Here are the readings: click here!
This sermon also had a visual aid. I wasn't sure I would us one, but I thought it might be fun to try something new. So I brought it up to the pulpit with me, unsure. But I did use it. It was a spiral that I made out of some poster board. It was on a bit of string and would turn around. I know it is nothing like a revolution, a visual aid. But it was still something I had not done in a sermon before.
And now without further chatter here is the sermon!
In Sunday School this fall we have been reading, watching and learning about stories from the book of Genesis. We have been thinking about these family stories, and trying to understand God’s role in their stories. A few weeks ago we got to the story of Jacob wrestling with an angel, and we talked about how each of us in our own way wrestles with God, asking God to help us to better understand the difficult things in life. When I asked the kids what are the hard problems that they bring to God, their answers were all startlingly heartbreaking. Jahzara, whose mother’s military service will soon compel them to move out of Brooklyn told us she wonders why God can’t let them stay in Brooklyn longer. And Annie, who is three, told us she wonders why God makes her mother go to work instead of staying with her every day. This week, I suspect the questions we are all wrestling with have to do Super Storm Sandy. Why were some plunged into darkness while others of us had plenty of light? Why were some homes washed away? Why did some places have a eerie, empty, closed feeling while others bustled like normal? Why were some trapped in their homes? How could life have felt so normal for some of us, while it ended for others? Our Sunday School lessons always end with an art activity, and perhaps tellingly, the art activity for this lesson was creating a spiral of the questions that we wrestle with, and then cutting the spiral into a mobile so that we could observe the perpetual motion of the spiral, and be always reminded of our perpetual relationship with God through our wrestling. Something about the spiraling spiral and part of our relationship with God always being a wrestling match seems apt in our life after the storm. There is no doubt something dizzying about focusing on these questions, but I would like you to keep this image in mind as we look to today’s Gospel passage.
As we confront today’s Gospel about life after death—about the triumph of the glory of God, part of me feels that this text can feel a little insensitive. Certainly the many who have died are unlikely to return to life. And through we know of the Glory of God, right now as a city, and as a people we are experiencing the pain and the weeping and the confusion of the friends and family of Lazarus after he died. They are distraught. They wish that something could have been done earlier, if only Jesus had come four days before, he surely could have healed Lazarus. If only we had realized that this storm was going to be different from previous storms, if only we had better sea walls, if only we had a levee, if only we had addressed rising sea levels and climate change. The frustration, weeping and the feeling of being disturbed in spirit that Lazarus's family felt are familiar to us today. The word disturbed in spirit is kind of an interesting one. In Greek, the language that the Gospels were written in, the word has a connotation of anger. This too is a feeling that we as a city are feeling right now. On a report on NPR that I heard on Friday evening, the reporter was struck by the way that when he was visiting hard hit, devastated neighborhoods and towns, with out failing the people of that neighborhood would tell him that they were confident that somewhere else, some other people were getting more services, better treatment, more attention, faster responses and as a result, people were starting to feel increasingly angry. Or perhaps increasingly disturbed in spirit.
The interesting thing that I find, the part that makes this Gospel less insensitive that it felt to me at first, is that not only are the people, the family and the other Jews upset and weeping, but that upon seeing this Jesus is deeply moved. And then that rather revelatory verse: Jesus began to weep. And we see a few things in that weeping. First of all let's look at what John's gospel says people see in Jesus' weeping. First they say: "see how he loved him." They see Jesus' love for the dead man in Jesus' weeping. But the very next thing they say is "could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?" this is that "if only" response all of us have been having in different ways to the storm damage. But I think the response they don't have, that I think is available to us in reading this Gospel as sacred text is seeing Jesus' humanity in this moment. But more even than his humanity seeing that Jesus is not crying because Lazarus is dead, not crying because he loved Lazarus--but rather than Jesus is crying because Mary is crying. He is suffering because people he loves are suffering. From this, and knowing of the reassuring love offered through God's grace, we see that when we are suffering, when we are crying, Jesus, the son, cries too. This does not relieve our suffering, does not mitigate our suffering, but in it we learn something new about God. The new thing, the good news, the thing that keeps this text from being insensitive is that Christ God freely enters into suffering WITH us. This is of course is related to the large truth we learn in when we see Christ on the cross, Jesus willing to suffer for us. In the imagery from revelation, we have the image of God wiping tears from our eyes.What might this willingness to suffer, this willingness to wipe tears away mean for our understanding of who God is in our lives?Perhaps if we think back to the Sunday School spiral of questions, we can imagine too that Jesus is there with us as we wrestle. Not only is it that we are wrestling with God, but God is wrestling along side us. God is a willing participant in our suffering, a willing companion, and is moved by things that move us. When I hear people ask things after a tragedy like, "How could God allow this to happen?" I think what we can understand from this passage is that God is feeling that too!
But our passage does not end with God weeping. There is more. There is the triumph over death. Jesus has them roll back the stone, and commands Lazarus to come out. When we hear Jesus telling the family to unbind Lazarus from the strips of cloth, we understand that symbolically we are all being unbound from the tyranny of death. But these sort of passages have a different sort of resonance in a week of horrible stories of death and destruction. A week like this makes death seem pretty powerful. We can easily see the role of God and the roles of some of our contemporary saints in the heroism of first responders, and stories of people saved in the nick of time. But we might struggle more to understand the death of two small boys in Staten Island, ripped out of the arms of their mother. There it seems as if death has won out.
How are we meant to understand the victory over death that Lazarus's rising to life at Jesus' command and yet still live in a world where we will all die, and our loved ones will die? What does victory over death mean? What does it look like? Surely we all agree that we are not expecting to be removed from the tomb like Lazarus, but what are we expecting, and when? And how do we envision it?
The writer of the Book of Revelation certainly had no problem with visioning the future. As much as our stories we are studying in Sunday School from Genesis are origin stories, the book of Revelation is an imagining of the end. In thinking about Genesis and Revelation as beginning and end, alpha and omega, one helpful thing emerges for me. Where we (and all things) come from is God, and where we are going (or maybe returning to) is God. We may not embrace all of the symbolism or even the problematic violence, or the exclusionary aspects of the Book of Revelation, but it is a reminder for us that we as Christians have a vision for the future, have an eschatology. We are headed somewhere, and that somewhere is back to God. In think in these times of total destruction and devastation there it feels hard to me to declare victory over death from the pulpit when so many are facing the reality of death, but I can declare our movement towards God.
In knowing that in our end, we will come to dwell in God and God in us, that we can begin to understand that victory over death means that death is no longer the end. Past death we have a God with us. We don’t have to understand victory over death as the end of death, but rather the end of the end. When we go back to the spiraling image that I began this sermon with, I think it’s circular nature, beginning with God and ending with God will be helpful for us in the coming weeks. As we as a church, and as a city respond to the needs of those who have suffered greatly, we can consider the example of Jesus in this Gospel passage as a way forward. We as a church today have asked those who were able, and who got our email yesterday to bring some supplies to people in Redhook who are still living with out power and water. And we will bring those over this afternoon. We will have more opportunities to serve, and to be helpful, more opportunities to weep with those who are weeping, and to unbind those who need unbinding. We will have the opportunity to live out our baptismal covenant. All Saint’s day is one of four days especially set aside in the Book of Common Prayer as a time to renew our baptismal vows. They remind us of the commitments we all make as Christians, and that those we remember today as Saints showed us in their lives and examples. To that end, we will proclaim by word and example the Good news of God in Christ. We will seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves, and we will strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being.
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