“Life Unbounded”, A Sermon Preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, April 10, 2010 at Church of the Ascension, Rochester, New York
21Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. 22But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” 23Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”(John 11:21-23)This past month we have all endured the pain of watching the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan with all the death and destruction that ensued in its wake. Over ten thousand people lost their lives in that devastating natural disaster, a numbing statistic that so boggles the mind and keeps us from truly grasping the personal human pain each individual human being in that statistic represents to family and friends. And then as we’ve watched the Middle East uprisings and revolutions, we celebrate the relatively peaceful transition in Egypt and watch with baited breath the unfolding events in Libya, Yemen, Syrian and Bahrain, feeling relief that casualties have been relatively few considering how significant are the changes taking place at high levels of power. But even those few casualties represent someone’s family member, a brother, father, son, husband, wife, daughter, sister, friend and the pain of the human condition returns again. And every time something catastrophic happens or people die through wars and insurrections we mourn the dead while striving valiantly to save as many human lives as we can. Early this week, I attended a workshop by noted author and speaker Brian McLaren, who told us of a conversation he had with a friend who is an evolutionary biologist and who worked in Washington with think tanks working on stem cell research and its potential. His friend told him of the very real possibility that before too long it will be possible to use stem cell technology to fashion biologically compatible “spare parts” for all of us, which his scientist friend pointed out could mean biological immortality for those who had the resources to take advantage of the technology. That very possibility alone, has kept stem cell researchers from going too far with the research at this point.
From time immemorial, human beings have struggled against the despair that our own earthly mortality brings upon us. We have spent billions of dollars on research and technology to eliminate diseases that cause death and we spend billions every year trying to extend human lives, even where there is little or no quality of life left. We don’t really want to think about death, if we can possibly avoid it, and in our modern culture we have sanitized death and moved it out of the home and into institutions, and ceded the care of the dying to medical professionals. We live our ordinary days as oblivious to the reality of the end to which we are moving as were those people in swallowed up by the tsunami that pounded their villages. Even we Christians, who purport to believe in eternal life, are reluctant to befriend “Sister Death”, as St. Francis named it. We too want to extend and prolong earthly life because this life is all we consciously know and we fear the unknown beyond the grave.
The story of the raising of Lazarus is a powerful story and taps into that universal human fear and dread of death. Mary and Martha sent for Jesus when their brother fell ill because they wanted him to come and cure Lazarus so that he would not die. Lazarus was too young to die, his was one of those untimely deaths against which we mortals rail particularly strongly. Jesus did not come as quickly as they hoped he would and their brother died. Both sisters almost accusingly exclaimed to Jesus when he finally did appear, “If you had been here he would not have died.” How often have families lamented “if only we’d done something sooner”, “if only the doctor had done x or had not done y”, “if only he/she had not gone there that day, or done this or that, or eaten or drunk that particular thing” they would not have died. How many people wish their loved ones had been somewhere else when the tsunami swept ashore a month ago, in some cases just a few feet in a different direction one way or the other being all that would have been necessary for a different outcome.
The story of the raising of Lazarus is every grieving family’s fondest hope – that somehow, miraculously, their dead loved one will stand up and walk out of the tomb. How many people hoped that miraculously, underneath the rubble and debris left in the wake of the tsunami, their loved one would emerge alive. In the gospel story, that’s what happens – Jesus summons Lazarus, and out he comes, wrapped in the burial cloths, four days dead, he walks again. Jesus brought the corpse to life having told Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” Problem is, of course, that even Lazarus eventually died to this mortal life, as did his sisters. Believers though we may be, all of us, and everyone whom we love, will experience bodily death sooner or later.
The miracle in this story isn’t the resuscitation of Lazarus but rather, the window into eternity that Jesus provided when he performed this miracle. Jesus was empowered by God to resuscitate Lazarus in order to demonstrate God’s power over death to those who witnessed the miracle. Notice that I said resuscitate and not resurrect. Lazarus was temporarily restored to bodily existence, but resurrection is another matter. Jesus, the One sent into the world to show us what God looks like, was empowered by God to illustrate in a vivid and tangible way a reality that is not visible or tangible in human terms. That reality is the fact that God’s love is so transformative and powerful for us that when we open ourselves to it, and allow ourselves to enter into the loving relationship that God desires to have with each of us, bodily death becomes a rather unimportant thing in the grand scheme of things.
Belief in Jesus is not an intellectual assent to some set of doctrines or assertions about him or about God. Belief in Jesus is simply a willingness to be in relationship, loving relationship with the divine being at the center of the universe. It is that loving relationship that is salvific because it is in the context of that relationship that we are able to live abundantly while we sojourn on this earth and to surrender peacefully when our days here are over. It is that loving relationship that sets us free to become who God created us to be and that empowers us to withstand whatever befalls us during our earthly life.
I am resurrection and I am life, Jesus says. That is his way of saying I am with you now, during your earthly life and I, God, will be with you always, in the resurrection time as well. Our days with God are not limited to the number of days we enjoy earthly existence – our days with God encompass all of eternity but only when we enter into relationship with God can we begin to experience that reality. And the experience of eternal life begins now, in this earthly life, when we pray, when we place ourselves before God, nurture our spiritual lives and allow our souls to touch the sacred. Just as Jesus showed Mary and Martha what God’s promise looks like when he resuscitated Lazarus, so too God shows us what eternal life looks like when we break the bread of communion together in the presence of the Risen Christ, when we hit bottom in our lives and find that God is there to pick us up out of the ashes and get us going again. When we live into the truth that we are spiritual beings as well as corporeal beings and begin to understand that who we are is not limited by our physical body and its vitality, then we are free to sink deeply into relationship with God. That relationship is eternal life – it begins now and continues beyond the grave.
Some people say that religious people, Christians in particular, are either afraid of death, and hence have concocted a fantasy of an afterlife to cope with that fear, or that we are obsessed with death, since we constantly talk about the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. To those critics I say - quite the contrary. What we are obsessed with is life- abundant life to be exact. As one theologian puts it, “Jesus came not to negate life but to give it more abundantly. Christianity is not decadent worship of death for its own sake, but the discovery that including death within life is the secret of the fullest life.” (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future, in Ulanov, Death, p. 68). How many secular folks take the time to think and talk about this tough issue? Not many, except, perhaps, medical professionals. Why do we persons of faith do this? Because it is only when we honestly confront the reality of our mortality that we can live life fully, joyfully and with abandon. Preacher David Buttrick says, “our lives are as brief as the hyphen between the dates on a gravestone.” And nun Joan Delaplane observes, “the point remains: It is not how long we live, but how well, how fully we live the hyphen.”
Jesus came that we may have life and have it abundantly. He tells Martha and Mary, “everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” The emphasis here is on the word lives. We do not think about death to be morbid. We acknowledge and embrace our inevitable bodily death in order to live fully and richly the life that is ours to live. When we truly live we savor all that we experience during our earthly journey - the loves and friendships, music, art, nature, the changing seasons, children playing, puppies tumbling, our work, the political and social events of the world in our particular time in history, the first flowers of spring, the sound of the ocean, the pink sky of sunrise and the glow of sunset - every teeming moment of the span of the hypen that is allotted to us. When we enter into relationship with Jesus, which is what “believing” in him means, we learn to sort out what really matters in the grand scheme of things and to let go of those things that don’t really matter. If we don’t learn to let go, we become like one of the skeletons in Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones - all the life juices sucked out of us by worry, pain, fear, alienation, isolation, greed, selfishness or whatever. Relationship with God puts flesh on our dry bones, breathes life into our lifeless corpse and makes us ready, willing and able to embrace abundant life. Loving relationship with God unbinds us as it did Lazarus.
The recent earthquake and tsunami and the many violent conflicts around the world remind us all of the reality that bodily life is short and unpredictable, and Sister Death awaits each of us. Relish the inevitability of your own bodily death, knowing that “fear of death is fear of life.” (Helen Tworkov,Tricycle, Fall 1997). Live fully in the love of Christ and embrace the transition to eternal life when your time to do so comes. Rest assured that Jesus is “the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in [him], even though they die, will live.” Then, like Lazarus you will emerge from the tomb of alienation and fear, and walk, unbound, into eternity. Amen.
