What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, April 10, 2011

Fifth Sunday in Lent
Ezekiel 37:1-14 • Psalm 130 • Romans 8:6-11 • John 11:1-45

Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, "Lord, he whom you love is ill." But 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." Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was. ... When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. ... When 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." When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, "Where have you laid him?" They said to him, "Lord, come and see." Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, "See how he loved him!" But some of them said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?" Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus 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." Jesus said to her, "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?" So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, "Father, I thank you for having heard me. I 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." When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!" The 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." Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him. (John 11:1-6, 17, 32-45)


When I was on internship, I was part of a conference one day where a nursing professor was talking about death and dying. She said a line that I will never forget: “Last time I checked, we are all 100% terminal.”

With our Scripture readings for today we are presented with a rare opportunity to talk about life and death—not when there is a crisis, not when there’s an emergency. But about what God does for us despite the fact that we are all terminal. Last time I checked, that is.

There are a lot of ways that we try to deny that we are going to die. We don’t like to talk about it. There was a great story in the NY Times last summer called “The Pacemaker that Killed My Father”, about a man who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, and then had another doctor put a pacemaker in him who didn’t know he had Alzheimer’s. He was given life that tried to defy death. This man will now live longer with a de-habilitating illness than he could have. We live in a death-denying culture. We want to be cured more than we want to be healed.

All that Ezekiel and the Israelites saw around them was death. They didn’t have a choice to deny it. They were in exile, in captivity, under persecution in the area now known as Iraq. But the Lord gave Ezekiel a vision of resurrection—a vision of hope—a

vision of God taking dry, dead bones, and connecting one bone to another, giving them flesh, and giving them the animated Spirit breath of life! You remember the spiritual “Dem bones, dem bones, dem…dry bones.” There’s a reason African-Americans created this spiritual: it gave them hope in the midst of slavery.

It at that moment when Ezekiel prophesied that vision, it wasn’t about whether it was true, or whether it would happen. It was about God giving the Israelites hope. The Israelites had gone through a time when they only saw God as being alive in their Temple in Jerusalem. Now they were gone from that. Where was God?

Ezekiel prophesied: God was still with them. Dry bones and death could not keep keep God from breathing new life into this exiled place they thought God had given up on. What’s so amazing about Ezekiel’s vision is that it wasn’t the beauty or the awesomeness or the sacredness of the vision itself. It was what the gift of this future image of dry bones did for the Israelites in the present moment: it resurrected their present reality.

It’s funny, isn’t it? When we talk about death—we actually end up talking about our present lives. In one of his books (Will the Circle Be Unbroken) Studs Terkel interviews people about death no matter who the person is, when they start talking about death, they end up talking about the dreams they want to fulfill before they die, and stories about the deceased whose lives have influenced them, and stories of what they experienced at someone’s death. When we deal with death—we end up dealing with life.

Jesus sees death for all its ugliness. He weeps with all his heart at Lazarus’ tomb. It’s one of the rare times in the Bible when he truly lets all his sadness for the

human condition really hang out there. Jesus raises Lazarus not as a cure-all, not as something to have him live forever. Lazarus will die again. But Jesus raises him as a witness to the glory of God, for the sake of us who are witnesses to Jesus’ mercy even in the face of death.

We can be a part of giving that hope of Jesus in the face of death. Today United Lutheran is a part of over 1,000 faith communities across the country that are honoring “Lazarus Effect Sunday”, sponsored by the ONE Campaign. The “Lazarus Effect”, is the effect that Jesus has on Lazarus and on us by his rolling away the stones that keep us in the tomb of the stigma of death—an effect that doesn’t deny we will die, but that invites us to live our lives in relationship with the ONE, Jesus, who is our life and our resurrection. He is the ONE who is our “Lazarus Effect.”

What the ONE Campaign wants to remind us as congregations, is that the promise of new life in the face of hopelessness, is the same power he gives us to support those with the least amount of hope in our world—including the millions upon millions affected by the HIV/AIDS disease in Africa. Even though the diagnosis of HIV/AIDS is still 100% terminal, 40 days on Anti-Retro Viral drug therapies, costing 40 cents/day, sees an amazing improvement in the quality of life of someone who is living with HIV/AIDS.

In a short HBO documentary called “The Lazarus Effect” (which anyone can watch on You-Tube), we see the stories of HIV/AIDS patients Constance, Bwalya and Concilia who used to be skinny, frail, weak and hopeless. After taking their medicine, we see them gaining weight, strength and most importantly, hope. We see them rejoining their communities, and reconnecting with their friends and family again.

All this happens because they were given a dream, a vision of how they could live their lives differently—even in the face of death. We can support that dream given to Constance, Bwalya and Concilia by telling our government to continue funding the AIDS Global Fund which supplies these life-giving drugs by signing the ONE Declaration after church today or at www.one.org.

During Lent, we’ve been given a dream, vision, a hope. The “40 Days of Purpose” theme has included us reading Living Lutheran by David Daubert. In it he talks about ELCA congregations that are growing even in the face of what seems to be like a wider denominational dying process. A study in the late 1990’s showed that in growing congregations, it wasn’t about how many programs or activities a church had—it was about 1) how clearly they articulate their mission, and their purpose and 2) how open are they are to change for the sake of “being effective for God.” The urgency for catching this dream at United Lutheran is real!

God gives us dreams of a future to dream about our church’s future and to open us to embrace change for the sake God’s mission. God breathes this vision into our dry bones, the same breath where the dead are called to face life with hope. We as the church are here to live, not to count down to death, but to dream, to have a united vision of hope, even in the face of death.

What are the dreams, the visions, the hopes that sustain us in our lives—and as the church? Where are the valleys of dry bones or dark tombs in our lives that need to receive the breath of God today, or that need to receive Jesus hands reaching out to roll away the stones where we have given up?

As we head into the Holiest Week of the church year starting next Sunday, we will go into it walking with "40 Days of Purpose" under our belt. With God's help we have accomplished a lot this Lenten season! Today, we walk forwards to face Good Friday with visions of resurrection in our mind’s eye of dry bones coming to life, and of Jesus Lazarus out of his tomb. These dreams and visions will sustain us to face death, and live in hope of resurrection. Amen.