Preacher's Post 7.0

Submitted by Executive Direc... on March 6, 2008 - 8:58pm.

The Word: Fifth Sunday in Lent

Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 130
Romans 8:6-11
John 11:1-45

Ezekiel's dry bones...Lazarus in the tomb...Is there hope?

Quotable Words:

"Can these bones live?" ~ Ezekiel
"...practice resurrection." ~ Wendell Berry

Preached Words:

Let These Bones Dance

A wasteland of bones in Ezekiel’s eerie dreamscape, dry bones, picked clean, gleaming white in the hot sun. And another kind of wasteland in John’s gospel: grieving women, Lazarus dead, four days dead, decaying in the tomb. Bleak scenes for this fifth Sunday in Lent. Bleak, but familiar stories, these of Ezekiel and John, stories that have made their way into the images of poets and painters and gospel songwriters.

We count on these familiar images: Ezekiel’s bones up rise up dancing. The promise of weeping turning into dancing, the promise of life in the midst of death. It’s a promise, for many of us, that brings us back here, week after week, counting on signs of life to counter the deaths big and little our week serves up, each small disappointment or devastating disaster.

The promise is here in these stories from our ancestors, to be sure, the promise of life, but there’s an edge to the promise. There is no wave of a magic wand in these stories. Before the promise is the command, a clear directive: “Prophesy, mortal, speak, breathe on these bones.” “Unbind him and let him go free.” The promise of life comes right alongside a command, a call to do something. Let’s look at that.

Ezekiel's story of dry bones was addressed to a people in exile--the Israelites captive in Babylon about 600 years before Jesus--a people without hope. Ezekiel speaks to tell them that just as God's Spirit (God’s breath, ruach) had moved over the deep and created the universe, so too God's Spirit could move among them and create new vitality in the children of Israel. But this time they must be the ones to breathe God’s life-giving breath. “Mortal, speak, speak my word of life, breathe my breath, use your lungs, use your tongue, breathe my spirit on these bones.” They had to step up to the plate.

And John’s Gospel story of Lazarus gave life to his community, living as they did at the end of the first century in a kind of exile, separated from the temple at odds with the religion of their parents, struggling to keep their identity intact and their faith alive in the face of Roman persecution. They needed to hear again the story that had brought them together in the first place; they needed to remember the story that gave them their reason for being, the story of Easter, the story of the unbinding that targeted the fear in their hearts and gave them freedom deep in their souls.

So, in the old tradition of Ezekiel and in keeping with the new Way of the Jesus movement, John gives the story of Lazarus, a story not found in the other three gospels. This is a story for a people who had tasted something of new life and longed for more. This community was alive with this new Way, this new Way that changed the way they saw each other, changed the way they regarded life and the way they knew death. They felt a new power, a new Spirit that moved within and among them with the same power, that same ruach that moved over the deep before time began. But sometimes, when the going got tough, when the Roman crosses filled their hilltops, they forgot about that power. Sometimes they got lost in their fear, in their exclusivity, in their blaming of others, especially their blaming of the temple Jews. Sometimes they forgot the spirit of Jesus. So John gives his community the story of Lazarus raised, and his community re-lives the spirit of the resurrection of Jesus.

It all starts with Martha. Martha is the key to this story. In Jesus’ exchange with Martha, John gives us the first clue that something new is afoot. Martha goes out to the road to meet Jesus. Unheard of audacity in that woman--more bold even than that Samaritan woman at the well. Jewish women did not speak to men on the road; they certainly did not speak first; they only spoke if spoken to.

Martha is a good Jewish woman, but she is audacious in her anger and grief: "If you had been here my brother would not have died." Jesus rises to the occasion with equal audacity. “Your brother will rise.”
At first, she thinks he is talking about some kind of future resurrection, the kind of resurrection the Pharisees believed in. No news in that.

But then comes the clincher, the last of the famous “I am” statements that fill John’s version of things. After a series of statements, I am the bread of life, I am the light of the world, I am the good shepherd, John has Jesus say to Martha: “I am the resurrection and the life.”

“I am the resurrection and the life," he says. "Do you believe me?"

And from Martha come the words that are at the heart of Christian faith: "Yes, Lord I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, he who is coming into the world." Martha proclaims him the Christ. It is this proclamation that identified the people of the Way. In the midst of grief, when all hope is lost, Martha doesn’t reach to the past for familiar comfort, she plunges ahead to the new life that is stronger than death. In this very act of proclamation, in the brave defiance of the way of death, Martha’s words speak a new way. The community of John could hear this story and remember not only the past, the earlier times God’s spirit had been present with the people, they remember the future.

Martha’s proclamation of faith announces the wholly unexpected, the wholly new, the impossible, in the face of death. Lest there be any misunderstanding about the radical nature of the transformation from the old ways of death to the new way of life, John reminds his listeners of the teaching of the rabbis which said that the life breath hovered near the body three days, and then left; by the fourth day, the soul was gone. Everyone knew there could be no hope for life on the fourth day, no possibility of resuscitation. Lazarus is gone.

But then, we hear “Lazarus come out!”
Lazarus is alive--not in some kind of afterlife, but in the flesh and blood, here and now. Just as Ezekiel promised that Israel was to be restored out of captivity to be a present light to all the nations, here is Lazarus restored.
And next? What to do with this impossible new life? Get busy. "Unbind him and let him go!" Jesus calls on the ones who hear, the community around Lazarus, to carry on the task of new life.

Now, John’s gospel story could have had Jesus do the unbinding, completing himself the task of bringing Lazarus back, doing yet another amazing miracle, another sign of the presence of God. John usually goes in for the big miracle.

But the raising of Lazarus, even in the remarkable gospel of John that is so set on showing the miraculous, even here the raising of Lazarus is not so much about a divine supernatural intervention in the course of things, as it is about the power of the gathered community.

Divinity is present, to be sure, but it takes the entire community to create new life. The bringing of new life is accomplished by God through Jesus, but it also requires the community gathered ‘round. “Unbind him!” It is all of them, from bold Martha to the curious bystanders, to the skeptical ones who did not see Jesus as the Way to new life, all of them are invited to join in the project of life-giving.

Our gospel is a social one. The stories that gave life and vitality and freedom to our ancestors are not stories about one pile of bones regaining skin or one corpse coming back, or one person finding enlightenment; they are stories about a whole people enlivened again. These are tales of truth about people who come to life as they are called to be life-givers, to share the tasks of prophesying, truth-telling, building, unbinding, the tasks of liberation.

We recognize these stories, because we know our own places of exile, our Babylons where we feel, like the early Israelites, "clean cut off." And we know the grave of Lazarus, the deep grief of losing, the chill of fear, where we fail to remember the future, where we fail to remember to breathe the breath of life.
The good news here is not that miracles happen. The good news in these stories is that vitality, new life, is possible for us, promised to us in fact, even now, in face of our private doubts and fears and the reality of our public world, a world enthralled with the way of death: from Iraq to Afghanistan to the Sudan to the next budget cuts in critical social services for our poor, our elders, our children.

We need that promise of new life in our world. We need Martha. Martha’s courage is not only that she finds her voice; it is deeper; Martha courage comes from her trust. Martha is a woman who has the courage to trust. Martha trusts this man; she opens herself up to trust enough to name her grief and her disappointment in his absence. She trusts him enough to speak the truth. She trusts the reality of the presence of God right before her very eyes in her friend Jesus; she knows he bears the light, she knows that he could overcome the powers of darkness. She declares Jesus to be the Christ before he raises her brother from the tomb.
Martha's resurrection faith did not stop there in Bethany. It keeps on here today with us, each time we trust enough to name the truth, each time we have the courage to enter into grief and work through to the freedom that comes from losing and finding a new way. Each time we remember that the way of God is a life-giving way, a way that always invites us and stretches us beyond our limits into a larger truth. And each time we remember, Ezekiel’s bones dance and Lazarus goes free.

We have just a few days left of Lent, as we make our way toward Holy Week, for the signs of resurrection. Where might we breathe new life into deadness? Where might we trust that God is leading us into a larger truth, a new freedom? Where might we see that our losing is really finding a new Way? What needs unbinding? In me? In our church? In our nation?

Lent is our time to look around, to look within, to hear the promise and practice the imperative:

Prophesy, speak, breathe on these bones. See if you have the guts to trust. Use your tongues, your lungs, stretch your limbs, use your hands, find a new way. Unbind him and let him go free.

And get ready to dance.

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