Fifth Sunday in Lent
This morning’s readings are two of the most powerful, dramatic and eerie stories in the Bible. The first is a story of dry bones that come to life…
Ezekiel had a vision and it went like this:
God lifted me up and carried me across a great valley. A huge moon shone down and everywhere I looked there were bones, dry bones, bones shining in the moonlight…
In Ezekiel’s vision, those dry bones are all that’s left of God’s chosen people Israel. They’d been carried into exile far from the Promised Land, far from everything they’d known and loved. They had been God’s very own chosen people and now they were nobody. Their bones had dried up, their hope was lost and they thought their story was over. And then God asked, “Can these bones live?” Of course, the answer is “No.” They are bones. No skin, no sinews, no breath of life. They aren’t even skeletons, they’re just a heap of dried bones. But God’s ways are not our ways, and those dry bones will live again. Jesus was so deeply steeped in the scriptures, that he may well have had Ezekiel’s vision in mind when he walked up to the tomb of Lazarus and told them to roll away the stone. Everyone thought he was crazy, of course. “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.”
These are stories about heartbreak and anger, about hopelessness and hope, about dying and rising. The people who said ‘Our bones are dried up! Our hope is lost! Our story is over’” really believed it was true. It’s a feeling we know too – our hope is lost, our story is over. And left to our own devices that might play out. But we aren’t left to our own devices, and our God always, always has more imagination than we do! Maybe we can’t imagine dry bones coming back to life, but God can. Maybe we can’t imagine the exiles coming home again, but God can. Maybe we can’t imagine the lost being found, but God can. Maybe we can’t imagine life overcoming death, but God can.
In our gospel reading, Martha’s heartache was an ache so overwhelming that she could scarcely bear it. Many of us know this feeling too. And when we’re in the midst of such deep suffering, heartache sometimes turns angry and we can be tempted to look for someone or something to blame. I suppose we could call that human nature. After all, blame is an excellent defense mechanism. It does a good job of helping to protect our sense of self-preservation or even self-esteem. If we can blame someone or something, we don’t have to take responsibility for things gone wrong. Blame gives us a sense of control. If we can blame someone or something for things gone wrong, we feel that we have some control over things going wrong. Blame distracts us from fear. If we can blame someone or something, we don’t need to be so afraid of the bad thing happening to us. “Lord if you had been here my brother would not have died.” In her heartache and suffering, Martha blames Jesus who should have come days earlier and cured her brother. But no. He waited too long and so her brother Lazarus died.
Questioning God, being angry with God, wondering where God is or even if God is, are all very real and important parts of our faith journeys. And while I believe with my whole heart that God is still making miracles, I do not for a moment believe that God is busy manipulating the world so that our lives will be perfect. “Lord if you had been here, I wouldn’t have lost my job, wouldn’t have gotten this diagnosis, my marriage wouldn’t have ended, my beloved wouldn’t have died.” But jobs are lost, scary diagnoses happen, marriages end, people we love die. Does that mean God is not with us? Does it mean God doesn’t care? Of course not. Jesus didn’t promise us a life of ease, quite the contrary. Suffering is a very real part of human life. The paschal mystery that is dying and rising is a pattern for our lives and doesn’t only have to do with mortal death and rebirth into eternal life. There are losses, little deaths throughout our lives. Jobs end. Relationships end. Children leave. We lose our health, our independence or maybe just our self-confidence. But that’s something of what it is to be human. Dying and rising, dying and rising, dying and rising. In every end there is a new beginning. One door closes, another opens; there is no end to the ingenuity of God’s grace.
The raising of Lazarus is the last and most dramatic of the seven signs in the Fourth Gospel, a series that began with the wedding at Cana where Jesus changed the water into wine and continued with him healing a royal official’s son and a man at the pool of Bethesda, feeding 5,000 people with 5 loaves and 2 fishes, walking on water and healing the man who’d been born blind. Each of these signs uses a story, something that happens, to reveal a dimension of
Jesus as the one who does what God does. He heals, he feeds, he makes us see, he
subdues chaos by walking calmly across the wild sea, he even overcomes death. Martha knew her brother would be raised from the dead in the resurrection on the last day, but Jesus gave him life that very day. Don’t miss that. God is giving life this very day.
God is right here, right now, in the midst of everything going on in the world around us and the world inside us. And even in the midst of all of our heartache and fear and grief, especially in the midst of all of our heartache and fear and grief, God is right here. But if we don’t stop or at least rest from all the clatter and din of merciless and ugly rhetoric, of lies and dire predictions, of cruelty beyond measure… we might not be able to see that God is right here. And that, my dears, is what this story of Lazarus is actually about. Even when it feels like God is absent, God is right here. God is always here.
God promises always to be with us. That doesn’t mean God will swoop down and wipe out the people and systems we believe are responsible for the condition of our country and our world right now. That isn’t how God works. God is not swooping down to change the power structure of the world any more than God is swooping down to give you a parking place. What kind of God would do what is being done in the world today? For that matter what kind of God would do what is being done in the world on any “normal” day? Nearly 15,000 children die of starvation on any “normal” day. Of course, God is not swooping down to manipulate the world, and somewhere inside ourselves we know this. Our God is the God of love, and I believe God’s heart is breaking just as our hearts are breaking for the ones who are starving, the ones who are imprisoned, the ones the ones who are scared, the ones on the front lines, the ones who have died.
And still we ask, “Where is God in all of this?” We ask, “Why isn’t God fixing things?” even when we know God will not swoop down and fix the world. God came among us, came to be one of us, precisely to make that point. God incarnates; God does not manipulate. God incarnated in Mary’s newborn baby boy and God incarnates in us, just the same. God is not distant and manipulative. God is present in each and every one of us and the way God works in the world is through our presence and action. It is not enough to pray. It is not enough to hope. It is not enough to care. It is not even enough to love if our love does not move us to action. God is not fixing things. And why? Dear ones, it’s because people are not fixing things. We can’t simply pray for an end to violence. We need to change the structures that allow and encourage it. We can’t simply hope that there will be an end to hunger. We need to feed people. We can’t simply care about unhoused families. We need to have a hand in finding shelter for them. And we can’t claim we love our neighbors if we can’t give them a ride, take them a meal, visit them when they are sick, and share in their heartaches as well as their joys. Believing in God isn’t an idea we carry around, it is a call to action. The people of St John’s know this, and you live it. I hope that brings you great joy even in the midst of all the difficulty around us. God’s love, alive and lived out in you, is changing the world.
So you see, God is here. On this very day, God is bringing dry bones back to life, through you. Our story is not over, our story begins anew everyday with the God who says, I am going to open your graves, O my people. I am going to open your graves, and raise you up. I will put my Spirit in you, and you shall live. I will bring you home from the places of exile, and there I will live among you. And you will know that I, your God, have done this. You will know that I, your God, am a keeper of promises.
Amen.