March 13, 2005
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for Life: Raised to New Life Broad Street Christian Church has named three core values that will direct our ministries in the years to come. The values speak to what is most important to us as we live out the gospel of Jesus Christ in our ministry – what we do inside these walls through worship, study, fellowship, and nurture. These core values are also important for what we do in mission. As Broad Street Christian Church moves beyond the borders of this building, we will give life and shape to our basic values of spirituality –deepening our knowledge and understanding of God, and of justice – doing the right thing for the right reason, and to our third value of relationships strengthening the connections between and among us. The two Sundays previous to this one have talked about spirituality as we overheard Jesus and his conversations with the woman at the well. Last week we dealt with justice as we heard the story of how Jesus gave sight to a man born blind. Today for the final sermon in the series, we find ourselves thinking about relationships in the grief stricken circumstances of the death and raising of Lazarus. We meet Jesus, the disciples and his friends in a transitional time. If you read the first ten chapters of the gospel of John, you will see Jesus in a very public ministry. He is among the people talking, teaching, healing, and telling people about the realm of God. Chapters 13-21 find Jesus moving toward what he calls his “hour” the time of his passion – his death and resurrection. Issues of life and death and of relationship converge as we consider Jesus, Lazarus and his sisters. We know that the relationship between Jesus and his friends Lazarus along with his sisters Mary and Martha was one of close friendship. Luke 10 tells of a time when Jesus was at their home, Martha was busy preparing and was a bit disturbed that Mary chose to listen to Jesus rather than to help her set the table. The 12thth chapter of John will tell us that Mary washes Jesus feet with oil and her own hair. These are intimate acts of people who are in relationship with each other. Chapter 11 and 12 find Jesus in between. He has his encounter with Lazarus, people seek his counsel, he predicts his death and betrayal. And in all that he does, he is strengthening the connections between his followers and God and he shows us something about relationships. First, relationships have the power to transform us. We are changed by our connections with each other. Imagine your life with your closest relationships. How much of your life would be diminished without your best friends, your beloved spouse, your devoted partner, your children, grandchildren, your great grandchildren. What would your life be without your parents and other close relationships you know? We are the people we are because of those relationships. They shape us, they help us to be who we are, and without them we would be different people. So it is with our relationship with Jesus. Through our relationship with him, we see the power of God able to transform us even in the time of crisis and death. The immediate crisis is that Jesus’ friend Lazarus is sick. We can suppose that Jesus knows Lazarus is seriously ill, but he doesn’t do what is natural for so many of us, he does not drop everything and go right away. Instead he claims a teaching moment. This illness will not lead to death, he says, but instead it will help you to see the glory of God. When we are in crisis, when we are in emotional and physical pain it is hard to be patient, and it can be nearly impossible to wait to see the glory of God. We want God to hurry up and fix things, and we begin to question our relationships when God moves too slowly. One writer tells us, “Jesus loves not only Lazarus, but Martha and Mary as well. We are surprised then, that he delays taking action for two days. Even if he has the power to raise Lazarus from the dead, Mary and Martha will suffer terrible grief if Lazarus dies. Jesus can spare them that, but does not do so. As much as he loves them, his purpose is to give glory to God, and that takes precedence. His decision to delay for two days will serve to heighten that glorification. When he finally arrives in Bethany, there will be no ambiguity about Lazarus’ death, the miracle that Jesus will perform, or God’s involvement in the process” (www.lectionary.org/john11.1-45 p.3). When Jesus finally decides to travel the two miles from Jerusalem to Bethany the disciples go with him knowing it’s a dangerous trip. They can get there safely enough but the last time they were there people tried to kill Jesus. And by the time they begin the short walk to Bethany, Lazarus has indeed died. They arrive at Bethany, actually the outskirts and learn the second lesson about relationship, that our most intimate connections involve risk and truth telling. They risked their lives to go to Bethany, but they went nevertheless. It was worth the risk for them to go. We risk some things when we enter relationships, when we choose connection with people. We risk loss of control, we risk not knowing how it will all turn out, we risk being open to what God will do for us through others, we risk being God’s instruments as we reach out to others. The truth is told as first Martha and then Mary become instruments of God as they encounter Jesus. A grief-stricken Martha meets Jesus on the road and says to her friend words that surely stung his heart. “If you had been here, my brother, your good friend, would not have died”. Her truth is that Jesus could have saved his friend. So many of us know Martha’s grief. You know it if you’ve sat at a bedside or at a graveside – if only we’d called the doctor sooner. If only I had done things differently, if you had only let us know before you did what you did. God why now, why didn’t you prevent this heartbreak, this punch to the soul, this horrible agony? If you had been here…why weren’t you here? Martha’s lament is as real and honest as our own. It springs from the cracks in a broken heart, but she does not stop at lament. Let’s go the extra step with Martha. Her relationship with Jesus is deep enough and real enough and strong enough that she can not only share her grief, she shares her faith too. “I wish you had been here, but I know that right now God will do what you ask, I know Jesus, you have that intimate connection with God that makes it possible for God to act through you”. From her honest lament and from her expression of hope, Martha receives a promise and a revelation. “Jesus tells Martha that Lazarus will rise again, and Martha hears his comment as platitude. “Yes, Jesus, he will rise again in the resurrection, but that is small comfort today. Lazarus is dead now, and that is the grim reality with which we must deal today. If you had come earlier, Jesus, we would not have had to wait until the resurrection to see him again. He would still be with us today. That is what we prayed for, Jesus, and you broke our hearts by not giving us the miracle that you could have given us” (lectionary.org, p. 5). Jesus loved Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. His relationship with them was such that he could take the anger he received and give Martha a word of revelation about himself. Martha, it is alright, “I am the resurrection and the life”. What you long for is not a future event, it is here for you now. Your brother will rise because the one with the power to raise him is here”. There may be something in you that feels dead, I would encourage you today to connect with Jesus, to build and strengthen a relationship with him, it is Jesus who, by the power of his love for you has the power to lift you up and give you new life. “Do you believe this”, Jesus asks. Indeed Martha does. Martha is led to confess that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who will come. Our relationship with Christ is made strong when we make Martha’s confession our own. That confession opens us up to the possibility of the miracle that Jesus will perform. It helps us to hear Mary when she comes and makes the same tearful statement as Martha. “If you had been here, Lazarus would still be alive”. Jesus is moved by her tears, sheds his own, and asks where Lazarus is entombed. The people see his tears and hear his question and wonder at what they thing of as his helplessness. “I heard that just a few days ago, he gave sight to a man who had never seen a thing in his life. Too bad he couldn’t save his friend”. We have seen people prosper when we have not, seen churches grow while we stood still, families are spared in nature’s disasters and other are lost. Innocent people are killed in Atlanta and Brookville, Wisconsin and in war zones around the world. Why couldn’t they all be spared? Jesus stands at the tomb of Lazarus and reminds us that in life and in death our greatest connection is to the God who longs for an intimate relationship with each of us. It is from our relationship with God and with Jesus Christ that all others spring. Jesus stands at the tomb secure in his relationship with God. He asks that the stone be moved. He is not deterred by Martha’s concern that there will be an odor four days after Lazarus has been buried there. The glory of God is going to be revealed. Jesus prays and calls Lazarus out of his burial place. He emerges wrapped in his grave cloths. The image begs a question. What binds you so that your life is stunted? Are you so wrapped up in worries about money, or health, family, work, school, so that there is little life in you? Are you bound up by a reluctance to move forward because you don’t know what’s there? Our connection with Jesus is one that calls us out of our bound up places and sets us free. “Unbind him and let him go”, Jesus says. He says the same to us. Unbind yourself from ceaseless worry, trust that the Christ who set you free is with you. Jesus wants to set you free. This is not the time for death, not even when life’s circumstances are hard. There is still a time for life. That is why people came to believe that Jesus was the promised Messiah. This is a miracle life giving story. “No one expects that life can come out of death. No one grasps that Jesus is the life-giving power of God. But Jesus persists. To Martha’s conventional Jewish theology, Jesus declares, ‘I am the resurrection and the life.’ To be connected to Jesus means to be a recipient of eternal life. The un-heard of claim of God’s renewing power in Jesus is then acted on, as Jesus calls Lazarus from the tomb. Deed follows word. Along with symbols of death, intense grief, a skeptical and somewhat impatient audience, the odor of a decaying body, the tightly wrapped grave clothes, Jesus speaks and acts, and there is life” (Texts for Preaching – Year A Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1995 p. 226). In the days ahead, there will be a plot to kill Lazarus, and plots to kill Jesus, but through it all Jesus will declare that his primary relationship, his deepest connection is with God, and in God there is life. It is the connection that makes him who he is, and it is the connection that makes us who we are. Our relationship with God is life itself, promised, fulfilled, and eternal. Our values of spirituality, deeply understanding and knowing God; of justice, doing the right thing in the light of God, and relationships, connecting with each other as God connects with us, declare that we will be about life in this church in all of its abundance, and even in moments of difficulty. We will laugh and cry, lament and rejoice together and declare that this is a place where relationships are formed and strengthened. It is our relationship with each other and with God that gives us hope, keeps us going, calls us out of our dead places and unbinds us so that we can walk as new and renewed daughters and sons of God. May God continue to be in relationship with us and us with God so that at every stage of our lives, we can hear and respond when our name is called from death to life to life everlasting. And may we be in relationship with each other enough to lend a freeing hand when the voice of Jesus says to us, unbind her, unbind him, unbind the church and let it go. Thanks be to God. Amen. Dr.
LaTaunya M. Bynum |
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