First Presbyterian Church

First Presbyterian Church

Rev. Sam Pendergrast

March 9, 2008

John 11:1-45

 

 

“With Jesus and a Dead Man”

 

When I was a pastor in New London, Iowa, many years ago my office window faced North Elm Street. Across the street was a large, vacant lot. Just to the left of that lot was a home that had several junked cars for yard ornaments. I suppose in this town of 2,000, a block from the railroad tracks, no one thought much about enforcing junked car ordinances if they had them. In the yard of that house was, appropriately enough, a junkyard dog. In the middle of the yard a tall iron stake had been driven into the ground. Around that stake was an iron ring. To the ring was attached a chain. To the chain was attached a dog collar. And to the collar was attached – well, you get the idea. The dog did not appear to be a very quick study. Whenever anyone walked along the sidewalk on either side of the street in front of that house, the dog would leap up. He would rush toward the person in a snarling frenzy only to be jerked off his feet by the chain and to fall to the ground. I avoided walking that way most of the time, even though the chain was strong, because that was a scary dog. The dog always lost to the chain. As I said, he didn’t seem to learn anything from his experience. Maybe it was brain damage from the force of being jerked up short so many times. I remember sitting at my desk, looking out across the street and watching the futile efforts of the dog when I was preparing for a funeral. “In the midst of life, we are in death,” run the words from the Burial of the Dead service in the old Book of Common Prayer. In our headlong pursuit of life, death intervenes. If we are the dog, death is the chain.

 

The strong chain of death certainly jerked the Hannah family up hard over the past couple of years. The flow of the normal events of life – love, marriage, children, careers and grandchildren – was interrupted in just over a year by the deaths of Jeanne and Bruce, both before the age of 60. Eric and Scott and their families were jerked up short and left stunned. No doubt they are still reorienting their lives around the empty spaces that were left when Jeanne and Bruce died. After someone dies you never “get back to normal” because “normal” has ceased to exist as it once did. You never get over it, but you learn to live with it. Your life is forever different. When my Granny died in 1978, my Uncle Britt, who then would have been 60 years old, said, “I feel like I’ve finally grown up. Now I’m the oldest generation in my family.” The death of someone you love changes you forever. This congregation, too, is reorienting after the deaths of two members who were so active and involved. The choir had to adapt quickly. Monti has stepped in. We are all different now that Bruce and Jeanne are gone. And you may think of Harriet Denham, Jane Wright and others. A congregation is always adapting to the absence of those we have loved and worked with who we know now only in memory.

 

It doesn’t take a physical death to disorient us and jerk us up short. Life is full of losses. Loss is another name for death that sometimes seems gentler. We grieve our losses none the less. A couple divorces after a relationship fails. My cartilage is wearing out and my knees no longer take well to running. Many of the dreams of youth I have left behind as through the decisions of life I have closed many doors behind me and narrowed my path. My children grow up and begin their own lives. Illness, disability, the losses of aging, troubled children – you name it; life takes its toll on us.

 

We might find ourselves saying, with Martha and Mary: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Where was Jesus when we needed him? If he had only been here, he could have bailed us out, kept us from having to suffer like this. Hear the note of complaint in Martha’s voice, and in her sister’s. How Jewish. How faithful. How trusting of God’s constant love and presence to be able to cry out in frustration and anger, to argue with the outcome, to complain about our lot. It reminds me of Tevyeh in “Fiddler on the Roof” when he told the Lord what an honor it was to be the Chosen People, but given what seems to happen to the Jews, “Couldn’t you choose somebody else for a while?” I think there is a mistaken, modern, pietistic tendency to accept everything that happens as God’s will, whether the event is evil or good and to suffer in silence, not really being honest and bringing our whole selves to God. Jesus welcomes the complaint of the sisters. Granted, he uses it as a teaching moment and as the opening to reveal himself as the very presence of resurrection. But he does not chastise them for their honest complaint.

 

After all, it was the complaint of the church to which John was writing. By this time, around the year 100, seventy years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, a couple of generations had come and gone. What were they to make of what they thought they heard Jesus say: “This generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” The first generation of Christians lived in expectation of Jesus’ imminent return before the end of their lives. Now, what were they to make of the delay? What were they to think about all those who had already died? In addition, persecutions had begun. Jews who confessed Jesus as Lord were in many places cast out of the synagogue and no longer had the freedom of religious practice that the Romans offered to the Jews. This new religion was looked upon with suspicion by the Empire. Many Christians experienced martyrdom. John was putting the complaint of the early church into the mouth of Mary and Martha: “Lord, if you had been here….” If Jesus had only returned as he had promised, my brother, my sister, my child, my friend would not have died.

 

Jesus’ answer to Martha is his answer to the church. “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live. And those who live and believe in me will never die.” Jesus uses a variety of vivid images to refer to himself and the gifts he brings from God. I am the good shepherd. I am the vine. I am the bread of life. I am the light of the world. But to this point in the gospel we have not heard anything like this. Those who have died are alive because not only is Jesus bread, water, vine, shepherd and light; but he is the very resurrection itself. In his presence – with Mary, Martha and Lazarus, with the early church, with the church through the ages, with you and me right here today – in Jesus’ presence is the power of resurrection. Not only are those who have died alive in God’s new world in the resurrection, but those who are living now can have a new kind of life right here, today. I am the resurrection and the life, said Jesus.

 

In the second chapter of the letter to the Hebrews the author says that Jesus came to free all those who were held in slavery by the fear of death. Because we belong to God, there is nothing that can hurt or destroy us. No one’s opinion or ridicule, nothing anyone can do to punish us, no physical lack, no pain, not even death itself can undo us. We belong to God! We belong to God and nothing can take us out of God’s hand. Because we belong to God, we can live as God made us to live, freely joyfully, letting go of all the old baggage of fears and resentments, unforgiveness and the negative messages we have picked up along the way. You are made in God’s image! You are a precious child of God! You have been reborn. The image of God within you is being restored. You don’t need to be afraid or anxious any more. You are set free to live as God made you to live. This is not an invitation to selfishness but to self-discovery, the discovery of the person God made you to be.

 

“Do you believe this?” Jesus asks Martha. John was asking that question of the young church. Jesus asks that questions of us. “Do you believe this?” Can you honestly say that in life and in death you belong to God and that the trust you have in the truth of that makes it possible for you to really live? There’s a line from one of the prayers in our funeral liturgy: “Help us to live as those who are prepared to die, so that we may die as those who go forth to live.” Is that us? Are we that free? Can we trust those promises to be true? Does our belief show up in the way we treat one another? Are we freed from the need to protect our status and position, to put others down to make ourselves look good, to drown ourselves in pleasing others because we’re so afraid they’ll reject us if we don’t? Can we really live in the freedom God gives us? Do we live with the lightness of forgiven children of God? Author Anne Lamott said in a recent interview, “We're here to know God, to love and serve God, and to be blown away by the beauty and miracle of nature. You just have to get rid of so much baggage to be light enough to dance, to sing, to play. You don't have time to carry grudges; you don't have time to cling to the need to be right.” That’s because we live by grace.

 

We have been set free, my friends. We don’t have to cling to our security blankets, whether those are physical or psychological. Death is no longer our enemy. We have died and been raised with Christ. Life is forever changed.

 

My friend, Wayne Kamm, rector of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, during my years in New London, told a story about a visit he made to the New Melleray Abbey near Dubuque. He was with a group of clergy on retreat. The guest master gave the men a tour of the abbey. At the end they stopped in the church yard by the monastery’s cemetery. When a brother dies they wash him and put him in his best habit. They lay him out in the church and sit vigil with him for twenty-four hours, taking turns praying the Psalms and the prayers of the church. Some of the brothers dig the grave. After the funeral service they carry the body the short walk to the church yard and to the grave. “We lower the body down,” explained the guest master. “Then a brother climbs down into the grave with the deceased to arrange his clothes and to place a cloth over his face. He climbs out; we pull up the ladder; and we take our shovels and cover him up.” It’s very simple. This one who has renounced the world and its possessions is laid to rest here in the church yard in the monastic habit that symbolizes his vocation in the church.

 

Suddenly one of the pastors in the visiting group – Wayne thinks it was a United Methodist – said loudly, “How barbaric! How can you just throw dirt on him with no casket or anything?” With a great smile on his face and a twinkle in his eyes, the guest master said, “Because we believe in the resurrection!”

 

My friends, in our baptism we have died and been raised with Christ. As we come to his Table, we are fed with his life. Nothing can hurt us. Nothing can make us afraid. Not even death. To God be the glory. Amen.