The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA
April 10, 2011
The Fifth Sunday in Lent

Scripture Readings:

Hebrew Scriptures – Ezekiel 37: 1-14¹

¹The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. ²He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. ³He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” ⁴Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. ⁵Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. ⁶I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.”

⁷So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. ⁸I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. ⁹Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” ¹⁰I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.

¹¹Then he said to me, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ ¹²Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. ¹³And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. ¹⁴I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act,” says the Lord.

Gospel – John 11: 1-8, 17, 20-27, 32-44²

¹Now 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?” ….

¹⁷When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. …. 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.” ….

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.” ³³When 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.”

“Take the Death Out of Your Life.”

Someone with whom I’ve been speaking for some time, and who’s been struggling with a difficult and prolonged illness, expressed openly a fear that she’d long kept only to herself: “Will I get better only in time to die?” she asked. Like many of us this person simply but deeply yearned for healing. Wanting to be married, she never had been, and her longing to become a mother eventually turned into just a sad memory. With her friends and family long since dead or no longer nearby, she felt very much alone in a kind of self-imposed exile, afraid that she would die never having fully lived.

The experience of some kind of restoration in our lives, of the realization of at least part of our deepest hopes, is common to us all. We long for the restoration of relationships that have gone bad or become empty, for the restoration of physical or mental health, for a better job, for friends, for a return home, for more meaning to our lives. This same yearning (as we’ve recently discovered in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen and all across Africa and the Middle East) is a yearning that also exists among nations – in fact, in all of the people of the world. Just consider the momentous events that have taken place throughout the world in our own lifetimes! In all of those struggles for liberation and autonomy we see the same glimmers of hope, the foreshadowing of resurrection and restoration.

If you ask me, though, I don’t think Lazarus wanted to be “raised from the dead.” Life was far too much for him. He wanted to just run away and hide. Have you ever felt like that? I have. But this I’ll-never-leave-you-alone Jesus – with his insistence that we live, that we cross every threshold we come across, that we grieve but still grow – this Jesus flooded Lazarus’ dark and deathly solitude with light and life. And so Jesus turns to this unfortunate man’s family and insists, “Release him! Let him go.”

This is exactly what Jesus came to do. He came to contradict our inclination to argue and withdraw from other people, to turn away from pain and real effort, to move us away from our awful potential for making mistakes, and to shatter our comfortable complacency. As it’s long been said by other pastors before me, Jesus came not just to comfort the afflicted, but to afflict the comfortable. And so he shouts again and again: “Lazarus, Mary, Martha, …Doug, come out!” Don’t resist a painful rebirth; don’t turn your own becoming into an abortion. It’s this incredibly powerful reluctance to be that would drag our world back into the darkness and chaos out of which God called it to begin with back in Genesis. It’s this reluctance to be and to grow, to refuse to go through the never-ending pains of moving from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly, from buried seed to apple tree, from tadpole to frog…from protected fetus to a fully formed adult human being, this refusal to be who we were created to be, that will keep us entombed and unchangeable for all eternity – which is just another way of saying that we will have chosen to be dead.

Jesus would reverse such fear and depression – along with the meanness that it often generates. He calls us out of our self-imposed tombs into the light of joy, hope, humor, compassion, love, and life in all of its fullness³ – all of those things that make the cynic sneer. We may hope that the stone behind which we would hide forever will stay put, blocking the clarity and resonance of his call to come out and grow. But Jesus refuses to let us even play dead. The womb is not our final resting place; and yet what fetus, if it knew all of the pain and trial to come would ever want to be born? The repeated wake-up call of Jesus will ultimately be too commanding, though, too challenging to resist, and we’ll stagger out (still reluctantly maybe) squinting with timidity before the light of life (with all of its capriciousness and uncertainty) to hear his next, even more frightening, command: “Untie him! Release her!” Let them go free – to become the poets, the scientists, the saints, the perennial beauties that God intended them to be from the very beginning!

So when Jesus says to his disciples, “Let’s go back to Judea,” they’re horrified! Jesus wants to go back across the Jordan, back toward the threat of death? “Rabbi,” they say, “we just left there, remember? The Judeans were the ones who were getting ready to stone you!” But Jesus is going. He’s walking right into the midst of the car bombs and the gang-controlled neighborhoods, into the custody battles filled with collateral damage. He’s going back to walk among those old, half-buried, moss-covered stones of grief and regret. But he’s not going back just to sacrifice himself on the cross of somebody else’s anger and fear, as if sacrifice were some kind of virtue in itself. He’s traveling into harm’s way in order to do what he’s always done, and to be what he’s always been: the one who calls us into new beginnings, into life, toward resurrection. He’s going back to open up the graves that we’re not even completely convinced that we want opened, and to call out of them the kind of justice, forgiveness, and healing that in the face of threats of death we thought could never be. And he wants us, his disciples, to go with him. He wants us to be there when he comes to Bethany and says, “Take away the stone.”

The common human experiences of suffering and death are not being denied in our readings for today – whether they be the reality of exile as experienced by Ezekiel and the people of his day, or the inevitable death of Lazarus and the grief of those who loved him and will experience it all over again, or the rejection that led to Jesus’ own death, or the daily struggles we all face to live according to the spirit of compassion that we’ve received. And yet you and I are being called today to look within what seems like lifelessness and find there, instead, the reality of life in all of its fullness.

Can these bones live?

The wonder in all of this is that given the life-and-death realities of the world at large, our deepest human communion doesn’t seem to be that we discover a way to live forever (None of us gets out of here alive, after all!), but in the common experience of uneasiness – a “dis-ease,” if you will – about how we will die, coupled with our deep desire to experience some measure of joy and the intimacy of family or quality relationships in our lives before we do.

Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, long considered by many to be one of the most foremost authorities on death and dying, was moved to write a poem following the death of a patient with whom she’d been working; she put it this way:

…in this world,
nothing takes without also giving,
and death has given a richness of life
to be valued and cherished,
until the moment is over.
So recognize the supreme secret:
Death will one day take life from you,
so while you are able,
take the death from your life.⁴

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