Lent 5A 2005
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 130
Romans 8:6-11
John 11:1-45
Can these bones live? God asks Ezekiel today in the first
lesson. Can these bones live?
Good question. I asked that question this past week when
I went to a Mission Developers meeting in
I was also reading, this past week, a novel by my favorite British author, Iris Murdach. The Word Child, is a
fascinating story of a man who is busy denying life.
The story is told by this man, Hilary. He had a very tough childhood but went on to
Hilary took her out for a
drive.
And there was an accident, or was it?, and she was killed.
The novel opens some 20 years
later. Hilary has managed to control his
anger, his
guilt, his life, by the
careful scheduling and the repressing of his talents.
But now, the husband shows up and who nows what will happen?
Hilary’s carefully controlled
world is about to break open…
Will he get a chance to
live? OR will he continue in his
self-imposed world of carefully controlled and miserable daily existance?
He has spent a lot of energy
on keeping the door of emotions shut.
You know what I mean? He is so afraid of the past in his closet, the guilt and pain
and shame, that he is spending every
waking minute trying to the world around him,
that he is not really living. Just surviving.
Can these bones live?
But what if, what if the door opens and the past
enters the room and it has lost its
power?
We spend a lot of energy
keeping life under control. We spend a
lot of energy and money keeping life under our control
All right, lets be honest, in 21st century
For we all want to look
younger, live
longer, be happier. And we certainly don’t want to be reminded
that all flesh is grass. That dust we
are and to dust we shall return.
So we pay other people to
deal with the reminders that life is fragile and comes to an end. We put our elderly in homes, our dead in fancy
coffins.
And we have “Celebrations of
Life” instead
of funerals. And many folks will skip
the services of Holy Week and try to cut straight to Easter.
Used to be, when someone died, the body staying in the house and everyone
came to sit with the grieving. I
remember an older woman telling me many times about seeing her dead sister in
her little coffin in the middle of the dining room table.
Now we don’t even see the
coffin go in the ground,
we aren’t able to put dirt on the cover. We keep our distance. pay our respects,
and generally avoid the grieving.
We don’t want to think about
death. That it will happen to all of us
someday. That not a
soul in this room will be able to avoid that.
What would happen if we
looked death in the face? What if we
stopped avoiding pain,
covering up our hurt,
keeping the closet door shut?
What if we could be honest
with one another and with God about what the world works so hard to avoid
thinking about? Death
and loss and grief?
Time to think about today’s
story. The raising of
Lazarus… a powerful story in many ways.
Here we have Lazarus who was
sick unto death. His sisters, Mary and
Martha sent for Jesus.
Jesus came, too late.
And we have the moving cry of
Martha, echoes
later by Mary, “Lord, if you had been
here, my brother would not have died.”
How many times throughout the
centuries has that cry been repeated?
Lord, if you had been here, my mother would not have died…my
sister, my friend, my child…
Lord, if you had been here…the weeping cry
of the people of God faced with death. If you had been here… if you had been here…
Mary and Martha know the
power of Jesus, that
Jesus is life. And Martha proclaims
this…”Yes, Lord, I
believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the
world.”
Yes, Lord, I believe, but still my
brother has been in the tomb for 4 days.
His flesh is rotting,
his spirit has flown….
Jesus sees Martha’s
grief. He sees Mary’s grief. He listens to their cries. He sees their faces. And he is deeply moved. And Jesus joins the cry of the grieving. Jesus began to weep.
No macho control here. Jesus is overcome with emotion and not afraid
to share his tears.
And in our grief and pain
Jesus shares our tears. The story
could end here. It is enough for me to
know that Jesus wept.
But it goes on, Jesus goes to the
tomb. And looks death in the face…
And calls out; “Lazarus, Come out!”
And the dead man came out, the bones
live, and many of the Jews
therefore who had come with Mary and had
seen what Jesus did, believed in him.
Wow. Lazarus has his second chance at life. The family is restore
for the time being. Lazarus will
die again, his time will
come. But for now, there is new life and new hope. Jesus has looked death in the eye and
wept. And then acted. And life happened.
The irony of this story is
happens in the next few verses, the ones we don’t have today. The very next verse says: “But some of them went to the Pharisees and
told them what he had done. So the chief
priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the council and said, “What are
we to do? This man is performing many
signs.” … So from that day on they
planned to put him to death.”
Jesus had to know this. He was already cast out of the
synagogue. his
love was already making enemies. And
then he goes to
For this is the beginning of
the end of Jesus days on earth. For if
we are to deal with Jesus,
we have to deal with the compassion of Jesus. If we are to deal with Jesus, we have to come to
terms with Jesus breaking the rules and talking to enemy women and eating with
sinners and raising strange old men back to life.
If we are to take Jesus
seriously, we
have to take both what Jesus said and how he lived, and how he died seriously.
For even at the end, Jesus looked death
squarely in the face. He knew what lay
ahead and went forward anyway. Without anquish? yes, Grief?
Yes? Fear? no.
For death doesn’t have to
have the final say. It doesn’t have to
rule our lives. It doesn’t have to
scare us into trying to keep it at arms length.
When I was a hospice chaplain, the most amazing
part of life I was privileged to witness
was the honest facing of death. It was
a beautiful thing for the people who trusted in God’s presence. People who had lived fully, knowing the end of
this life comes to all people.
So what would life be like if
we were no longer afraid? If we no longer worked so hard to deny death? If we let those old wounds and hurts and shame out only to find out they fade away when hit by
the light of day.
What would life be like if we
treated every day as a gift to be shared with others? If we treated every person
as a beloved child of God? If we
reminded one another that Jesus wept too, without shame.
If we remembered that Jesus
is Lord of both the living and the dead.
What would life be like if we
quit denying part of it and lived all of it?
In my novel, Hilary comes face to face with the
past, and after some stumbling
about, learns to let go at last. To forgive others but
most of all to forgive himself.
And then, in
the end of the book, life begins to
happen, the bones live and not only
Hilary, but the people closest to Hilary
begin to have life. These bones live!
And in real life, that dying little
congregation in
And the bones live! St. Paul Lutheran in
What a joy, in the midst of all the dead bones, the old debates, the cynicism that surround even the
church, to see such new life!
Can these bones live? The answer, at last, will surprise us all with the force of
it’s YES! WITH THE HELP OF GOD!
AMEN