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March 9, 2008
Do You Believe This?
John 11:17-43
Reading recently about a soldier's recollections of what it is like to be on an investigative detail after a bombing such as the one which occurred in the market place in Bagdad this past week, I recalled an experience I had myself in El Salvador in the mid 1980's. Witnesses talk not only about the horrors you see, but also about the other sensory assaults which one experiences, sounds and smells – most of all smells.
I was in El Salvador in 1986 when the civil war was still going strong, with a group of others attending a church-sponsored conference for peace at the Central American University. When the van in which I was riding took a side road through a narrow valley on the edge of the city, we were confronted with an unbelievably awful stench. In a few minutes we were told that we were in the place where the bodies of victims of the death squads were regularly dumped in the middle of the night so that they could be found and claimed by their families. I will never forget that instant when I realized that the overwhelming odor which permeated that dreadful place was the odor of death.
Our defense mechanisms are so strong that we do not allow ourselves to acknowledge the horror that exists in our world. Unacknowledged is unaddressed. From the killing fields of Cambodia, to the horrible massacres which took place in Rwanda, to the affects of a terrorist attack on a Seminary in Jerusalem or the bombing of villages in Gaza the horrors of human violence – neighbor against neighbor – is an all too common aspect of our experience these days. But strangely enough, analysts note, we are not necessarily becoming more conscious about violence or determined about putting an end to it.
We talk about the tragedy of Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois or even University of Iowa not that many years ago, and we see the affects of war on the nightly news. "We are getting used to a lot of behavior that is not very good for us," wrote Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in a journal a several years ago, "we have normalized criminality...," he goes on to say. [i] Robert Jay Lifton , a psychiatrist and author also talks about what he calls, "psychic numbing" the process by which a culture becomes anesthetized against the pervasiveness of death in the midst of life.
All of us have experienced losses in our lives. Sometimes, these are profound and nearly debilitating tragedies. No one is exempt. Certainly we do not want to live in a perpetual state of fear; we do not want to hide behind walls and alarm systems or be home bound, not daring to venture forth after dark. Most of all, we do not want to be afraid to love another and risk the vulnerability which occurs when we care deeply about another person. So we have learned to adjust. We have learned even to take stories of violence in stride...or at least, we have learned not to allow them to keep us from going about our business. We are numbed by death into a state of adaptation. In a strange way it controls us as we avoid certain subjects and shun involvement in certain issues.
Otto Rank, the German philosopher, talks about the human being who "refuses the loan" -- which is the fullness of life -- "in order to avoid the payment" -- which is death. In the process of becoming numb, each day I think we chip away at our faith in each other and our faith in a God who surely must want things to be different. Is not our God a Lord of life?
"I am the resurrection and the life...." are Jesus words in this story of Lazarus. It is a curious one in that it appears only in the Gospel of John. None of the other Gospel writers or Paul seems to have heard of Lazarus and this miraculous resuscitation of one whom John says is a beloved friend of Jesus. Never-the-less, there are other stories of Jesus raising people from the dead. John seems to have a special source or witness to events that the other writers did not have, or else he has merged some of the synoptic healing stories together into one event surrounding this character Lazarus. We could spend a lot of time talking about the historical and source issues, but in fact as is true with all good stories, the absolute veracity of each fact is not as important as whether the story communicates what it is meant to communicate to those who hear it.
This is one more story in which the disciples take on the role of "every-man" - that is all of us. As the story begins there is a lot of nervousness about the issue of Lazarus's illness. In the portion which we did not read this morning there is a debate about whether or not Lazarus is really dead - or just asleep. Then the disciples nag Jesus about the need to stay away from Jerusalem and the dangers that lie in wait for him there. Finally, in a rather cavalier gesture, Thomas says, "let us also go that we may die with him."
Death is indeed the issue as Jesus makes his way to Bethany and is confronted by Lazarus' sister Martha on the road. This is the point at which we started reading this morning. In rapid shot dialogue between energetic Martha and her teacher and friend, she first confesses a belief in Jesus ability to heal..." If you had been here our brother would not have died."
Then the story moves deeper as Jesus says, "Your brother will rise again."
Martha replies, "well yes, if you mean in heaven...or at the world's end, the resurrection on the last day."
Jesus now reveals to Martha the whole point of the story. "I am the resurrection and the life." “Do you believe this?”
"Martha who had gladly confessed to Jesus what she "knows to be true," now moves beyond knowledge to belief. She confesses, "I believe." Even as she scolds Jesus for delaying is response to their need, she enters into a deeper and more profound faith in him and in the connection between faith and fullness of life.
Our own religion often fails us right there, at that point in our own narratives, right at the instant when we fail to push the point. Martha said, reproachfully, "Lord, if you had come our brother would not have died." And Jesus felt their sorrow and his own loss of a friend, and he also wept. As theologian of spirituality, Morton Kelsey points out in a discussion of this Lazarus story, "We won't come out and say it . . . ‘Lord, we asked for it and you did not grant it… you failed us.'” Yet, this kind of honesty is absolutely necessary if we are to access the true healing power of Jesus. When we are phony there is not much that God or the Holy Spirit can do for us. When we are afraid or resentful or lost and bitter, we cannot get much help until we admit that this is the way we feel. [ii]
Martha is the center-point of this story. It is Martha who dares to believe, not only that it could have been different... but that it still can be . She asked Jesus where he had been and in a sense, she wanted to know where he was going to go as well…how will you now proceed , Lord? She believed that God's intervention was possible, that is what her heart of faith demands. As another, more contemporary theologian, Jergen Moltmann says, "The concept of dread and the principle of hope are not opposites at all. They complement each other...." [iii] Jesus wept over those who so easily seemed to give in to death.
"Jesus wept..." says John. I think it was not so much over the loss of his friend, Lazarus, but rather over the complacency of those he saw who had come to attend the sisters, Martha and Mary; the hand ringers, the mourners. Our ambivalence about death is so great that we will not confront it. "Look at you," Jesus seems to be saying. "You wail and you weep and you give in... Death for the most part has its own way. You roll a stone over the tomb, to cover up the stench and the rot and the horror..." Face it... "Roll the stone away!" Jesus says. "Lazarus, Come Out!"
"We run the risk of wanting to get out of pressing situations with quick solutions and we forget that the quick solutions can be patches but not true solutions." [iv] These are the words of Oscar Romero, who was Archbishop of El Salvador in the 70's. After years of silence and complacency the Catholic Church in that little Central American country took a prophetic and dangerous stand against the powers of death. Romero became the voice of the people as he called for an end to the killing in a country which was plagued by the insidious violence of death squads. 28 years ago on March 24, 1980, he was himself assassinated while he was offering communion to a congregation gathered in a hospital chapel in San Salvador.
Two weeks before he died, he was interviewed by the Mexican newspaper Excelsior and said, "I have often been threatened with death. Nevertheless, as a Christian, I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I shall arise in the Salvadoran people. I say so without meaning to boast, with the greatest humility....let my death, if it is accepted by God, be for the liberation of my people and as a witness of hope in the future." In El Salvador now, the guns are silent. Former combatants work together in a national government which is seeking to empower the poor with options for life instead of silencing with the treat of death. Romero lives now as a name which inspires not only hope in the face of oppression, but honesty and faithfulness for any seeking the courage to face down their own fears.
It was Woody Allen who said, "I'm not afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens." We are all afraid of death. In our eagerness to avoid it or adapt to our fears, we give it power over us...and empower it to destroy the peace and the civility of our world. "If we believe in Christ,” says theologian Moltmann , "fear does not isolate us from God. On the contrary, it leads us deeper into community with him. Christian faith in God is essentially fellowship with Christ and fellowship with Christ is essentially fellowship with the Christ who was tempted and assailed, who suffered and was forsaken....in his suffering Christ went through the very fears and anxieties which men and women encounter too..." [v] He has made that journey to the darkest places – if circumstances call upon us to take a similar path, the pioneer of the way is with us on that journey.
Lent is a time to face our fears...journey with Jesus even into the depths. It was Jesus who said, "Lazarus come out....unbind him and set him free." It is a time to believe that in Christ, our God is calling us to come out! to have courage as a people who have been freed from death's power. It is time to look at our world and our human family with a resolve that we can be cured of our violence; that the threat of death has lost its power. Where are you going, Lord? The journey could take any of us through depths that we would never seek. But, in a resurrected world of faith , the final and inevitable destination is life!
“I am the resurrection and the life!” Do you believe this? Amen.
[i] Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The American Scholar, quoted in the Wall Street Journal , January 1993.
[ii] Morton Kelsey, The Other Side of Silence , pp 264-7
[iii] Jergen Moltmann , Jesus Christ for Today's World , Fortress Press, 1994, page 53.
[iv] Oscar Romero, quoted in James R. Brockman, The Word Remains: A Life of Oscar Romero , Orbis Books, Maryknoll , N.Y., 1982, p. 216
[v] Moltmann , Ibid, p. 53
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