Sermon, March 17, 2002
5th Sunday in Lent, Year A
The Rev. Lowell E. Grisham
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Fayetteville, Arkansas

Gospel -- John 11:17-44  Jesus raises Lazarus from the tomb

In his book titled Working, Walter Lunquist writes, "The turning point in my life was the death of my father. It was a funny thing. Here you’re watching this beautiful guy with white hair lying in his bed dying of a heart attack. You hear him ramble and wander and talk about his life: ‘I was never anything.... I didn’t mean anything....’ You watch death. Then you say, ‘Wait a minute. What’s going on with him is going to hit me. What am I doing between now and my death?...’ You begin to assess yourself and that’s a shock. I didn’t come up smelling like a rose." (quoted in You, Mark Link, S.J., p. 111)

As Martha observed in our gospel today, it doesn’t take even four days for death to raise a stench. But if you live with something long enough, you can get used to the smell. As a child we used to visit with our cousins who lived downwind to a paper mill. As we all went outside to play, my sister and I were gagged by the smell. "How do you stand it?" we asked. "Oh, you get used to it. We don’t even notice it," they told us cheerfully.

How much of death do we live with? ...getting so used to the smell we don’t even notice it. But the stench is there. And we are bound in the death rags of old habits and hurts, sealed in the cold comfort of our familiar dark tombs, going through the motions of life like we are on an assembly line waiting for the horn to blow at five o’clock so we can punch our ticket out.

That’s enough for some preachers. They tell us "getting saved" is about making sure you’ve said the right words so that you get your ticket to heaven when you die. Not so for Jesus. His work of salvation was about having life before death. He says to Martha, "Your brother will rise again." And she talks about the future. "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day." But Jesus is talking about now! Here! He says he is the resurrection and the life, right here, right now in the present moment. Live now and never really die, he says.

Our translations fail to communicate the passion behind Jesus’ words. Our NRSV describes Jesus as "greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved...Jesus began to weep. ...Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb." The literal words say that his bowels were churning with emotion, with a passion that includes a portion of anger. He is exploding from within. Weeping with compassion and fury. He is seething and angry with what death has done, not only to his friend Lazarus but also to all of those around him who have given up. He focuses his fierceness upon the tomb and cries with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!"

Deep in the quiet of Abraham’s bosom, Lazarus hears the distant voice of his dear friend speaking to him, telling him to return. And he makes the hard, difficult, choice of struggling back to life, crawling blindly, groping in the dark until he emerges into a new light where he can breathe again and Jesus shouts, "Unbind him, and let him go!"

I know Lazarus. He is a friend of mine. He came to my church hesitantly and cautiously, having been betrayed by an ex-friend who was a priest in a former church. He had suffered a series of failed jobs; a series of failed relationships. He was trying to start over in a new place in a new town. But he had done that several times before, and the same failures had haunted him over and over.

Something had drawn him to that church to visit, and he had heard or felt something that made him want to believe, made him want to trust that maybe this time it could be different. I asked him if he would be willing to talk over his life situation with some people who had also been through some tough times, some people who I knew to be wise and trustworthy. He said okay, and started the risky business of meeting with a group of men to talk about stuff that matters.

He gave therapy another try. And, he started to pray. The contemplative practice of Centering Prayer began to open up interior space in him. He said that in the interior quiet of resting in God’s presence, it was like God was taking him back through a lifetime of hurts and healing them at a level too deep for words. Sometimes he emerged from his prayer with tears that he couldn’t account for.

Finally he experience an emotional catharsis of recollection and healing as his earliest memory of hurt emerged into consciousness. His adult self watched with compassion as he recalled the primordial helplessness of his two-year old self being displaced and usurped by the birth of his sibling. It was a resentment and anguish he had carried all his life, and it had interfered with his every relationship, dulling even his own sense of self and his worthiness. Letting the straps of that bondage fall from his emotional body, he experienced a newness and hope that was like a rebirth. He emerged from his tomb with a joyful shout, unbound and set free. He is happy in a way that has been unimaginable for him since he was two years old.

Episcopal priest Robert Capon has said that "we are in a war between dullness and astonishment." Many of us have buried portions of ourselves, sealing off the hurts and resentments that we were powerless to prevent. Burying them behind the dull, heavy rock of forgetfulness and repression, where they stink and fester, dulling our lives with death and decay from our very bowels.

Jesus is more than "greatly disturbed and deeply moved" about our condition. Jesus is churning with emotion, exploding from within to reach into our wounded depths and cry "Lazarus, come out!" He demands that we struggle against the dark. That we strain against the bonds. That we crawl and dig and scratch our way back into the fullness of light and freedom that is our inheritance.

He speaks to the church and tells us what to do for each other. "Unbind them, and set them free!" That’s what those men did for my friend. And the prayer and the community did their parts to loosen the fetters that had enslaved. We share in Christ’s work of raising the dead and the dull. That is astonishing business. And I can tell you that when my friend Lazarus looks at the turn that his life has made after all of these years of dullness and futility, he is astonished. It’s amazing, he says, to feel so free. It’s like everything is possible, everything is new.

Maybe you’ve heard preachers tell you to believe in Jesus so you’ll be sure to have life after death. I tell you Jesus seething with passion and emotion, moved from his very depths, right here, right now, crying out to you with the loudest of voices – that you might have life before death.

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