April 5, 2015
THE GOD WE CAN KNOW 6. Knowing God’s Possibilities
John 11:17-26
PREFACE TO THE WORD
The scripture reading from John that was read to us earlier sounds like what we’d expect to hear
on an Easter Sunday morning. It tells how Mary went out early in the morning, found an empty
tomb, and ran back to tell the others. A couple of the men ran out to the tomb and discovered
that sure enough, the tomb was empty and they went home. But Mary lingered and wept. She
encountered someone who she thought was the gardener, but when he called her by name she
realized that it was Jesus, resurrected from the dead.
But we’re going to hear another reading from John that isn’t an Easter reading. It’s about a man
named Lazarus. Actually, in Hebrew, his name was Eleazaros, which means “God has helped.”
We don’t know much about Eleazaros… It is assumed he was a relatively young man, who lived
with his sisters in a small village just outside of Jerusalem. He probably never ventured more
than a day’s walk from home.
One day, Eleazaros became ill. Unfortunately for him, he lived in a time and place when
medical options were limited. His worried loved ones could no nothing but watch him rapidly
decline. But then it occurred to them that maybe Jesus, the Great Physician, could do something
for him so they sent word to Jesus to inform him that Lazarus, one that Jesus loved dearly, was
gravely ill.
Jesus got the word, but he didn’t seemed too concerned about it. He loved the family, but after
getting the word of Lazarus’ illness, he lingered where he was for an additional two days.
Finally, he decided it was time to head back to Judea, to Bethany, to the small village and the
people he loved… even though it was a dangerous place for them to go.
Here’s where the story picks up in our scripture reading for the day…
Scripture Reading: John 11: 17-26
Sermon
I.
A. The story builds with Jesus standing outside Lazarus’ tomb with Martha and Mary and a host
of others who had been in their home giving them comfort in their time of grief. Jesus wept.
Some noticed and took it as an indication how much Jesus loved the man. Others wondered
why Jesus didn’t keep Lazarus from dying in the first place.
Jesus called for the stone to be removed from the tomb. He said a prayer and shouted for
Lazarus to come out. And, according the story, he did – Lazarus came out of the tomb,
squinting in the light, stinking with the stench of death, and wondering what on earth had just
happened! His feet were bound, his hands tied, and his face covered with a cloth.
“Unbind him,” Jesus said, “and let him go.”
B. Today, on this Easter Sunday we have a story about a dead man being brought back to life
and Jesus saying: “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.”
The point that the author of this story is making may seem to be pretty clear, but digging a
little deeper may reveal some surprises we aren’t expecting. In fact, there are at least three
important distinctions we need to make… three important distinctions that may change our
understanding of this story all together.
C. Let’s begin with the main character… Lazarus. For all the drama surrounding Lazarus’ life,
death, and his second shot at life, you would think he would have some important things to
say, right? But he never does. He never says a word. We don’t have a single quote from
Lazarus in the Bible. As significant a role as he played, Lazarus is actually not the main
character in this story. He isn’t even a supporting actor. In a lot of ways, Lazarus is just a
prop in the story. The real emphasis here is on his sisters, Mary and Martha. The focus in on
those who have to face and deal with death.
So that’s the first distinction we make today. In this story of Jesus bringing Lazarus back to
life, our attention is not to settle on the dead brother brought back to life, but on his sisters
who mourn his death. This is what makes this story relevant for every one who hears this
story, including us today: In the living of our lives, we all have to face death, including the
deaths of people we really love and, in a very personal and existential way, our own death.
Our Easter story today is the Mary & Martha story of facing death and learning to trust in
God’s possibilities.
II.
A. The Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor – Episcopal priest, teacher, columnist and author –was
named by Baylor University as one of the 12 most effective speakers in the English-speaking
world. For years, her books reflected her perspective as a church member and leader. But a
book she authored in 2006, Leaving Church, is about burning out as the priest of a parish she
had wanted very much to serve, and then leaving not only the pastoral ministry but many of
her former beliefs, too.
Taylor and her husband moved to the hills of northeast Georgia in 1997 when she was called
to be pastor of Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church in Clarksville, Georgia. She’s written that
she wanted to spend the rest of her life as close to God as she could get, and she thought
being a parish priest would make that possible.
But at Grace-Calvary she was a workaholic. “In my wish to do well for that congregation,”
she confessed in an interview with Bob Abernathy on PBS, “I wasn’t doing particularly well
for myself or my friends or my family. And I even found that the work for God was taking
me away from God. There was no time anymore to be quiet or still or pray.”
Then Abernathy commented: “Meanwhile, your understandings were changing of what faith
is and of what you believed.”
Here’s what she said: “Beliefs have become unimportant to me. Faith as radical trust became
even more important to me during this time, because so many of my certainties about who I
was and what I was supposed to be doing fell away so that faith was really what I had left…
That’s what I [mean] about faith as trust. It’s not certainty that I’ve got a hold of something
that won’t move. It’s a willingness to keep walking into the next day, open to whatever may
turn out to be true that day.”
B. And that’s the second distinction we need to make in today’s story – the distinction between
“belief” and “faith.” Jesus said to 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. Do you believe this? [Martha] said to him, ‘Yes, Lord, I believe.’”
In commenting about this passage, Barbara Taylor Brown suggests that the important word in
these sentences is not resurrection or life… but the word believe. The original Greek word is
pisteuo, which can be interpreted as either believe or trust. We’ve talked about this before in
this church, and today we need to talk about it again. In very simple terms, “believing” is
something we do in our heads, while “trusting” is something we do with our hearts.
Someone once described the difference between “belief” and “trust” this way: “I went to a
new dentist. I saw the diplomas on the wall and believed the doctor was competent. I
watched as she treated her patients kindly and I believed she was caring. I saw an expensive
car in the parking lot with a license plate that said ‘Tooth Doc,’ and believed she was
successful. But when I got into the chair and she walked over to me with a pointed
instrument in her hand and said ‘Open up,’ I needed more than belief. I had to trust!”
C. Let’s hear this “I am” saying of Jesus again using the word “trust” instead of “believe…”
“I am the resurrection and the life. Those who trust in me, even though they die, will live
and everyone who lives and trusts in me will never die. Do you trust this? Martha said to
him, “Yes, Lord, I trust.”
D. Faith as a radical trust does not mean trusting in the truth of a set of propositions about God
or doctrines about Jesus. It means leaning fully into God and putting your full confidence in
God’s possibilities offered in Jesus Christ, “the resurrection and the life.” It’s possible to go
through life believing in God, and yet never really trusting in God. It’s usually when we’re
facing the darkness of the tomb, literally or metaphorically, that we discover the truth of what
Rev. Brown wrote… that “real faith is not certainty that I’ve got a hold of something that
won’t move. It’s a willingness to keep walking into the next day with trust, open to whatever
may turn out to be true that day.”
E. So this story in John is about those who face death, trusting in God’s possibilities. Death, in a
thousand manifestations and more, is a part of our mortal existence. Indeed, it’s hard to
define Life without Death. And it may sound weird, but the truth is that resurrection – that is
to say, the miracle of new possibilities – cannot happen without death! Easter occurs not in
spite of death, but because of it. And Christian faith offers hope because it faces death
squarely and moves through it, not around it. Pain, and disappointment, and heartache, and
los… all these cousins of death, well… they are not final realities.
F. It’s when we accept the things we cannot change and remain open to God’s power to do new
things, that we discover what resurrection really is.
III.
A. And that’s the third distinction we need to make today. It’s the distinction between
“resurrection” and “resuscitation.”
B. In an interview about her newest book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Taylor Brown
says this quote worth repeating,
“There is a lot of what happens these days that I would call ‘spiritual bypassing,’ where one
offers a religious formula that will help you stay on top. But I cannot sell out the Christian
message, which at its heart says that when the bottom drops out and you’re screaming your
guts out at God… there’s more. It says that if you are willing to enter the cloud of unknowing
and meet God in the dark – maybe even the dark of a tomb – you might be in for a surprise.
“The great hope in the Christian message is not that you will be rescued from the dark, but if
you are able to trust God all the way into the dark, you will be surprised!”
C. It’s precisely for this reason that Pastor Rob Fuquay in his book, The God We Can Know,
reminds us of the difference between resuscitation and resurrection. “Resuscitation,” he
writes, means bringing back to life; that is, returning life back to the way it was. Technically,
the story of what happened to Lazarus is the story of “resuscitation.” Lazarus came back to
life, resumed life, and later died again. Lucky guy, he got to die twice!
“Resurrection,” on the other hand, means entering a whole new life, a different life.
Usually, when we are praying and pleading to God for salvation of some sort, we desire
resuscitation rather than resurrection. We are doing what Taylor referred to as “spiritual
bypassing” – searching for a religious formula that will help you stay on top, or get back on
top. We pray that God will fix this broken relationship, make a child return to his or her old
self, get our job back, get an old life back, restore health again, bring the country back to its
former glory… bring something back to the way it once was. Often, our prayers are that God
will just return things to the way they used to be.
That’s “resuscitation.”
D. Jesus did not say, “I am the resuscitation of your old life.” He said “I am the resurrection and
the life.” He doesn’t just restore. He transforms. In our lives, Death does its best to take
away. Death forever changes things. That’s what Death does. But here is what Death
cannot do: Death cannot give a future. Death cannot create. Death cannot do a new thing.
Only the Great I AM can do that. And it’s the stuff of resurrection.
E. For the last six weeks of Lent, I’ve ended my sermons on these “I am” saying of Jesus with a
story from the book we’ve been studying together, The God We Can Know, by Rob Fuquay.
Here’s a story he tells in this chapter on Knowing God’s Possibilities…
Once a woman approached Fuquay at a conference. She attended a church he once served
in that community. She explained she had come to that church under unusual circumstances.
She began attending shortly after a reversal of her planned suicide. At home alone, she had
sat with a pistol beside her, preparing to end her life. Her marriage had failed, and a
gambling addiction had wasted her resources. She was out of hope.
As the woman tried to compose a note explaining why she chose to end her life, she heard a
voice say, “What are you thinking? You don’t want to die,” and she remembered her niece
begging her to attend church with her. The young niece could see the joy was gone from her
aunt’s eyes.
So the woman made a decision. “I can’t go through with this until I honor my niece’s
request. I owe it to her.” She doesn’t understand why she had that thought. It didn’t make
sense to her at the time. But for whatever reason, she made up her mind not to go through
with her suicide until one last visit to church to sit beside her niece.
That Sunday she sat in the last row of seats in the balcony… as far away from the front of the
church as she could get. A man in the praise team recognized her and knew she used to sing.
After the service he found the woman and invited her to join them. She refused, but did
return to worship the next week. This time she sat on the next to the last row in the balcony!
Week after week the woman returned, each time sitting a row or two closer to the front,
eventually working her way toward the front on the main floor. People in the praise team
kept inviting her until she gave in and agreed to join them. Sometime during these weeks,
something happened. It was like an unexpected peace. She met the One who is Resurrection
and Life. She decided she wanted to live.
When Fuquay talked to the woman at the conference, she flashed her hand at him. A
dazzling ring adorned her finger. She had met someone and fallen in love. They were
engaged. “It’s an amazing thing to look in someone’s eyes and see them sparkle, knowing
that life nearly ended in a flash,” he wrote
You could say her old life did end. It had to. Her life, as she knew it, had to end in order for
the new one to emerge. She couldn’t see it. She couldn’t even believe it. She just came to a
point where she trusted the One who could.
F. Standing outside her brother’s tomb, Jesus assured Martha and Mary (and us 21st century
eavesdroppers) with these words, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who trust me,
even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and trusts in me will never die. Do
you trust this?”
Martha’s response was “Yes, Lord, I trust…”
Do you trust? Have you found new life in Jesus? No matter what death throws at us, we find
the miracle of God’s new possibilities in him. We experience it in the God we can know.