John 11:1-5, 17-44

The Dead Stay Dead...Dont They?

Sermon preached Easter Sunday, March 27, 2016
Opening
There is a story about a man who got into a taxicab in Manhattan. The drove for a while,
then the passenger said, Hey Buddy, and tapped the driver on the shoulder. At that, the
driver screamed and lost control of the cab, nearly hit a bus, jumped the curb and stopped
just inches from a huge plate-glass window. For a few moments, everything was dead still
and silent. Then the driver said, Man, you scared the living daylights out of me.
I'm sorry, said the passenger. I didn't realize a tap on the shoulder would scare you so
badly.
No, Im sorry...it isn't your fault," said the driver. Today is my first day driving a cab.
Before today I was driving a hearse for the past 25 years.
A guy whos used to driving a hearse doesnt expect a tap on the shoulder from one of his
passengers. Because the dead, are supposed to stay dead, arent they? Nothing is more
certain than death, nothing more final than the last stop of our journey - the cemetery.
Where we will rest, they say, in peace, forever, as we return to the dust.
The dead stay dead, dont they?
Ive done countless funerals, and after the service, most times we then get in our cars, put
on our headlights and drive the cemetery. At the graveside I do the brief committal
service. And the deceased, as we call him or her, is sealed up tight in a wood and metal
casket and then lowered into the ground, but not just the ground, into a steel vault
required by the state of Pennsylvania, and after we leave a lid is put on the steel vault and
dirt heaped on it - Ive wondered what all that is about - what is the point of that - its like
were locking the deceased in there...but Im pretty sure, theyre not going anywhere.
The dead stay dead, dont they? Unless...Jesus has something to say about it.
First part of the story
There was a man named Lazarus, who had two sisters, Mary and Martha. They shared a
home in the little village of Bethany, just on the outskirts of Jerusalem. They were dear
friends to Jesus; we see from the other gospels that he spent time in their home; we are
told that Jesus loved them.
One day Lazarus gets sick. Maybe he had a sharp pain in his lower right abdomen that
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meant appendicitis; maybe one day he felt a large lump on the side of his neck that meant
advanced cancer...or maybe it was measles or diphtheria or a hundred other ways death
could come for you back then.
Jesus doesnt show up
Whatever it was, Lazarus was sick, very sick for a few days. Sick long enough so that
Mary and Martha got word to Jesus, who was some distance away. Jesus has healed lots
of people, surely he could hustle down to Bethany and do it again for his friend Lazarus.
But he doesnt. Jesus inexplicably stays where he is. He is absent, when Lazarus and
Mary and Martha need him most.
Does that strike a chord with anyone? This text is strikingly honest and it matches up
with our experience - the nights we have cried out to God and felt only absence; the times
we have sunk into depression and felt like we were going under; the times we have
prayed and it felt like our prayers were ricocheting off the ceiling.
Some years back Louise Erdrich wrote a book called Love Medicine. Its about
an orphan named Lipsha who is adopted by his grandparents. One day Lipsha
goes to Mass with his grandfather and was startled when
Grandpa filled up his chest and opened his mouth and belted out them words
HAIL MARY FULL OF GRACE. He had powerful set of lungs....He hollered
and yelled them prayers, and I guess people was used to him by now because
they...did not gawk like I did...
Afterwards I out and asked him. How come? How come you yelled? God
dont hear me otherwise, said Grandpa....
...I broke right out into a cold little sweat....because I knew this was perfectly
right....Gods been going deaf...I had this Bible once. I read it. I found there was
discrepancies between then and now...(God) even appeared in person once in a
while. God used to pay attention, is what Im saying.1
Jesus...tarries. Hes not there. When his friends desperately need him.
Lazarus dies
While Jesus is not there, Lazarus gets sicker and finally dies.
Jesus finally gets off his tuckis and heads down to Bethany. When he arrives, the village
is in full mourning mode.
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Now today, when someone you love dies, people respond by loading your
refrigerator with casseroles, calling and sending cards and flowers, making
contributions to church or a charity in memory of the deceased.
But back then, people would stand by you and help you mourn, mourn for you if
you were too paralyzed by grief to express your pain - if youve seen video of how
people mourn at funerals in the Middle East today, with men and women
unashamedly weeping and bawling and howling, thats the way it was in Jesus
time too.
Jesus gets there - and Mary and Martha react very differently to him.
Martha, in her grief and disappointment, comes charging out to meet Jesus, gets to
him before he even enters the village and says, Lord, if you had been here, my
brother wouldnt have died. And he doesnt rebuke her for her impertinence, he
listens and tells her to hold on to faith; to trust him.
Mary, is paralyzed by her grief and stays huddled in her home. She doesnt want
to see anyone, even Jesus. But Jesus wants to see her and so Martha goes and tells
Mary that Jesus is waiting for her and she gets up and goes outside to him and
Mary says pretty much the same thing to Jesus that Martha did - Lord, if you had
been here... And Jesus doesnt rebuke her for her impertinence, either, he tells
her the same thing, to hold on to faith, to trust him.
We can learn from Mary and Martha here. They complain to Jesus. You could have
come, you could have been here, you could have healed Lazarus like all those other
people you healed - people you didnt know, hadnt met before - but heres someone you
love, our brother, and you dont heal him?
No doubt some of you here today, have felt disappointed by God. Like, where were you
when I needed you? And no doubt some of you who felt that way were told things like
its Gods will...like God needed another little angel...and that you need to suck it up.
A true story Ive told before bears repeating. We had dear friends in South
Carolina named Jacqueline and Joe Olmert, members of our first church who kind
of adopted us and loved us and helped us Yankees figure out the ways of a small
town in the rural South.
One day Jac and Joe told us the story of their grown son Philip. He was about
forty, married with small children, a physician. One day he was on a stepladder
cleaning out some gutters and fell backwards and hit his head and died.
One of the women in the church - a leader in the church with a strong but
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sometimes misguided faith - told Jac and Joe that their sons death was Gods
will, and they simply must accept it as such. Meaning, God directly purposed that
their son lose his balance, hit his head, die and leave behind a family wrecked by
grief and absence.
Jesus does nothing like that - he takes the grief and pain directed at him by Martha and
Mary and stays right there with them; he even goes and seeks Mary out when she is
secluded in grief.
We are given the same permission in our pain - and if you have a real relationship with
God you are going to have times of disappointment, Im not going to tell you otherwise there are things we dont know and understand in this world - but, we are invited to
respond like Mary and Martha, like the Psalmist, like Jeremiah and Job and cry out,
Where are you? Why did you let this happen? And find that our honesty with God,
will draw us closer to him.
Jesus gets angry
Jesus takes their emotion...but then gets emotional himself.
He gets angry. And the Greek word for anger is a really strong word. Many English
translations try to soften it- Jesus was deeply moved in spirit (NIV) or sighed heavily
(NEB). Uh...no. The Greek word means deep anger down in your gut that explodes out
of you in a blast of rage and fury. Jesus was outraged.
What is Jesus outraged about? The awful power of death. Jesus anger, as one biblical
scholar says, is the revulsion of everything that is in him against the power of death.2
Jesus Christ hates death. And what it does to us.
Now, we joke about death, a gallows humor to help us cope with it.
Like this story. Just before the funeral service at the funeral home, the funeral
director came up to the very elderly widow and asked, How old was your
husband? '98, she replied. Two years older than me.
So you're 96, the undertaker commented.
Yes, she responded. Hardly worth going home, is it?
We joke about it...we try to rationalize it - you may have heard people, even preachers,
say that death is part of life and that we must accept it as part of the human condition, like
Hamlet says, death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.
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And we try to ignore it.

You may have noticed the trend in funerals today that many of them are not about
mourning death but are a celebration of life. Theyre upbeat, personalized
experiences to honor the deceased. Earlier this year the BBC reported on this
trend, they called them happy funerals. And they reported that Monty Pythons
song Always Look On the Bright Side of Life, had become the most popular
song played at memorial services - replacing Verdis Requiem.
The rage of Jesus, is at odds with that. The New Testament, is at odds with that. Death is
a violent intrusion, a thief, a robber, an enemy to be fought and defeated. Paul calls death
the last enemy to be destroyed by Christ.
Death - the death of people we love, our deaths, the deaths of children taken by disease,
of innocents blown to bits in the Brussels airport, of parents taken from their children, the
death of each and every person - enrages Christ.
Dylan Thomas said, rage, rage, against the dying of the light, and so the Lord does.
Jesus rages - for us.
And Jesus cries
Then Jesus and the crowd move to the tomb of Lazarus. Jesus stands before the tomb of
his friend. And he bawls. Sobs. Tears.
Not only does the Lord get furious at death, our Lord grieves over what it does to us, to
all those he loves. Here we see Jesus in a grave, devastated as we are.
Each of the four gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John - presents a distinct portrayal of
Jesus. In John, we have paradoxically, Jesus at his most divine, and Jesus at his most
human. Jesus is God and human, in the same person - and so we have a Lord who feels
what we feel - when we stand sobbing at a graveside, he knows exactly what thats like.
In Jesus we see that God has a heart.
Jesus wept.. Later in the story he will weep again, as he looks over the city of Jerusalem,
knowing that they will reject him. He looks at the city and thinks of all the people who
live there in worry and fear and doubt, all the people who are trapped in sin, Jesus will
look and think about how much he loves them and wants to embrace them and they wont
have it.
Jesus weeps for them and for us. For everyone who is confused or lost or stubborn or just
so busy they race through their lives without ever wondering what its all for - people
who are headed to the grave without every saying Yes to a God who would die to save
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them. Jesus weeps - for you, for me, when we are lost, vulnerable, alone and snuffed out
by death.
Only a human Jesus can feel what we feel...but only a divine Jesus can fight the fight, we
cannot. To save us. He doesnt weep helplessly - he dries his tears, and channels his
anger and fights for us.
But then he raises Lazarus
So Jesus stands there at the front of the tomb of Lazarus. Hed been in there four days.
John adds that detail to emphasize he really was stone cold dead - because back then it
was commonly believed that the spirit of the dead hung around the body for three days,
but on the fourth day, the spirit departed leaving the body alone in the grave.
Mary protests when Jesus says roll away the stone from the front of the tomb - in the
King James she says, He stinketh - his body has already begun the slow decay back to
dust. Lazarus is not just a little dead; hes really, really dead.
And Jesus calls him by name, Jesus bellows, Lazarus, come out! And a figure wrapped
in grave clothes stands in the mouth of the tomb - I can imagine a collective gasp went
through the crowd, maybe some people were terrified and fainted, Lazarus comes out, all
the way out, of his tomb and Jesus says unbind him and let him go. Get him out of
those grave clothes because Ive given him back his life.
But there is a bigger fight ahead. Jesus knows what comes next - just after our reading
the head religious honchos decide Jesus is getting too popular, hes a threat to them - and
so begins the countdown to the cross. Then Jesus sets his face like flint and heads
towards Jerusalem. And in a little while theyll murder him on the cross and lay him
stone cold dead in another tomb.
And those who hated him, and the powers of sin and death thought theyd won, theyd
snuffed out the only hope of humankind and left us naked, vulnerable and alone before
the power of death. Because the dead stay dead, right?
But today...well, we know what happened, dont we? God raised Jesus from the dead,
God broke the powers of sin and death, and raised Jesus to a new and different kind of
life - Lazarus, came back to this life and died again, Jesus, was raised to eternal,
everlasting life bursting with power and strength and goodness.
Closing
Well time to wrap this up.

Youve probably heard of pre-planning your funeral. You can go to the funeral home and
do it, you can meet with your pastor and plan the service - and did you know, you can
even go to Costco and pre-order your casket. Theyre right there on Costcos website,
along with user ratings. One to five stars. One user wrote,
My mom passed away in April of 2014, prior to her death she decided that she
wanted to get her casket from Costco. I gave her a look and double take. She
laughed at me. When the time came I respected her wishes and ordered this casket
...my dad was a little unsure about curbside coffin delivery but it worked out
wonderfully.
Truth is, youre going to die. And youd better preplan. Not your funeral, so much as
your eternity. What to do? Do what Jesus told Mary and Martha - I am the resurrection
and the life, those we believe in me, even though they die, will live. Forever. Like the
resurrected Christ.
You see, when Jesus raised Lazarus, he was pointing ahead to his own crucifixion and
resurrection and to say - yes, death will come to you, but trust in me, trust in me, believe I
am the Son of God and I will defeat death for you.
And one day, he returns. With a shout. And I think hell shout, to you and me, Scott,
come out! Don, come out! Kari, come out! And out of the dust of the grave well come,
resurrected, glorious and beautiful. Like him. And well live forever. Amen.
Endnotes
1. Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine, p. 194. New York: Bantam Books, 1984.
2. Herman Ridderbos, The Gospel of John