2023 03 26 Sermon

The Unwrapping of Faith
Lent 5 A
John 11:1-45
Rev. Karl-John N. Stone

        Today is the 5th Sunday in Lent, but this story of the raising of Lazarus is kind of letting Easter out of the box ahead of time!  The difference being that Jesus was raised from the tomb never to die again; he defeated the power of death forever.  For Lazarus, on the other hand, he was raised from his tomb and unwrapped from his grave clothes—yet as extraordinary as this is—he was raised back into the ordinary form of human existence.  Happily, Lazarus got his old life back, but sadly he was going to die again.

        This story brings up two contradictory experiences that may resonate with many who have experienced the death of a loved one.  The first thing I notice about it is love.  The reason the death of a loved one hurts so much is because of love, and the loss that must be grieved because your love will no longer be experienced with that person present “in the flesh” anymore.  We hear from John’s gospel that Jesus loved his friends Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.  We also hear that their Judean neighbors loved them as well; they came out to console and support Mary and Martha after their brother Lazarus died.  In our own lives, we frequently experience an outpouring of love from friends, family, and neighbors—and Jesus himself—when a loved one dies.

        The second thing I notice in this story is that these sisters, Mary and Martha, also experience the absence of Jesus, right when they wanted him there the most.  As John’s gospel tells us, while Jesus is traveling with his disciples, Mary and Martha send a messenger to tell him that Lazarus is ill.  But rather than hurry back to the village of Bethany to intervene with a miracle of healing when he hears the news, Jesus decides to wait two more days where he is, before going back.  Jesus had his reasons, which he explained to the disciples, but if I were there in the place of Mary or Martha, for me these reasons might not make much sense, and I would not feel very comforted.  And this is also a common experience that many people of faith have—that you go through a time when you don’t sense that the presence of Jesus is with you, or you feel his absence.  This doesn’t mean that Jesus is not somehow at work in some way—but you don’t feel like he is.  And that can be very disconcerting, disorienting; painful even.  It may even feel like you’ve lost your faith.

        Ironically, these experiences of doubt and discomfort, even crisis, are invitations from God to learn anew how to be a person of faith.  The thing is, we don’t get to control when these things happen.  Like the seasons of the year, which come and go whether you want them to or not—and which always have a bit of unpredictability about them—the disorienting times in the life of faith come for everyone at some time or another.

        And this is normal.  It’s the normal pathway that God has provided for us to grow deeper in our faith.  Now, it’s not comfortable.  We don’t like it.  And this is where Mary and Martha find themselves after Lazarus has died.  Up to this point they’ve been faithful to God.  They have a great relationship with Jesus.  They’ve done all the right things.  The serve and love God and their neighbors.  They know the Bible.  They believe God’s promises.  They call upon Jesus in their time of greatest need.  And what did Jesus do?  He waited two more days before coming to help them!  Who wouldn’t have cried out to Jesus with the same words as Mary and Martha: “Lord, if only you’d been here!  Then our brother would not have died!” 

        Before Jesus raises Lazarus, and unwraps him from his grave clothes, and prepares him for a new stage in his earthly life, Jesus wants to unwrap Mary and Martha—to unwrap them from one stage in their life of faith, in order to prepare them to live into a new stage in their life of faith.

    The classic phrase for this type of disorienting experience is “the dark night of the soul”.  And as they enter this time, quite against their will, Mary and Martha cry out with the kind of honest lament that so many people cry out with at one time or another.  Ya know, there’s nothing wrong with telling God exactly how you feel.  It shows that you’re human.  Because there are things we just don’t understand.  We grieve.  We suffer loss.  We live through pain.  And sometimes even our faith, as we’ve previously experienced it, doesn’t seem to be “working” the way it used to.

    Some take this as a sign that they should give up on faith.  But ironically, the dark night of the soul is really a sign that God is unwrapping you from your previous experience of faith, and he’s inviting you to persevere with Christ, until God leads you into a new stage in your life of faith.  You can’t know ahead of time how long this process will take; you can only kind of stumble forward with trust that eventually God will lead you there.

    I think you will find—whether it’s people you read about in the Bible, or people you meet in the present day, or people you learn about from any era of history in between—you’ll find that a person of deep spiritual wisdom and mature faith has invariably been through some kind of “unwrapping” of their faith; a time of disorientation and doubt and lament; a dark night of the soul—where they’ve had to turn toward their own pain and ask Jesus to help them carry it, as he once carried the cross for our sake.  By committing themselves to the hard work of walking through their time of trial—instead of trying to distract themselves from it—but to walk through it, they have allowed God to transform them.  By persevering with Christ, they have surrendered a big chunk of their ego, and in return gained a truer version of the person God created them to be.

    This is because we have a God of death and resurrection and life.  Death is real.  Lazarus died.  As a result, Mary and Martha cried out to Jesus in lament.  And they also had the support of friends and neighbors who consoled them.  And Jesus himself grieved with them over the death of Lazarus—he was so deeply moved that he burst into tears and wept.  What an amazing portrait of God’s nature, that God is not indifferent to our grief but comes near to us in Christ and weeps with us.

    While death is real, it also does not have the last word.  Death is not the end.  Jesus does not stop death from happening, but he also does something ever harder.  He defeats the power of death!  “I am the resurrection” he tells Martha.  Through Christ, there is a new way of being that awaits us—a gift of complete union with God in the resurrection to eternal life.

    And because God promises this resurrection life with Jesus, this future reality that waits for us can burst into the present!  “I am the resurrection and the life” Jesus tells Martha.  Like Mary and Martha, after we go through the discomfort and disorientation and loss of being “unwrapped” we can join Christ in living a new, transformed kind of life right in the here and now.  And we can stay close to Jesus—who poured out himself in love for Lazarus, for Mary and Martha, for us all—and we can to learn from him how to keep growing in our love for people, and for God.  Amen.