Life

April 5, 1987, 11:00 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Join 11 (selected verses}

"J am the resurrection and the life."
-~John 11:25a (RSV)

"IT am the resurrection and the life...whoever believes in me will
never die." Jesus said that, and it may be the boldest claim ever made,
and the highest hope...

When someone asked Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, if he ever
thought about life after death he responded, "Who hasn't?" But then Buber
went on to say that “after" is the wrong word. The Bible is interested in
“life before death," as well as life after death...which is where the issue
is for most of us.

My proposal this morning is that we live in the tension between life
and death, that to be human is to know about death, and to the extent that
we know about it, to live under its power. My proposal is that God is on
the side of life: that in Jesus Christ, God has invited us to live life in
spite of death, accept life, love life ~ to have eternal life. My proposal
is that, in regard to this issue there is a decision to be made by each of
us, the most important decision we will ever make. My further proposal is
that we make that decision many times without even knowing it.

My proposal comes from a story in the 1lith chapter of John. It is
a story about the power of death and the power of life, which turns out to
be the power of love... As a matter of fact, that is the subject of the
entire Fourth Gospel.

Near the beginning a man comes to see Jesus under the cover of
darkness. Jesus tells him that in order to live he must be born again.
“How can this be?" Nicodemus asked. “What does this mean?"

The Fourth Gospel answers by way of a wonderful sequence of
vignettes to illustrate what it means to be alive - In Christ: a crippled
man walking: an outcast woman accepted: a blind man seeing ~ each a
brilliant work of art, full of subtlety and nuance, but with some details
so vivid you can almost feel the touch of a hand and see the brightness of
a light in the darkness.

This story is the last in the amazing sequence. It is the: summation.
It is a dramatic illustration of God's power of life. It is also the cause
for Jesus' crucifixion. After what transpires this day Jesus is a dead

man. Please come into the presence of this story with great respect. It

is perhaps the most difficult story in the Bible for us. It-is meant to

be. It is about the most important issue of all. So come inte the presence
of this story with the same quiet respectfulness with which you might stand
before a work of great art .- or with which you might sit as the organist
plays the Toccata & Fugue in D Minor. Come into the presence of this
strange and piercing story and listen for what it says to you.

Martha, Mary and Lazarus, sisters and brother, lived at Bethany, two
miles outside Jerusalem. They were close friends of Jesus. He was in
their home frequently. He would use their house as a base during the last
week of his life.

A message came to Jesus. “Your friend is dying." Why Jesus then
waited two days is not clear. When your best friend is dying, you drop
what you're doing and go. By the time Jesus approaches Bethany, Lazarus
has been dead four days. That, according to Rabbinical teaching means
really dead.

When Martha hears that he is on the way she goes out to meet him. In
fact, Martha challenges him. "This needn't have happened had you come
earlier." And it is in conversation with Martha that Jesus says words
which tell us what this incident is about. "I am the resurrection and the
life... Whoever believes in me will never die."

Martha leaves and Mary replaces her and the same conversation takes
place. Then, approaching the place of burial, Jesus begins to feel "deeply
moved in spirit and troubled," the text reads, moved either by his friends'
grief, or by his own profound response to the death of his friend Lazarus.
The intensity is building now. An alternate translation of what Jesus was
feeling is “profound. anger.” ;

The crowd, which is a kind of Greek chorus in the background, wonders
why a man who goes around making blind men see, can't deal with a sick
friend. And then the author, with a straight face, tells us that Jesus
said, "Remove the stone from the cave where he is buried." Martha, the one
we have learned you can count on to worry about the pot roast while
everyone else is talking about religion, makes a delicate but relevant
observation. “Remove that stone and there will be an odor." Jesus prays,
and then the author uses another unusually strong word: “he shouted,
"Lazarus, come out.'" Jesus instructs those with enough fortitude still
to be around — and it surely wasn't many ~ to unbind Lazarus. Lazarus is
never heard from again, The immediate result of this incident is the
determined, collaborative effort by the authorities to eliminate Jesus.

For the past decade, it seems that someone is always dying and coming
back to life, and then telling their experience to a writer who puts it all
in a sensational book. On the day I prepared this sermon the Today Show
reported a breakthrough in the science of extending human life by freezing.
Apparently a scientist put his dog on ice for a day or so and the dog
seemed none the worse for wear. So what we modern folk have to decide

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first about this story is on what level] to listen to it. Is it science? Is
it history? Is it psychology? It is my profound hope that when you decide
the level at which you will listen, that you actually listen for the Word
of God in this story. Because whether or not. it happened like it says it
happened is not, in this instance, the issue or even the most important
‘question to ask. The issue is what God is saying ito us in this disturbing
and penetrating story. : : :

As I struggled with this passage this week and contended with it and
argued back at it, I rediscovered a wonderful little fact that put it ‘all
in perspective. Archeologists have discovered a first century tomb about
where the town of Bethany was and there are three names carved on a rock in
that tomb and those names read Martha, Mary, Lazarus. Somehow when.I read
that - the hair raised on the back of my neck, not at the mysterious .
supernaturalism of the story, but at the magnificent fact that those people
actually lived! It rooted this fantastic, mind-boggling story in a reality
with which I can cope. I'll never know what actually happened on that hot
afternoon with the sun blazing down so mercilessly that you had to shade
your eyes to see anything, with small groups of people nervously following
behind Jesus as he strode up to the tomb... fascinated yet terrified. that
he might actualiy do what he was surely going to do; almost perceptibly
backing away, or looking so intensely that their focusing mechanisms went
hay-wire as he shouted into that gaping hole in the side of the hill to his
dear dead friend. What I can know is that they were flesh and blood people
that afternoon who lived in time and space. What I know is that something
happened that day so utterly unlikely, so incredible, that when they told
about it later, there were no more appropriate. words than resurrection and
new life, and that whatever it was that actually happened, they had never
been more sure than they were that afternoon that he was God's Christ and
that in him there was such a newness of life, and.an abundance of life,
that living without him now appeared to be a lot like death. What I am sure
of is that whatever it was that happened that day, Lazarus learned what
being alive means, that he loved his life as he never had and valued it,
and lived it fully and that when he eventually died, he did so with a
confident courage because he knew the power of love had conquered the power
of death.

It is still two weeks before Easter and we have a crucifixion toa
_-Mmark, but what this story knows, and what the Christian religion suggests,
is that resurrection is not just an event that happened one time-to Jesus,
it is an experience available to people in the midst of this business of
living. It has been proposed that death is far more than an event which
will happen for each of us at the end of the day. Rather death becomes a
power in whose reality all of life is lived and which expresses its power
in the form of a lot of small, daily deaths which keep us from living.

Death is whatever keeps you from living fully. It may be the fear of
your own death which has paralyzed you. It may.be huge outside forces
which oppress you and inhibit you and keep you bound in grave cloths... In
South Africa, Christian people who read this story conclude that the power
‘of death is a political structure that denies the full humanity of the vast
-majority of its citizens and is therefore deadly to them. And to those
‘people this story of Jesus shouting to Lazarus, bound, enslaved, to get up
and walk, to live, sounds striking and sometimes revolutionary.

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The power of death-is whatever is keeping you from living. The late
William Stringfellow used to teach that it is the image of ourselves to
which we bow and for which we will do anything and which we allow to
determine everything about us from our choice of. scotch, to the car we
_ drive, the schools our child attends and the magazines we read. . Paul
'Tournier says the power of death is the guilt under whose authority most of
-us live. Who doesn't know something about that? Dag Hammarskjoid said the
power of death is the cynicism and skepticism which the modern age teaches.
“God doesn't die on the day we are no longer: capable of wonder," he wrote
in his diary, “but we dao.’

And so if you listen to this story with respect, God's word to you is
going to be an invitation to identify the powers in your own life which ~
keep you from living fully and which are, therefore, the power of death.

It is not a comfortable invitation: the sun may be blazing hot and you may
have to squint away the tears and you may be both as fascinated and
horrified and afraid as those onlookers were on that day long ago. But the
invitation is to identify and name the forces which keep you from being
free and human and loving.

What could it be? Upper middle class, fast-track Americans spend a
lot of energy, after all, pretending that we are fairly indestructible, in
control of our destinies, infallible, immortal, so it may not come easy to
name what keeps us from life.

It may be poor health ~ sickness, or a debilitating condition, or
a handicap, or a worsening situation - in whose power you live daily and
whose reality is an hourly reminder of your frailty... and maybe life has
become nothing more than a constant coping.

It may be a boring job which has become deadly and under whose
authority you have been reduced in spirit and strength.

It may be a bad marriage, a relationship that has sagged and
floundered and whose deadliness has long ago convinced you that there is no
hope and therefore no reason to go on investing or even trying to love.

It may be guilt, from what you have done which was less human than
you know yourself to be, or a betrayal of those you most deeply love and
for whom you know yourself to be capable of dying.

What this story proposes is that we identify, in order to leave
behind, the forces which keep us from Living and which are for us,. the
power. of death.

This strange and wonderful story declares in very vivid images that
God-is passionately committed to life. When Jesus confronted the reality of
his friend's death he was deeply moved - or - he was deeply angry. I like
that. ; :

If you have confronted the reality of. death, you know. that among

other feelings it calls out of you is anger. Counselors know that part of
the important grief process is anger: anger at doctors, anger at funeral

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directors, anger at clergy or anyone else in the vicinity because beneath
it all is the primal anger, at God ~ at the basic insulting unfairness of
death. In a recent interview Bette Davis described her stroke as an
“ultimate insult" and then expressed considerable anger at everyone...
doctors, nurses, friends; it was a primal anger. I love the possibility
that Jesus was angry because his dear friend was cut off in the fullness. of
life.’ I love knowing that the power of God is angry and offended with
death. : . ; ,

God loves life. God loves it when people live life fully. ‘And so
one of the best kept secrets is that to be a Christian -— to follow Jesus
Christ is not to cut back your living, to pull in your horizons and lower
your sites but to live life deeply by loving it profoundly...precisely
because in Jesus Christ God has loved it. To love it precisely because
Jesus Christ died loving it.

The invitation is to identify the power of death in the middle of
your life: to start "discarding your own grave cloths" is the way someone
put it. And it is an invitation to jive as you have never lived before —
by celebrating, appreciating and loving your own life.

The word here - shouted to each of us to get our attention is to
start living again by loving.

Loving life with great, uncompromising passion, loving your own life
as God's personal gift to you.

Loving those dear people God has given you as precious gifts, loving
acquaintances and strangers, people you know-and people you don't know.

Loving the whole wonderful world which on some mornings needs a few
more people who know how to embrace it and hold it close ~ by embracing
each other and holding each other close.

My proposal to you this morning began with the suggestion that we
live in this tension between the power of life and the power of death. My
proposal conciudes with the suggestion that in Jesus Christ God has shown
the power of his love to raise up men and women to new life

The Good News of this Gospel is no less staggering than the story of
Lazarus. Jesus said: "T am the resurrection and the life...whoever
believes in me will never die."

The invitation is to trust that: to believe in Jesus Christ: ‘to live
in his love, forever. Amen.

Praise be to you, 0 God, for light in the darkness.

Praise be te you for love which lives in the middle of
hatred and apathy.

Praise be to you for reminders that you have overcome
the power of death, and that in your love, we are
safe forever.

Praise and adoration and glory and power to you great God,
and to Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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