A sermon manuscript for the Fifth Sunday in Lent.
Readings: Ezekiel 37:1-14, Psalm 130, and John 11:1-45.
Jesus said, "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”
Jesus comes to us to live with us in a world where life and death are in a constant dance. Blooming oak and ivy find their nourishment from the soil made up of things long dead. In hospitals, life begins and ends not just daily, but even hourly. Sometimes it seems like this whole world is a swarming train platform with passengers arriving to begin new journeys at every moment, even as the journeys of others end.
Yet, despite how fundamental this truth is, we live in a culture that is simultaneously fascinated with and yet in almost utter denial of death. Hospital and crime dramas populate network television. Yet, they are interspersed with advertisements for clothes, cars, creams, and so many other products that promise perpetual youth and beauty.
But today’s scriptures put us unavoidably in touch with the death we know to be real even as we try to hide from it, or to keep it safely confined to television, or to buy it off with so many consumer goods.
In Ezekiel: we are taken to a valley eerily full of dry dismembered skeletons… In John: to a body rotting in a tomb… In the psalm: to a voice crying from the depths… from drowning in the sorrow and desperate hope of waiting for the presence of God.
This is the reality of death, and it confronts us in scripture today. And, even as we turn to look fearfully into death’s face, we are offered a promise that is so hard to believe – for Ezekiel, for Israel, and for Martha, and for us:
God can bring life even to the most dead places…and God will. God does.
God can restore life to a valley of dry, dead bones – can bring a people dead in exile out of their graves. God can reach into the tomb, and call out the one who is 4-days dead, can reach beyond the stench of decay and unbind Lazarus from his grave clothes. God can reach into our own despair, decay, and fear, can bring us into light and life. And God will. God does.
But, strangely, this beautiful, almost unbelievable power is exactly what the powerful ones of Lazarus’ time seem to fear in Jesus… That he is powerful enough, and so fundamentally different from them… that he can turn death into life terrifies them… because it turns their world inside out, and threatens their power.
They rely on things working the other way around, you see… because that is where so much abusive human power derives… from the threat of turning life into death. If the powers of this world cannot bind us in grave clothes and consign us to our tombs, we don’t need to fear them anymore. This Jesus undermines every fear-mongering, abusive, control-seeking power that slouches around this living dying world stalking new prey.
The power of Jesus to call forth life out of death is so strong, in fact, that some people have chosen to interpret Jesus calling Lazarus out by name not only as an expression of Jesus’ personal love and care for his friend… but also as an act of restraint. If Jesus had not called to Lazarus by name, and to Lazarus only, they say, his command “Come out!” might have caused every grave and tomb on earth to open at that moment and their occupants to rise right then!*
And because they fear this awesome power, even as Lazarus steps out of the tomb, we will soon find the powerful ones plotting against this power of life, plotting to make Lazarus dead all over again… And even more, at this moment, the whole gospel of John takes a decisive turn, as the powers of death begin decisively to seek to destroy the one who gives life, who is life. If we hadn’t already, we have turned towards the cross today – toward the final desperate act of death to cling to its throne.
So, even in this story where Jesus brings life and resurrection to earth, we find that we receive the promise of life in a world where death still seems to roams with impunity.
We live in this promise even as Japan mourns thousands dead. We live in this promise even as we receive cancer diagnoses, lose jobs, have our families or our friendships torn apart. We live in this promise even as children sleep on the streets, as people go hungry, as Libya, Syria, the Ivory Coast, and so many nations are ravaged by violence. We live in this promise even as we say good-bye to dear ones who have died.
And yet, we are learning with Martha and Mary and Ezekiel and the exiled children of Israel that we can live without fear… because though death still dances around us, its power over us ends when we are brought into the power of the one who is the Resurrection and the Life… When we die in baptism, we are called out of our tombs and into this world to live without fear.
Sometimes we over-domesticate baptism and forget how much our identity as people of faith is part of the dance of death and life. We may think of baptism as washing or cleansing, as an initiation into a family or community. And it is all those things. But sometimes we forget that it is no less than dying and rising to new life.
Saint Ambrose claims that being covered by the water of the font fulfills the promise we heard on Ash Wednesday, “You are dust and to dust you shall return.” The font is our first grave… For this reason, I think Ambrose might appreciate the sand in our font, because he seems to think that if we could actually immerse people in earth, in dirt, without bodily killing them, maybe we should… because then we might better understand the death and resurrection that is baptism. We might better understand that in baptism we truly enter our tombs… and then those tombs are opened and we are called out by God into the promise of life.*
So, like Lazarus and the bones brought back to life, we still live in this same dancing dying world, but, like Lazarus and the bones of Israel, we have been called out of the grave and unbound from the garments of death… able to look ahead to Easter… to the moment when we will again break the surface of the depths of waiting for God’s promised presence, of the waters in which we are buried. We look ahead to emerging from those depths to gasp again our first breath of resurrected Easter life. We are able to look to the moment when we will not only be free of the rotting grave clothes but will be clothed instead in living white light.
The final victory is still to come for Christ and for us, but the drama is unfolding…as life dances with death, as we journey with Christ toward the cross, waiting for the Resurrection and the Life to bring us finally and fully out of our tombs.
And we trust that he will do this, because we have heard today that the order of things that we know and fear– where living things are made to die – is being turned on its head. And now, in Christ, what dies is made to live.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
*Eslinger, Richard L. "Fifth Sunday of Lent, March 9, 2008" in New Proclamation, Year A, 2007-2008: Advent through Holy Week. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007. 202.
*Ambrose of Milan, "Prefigurations of Baptism" in Edward Yarnold, ed, The Awe-Inspiring Rites of Initiation: The Origins of the R.C.I.A. 2nd ed. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1994. 117.
