Sunday

Ezekiel 37:1-14 / John 11:1-44

When the crowd who had gathered for Lazarus’ funeral saw Jesus weeping by the grave, they said, “See how he loved him!”  It makes me wonder if it was the love of Jesus that raised Lazarus.  Of course, it was God who raised Lazarus.  That’s why Jesus prayed ahead of time, thanking God for hearing him.  But it’s as if Jesus is channeling the love of God.  As if the love of Jesus and the love of God are one and the same thing, so powerful that it can even raise Lazarus from the dead.

It makes me wonder if our love can channel God’s love and raise people up.

Of course, we live in the 21^st Century and we know about science, so we know that nobody can be raised from the dead.  That’s why our Call to Worship today is the poem called Credo, which means, “I believe,” by the Christian poet, Frances Copsey.  She died recently of multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease of the central nervous system that usually involves the gradual twisting of the arms and legs into paralysis over many years.  As to what it’s like living with MS, she wrote this short poem called, The Answer:

The answer to the impossible question
“How are you?”
Is “Not so bad, thanks.”
Thus you avoid negativity, duplicity,
And above all, you avoid the truth.

I said that Frances Copsey was a Christian, but I don’t mean one of those christians who believe that once you’ve “accepted Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior” everything will be sunny and bright and you will never have another problem in your life.  How foolish is that?  I mean that she’s a Christian like we are, the kind of Christian who lives in the real world with the scientific facts of life.  Here’s another one of her poems called, It’s Not a Good Day.  See if you agree with me that this poem is both realistic and Christian.  It’s written in the voice of God:

I know you are angry,
Says God. Your silence screams.
So get real,
Be your hidden self with me,
The one that is not
Nice, not nice at all. Don’t be embarrassed,
Bawl if you want to.
Rage.
Sulk.
Kick and pout like a child,
I like children. Yes,
Poo, tantrums and all.
So when someone says “Let us pray . . .”
Knot your arms and mutter
“Will not!”
If it helps,
If it’s where you are just now,
Because where you are is
Exactly where I want to be, too.
With you.

That’s what we call “incarnational theology,” our belief that God is with us…even when we’re having a bad day and we don’t feel like praying, or can’t muster up the faith to even think about God, let alone believe that Lazarus was raised from the dead or that God made those dry bones live back in Ezekiel’s day.  Think of all the crazy-making creeds and dogmas that Frances Copsey must have heard from well-meaning church-goers as she struggled with MS.  But she gives us an alternative to that silly kind of christianity in her poem, Credo:

Theologically speaking, I’m one of the awkward squad,

always asking questions or questioning answers;

it’s uncomfortable for all concerned,

especially me.

I wish it wasn’t so;

I wish I could tuck myself up in tradition,

snuggle down into certainty,

learn to trust,

but I don’t know how—

don’t even know what the God-word means to me now.

I do know love when I meet it though.

Oh yes, I recognize Love.

The people at Lazarus’ funeral know love when they see it, too.  When Jesus cries at the tomb of Lazarus, they say, “See how he loved him!”  It’s not the religiosity of Jesus, it’s the love of Jesus that calls Lazarus from his tomb.  That’s so important for us 21^st Century scientific types to learn.  —That it’s not about the foolish christianity that sets itself up as the enemy of science.  It’s about love.  Jesus taught us that God is Love.  There’s no conflict between science and love.

That’s true of Ezekiel’s vision of the Valley of Dry Bones.  Most of us have seen an animal skeleton when we’ve been out hiking, or at least in a museum.  But imagine, as Ezekiel did, an entire valley of dry bones, human skeletons “countless in number.”  It was a metaphor, of course, for ancient Israel, when their country had been destroyed and all their people either killed or enslaved by Babylon.  That’s why Ezekiel asked, “Can these dry bones live?”  Can the people of Israel be brought back to life?  Centuries later, we know that they were, that the people of Israel were eventually set free and returned to rebuild their county.  But Ezekiel and the people didn’t know that then.  They were living on faith.

Their faith was that God still loved them—even in the worst of times—that God was still with them.  Today, even we 21^st Century scientific types have to admit that, hey, that really did happen, the prophecy was fulfilled.  The people of Israel did reconnect, as if bone to bone, and returned to their homeland and rebuilt their nation.  But while they were waiting, they had to keep the faith that God still loved them, was still with them, in order for God’s promise to be fulfilled.  That’s why we say in communion, “Through the marriage of our faith and your grace.”

Mary and Martha had to keep the faith, too, while they were waiting for Jesus to arrive.  Each of them says individually to Jesus, “If you had only been here, our brother would not have died.”  But then Jesus did a lot more than preventive medicine.  Jesus brings Lazarus back to life, or at least lets God raise Lazarus through him.

That sounds anti-science.  But, then again, nobody takes Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones literally.  We all know that it’s a metaphor that stands for something else. It was Ezekiel’s sermon-illustration when he was preaching to give the people hope during a really bad time.  But that hope did come true: the Hebrew slaves were set free and did rejoin with one another into the body of Israel and return home from exile… and they saw God’s saving work in that deliverance.

600 years later, John’s church was waiting to be saved, too, from the Romans.  Church members were being rounded up and thrown to the lions for the entertainment of the Romans.  They were waiting for Jesus to come back and save them.  Why was Jesus waiting?  If only he were here, they said, this would not be happening.  So John told them the story of Lazarus.

Death is literal, of course; it really happens.  But death can also be a metaphor.  Fear can paralyze us and put us in our graves before we die.  So can grief.  Resentment can be a kind of living death as well.  UCC hymn-writer, the Rev. Dr. Ruth Duck, wrote:

Out of the depths of fear, O God, we call to you.

Wounds of the past remain, affecting all we do.

Facing our lives, we need your love so much.

Here in this community, heal us by your touch.

A lot of us live in tombs of our own making.  We no longer live, we just exist in the shadows of some former disappointment, remaining in the wounds of the past.  We may have received a sad diagnosis, or lost a loved one, or lost at love, and we stay paralyzed by the pain of it.

When I’m tempted toward self-pity, I think of the character that Charles Dickens created in Great Expectations, Miss Havisham.  When she was young, as she was dressing for her wedding at home, at 20 minutes before 9 AM, she received a note from her fiancé, jilting her.  She immediately walked around her house and stopped all the clocks at 20 minutes to 9.  She never took off her wedding dress again and left the cake on the dining room table to rot.  She drew all the drapes and never left her darkened house, which became the tomb in which she lived for decades.  She lived the rest of her life in the eternity of 20 minutes to 9.  Dickens wrote that her long life away from the sunlight prematurely aged her and caused her to turn a ghostly white, so that she looked like a cross between a waxwork and a skeleton.  It was based on a true story.

Things did not end well for Miss Havisham.  One day, while walking past her fireplace, her wedding dress caught on fire and was literally burned off her, which eventually caused her death.  In her final days, suffering as if in hellfire from her burns, she felt guilty as she realized how many people she had hurt by taking her grief out on others.  Miss Havisham had jilted life.

Not all of us end up like Miss Havisham.  We recover from our losses and wounds—not in a phony way—we all have bad days and dry patches, and when we suffer a loss, it’s healthy to grieve for a while.  We take to heart Frances Copsey’s poem, It’s Not a Good Day, and trust that God is big enough to accept us when we’re angry and sulking and stubbornly refuse to pray.  We trust that the last line of her poem is true, when she has God say, “Because if that’s where you are right now, that’s exactly where I want to be, too. With you.”  But, ultimately, we each have to choose if we’re going to end up like Miss Havisham or be like Lazarus and come back to life.

I wonder how Lazarus felt about Jesus calling him back to life…knowing that he would have to die again, as we all do.  I wonder if he wondered if it was worth the pain to come back to life.  But then, he had the love of Jesus to come back to.  My father died a few years ago, but 20 years before that he had a heart attack in the parking lot where he worked.  He clinically died but was brought back to life by an electric shock with a defibrillator—in his case, science was used for a loving purpose.  When I was growing up, my dad was a real Type A personality, always working, pushing, achieving.  He was a child of the Depression and always worried about money.  He was an engineer, a science guy, who worked in management for a large corporation.  He achieved a lot, but it was stressful, and he had a heart attack.  But he came back to love.

After his heart surgery, when he came back to life, he was like a new person.  He and my mom decided that they had enough money if they committed to living simply, and Dad retired early and they committed themselves to enjoying life in whatever years they had remaining.  I remember one time, shortly after that, they came out to visit me in California, and Dad invited me to take a walk with him—in the middle of the afternoon!  Before his heart attack, he would have considered that a waste of time, time when he could have been working to make more money.  But now he took time to take me for a walk and he said, “Before I died, I didn’t take the time to smell the roses, but when I came back to life, I realized that the purpose of life is to live.”

The story of Lazarus—in deed, the entire gospel story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrec-tion—is meant to bring us back to life.  Not in the way of calculations and formulas, dogmas and creeds, but in a relationship way, through the love of Jesus.  I love how this story ends.  Lazarus comes out of the tomb, wrapped up like a mummy, and Jesus says to the community, “Unbind him and let him go free.”  Jesus leaves the ongoing resurrection work to us.  When I first came to Sixth Avenue six years ago, one of my first sermons was on this Lazarus story, and I emphasized that unbinding each other from the wounds and worries that keep us from living fully is what our life together as a church is all about.  Ever since then, whenever I share with Brian LeMaire that I have a worry about one thing or another at church, he always replies, “Let me unbind you of that and set you free.”  It’s our little joke, but it does the resurrection work of bringing me back to life.  God touches us in community and is present through us for those who suffer tragedy.

When Jesus cried at the tomb of Lazarus, the people said, “See how he loved him!”  The love of God worked through the love of Jesus to bring Lazarus back to life.  Then Jesus invited the congregation to let God’s love work through their love by unwrapping Lazarus’ mummy clothes and finishing the work of resurrection by setting him free, as Jesus himself went on his way to what we now call Palm Sunday.  There is no conflict between science and love, which is what following Jesus is all about. So let’s be a church that channels God’s love and brings people back to life, so that outsiders say of us, “See how they love them!”

Pastor Dan Geslin

6^th Avenue UCC

Lent 5, 2011