RVCC Pastor's Sermon

Sermon - March 9, 2008

“A Little Easter Story”

By Rev. Nancy Foran
John 11:1-45

He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He just was not in the right place. It was as simple as that. He should have been in Bethany just outside of the Holy City of Jerusalem, but he was not there. He was in the wrong place – a two day walk from the home of Martha and Mary and their ailing brother (and his good friend), Lazarus.

If he had been in the right place at the right time, none of this would have happened. Lazarus would still be alive – sick perhaps, running the incessant fever, unable to control the shivers and shakes, desperate and depressed, but alive.

He was alive when his sisters, Martha and Mary, sent the messenger – run, run like the wind, they admonished, and do not stop until you find him. Lazarus is so sick. Surely he cannot hang on much longer to this world.

But now, Lazarus was dead – four days dead, his body beginning to rot in the limestone tomb, as bodies do in the Middle Eastern heat. Lazarus was dead as a doornail. And all the sisters’ waiting and all their hoping and all their praying had been in vain – and the gaggle of mourners and bakers and food bearers had arrived to console the sisters and join them in their keening and wailing.

Only then - when all was lost, when Lazarus was dead and buried, dead as a doornail, did the sisters see their friend and rabbi, Jesus. They saw him through their tears, making his way to the outskirts of Bethany.

And when he arrived at the garden tomb, he confirmed what the rest of them already know. “Yup, Lazarus is dead, dead as a doornail.” And Martha, never being one to keep her strong opinions to herself, lashed out at him in her sorrow: “Lord, if you had been here…if you had been here my brother would not have died.”

Now anger he could deal with, and so the thinking man inside of Jesus told her the obvious: “Your brother will rise again.”

“Yeah, sure, right, at the end of time, but until then, what happens to us?” Martha muttered to herself as she retreated, perhaps to her kitchen domain, there to rattle her pots and pans again in unrequited frustration at the harshness of life.

Did she even hear the words that shattered and shook and changed the world forever? “I am the resurrection and the life.” Did she even see that the tears had begun to well up even as the profound words formed on Jesus’ lips, and that he struggled to hold back his sobs.

Yet, when he embraced Mary and felt her hot tears on the cloth of the shoulder of his robe and when he heard her whisper haltingly the words that her sister had so angrily shouted: “Lord, if you had been here…” Jesus barely heard the rest because he knew what she would say, and his own tears began to run freely down his cheeks and into tangled growth of his beard – and he could not stop them. “See how he loved Lazarus,” the crowd murmured in awe.

And it was then that Jesus went to the tomb, struggling to control his own voice, and commanded the un-commmandable: “Lazarus, come out! Come out! Unholy death, let him go!” And lo, the dead man walked – and the hushed crowd could only conclude, as some of the braver ones stepped forward to unwrap Lazarus from his linen grave clothes, that this indeed was the greatest miracle yet.

However, interestingly enough, John the Gospel writer does not call it a miracle. He calls it a sign – and it is the seventh sign in his gospel, harkening all the way back to the day that Jesus turned those jugs of water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana.

John calls these events “signs” and not miracles because miracles have too much of a tendency to simply stand alone and leave one in awe. Signs, on the other hand, point beyond themselves to larger and more profound truths.

And that, of course, is what we are about this morning – trying to sift through the sheer miraculous nature of this story – acknowledging in some way, shape, or form that sort of magical side of it, but not dwelling upon it as an end in and of itself - and instead lifting from these verses a meaning for today, here and now, whoever we are and wherever we are on our Lenten and life journey.

And to do so, we must first go back, go back hundreds of years to the prophet Ezekiel – and his famous vision of the bones – dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones. Edward Marquart tells the story this way.

“The year was 587 BCE, Before the Common Era. It was the low point of Israel’s history. The nation had become like a desert floor covered with dead skeletons in Death Valley. It was like World War I. No, it was much worse than World War I. It was more like the Civil War and the Battle of Gettysburg where there were dead bodies out there in the fields by the thousands. It was the low point…and the whole desert, as far as the eye could see for 360 degrees, was filled with white bones of long dead young men.

Because, you see, the Babylonians had wiped out the total Israelite army. It was no contest…All the young Israelite warriors were killed. Their bodies were sprawled out on the desert sands as far as the eye could see in all directions, not buried but just laid there to rot in the sun.

The temple was destroyed. The capital city was destroyed. Everybody was hungry or on the edge of starvation. The Book of Lamentations in the Bible says, “All the people groan as they search for food but no one gives them anything. The hands of compassionate mothers have boiled their children. They become their food in the destruction of the daughters of the people.

And the Israelite people who were alive were taken as prisoners, chains around their necks, and dragged back to Babylonia. The Jewish nation had become like the dead skeletons strewn across the desert floor in Death Valley. (No wonder) the Israelites began lamenting to themselves, “God can’t help us. God won’t help us. There is no God. God is punishing us for our sins. We are here to rot and die in the desert. We have become like dry bones.

But there was one person left. His name was Ezekiel. The Bible tells us that God took Ezekiel out into Death Valley, and God looked around the desert floor and asked Ezekiel: “Shall all these white bones covering the desert floor live again? And Ezekiel wisely replied, “Only you know, God, if those bones shall live again.” And God sang softly and then louder, with all the gusto of God, “Dem bones, dem bones, are gunna walk around. Dem bones, dem bones are gunna dance around. Hear the Word of God.”

Then God breathed life into those dead bones – and when the Israelites were at their very lowest point, they heard the Word of God. “Dem bones are gunna rise again.” The nation of Israel would come back to life again.” Perhaps Jesus was thinking of that ancient story when he called to Lazarus in the tomb. Dem bones are gunna walk again. Come on out, Lazarus!

Come on out and show everybody in every time and in every place the power of God. Not just the power of God in the bygone days of Ezekiel when bones danced on arid plains and certainly not just the power of God in some future world that we can only dream about, but the power of God now.

I am the resurrection and the life, Jesus proclaimed. Not - I will be someday, but - I am now. I am now the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will have eternal life, or to translate more precisely from the Greek and in a way that focuses less on what is to come and more on the here and now: “Whoever believes in me will have the kind of life that only God can give.” (Douglas Warren Brown)

What a marvelous sign the Gospel writer has given us as we take the final turn in the darkness of our Lenten journey. You see, now, for us, the road will wind no more. It will take us straight to Jerusalem, straight to the inevitable events of Holy Week, straight to the execution of the one that we have had the audacity to call our Messiah. There is no turning back for us now.

But as we go forward, John has given us this marvelous sign to take along with us. And it will remind us of the deep and profound truth of this story - that just as the power of the love of God reached beyond death in this little Easter-like story to pull Lazarus back, the one who was as dead as a doornail, so God can – and will - reach to pull us back to life as well.

God pulls us back from the whatever rots us from the inside, the darkness, the despair, the intolerance, the fear, the war mongering, the petty jealousies, the resentments that eat at our hearts and make our souls as dead as a doornail too. Come out, God commands each one of us. Come out.

Pray this week, pray every week that you will, at the very least, entertain the possibility that God can pull you back to life. Pray also that you will allow the power of the love of God to act in your life now. John tells us that Jesus says not “Someday in the deep mists of future time I will be the resurrection and the life, but now, right now, I am the resurrection and the life.” And as Beth Quick points out: “That means that our lives can be resurrected, brought back to life, much like the dry bones in our text from Ezekiel – right now. We can be made new, transformed, redeemed, refreshed, remade, right now.”

For me, therein lies the hope of Easter – and that is what I shall carry with me through the dark of the days to come – simply that if I can only let God be God, then right now, I and you and all the world can experience the kind of life that only God can give.

And so as we draw near to Palm Sunday I say - thanks be to the messenger who did not get to Jesus on time. Thanks be to Martha for her anger and to Mary for her tears. Thanks be to Lazarus for walking out of that limestone cave of a tomb –like the little Easter story that he was - like a preview, a trailer for the blockbuster that comes in just two weeks.

Sermon - March 9, 2008

“A Little Easter Story”

By Rev. Nancy Foran John 11:1-45

By Rev. Nancy Foran
John 11:1-45