Library
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Lazarus Come Out
11th in a series on The Uniqueness of the Gospel of John
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
John 11:28-44
28 After Martha said this, she went back and called her sister Mary privately. "The Teacher is here," she told her, "and is asking for you." 29 When Mary heard this, she got up and hurried out to meet him 30 (Jesus had not yet arrived in the village, but was still in the place where Martha had met him.) 31 The people who were in the house with Mary comforting her followed her when they saw her get up and hurry out. They thought that she was going to the grave to weep there. 32 Mary arrived where Jesus was, and as soon as she saw him, she fell at his feet. "Lord," she said, "if you had been here, my brother would not have died!" 33 Jesus saw her weeping, and he saw how the people with her were weeping also; his heart was touched, and he was deeply moved. 34 "Where have you buried him?" he asked them. "Come and see, Lord," they answered. 35 Jesus wept. 36 "See how much he loved him!" the people said. 37 But some of them said, "He gave sight to the blind man, didn't he? Could he not have kept Lazarus from dying?" 38 Deeply moved once more, Jesus went to the tomb, which was a cave with a stone placed at the entrance. 39 "Take the stone away!" Jesus ordered. Martha, the dead man's sister, answered, "There will be a bad smell, Lord. He has been buried four days!" 40 Jesus said to her, "Didn't I tell you that you would see God's glory if you believed?" 41 They took the stone away. Jesus looked up and said, "I thank you, Father, that you listen to me. 42 I know that you always listen to me, but I say this for the sake of the people here, so that they will believe that you sent me." 43 After he had said this, he called out in a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!" 44 He came out, his hands and feet wrapped in grave cloths, and with a cloth around his face. "Untie him," Jesus told them, "and let him go."
The story of Lazarus is a story of hope where there seems to be no hope at all, life in the midst of what is certain death
I want to look at that story by first telling you a true story of hope and life from our own congregation – one that some of you have been in prayer about.
On the last Sunday evening of May, two and a half months ago, fifteen year old Kelsey Campagnola of our congregation was with some friends at a farm in Strasburg Colorado for a barbecue. She and her friends were riding in a Ranger pickup – Kelsey in the back, a very dangerous place to be she will testify now. Kelsey was thrown out of the vehicle onto the ground, and her head hit the ground. When her friends got to her, she was still breathing but she was unconscious and bleeding out of her ears. The Strasburg EMT’s and Arapahoe county sheriff’s personnel arrived and then the Flight for Life helicopter. By that time she was vomiting profusely. She was intubated and flown to children’s hospital.
When her parents arrived that night at Children’s Hospital she was being treated in the ER and was surrounded by 14 medical personnel, including the trauma team. Her mother, Marti Campagnola of our congregation, says, “Kelsey was lifeless, lying on the gurney. We watched from the edge of the room with that sick, helpless feeling. Every parent’s nightmare.”
The X Rays and CT scans showed severe, traumatic brain injury. Kelsey was in a coma. She had multiple skull fractures, with the most life-threatening being the fractured bone surrounding her carotid artery, and all they could do was wait to see if the artery had been damaged. It had not. She was in the pediatric ICU for ten days and CT scans were taken every day. She was surrounded by her family and by the prayers of this congregation and of her friends all over. But the doctors were honest with her family: this terrible accident could go either way; she could recover or not recover.
Five days after the accident she began to move her arms and legs. A few days later she began to wake up and spoke for the first time. She was transferred out of ICU to the Neuro Trauma rehab unit and there she began to have to learn to talk again, learn to walk again, feed herself again, dress herself.
Three weeks after the accident she walked 100 feet all by herself. She made gradual progress each day, due to lots of resources, her parents tell me: excellent medical care, the love and prayers that continue to surround her, the staff at Arapahoe High School where Kelsey has been a student, and Kelsey’s strong will, determined spirit and indomitable courage. She was released from the hospital five weeks after the accident. She continues in Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy, and Speech Therapy each week. AND…Kelsey will start her sophomore year of high school on Tuesday, August 19!
She has some tough challenges ahead of her, but Kelsey’s mother Marti says, “Kelsey has beaten the odds. She has made a miraculous recovery – and these are the phrases the doctors and nurses and therapists have been using!!”
How do we explain that movement from near death to the promise of life? Can you feel the mystery in this story – the difficulty of explaining scientifically how one can recover when the odds against that recovery are so great? There are just some things that, in my experience are beyond our rational and logical categories – and I believe in science and logic and reason. AND I believe that our world and our lives are more that just logical. You will know that if you have read some of the stories in the books on our shelves by Dr. Rachel Remen who tells other stories like Kelsey’s and who tells about the father of two teenage sons who had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease for years, but when he collapsed from his chair in the living room on a Sunday afternoon after he and the two teenagers had been watching football, and as he was dying right before their eyes, he spoke to his sons for the first time in five years and told them he loved them and that they should tell their mother he loved her. And then he died. The doctors had said that there seemed to be almost no brain function left for him at all – and yet he spoke.
Life contains those mysteries, and the story of Lazarus is, for me, one of those mysteries. This story is not the only time the Bible tells about a person moving from death to life. Jesus participates in two other resuscitations in the gospels. One story is in Mark about a little girl who had died and Jesus goes to be with her and touches her hand and tells her to get up and then tells her family to give her something to eat. Another story is about Jesus bringing back to life the servant of a Roman officer – and in this story, Jesus does not even have to be with the man.
There are also stories of the early leaders, Peter and Paul, bringing people back to life. These must have been important for the original Christians, I think because they see Jesus still having power to bring hope and life into settings that seem hopeless.
Let’s move through these verses in John quickly and then see where we are in the story. Mary and Martha are mentioned in one other gospel. Jesus is having a meal with them, but only one of the sisters in that story is busy cooking the meal while the other sister is doing something scandalous – sitting as a student at the feet of Jesus while he teaches. This was impossible – no rabbi would let a woman be a student with the men, but Jesus did. Mary was the student, the learner, Martha was the doer – and they are probably each a part of our own individual personalities.
Jesus, when he hears that Lazarus is dying, waits a while to come to Bethany. In fact, when Jesus gets there, Lazarus has been dead four days. It fits with a theory in first century theology that the spirit of the dead person lingered after death for three days and then departed. So Lazarus, after four days was really dead. Jesus went to Lazarus’ two sisters, and as we said last week, does not offer platitudes and clichés. He weeps with them – just as God weeps with us today when we weep and hurts with us when we hurt.
Jesus orders the large stone – like a cartwheel – to be rolled away and calls to Lazarus to come out. And Lazarus comes out.
We can’t explain this story, and to try to sort out how it could have happened is the wrong approach. The point is that when Jesus is present, even situations that seem dead and hopeless can be filled with hope – a fifteen year old with a skull fracture that is so serious the parents are told, this can go either way, prepare yourselves.
What Jesus gives us is new life and a new source of hope. It does not just have to be about physical death. It can be about other kinds of hopelessness. And it can seem miraculous when we are in the dark tomb of hopelessness. It can be miraculous. There is a story of a Sunday School teacher who was working with her class of ten year olds. They were talking about one of the other stories from John’s gospel, Jesus at the wedding in Cana, when he told the servant to look at what was in the water jars for ritual washing and the servant found 180 gallons of the finest wine to be served to the wedding guests.
The children in the class were discussing that story and how it could have happened, and they were skeptical. But there was one boy in the class whose family the teacher knew from the same neighborhood. The father in the family had been an alcoholic and the family had suffered greatly from his addiction. They had little money for food and little money for other things. They were just barely surviving. But finally the father had admitted his addiction and had become part of the AA group at the church and was able to get a steady job back, and the family was on the road to recovery and had become more active in the church.
After the discussion of how Jesus could possibly turn water into wine had gone on, ten year old Jacob said to the whole class, “I don’t know whether or not Jesus turned that water into wine but what I do know is that in our house, Jesus has turned beer into furniture.”
When Jesus is around, we find hope and new life and new direction, where before there seemed to be nothing. I got an e mail on Thursday from the volunteer leaders of our Career Transition Workshop. Ron Miller and other servant leaders have been offering that job search resource for a while now. They meet every Wednesday evening. And last Wednesday evening they had their one year anniversary. Over the past year they have served 132 persons. Forty-one people have gotten jobs because of this group. Most of the people who attend are not members of our congregation – only 20% of attendees belong to this church, so this is a significant community outreach. And at last week’s anniversary celebration several persons spoke about how important the encouragement and support of their fellow group members has been, and how that has contributed to increasing their confidence and movement toward wholeness and actualization. I was humbled and inspired to read those words and for me, they are another sign that Christ brings hope and new life to us in our dark times.
If you have ever been downsized, laid off, fired, released from a job, you know what this sort of network can mean.
The story of Lazarus being returned to life is similar and different from the resurrection of Christ. Lazarus and the others in the Bible who were resuscitated would later die. Jesus’ resurrection was different and was mysterious. What we know is that his little first century movement that should have died out when he was executed by the government did not die out, because his presence continued to be real and powerful and so transformative that a billion people across the world have identified themselves as his followers. And his presence continues to bring hope and renewal in this life – as in the story of Kelsey Campagnola and her family that we began with, and in his words that we always remember at funerals.
When we have gathered to grieve at a memorial service or funeral service we use those words we said in the call to worship from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted.” And we always speak these words that Jesus spoke to Lazarus’ sisters: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live.”