The Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee



The Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year A, April 10, 2011, Otey Parish Sewanee

“When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come forth!” (Jo. 11:43).

Our Gospel covers some common human ground today, territory that most of us know at least by report if not existentially from our own experience. When Jesus comes to Bethany he discovers grief: grief at the death of Lazarus his friend, the grief of the mourning sisters Mary and Martha, his own grief and strong emotion. A quick look yesterday on my bookshelves by way of sermon preparation revealed plenty of source material on the subject, from Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking to C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. Every poet I picked up seems to have written about grief, a tribute to the common human experience. I think I only had to go two poems into John Crowe Ransome’s Selected Poems before finding one on grief, and most other volumes consulted were pretty much the same.

There’s an erudite sermon on grief contained somewhere there on my bookshelves, but somehow I think that the best sermon will emerge from our own experiences. Part of my method is counting on you to draw upon your own experiences this morning to preach to yourself. Joan Didion herself says somewhere that we tell ourselves stories so that we can live, and so I guess that we write about our grief and reflect upon it so that we can go on living without forgetting. The key to this is that in the midst of sorrow there is something that we are unwilling to let go of, and that something is love.

“When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved” (Jo. 11:33). That just about nails it. We know what this is like: disturbance of spirit, unsettlement of mind, the movement of the tectonic plates of our existence and the sheer sense of loss. There’s the moment where everything changes. We don’t need the poets to tell us what this is like because we know it for ourselves. It’s the human predicament and the human tragedy, of love that leads to loss. We see it in the newspapers and on our TV and computer screens, in Haiti and Japan and Libya and in our own communities and in our own lives. “Ask not for whom the bell tolls”, John Donne preached, “it tolls for thee”.

So we have the common human experience in our Gospel, the domestic tragedy in suburban Bethany, but then something extraordinary happens, something out of their experience and our experience. Jesus breaks it all open when he summons Lazarus from the dead. We think we know what the world is all about, the well-worn path that leads down to death, but that’s not all there is. Jesus is pointing out another way to go, where life overcomes death and grief is forgotten because love is secure. We hold on to grief because we don’t want to give up on love, but now there will be no need to do so. It’s almost unimaginable, but there it is.

The raising of Lazarus opens new possibilities for the human race, possibilities of leaving grief and its deep wounds behind. The raising of Lazarus is a foreshadowing of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ himself, which points to new life for us. There’s more to living than losing, and in God’s economy nothing is ever written off.

So there’s a new story being told in our Gospel today, a story by which the human race can live and love without fear. This is the real shifting of the tectonic plates, placing life on a whole new basis. Grief is overcome by joy. When Jesus summons Lazarus, he’s really summoning us, to come out of our graves and to begin to live. We may be four days dead, or maybe longer, but the voice of Jesus is calling us and telling us to rise from the dead. New life starts now.

That’s the story that Jesus begins to write with the raising of Lazarus. If we tell ourselves stories so that we can live, then Resurrection is the story that we live by. It’s the story that all of us are invited to become a part of. Those being confirmed today are becoming part of this whole new way of living. As we tell the great story of Jesus’ death and Resurrection at Holy Week and Easter, now drawing close, we come close to what it’s all about. Can we hear Jesus calling us, the voice summoning us from the tomb? He’s telling us to leave the old grief and the old life behind, to get out of the dark and into the light, to start breathing and to get moving.

- The Rt. Rev’d John Bauerschmidt, Bishop of Tennessee

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