Lazarus Had to Want to Live

Lazarus Had to Want to Live

Ezekiel 37:1-11 & John 11:1-45

Lent 5A

I was having a conversation with a friend earlier this week and I was talking, lamenting really, about the rainforest-esque quality that our weather has had, that because my house was a new construction and the builders decided not to sod in the back 1/3 of the lot and even though many of us in the neighborhood have tried to seed it, very little grass has grown and it more resembles a mud pit than an actual backyard. You know, the kind of space where children can play, or you can put up bird feeders, or that you want to hang out ever. As you can tell, I (and my neighbors) are not bitter about this state of affairs at all. This is made all the more pronounced for me because I came from Alabama and a back yard situation that was a close to heaven as I think one can possibly get on this side of the Jordan. So, picture this. My backyard had a large screened-in porch with a a rug and a space heater and a table and chairs. On the wall was a television where I could watch football in the fall months, Lesley and I could sit out and watch news or one of our shows after the kids had gone to bed. It was wired with speakers and in the afternoons, I would sit out there any listen to NPR or a Grateful Dead concert. And the whole lot was filled with a number of bird feeders each with a different kind of feed in order to attract different types of birds. Large blue jays in one. Goldfinches in another. Tufted titmice who came in and wrecked their feeder like a 4 year-old might wreck his bedroom (or so I’ve heard). But maybe the best part of all of that was in the earliest hours of the morning. When everything was still and quiet. When everything was cascaded in a darkness that was just beginning to show wisps of light. When there felt as if there were not another soul on the planet. For it was then that I could slip out with coffee in hand, with book in hand, and just sit and think and pray and watch the sunrise crest each day with solemnity and reverence demanded by the perfection of God’s beautiful creation unfolding before me. It was as if the whole of the world was slowly but inexorably coming to life all at the same time and it was there for me to sit and watch. And that formed the foundation for my day, everyday. That was what happened before children woke up and there was breakfast and school lunches to be made and clothes to be picked out and backpacks to pack and all the other stuff that seems to invade the perfection of the cosmos without fail each day. Before any of that was the quiet of watching resurrection and redemption happen over and over and over again and the longer I lack that piece of the puzzle in my life that more I long for it. It was my unquestionable proof of God’s providence and the movement of the spirit everyday and apart from it, things cease to make sense very quickly. And I have tried to recreate it here. I still have my quiet time in the morning with coffee and reading and prayer but absent sitting in the midst of creation with cool air and birds chirping and watching the light wrest control of the day from the night I’m just not in quite the same frame of mind and I miss it.

This Sunday, this year is a real conundrum for me that I didn’t predict particularly well. We commenced our Lenten journey together we me telling you, promising you that we weren’t going to dwell in the darkness of the season, in demands that we give something up, in the call for us all to die to ourselves that we might live in Christ because it all felt like too much to ask of a time in our world when death, dying, lack, and darkness seemingly threatens to subsume everything. And yet, had I thought a bit more about it, I would have remembered that these two stories were sitting where they always were in the journey. Stories in which Ezekiel finds himself cast into a large boneyard with death and decaying all around him. Stories in which one of Jesus’s closest friends dies and Jesus is so swept up in the emotion of it all that he breaks down and weeps. Stories where the gathering whether singular in the case of Ezekiel or the whole of the town in the case of Jesus is called to stare deeply into the mystery of death and find that ever present spark of light and life and we believe continues to burn after our earthly lives have drawn to a conclusion. And the reality is that I love both of these stories deeply. They both capture something that is eternal about the nature of God’s care for all God’s children. They both capture something that is everlasting about life even when it seems to have come to an end. They both capture the ever-present love that sits at the base of the cosmos that forever holds all of it in tender care. And so, in order to keep my promise to you to not dwell of death and on darkness, I want us to look at these stories not with the perspective of the prophet, of the townspeople. Not as surrounded by the seeming finality of the boneyard, the tomb, but as a people who are expectantly waiting for what comes next. What comes next in the story of Ezekiel and the vision given to him by God to see life emerging from the deadest place one can possibly imagine? What comes next in the story of Lazarus some four days in the ground and yet just waiting for life to erupt out of that place and into the world? For just as on my back porch every morning, I could celebrate and bear witness to the power of light to overcome the darkness of the evening tide. Just as life began to slowly but without fail appear all around me. Just as in the stillness of each new day I could feel the Holy Spirit all around me in the cool breeze moving across the face of the earth as she did at the beginning of creation. So, too, are we called to see that same light, that same life, that same movement around all of us in every new moment.

It is easy in the midst of the brokenness of the world to get lost in the struggles, the pain, the hatred, the division that seems to plague our existence. To see places where war rages on, places where natural disaster wreaks havoc on already desperately impoverished populations, places where governmental forces have decided to pick on defenseless transgender children who just want to live their lives as they understand them to be, places where people struggle for dignity and hope and a measure of anything that resembles peace. It is each to get lost in all that. And yet. And yet, when God sees all of this pain, this hurt, this beatdown nature of existence that so many of our siblings, children of God, all of them experience in this life. When God sees all this, God sees opportunity to demonstrate the love of God making a way out of no way, casting an everlasting light across the face of those who have been walking in darkness for far too long, calling forth life out of even the earthly tombs that dot our landscapes.

In our passages from today, we are told Ezekiel saw a valley of dried out and decaying bones. God saw a valley teaming with life that had not yet been tapped. Mary, Martha, and all those in the village of Bethany saw a friend who had died. Jesus saw an opportunity for resurrection. Nicodemus, coming to Jesus in the dark of night could not see the world as Jesus saw it. Jesus saw the world as worthy of being saved, every part of it. The disciples encountered a blind man and immediately began to seek to assign blame for the situation in which the man found himself. Jesus saw an opportunity to give sight to one who had searched for it his entire life. The Apostle Paul only saw a small band of rabble rousers rebelling against the Jewish faith. God saw beloved children seeking to follow the one we call God’s child. And today, in wars halfway around the world, do we see people who don’t look like us, act like us, worship like us, or do we see God’s beloved children, our brothers and sisters? When we think about the poor, the downtrodden, those who hope just to survive the day, do we see strangers or do we see a piece of ourselves? Do we see the Christ? What do we see? 

And once we do see. Once we have been given eyes to see and ears to hear it is not enough to stop at awareness. It is not enough to know that there is suffering in the world, that there are people who seek the God’s righteousness and a crust of bread. We have to be thrust out into those places. All our preparation during this Lenten season must move us to be resurrected on Sunday morning and to never see the world in the same manner. The time for pensiveness, for timidity, has drawn to a close and the time for a revolution of love to sweep the world has come and there are no half-measures when it comes to resurrection. The call to follow Jesus demands our all, every part of us and we leave this place inspired and alive and ready to proclaim not a valley of dry bones but one teeming with life. God is forever and always about the work of calling all the children to come home and we are blessed to be a part of that work, to be reconcilers of the world, to be witnesses to the resurrection that we might tell others about it. We are blessed to be a blessing. Now and always, amen.