Dig deep

6 April 2014 | 5 Lent | John 11:1-45
The Raising of Lazarus

The other day I learned that an old friend of mine was living in an extreme situation of dementia that has been going on progressively for years.  I love him.  He is alive.  But he is also not fully here.  It makes me grieve.  I know his wife is in daily agony.  Hopefully, he is already at least in part on the other side.

We have a hard time dying in America.  We are able to prevent physical death better than any culture in human history, but the result is that we don’t know how to let the jig be up.   For many of us, many people, it is like living the trauma of the story of Lazarus over and over, for months and even years at a time.

I have no solution for this state of affairs, as I don’t know any better than anyone else what to do about it.  Death is tough, incredibly tough, to face — as the end of our dreams; and prolonged death is strangely worse.

This morning I take some comfort from the knowledge that Jesus walked into this particular issue for and with us, — not solving it [What is there to be solved?] but sharing it, living within it, and giving us the kind of promise and support that he gives, for all time, by being in the mix himself.

It’s about Lazarus, his best friend.  Jesus loved Lazarus.  The story makes that very clear.  He loved Lazarus’ sisters Mary and Martha too, but he considered Lazarus his best personal friend.

You’ve got to know this was a real situation – the story we read today is a real story. It was 2,000 years ago, but when my wife Annie lived in the village of Bethany, barely two miles outside Jerusalem, the memory was as fresh as if it were yesterday.  Annie’s family lived in a house on the Mount of Olives, next to Bethany, and the mayor of Bethany, a man named Abourish, was a frequent visitor.  One day, as a 12-year-old girl, she was asked to entertain Mr. Abourish while her father got some things ready to meet him.  According to Annie, Abourish asked her, “Annie, do you think that God loves Christians or Muslims more?” Taken aback, and wanting not to make a significant diplomatic error, Annie said, “I don’t know, Mr. Abourish; what do you think?”  “Well,” the mayor said, “I know he loves Christians mightily – that they are very dear to him.  He loved Lazarus, and Mary, and Martha – the Scripture makes that clear.  But I believe he loves Muslims more.”  Shocked and curious, little Annie sputtered, “How can that be?”  “You see, Annie,” Abourish said kindly, “he raised Lazarus from the dead and he gave him back to his sisters – an act of great love.  But he did it on my land,  — and I am now a very wealthy man!  So I think he loves Muslims more!

It was just the other day in Bethany that the raising of Lazarus took place.  A twelve-year-old American girl heard the story and told it to me yesterday.

Lazarus was dying.   His sisters and the town were weeping. Jesus got into it, being overcome by the grief of the loss of his best friend.  Lazarus came back from the dead, not to live forever, — but to complicate the conversation.  Life and death were not simply separate from one another.  The line was blurred then – and it is blurred now.

So what do we do with this thing?  How do we deal with the reality of death in our lives – the death of loved ones, and our own inevitable death?  Jesus says in this story of Lazarus, “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.”

To deal with death:

• Dig deep,
• Cut across the grain,
• Spend your life…
• For love.

Dig deep; Cut across the grain; and spend your life – for love.

1. To deal with death: Dig deep.

One of the strangest details in this strange story of Lazarus is that when Jesus hears his friend is very sick, he decides to stay miles away for two more days rather than to come to visit him.  The Greek text actually says, “Because Jesus loved Lazarus, he stayed away two more days.”  The English translation mellows that down a little, because it doesn’t seem to make any sense.

Why did Jesus stay away?  What in the world would that have done to him, to Lazarus, to Mary, to Martha?  The last thing in the world you need to do is to make the sickness of a friend into a bigger trauma than it already is.

Unless there are things terribly important – even more important than the sickness of the friend, and both you and your friend know it.  Like soldiers in a war, you know there is a bigger objective, and you both are at risk of death all the time.

You want to make your life count; make your death count.  Dig deep, Jesus.  Dig deep, Lazarus.

2. To deal with death: Cut across the grain.

Jesus doesn’t do what is expected.  Not even what he might expect of himself.  He doesn’t go with the flow, he doesn’t do what he should normally do for a friend.  For some reason we don’t fully know or understand, he cuts across the grain of customary behavior and stays away from Lazarus’ bedside.

It magnifies the agony of the situation.  Not only is Lazarus suffering, not only are his sisters Mary and Martha frightened, but Jesus is not there – he is far away.

There are a lot of people who think that you need to let the big issues stay buried; that traumas and terrors of the past need to stay in the past.  In any case, it seems there is never a right time to take them up.  And especially, when your friend is sick, threatened with death, that is not time to take on the whole problem of death itself – of life after death.  Do your preaching and teaching and exploring later.  This is a time to be at the bedside.

But when exactly is the time to take on the big issues?  When exactly is the time to dig deep and cut across the grain?  If death is the great issue that is, through denial and fear, keeping everyone in bondage, when do you take it on?  When should Jesus have taken it on?  He took it on when he was personally engaged, when it cost him dearly, with the friend he loved most, when there was death around.   It always seems like the wrong time to dig deep, to cut across the grain, to spend your life.

What’s happening to Richmond right now is a little like the Lazarus event.  People are holding up the Shockoe Ballpark because of the slave market.  For five generations –143 years — the fact of Richmond’s Slave Market lay buried beneath the surface.  The fact was too horrible to speak of.  The biggest single fact of our history, it was completely unknown.  It made a lie of the entire narrative of the American Revolution, of the Virginia Gentlemen.  It revealed that Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson were speaking only for white people – that the nation was founded on freedom for half the population and bondage for the other half.  Twelve Years a Slave was repeated 300,000 times just six blocks east of here!

Why should we dig up that history?  Why now?  Shouldn’t we just forget it? Doesn’t it cut across the grain of progress?  Isn’t this the wrong time?

In your personal life or in civic life, you can’t know when you dig deep, when you cut across the grain, what will come up.  The course of history may be changed.  You can’t know once you start if you’ll ever do what you intended to do – or if the process or the discovery will redirect you so completely that life will be different thereafter.

“When Jesus heard [that Lazarus was ill], he said, ‘This illness… is for God’s glory…’ Accordingly, because 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.”  In that time, Lazarus died.  Jesus loved Lazarus.

If you’re going to preach the Gospel, if you’re going to interrupt the lemming-like passage of human beings along a fearful path from birth to death, you have to dig deep.  You have to cut across the grain.

3. To deal with death: You have to spend your life…for love.

It’s not some philosophical or theological task that is going on here in this story of Jesus and Lazarus.  Jesus is messing with death and dying, and his friend is dying.  He’s getting into grief and grappling with graveclothes.  He’s crying.  The sisters are crying.  Nowhere in the written accounts is it clearer that it is love that brought him here.  He loved Lazarus.  He loved Mary and Martha.  They seem to have been his adopted family.  He was literally spending his life, risking all of his integrity, all of his relationships – it was the most valuable currency he had, the most valuable currency anyone of us has.

The movies and romantic novels are full of stories of people doing things for love.  But that’s not the kind of thing we are talking about here.  Jesus is living out a love that is fully anchored in a genuine personal relationship with Lazarus and his sisters, but is also about his deep love of himself and all the people he knew – a love so committed and insightful that he was willing to mess with death, and ultimately get caught at it, in order to make clear the reality of eternal life.

It’s not like Lazarus didn’t die again.  We don’t know how long he lived after this event.  But his second death was different from his first in that he was clear, as at least some of the other people in Bethany were, that physical death was not the be-all and end-all of life – that there was a resurrection and there was life and that faith in God conveyed access to a full, eternal reality.

On the other side, after physical death, the character of that reality was not known, but absolutely not to be feared.  And on this side, making life eternal conveyed a new character to life.  It invited those who tasted it to dig deep, to cut across the grain, and to fully spend all of their lives – for love.

In that way, they were – we are — even now living in the kingdom of heaven.

To deal with death:

• Dig deep,
• Cut across the grain,
• Spend your life,…
• For love.

AMEN.

The Rev. B. P. Campbell
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Richmond, Virginia