Sermon On The Resurrection and Lazarus: 3-13-2005

Key Text Proclaimed in Sermon: John 11:1-45
          "Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. ²Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. ³So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, ‘Lord, he whom you love is ill.’ ⁴But when Jesus heard it, he said, ‘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.’ ⁵Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, ⁶after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was. ⁷Then after this he said to the disciples, ‘Let us go to Judea again.’ ⁸The disciples said to him, ‘Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?’ ⁹Jesus answered, ‘Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble, because they see the light of this world. ¹⁰But those who walk at night stumble, because the light is not in them.’ ¹¹After saying this, he told them, ‘Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him.’ ¹²The disciples said to him, ‘Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right.’ ¹³Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. ¹⁴Then Jesus told them plainly, ‘Lazarus is dead. ¹⁵For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.’ ¹⁶Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, ‘Let us also go, that we may die with him.’

17 When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. ¹⁸Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, ¹⁹and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. ²⁰When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. ²¹Martha said to Jesus, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. ²²But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.’ ²³Jesus said to her, ‘Your brother will rise again.’ ²⁴Martha said to him, ‘I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.’ ²⁵Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, ²⁶and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?’ ²⁷She said to him, ‘Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.’ ²⁸When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary, and told her privately, ‘The Teacher is here and is calling for you.’ ²⁹And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. ³⁰Now Jesus had not yet come to the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. ³¹The Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. ³²When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’

33 When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. ³⁴He said, ‘Where have you laid him?’ They said to him, ‘Lord, come and see.’ ³⁵Jesus began to weep. ³⁶So the Jews said, ‘See how he loved him!’ ³⁷But some of them said, ‘Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?’ ³⁸Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. ³⁹Jesus said, ‘Take away the stone.’ Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, ‘Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.’ ⁴⁰Jesus said to her, ‘Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?’ ⁴¹So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, ‘Father, I thank you for having heard me. ⁴²I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.’ ⁴³When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’ ⁴⁴The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’

45 Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him."

"Our Tomb"
  

          Today’s gospel is like a preview, a coming attraction for a movie, an “advertisement of what’s to come”. Like a movie trailer, the resurrection of Lazarus gives away morsels of the plot line about the upcoming resurrection of Jesus Christ. Coming soon, is a heart-wrenching murder mystery dramatizing the struggle of one man against the odds of royal power, oppressive armies and disloyal friends, a man staking it all on the love of God, a man willing to give up his life, that a poor child may live. Starring.. Arnold Swarz… I mean Jesus Christ. Easter coming to your church in two weeks.
          As a preview of what’s to come, the resurrection of Lazarus doesn’t give away the whole plot. In fact, these resurrection preview scenes resemble more of a resuscitation than a resurrection. Lazarus is resuscitated back to life by the tear-filled beckoning of Christ, and yet there is perhaps a certain disappointment in it all because Lazarus is caught between two eras; before the all-encompassing power of Easter, and as a result surely Lazarus will still suffer death a second time; some wonder if this is why Jesus wept?
          Not that Lazarus was moral or immoral, but I wonder if in fact it is easier for us to understand immorality than immortality. Is it easier to grasp a hard line on morality than fleeting mystical glimpses into an immortal- eternal life of love with God. One seems so present, and one well, so eternal and hard to get our minds around.
          As post-Easter people, we are already part of the resurrection, “I am the resurrection, and the life”, Jesus says. In baptism the momentum of our lives took on new meaning. And yet, we have more in common with Lazarus in our resurrection than with Jesus, we too will still die. Perhaps, perhaps it is not from the chronology of ashes to ashes and life to life that we are to draw out the meaning, but more abundant with meaning is not chronology but the resurrected quality of our lives. We are drawn into the resurrected life of Christ as a quality of our own lives lived for the sake of love. Throughout this journey, our morals may need to be recharged, we may need the life-giving resuscitating-breath of God many times, perhaps over and over. Even while living a resurrected life, we need God’s resuscitation from the life-sapping effects of addictions and immoral habits, deceptions, gluttony, or greed. Like a maple tree, it’s easy to get our sweet temptations tapped and soon life’s vigor and vitality are drained by guilt into buckets of despair.
          Or perhaps we’ve crawled into an inner cave of shame or denial over something, whatever it is, it is going to take nothing less than repentance, God’s resuscitation, and a new breath of strength for us to face again our friends, family, and work-mates with clear consciences and the sparks of hope that forgiveness offers.
These dark caves of conscience are recognized in the Lutheran Order for Confession, which begins “Most merciful God, we confess that we are in bondage to sin, and cannot free ourselves.” We confess here, that sin and our immoralities aren’t things we can easily just slough off, but in a very real sense, we are entombed by them. We finally think to bang on the rock but find ourselves even wrapped up tighter inside our tomb by a burial cloth and it stinks inside the cave of sin; it smells rotten. Even in confession, we cannot free ourselves, and yet the good news is- that while we are stuck, it is Jesus who commands that the stone be rolled away and the burial cloths unraveled, and then says to us- out of the tears in his eyes- live again, I will give you new life, I am the resurrection and the life. Come to me, he gestures, when you find yourself in a cave, and I will resuscitate you again.
          In most ways, humans are much better equipped intellectually to understand immorality better than immortality. Indeed, people like your selves, theologians, teachers, scientists… ponder, how is it that the Easter Jesus can both be felt in the flesh by the finger of doubting Thomas and in the next instance disappear through locked doors. And yet, morality isn’t a solid rock either. As the living body of Christ, we must wonder if the Spirit of God is often found breathing new life into old bones of morality. The church, changing stances on what is moral or immoral? A horrifying case in point is slavery. The horrifying part is I hope self evident for you, the case in point, however, is a famous person celebrated in a few days from now. His story, however, is more often forgotten while the green clothes, the shamrock clovers, and the Gaelic accents are more widely remembered. However, for all the green in your pocket, did you know that St Patrick was once a slave? Thinking of the metaphorical cave of life-sapping sin, St. Patrick was once held in bondage, in a cave not of his own doing, but trapped behind the stone of another’s morality.
          The story goes…
          In the year 387 Patrick was born either in Scotland or Roman Britain to parents Calpurnius and Conchessa. His birth name was Maewyn Succat and only later, when becoming a priest, he took the name Patricus (the Roman name Patrick). At age Sixteen, Patrick was kidnapped by Irish Raiders and sold into slavery in Ireland. In a written letter, preserved to this day, called his Confessions, he himself admitted that up to his point he cared little about God. In the year 409, after six years as a shepherd slave, and after a dream from God told him to leave by going to the coast to find passage aboard a ship, he escaped, returning to his family in southwest Britain.
A recent book by Thomas Cahill, titled, How the Irish Saved Civilization, is able to capture the dramatic turn of events in Patrick’s life as he escaped. He escaped because of God’s calling and resuscitating word to come out of the cave of slavery. And then, in another dream was called to become a priest and finally to go back, back to Ireland, where he had been a slave. When Patrick decided to "willingly go back to the barbarians with the gospel," Cahill explains, "he had to figure out how to bring the values of the gospel he loved to such people. These were people who still practiced human sacrifice, who warred with each other constantly and who were renowned as the great slave traders of the day.” His own experience of slavery and God’s salvation, caused him to become perhaps the first human being in the history of the world to speak out unequivocally against slavery.
          "The papacy did not condemn slavery as immoral until the end of the 19th century," and many American Christians not much earlier, Cahill says, "but here is Patrick in the fifth century seeing it for what it is.” St Patrick, far beyond evoking green leprechauns, shows enormous insight and courage and a tremendous ability to suffer with other people, to understand what other people's suffering is like”, even to redefine what is moral because he saw suffering, “because he had been there." Perhaps this is also why Jesus wept?
          Like Mary and Martha with Jesus, women can find a great advocate in St. Patrick. Patrick's Confession speaks of women of spiritual strength, he wrote, of Irish women: "But it is the women kept in slavery who suffer the most—and who keep their spirits up despite the menacing and terrorizing they must endure. The Lord gives grace to his many handmaids; and though they are forbidden to do so, they follow him with backbone." Thomas Cahill even proclaims that St. Patrick is actually the first male Christian since Jesus in 400 yrs of history, to speak well of women.
          Finally, St. Patrick offers us insight about listening for God’s calling especially in very difficult situations and to come out of the cave that has us bound by society or ourselves. Perhaps, even, to finally return and post a sign up in front of that cave to say, this is not right, this is immoral. From what cave is Christ calling you? Has God shown you a dream, a preview of a ministry opportunity coming soon?
Turn around then, be resuscitated by God, be unwrapped by Christ, and be free from the cave. Go to the difficult places and ministries where Christ calls you to bear his witness, not only of love inspired morality, but of God’s love- offering you the time of your life, a quality of life, called immortality.