viewings and funerals.  I experienced it as a peaceful time to be with family and cry.   I was not looking for the resurrection of the dead.   That would be horrific and impossible.

            I grew up in a little church in the country.  Literally had a dirt road on one side.  I played kickball and hide and seek in the church cemetery as a kid.  Not in a disrespectful way, but in the way that I would joyfully run in to join my friends, silently greeting Mr. Lingle, Mr. Eelman, Mrs. Espenshade, Mrs. Batdorf, and Mr. Shertzer, who had always sat next to our family in a pew and gave me and my sisters butterscotch candy from his pocket.   These were my friends, who now lived both in the cemetery and with Jesus, cause you could do that when you were dead.  I was not looking for their resurrection.   But every Sunday I would say, “We look for the resurrection of the dead.”

            Another thing I didn’t understand was this business of new life.   I hadn’t died, my life was the same as always.  But I was supposed to believe in a new life in Christ.    Getting a little older, I could theologically express what that meant.  You should die to sin, and be raised to  new life with Christ.  Drowning the old selfish part of you and remembering your baptism each day.  But it still felt hollow and like this was a part of my faith that I just accepted at face value without experiencing it.

            But the more I experienced of this world, and the more saw, I learned that physical death isn’t the only death we experience.  We grieve lost relationships, and marriages that have ended.  We lose work or the ability to work – we lose our role or our identity.  We lose community or place as neighborhoods change.  We lose our youth  – we lose our hair – we lose bits of our children as they grow – and our parents as they age.     Whether it’s moving, switching jobs, losing faith, or  anticipating a future loss – the losses each of us have racked up are a death to something in us each time.

            We live in a world that has been caught up in death for a long time. We kill each other in so many ways that the evening news doesn’t even report on.   We watch calmly as others die from poverty, hunger and malnutrition, and homelessness.  We stand on the sides as people are bound by unemployment, poor education, disease, lack of health coverage, child abuse, gun violence, discrimination, pollution, destruction of the environment, unsafe working conditions, and all the laws, policies, practices and attitudes which contribute to these conditions. And we throw up our hands and resign ourselves that we must live in death, the grave clothes must stay on there’s nothing we can do.

            While we call this scene “the raising of Lazarus,” that the actual sign Jesus performs takes up just two verses of the forty-five of this story.   The miracle is less than 5% of the story.  Typical of John’s Gospel, what matters most isn’t the action itself, but rather Jesus’ interpretation of it and our response to it.  So what else happens in this story?

            Jesus expresses his humanity and is over come with grief as he stands with his grieving friends.  Jesus seems to have a plan.  Jesus delays his travel, even though he knows Lazarus is near death.  He says to them, “This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”  Reminiscent of what he says about the man born blind – that those circumstances would also show God’s glory.  He knows Lazarus has died, and then he plans to go – to awaken Lazarus, so that his disciples and presumably the rest of the people gathered there would believe.

            But when he gets there, he gets involved, he is affected – “When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” He has just said that he will awaken Lazarus, but apparently the thought of his friend enclosed in a tomb, and the grief of his friends, is too much for him.  For all of us gathered here, who know the pain of burying a loved one – your Savior knows that pain.

            But Jesus has a job to do – and includes the rest of Lazarus friends and family in it as well.  He includes them in this miracle.  Gives them a task and a role to play.  First, they have to roll away the stone. He calls lazarus out, and they are to unbind him and let him go.

            The community, in other words, is commanded to participate in God’s action, to bring it to its desired end and outcome, to join in completing God’s redemptive act. Lazarus will die again, of course, hopefully after a long life well lived – but the community now empowered to unbind and set loose will endure.  Indeed, it has endured, persisting through the centuries in works of courage and mercy, justice and freedom.

            So also the promises of God we announce are not only about life eternal with God or even about God’s forgiveness at the last day.  Rather, the Gospel should make a tangible difference now, make things possible now, open up opportunities and options now, transform relationships now.             The promises of God are present tense, not just future.  Jesus empowers those who gather – whether they believe what their eyes are seeing or not, whether they confess that this miracle is really from God or not – Jesus brings them into the miracle and tells them to loose what has been binding.                   Sometimes we need to admit death so that God can start bringing about new life.  Funny, Lazarus didn’t ask to be resurrected, but his friends and siblings certainly pleaded on his behalf.  The disciples were mostly confused, as per usual, but its Thomas, we proclaims, let’s go too – let die with him too.  Now, did they mean let’s die with Lazarus too?  Let’s catch whatever bug he had, and Jesus can raise us too.  Or did he also believe Jesus life was in danger now as well, and his disciples.  Whichever “him” Thomas intends to die with – he’s is the one who strides boldly toward it, and names it as such.  Poor Thomas, who gets a bad rap for supposedly doubting his lord’s resurrection appearance after easter, is actually the first in line to run towards that mess, firmly trusting in Jesus.

            Our Lenten celebration must serve to remind us that the paschal mystery represents a victory over death.  We know the end of the story, even as we read from the points of view of the confused disciples.  The victory over death does not mean that death does not happen.  Loss and decay are facts of this fallen world.  But death does not win.  Look for the resurrection of the dead.  Look for those places where Jesus and his disciples boldly go.  Look for the glimmers of light, the signs of new life, and wherever the community is commanded to unbind what has been bound up, take hold of the grave clothes and trust in Jesus words.