Trinity Parish Church - Lent 5 - March 9, 2008

John 11:1-45 & Ezekiel 37:1-14

The Rev. Rachel Endicott

For many people, Lent is a season of death.  It starts off with Ash Wednesday and our remembering that we are but dust and to dust we shall return.  It continues through the season with this story of Lazarus' death, a death that prefigures Jesus' coming death.  And at the end of the season, we do indeed come to - I still believe oddly named - Good Friday, where Jesus is indeed hung on the cross.  He takes the torture leading up to the actual crucifixion, eventually suffocates, and - like Lazarus and others of the time - his body is placed in a tomb.

So Lent, with its penitential nature, is often considered as a season of not only bodily rejection, but death.

Now I don't want to buy into our secular world which has a strong denial of death.  In fact, I recently read a great example of this.  Apparently five days before Armenian-American writer William Saroyan died in 1981 from cancer, he reportedly called the Associate Press and left the following statement:  "Everyone has got to die, but I have always believed that an exception would be made in my case.  Now what?" ¹

But I do believe that the lessons today, and throughout Lent actually, are not about death, but about God's intense love, love for us.

In the past weeks, we've heard of Jesus' love in the way in which he interacts with those along his path.  He offers to the least of women, the Samaritan woman at the well, living water as well as words of healing.   Each of the people he encounters come away a changed person due to Jesus' love for them.  He breaks rules to care for them...he heals on the sabbath, he speaks with a disreptuable woman in a public place, and he provides for them what they most need, I believe, to know that they are loved by God.

And so it continues.  Today, in both the Gospel reading from John and in the passage from Ezekiel we find - nestled among the imagery of death - incredible statements of love and caring.  In Ezekiel, we find the love of God in the broader sense.  We find the symbolic image here of a nation that was scattered involuntarily into exile.  But it is to a whole people - this scattered remnant - whom God turns back from dry bones into living, breathing creatures.  Just as in Genesis, we have the breath being blown into them. We have not only life, but a sense of promise in God's saying to the people of God that they will have a place to be, they will have a home, soil of their own.

In the Gospel, the loving-kindness of God is showcased.  It is personal.  It is one-on-one.  The kindness and healing are directed toward Jesus' friend Lazarus.  Early in the passage, John writes clearly of Jesus' love for Martha, Mary and Lazarus.  As writer of the Gospel, John could have simply left the sentence as, "After having heard that Lazarus was ill, [Jesus] ... stayed two days longer in the place where he was."  Instead John gives insight into the fact that the human relationship between Jesus and the sisters and their brother was one of caring and concern, one bound with love.  So he writes for the world to know, "Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was."

This intense level of caring is brought into sharp focus later on in the story when Jesus indeed arrives at Bethany.  We're told - in that very short verse - that "Jesus began to weep", in some translations even shorter, more pointed words, "Jesus wept."  It isn't only Mary and Martha's friends who - in love - are consoling the women.  Jesus comes with an intense love for the three.

I'm struck that this kindness isn't simply a manifestation of Jesus' human nature.  We find that as God incarnate, Jesus does the most radical act of love, he not only gives a sense of peace, understanding and caring which he gives to others, but actually brings Lazarus back from the dead.  God's love encompasses breaking the usual parameters of our understanding.  He does away with literally the stench of death in an act of ultimate kindness.

Now, I was guess that not many of us have come back from the dead.  But I'm wondering how God's loving-kindness might be manifest in each of our lives, how we might realized how intensely God loves us.

For some people, God's love is manifest through a sense of peace or well-being in the most unexpected or trying of times.  I believe it was Nora Gallagher, who in her book Things Seen and Unseen, writes about the unexpected sense of peace and love she received with her first experience walking a labyrinth.  She couldn't explain it, but it was there.

For some people, God's love is made known through other people's actions in the world.  One of the blessings of having my job is that I get to assist people who are sometimes in desperate need through my discretionary fund and other means.  I am still always surprised when I help people and they respond to me something like, "I know God is with you."  I think that they are aware not only of my help, the gathered church's help, your help, but that all this happens with God's direction and help.

For some people, God's love becomes a reality in much more subtle ways.  It is through the day-to-day things, the times of great peace and well-being.  I know several people who have said that even something as simple as walking on the beach has for no apparent reason given them the knowledge that God loves them, not simply in the broad sense as God's love for creation as a whole, but in the intense, personal love of them individually.

For some people, God's love is shown through physical healing and wholeness.  One of my former parishioners would tell again and again how God had given him a new heart.  In his case, he meant it literally as he had had a heart transplant, a very eventful one as his original heart stopped at the hospital prior to being fully ready for the transplant of the new heart.  After some minutes of unprepared-for time without a beating heart, I believe, they were ready to start the transplant procedure which provided him with a new heart, the physical resurrection through which he experienced God's love.

The week after next, I invite you to participate fully in Holy Week and especially the Tridiium, the three great days at the end of the week, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and either the Easter Vigil or Easer services.  In invite you to continue on the journey of experiencing the most profound statement of God's love.