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When Dead Bones Live Again

 Date:      Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year A

Texts:

Ezekiel 37:1-14

Psalm 116:1-9

Romans 8:6-11

John 11:1-45

 Theme:      There is no reward in being dead and being alive is much more fun!

 Subject:      abundant life

Crucifixion

The rugged fall

In God’s presence.

Drop the lakes of blood incessant?

We bewildered,

Arms uplifted,

Celebrate a mass once more.

Man on man

Against his brother.

Sea of mothers’ tears

Rain on

Till the last drop

Or the One Mind;

Till the heart of love asunder

Flows with water and with blood.

--LDS

Last week, the Gospel reading reminded us that we are all handicapped—that we are born blind, and that not only is Jesus the light of our world but that what he is we are also.

This week’s Gospel reading, the account of the raising of Lazarus, informs us of something even more radical: We are all dead and Jesus is our resurrection and life. Lazarus was dead. Physical death is separation. Physical death is the separation of consciousness, memory, and feeling from the physical shell in which we live. We die. We are gone. Only the memory of our influence for good and for evil persists. Lazarus was dead. Death is frustration. It is the ultimate limit, the end, the point of no return. With death, all the bright hopes for a particular life are over. Lazarus was dead. Death is destiny. The only prediction that a soothsayer can make with one hundred per cent certainty is that all will perish. The exact moment when I shall die is shrouded in mystery, but the certainty is unavoidable. Jesus loved Lazarus. He loved those who shared his love for Lazarus. Their sorrow and grief touched his heart, leaving him confused and troubled. “Jesus wept,” we are told. And these two words, the shortest verse in the Bible, speak volumes of the compassion of the God whom Jesus images.

“Jesus wept.” Remember these words the next time you are angry with a friend, or hurt by loved one, or confused by a stranger’s way of life, or troubled by circumstances over which you have no control.

Lazarus was dead and Jesus wept for him. And then Jesus did something about his sorrow. He looked death right in the eye; announced his defiance of separation, frustra-tion, and destiny; and overcame them.

Even in the midst of life, we are all dead. Death is separation. We are all victims of the little murders, the small suicides, that deprive us of life. There is so much pain in each of us—the pain of not having been loved enough, the pain of being afraid to ask for what we want, the pain of realizing that we have harmed those we love. We deny the pain. We choke it back. We make everyone around us wrong. We wallow in being right. And, in the process, we cut ourselves off from our neighbors, our friends, our spouses, and our children. We pay the price of always being right, and the price is separation.

Even in the midst of life, we are all dead. Death is frustration. We begin life as pure potential. At each milestone in our early lives, we are told that we are the future of the world. We are raised on mother’s cooking, on father’s moral exhortations, and on our media-spawned dreams of romance and success. But life does not turn out the way that we are led to expect. We make mistakes. We lose courage. The fires of romantic love cool. We compromise for the sake of security or because we have responsibilities. We find out that we are as flawed and limited as those imperfect adults who reared us, those imperfect men and women we promised we would never be like! So we do exactly what our parents did—we transfer our expectations to our children. We expect them to climb higher up the ladder of success than we did, to be better educated, to make better choices, to have more, to do more, to be more. And then we walk the floors at night, just as our parents did, frustrated and disappointed. We worry ourselves sick because our children find for themselves ways to waste their potential and defeat themselves that we could scarcely have imagined in our own youth. Even in the midst of life, we are all dead. Death is destiny. The movie is over. The hero has kissed the heroine. The villain has been vanquished. The words, “The End,” have flashed on the screen. The credits are rolling and only a handful remain in their seats.

Everything has an end, a limit, a culmination.

What is is and what isn’t isn’t, and the sooner we realize it the more we will stop worrying about adding years to our life and start adding life to our years. Which of your by worrying, Jesus asked, can add a foot to his height or an hour to her life (Matthew 6:25, Luke 12:25)?

“To be or not to be—that is the question,” Hamlet mused. It remains the question for us. Separation, frustration, and destiny did us in. We have been dead in many ways, for many years. And then this upstart, Jesus, comes and stands just beyond our reach, and shouts at us in a voice that blasts our eardrums like a cannon shot. “Lazarus, come out! Come out of your separation. Give up your frustration. Transcend your destiny.” I think of those remarkable words of Jesus’ when he was challenged by those who did not believe in the resurrection of the dead:

. . . in the account of the bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise, for

he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the

God of Jacob.’ He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him

all are alive” (Luke 20:37-38).

God is the God of the living—not of the dead. In Jesus the Christ, God annuls the power of separation, frustration, and destiny. He give us the authority to live. How can you and I appropriate that authority for ourselves? How can we respond to the God who call us by name and tells us to get out of our caves of isolation? First, we must accept the truth of God’s verdict. We are all dead. As Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans: “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.... [and] the wages of sin is death...”(3:23 and 6:23). We are separated from God, from one another, from nature, from our own true identities. As the bumper sticker aptly says, “Death is nature’s way of telling us to slow down.” And the recognition of the little murders and the small suicides we have committed and continue to commit day by day is the beginning of breaking the power of death in our lives. Get out of your grave, says the One who is the Resurrection and the Life. Stop blaming. Stop whining. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Reach out. Forgive. Reconcile. Restore. Rebuilt. Dare to let the other guy be right and yourself be wrong. Accept responsibility for your own hurt feelings.

Reexamine your expectations—for your own life and for the lives of those you love. Are you allowing yourself to live or using your disappointment as an excuse for staying in the cave? In your most cherished relationships, are you a life-giver or a life-denier? Are you a grave-dweller or a death-defier? Are you a life-avoider or a life-affirmer?

Are you a source of love and comfort or the voice of frustration and disappointment? Are you the home to which a child may come regardless of their successes or failure or the place of confinement from which they must seek escape all the days of their lives? Accept what is. Accept yourself as you are—warts and all. When God commanded us to love our neighbors as ourselves, he clearly expected that we would be able to love ourselves. When Jesus called this the second greatest commandment, he indicated that he shared that expectation. Unless you can admit your failings to yourself, forgive yourself, and begin to honor and respect your own life as the gift from God which it is, you will never be able to overcome the deadness that robs you of life. And unless you can learn to knock off the judgmental attitude, the tendency to exclude from your acceptance all those whose lives differ from your own, you will remain mired in the grave of separation, frustration, and destiny. God accepts us just because we are. When we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). Not when we were perfect or lived up to God’s expectations—when we were yet sinners. This does not mean that God approves of everything we think or do, let alone of all that we fail to do or think. God is a just and righteous God who hates sin, who detests the harm we daily do to ourselves, our neighbors, and our world. The brokenness of our lives breaks God’s heart. That is why Jesus wept.

And yet God call us to life. He speaks his word and we are reborn. He calls us to repentance and restores us to himself. He forgives us and revivifies us. He invades our lives and we are born from above. He cannot tolerate our deadness. After all, he is the God of the living.

There is no reward in being dead and no need. And being alive is so much more fun!

Lazarus, get those dead bones out here. It is time to live!

 Amen.

 --LDS

[1600 words]

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