The Life of Lazarus

Lent 5A-26
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

Lazarus was dead. There was no sugar coating it. The scene Jesus and the disciples encounter at the home of Mary, Martha and the dead man is familiar to most of us. The regular routines of life and commerce had stopped. Family, friends, and neighbors are gathered. They sit together in clumps, engaged in quiet conversation marked with tears, probably eating abundant simple food others have prepared.

It should be clear by now today’s gospel isn’t about our happy bright, everything’s going right days. This gospel is for all our horrible bad days. Today’s readings are for those who feel half dead, for people afraid to even to hope. Our scripture invites us who are in mourning now to come worship, to receive the breath of the Spirit, to hear the voice of Christ, to be fed at the table, and to celebrate the life God gives even as we acknowledge we do not always understand it.

Anne Lamott writes in her beautiful book called Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair, “The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we’ve been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here.” (p. 81)
Jesus said, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead to wake us from our own tomb-like existence. Jesus and the disciples walked back to Bethany in Judea. Jesus walked into the midst of murderous enemies and to a dead man’s grave bearing the power –not of wrath or retribution—but of life.

Lazarus’ name means, “God helps.” Lazarus lives in a town named Bethany, meaning “House of Affliction.” Lazarus of Bethany means, ‘God helps those in affliction’. This means ‘Lazarus’ is us. Lazarus is you. Lazarus is me. Lazarus is our church, our neighborhood, our nation, the world around us. This is a story about the ubiquitous reality, opportunity, and pain of resurrection. In the tomb of Lazarus, we confront the painful truth that not everything that lives in us is worthy of our life.
Most of us must learn life’s lessons the hard way. Here is wisdom born of pain, born of loss, born of struggle, born of mortality, and fear of death. When we let the walls go up, the air goes out. It’s all too easy to shut our self in and cut off from one another. While we keep all the doors and windows shut tight so no light or air can get in. It shouldn’t surprise us that our lives begin to stink a little.

Our readings are like a survival kit, packed for us by our ancestors in faith for when we find ourselves shut in our tombs or stuck in the ditch. Scholar and preacher, Walter Wink, has said the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel, whom we read today, may be the first in all of scripture to proclaim the promise and power of the resurrected life God offers through the always present power of grace.

Ezekiel’s joyful discovery was born of long suffering. The desolation of war and forced exile into slavery in a foreign land led the prophet Ezekiel to envision the nation of Israel as a wasteland of bones scattered across a desert valley (Ezekiel 37). Bones that spoke of what was but is no more. No more Promised Land. No more Chosen People. Now their bodies were wrapped in chains. Their freedom swallowed in a living death. The prophet Ezekiel testifies to the power of God to rekindle hope even after we have become utterly hopeless.

Helpless and hopeless is exactly how Mary and Martha felt upon the death of their brother (John 11). Our bible does not offer an antidote to the very real painful realities of life. When Jesus saw Mary weeping, the King James says simply, “Jesus wept” (v.35). With his tears, Jesus assured Mary and Martha, not only that their beloved brother is worth crying for, but also that they are worth crying with. He acknowledges the grief that must inevitably accompany love. He acknowledges his own mortality. By raising Lazarus, he will seal his fate in Jerusalem. With his tears Jesus kindles the fire of hope in believing this old world that so grieved Israel, that provoked the psalmist, that still vexes us, can yet be changed for the better.

He calls us out from our tombs. Anne Lamott writes, Saint “Augustine’s insight that to search for God is to have found God is deeply profound, because the belief we hold in the existence of another world opens space within us, and around us, which creates a more radiant reality. A radiance is inside us, just as it is visible outside us, and to seek it is maybe to catch a glimpse from time to time of a light within, of a candle at the window of our heart, of a home somewhere inside.” (Anne Lamott. “Stitches.”)

In this light we glimpse the truth, all people are one. Stumbling from the tomb we breathe in a fresh outpouring of the Spirit. We find within ourselves a new mind, a new heart, a new consciousness of life’s interrelatedness. We are living once again in a new age of Lazarus. There is new Pentecost stirring in the human soul bolstered by new science and the ancient witness of our ancestors. All things are one.

Such resurrection implies transformation and transformation begets both hope and fear. Fear begets fundamentalisms that pop up like dandelions in times of in profound change. Unquestioning, incurious, rigid, and violent fundamentalisms of religion, of culture, of racial hierarchies, of gender, sexual orientation, and you name it, are attempts to return to the relative peace and predictability of our tombs. Tragically, they do not, they cannot yield peace but lead to further fragmentation and strife. We are right now fighting a new war started by fundamentalist Jews against fundamentalist Muslims alongside fundamentalist Christians who all claim God is on their side.

“The word ‘revelation’ is from the Latin ‘revelare’ which means ‘to lift the veil.’ Jesus is our greatest gift of revelation.” We step from the tomb into the light of day. Jesus rolls away the stone. He lifts the veil, not to show us an exclusive truth [belonging only to Christians], but to show us the most inclusive of truths, that we and all things are made of God. We can humbly share Jesus with the world. We can offer our treasure in love. (John Philip Newell, “A New Harmony,” p. xxv).

Jesus reminds us of what we have forgotten. Jesus, our epiphany, discloses to us what is deepest in the life of all things, the sacredness of everything that has being. (J. S. Eriugena, “Periphyseon,” p. 692). Jesus reveals the hidden ground of our buried in the depths of our consciousness (C. G. Jung, Psychology and Religion, p. 89). The gift of resurrection and new life is not opposed to the wisdom of other traditions. It is given to serve the wisdom of other traditions. We do not have to compete with one another. We complete one another.

Thomas Berry called this a “moment of grace.” (T. Berry, “The Great Work,” p. 198). It is a decisive moment in which we are being offered a new-ancient way of seeing with which to transform the fragmentation of our lives and world back into relationship. (Newell, p. xxvi). It is the way of Lazarus. It is the way of love. It is the way of peace. It is the way.