Lent 5 2017

Lent 5A 2017

Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 130; John 11

                                                           Rev. Adam T. Trambley                                  

April 2, 2017, St. John’s Sharon

This week we had a sudden death in the parish.  Gary was our senior warden and had gotten involved in many of our ministries in the relatively short time he has been at St. John’s.  He was taken too soon generally, and way too soon from those of us who were just getting to know him. 

When tragedies like this occur, especially at times when someone seems to be doing everything right, we have a lot of questions.  We mostly want to know why, but our desire to make sense of death has a host of corollary inquiries, as well.  Our fundamental response as Christians to these questions is generally not the easy explanation we would like.  Our response is not to minimize the tragedy of death or the suffering of those left behind. Instead, our response looks squarely into the bleakness of the grave and proclaims that we have something even more powerful.  Our response is hope.  Our response is the good news of Jesus Christ.  Our response is that the Kingdom of God is at hand.

We see one aspect of this hope in our first reading this morning.  Ezekiel is writing to people who were driven from their homes, carried off to Babylon, and dying in a strange land.  He looks over a valley filled with bones, and sees that they were very dry.  Ezekiel prophecies to the bones and they come together and take on sinews and flesh and skin.  Then Ezekiel prophecies and they are filled with breath and spirit.  Instead of a valley of dead bones, the whole multitude of God’s people are standing there.  They are resurrected from the dead – brought out of their graves.  We aren’t talking here about some zombie apocalypse with animated corpses running around.  Ezekiel’s vision is of those who have died being fully restored to life.

Part of the full restoration to life in being in community.  The whole house of Israel is restored in Ezekiel’s prophecy.  We don’t have people off in some private post death experience of afterlife, sitting in a nice garden by themselves.  Instead, we have everybody coming out of their graves and being restored to their own land, their own communities, their own cities, their own people.  The image that the book of Revelation uses for the eternal dwelling of the resurrected people of God is a city – the New Jerusalem.  The city is huge, something like fifteen-hundred miles on each side, and fifteen-hundred miles high.  The buildings must have some great views. The point is that we are going to be together as a restored community.  A community of love and righteousness.  A festive community of good wine and rich foods of every ethnicity and culinary palate. A community of art and culture offered in praise before the throne of the crucified lamb of God who was raised from the dead.  We are, in the end, restored to the fullness of a physical life beyond this current, mortal life so that we can be part of this eternal people of God.  This resurrected community is the hope we hold.

The good news that we proclaim is that we can get there because Jesus Christ has risen from the dead.  For me the most powerful and compelling way to understand Jesus’ resurrection goes back to the early Greek bishops and theologians.  They saw Jesus as a victorious conqueror going down to the land of the dead and breaking free.  Jesus, being fully human, was able to die.  But Jesus, being fully divine, was not able to be held by death.  Imagine the Son of God going down to hell – not the hell of Dante’s inferno with fire and brimstone and torture, but the way that the ancient people understood the abode of the dead.  The light of the world descends to a place of darkness. The Word in whom all things came to be enters a land of shadows and gloom, of ghosts and shades.  Instead of staying, however, he goes to the entrance, beats up the devil guarding it, and kicks open the front door.  On the way out, he breaks the locks and rips the gates off their hinges so they can never confine anyone again.  Then he goes back to his Father, taking anyone in hell with him that wants to come with him.  The gates of death are broken and no one has to stay there anymore.  When we die with Christ, we follow him right out the front door to a place of paradise with his heavenly Father.  We don’t wait in darkness for that final resurrection Ezekiel describes, but we wait in a paradise with others in the nearer presence of God.  Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection that overcomes death for us is the good news of our gospel proclamation.

We also proclaim the message the Jesus preached when he was on earth – that the Kingdom of God is at hand.  Our faith is not just about something that happens to us after we die.  Our faith is that the power of God is breaking into the world right now, that our eternal life is so close that we can reach out and touch it, that we can live as if we are already citizens in that New Jerusalem we are moving toward.  The assurance of the Kingdom of God on its way right now is exciting and joyful, but also sometimes frustrating.  One the one hand, we see miracles, we find ourselves transformed, and we experience the love, joy, and peace of the Holy Spirit.  Yet on the other hand, we still experience the pain of loss, the tragedy of death, and the scourges of poverty, oppression, addiction and ignorance.  Yet even in the midst of what seems to be evil, we can find God to be present.  God is always redeeming, restoring, and bringing new life.

In our gospel today, we see Jesus bringing the Kingdom of God to his friends.  In perhaps Jesus’ most powerful miracle, he calls Lazarus out of the tomb after he has been dead for four days.  Lazarus is not resurrected as Jesus will be on Easter morning or as we look forward to ourselves at the last day.  Lazarus is just brought back to this life.  He’ll die again, at least for a while, before being finally raised to the fullness of life.  Jesus presence and miracle, however, is the profound demonstration he has brought the Kingdom of God with him.  Lazarus is restored to the community of his family and friends.  This loving miracle also brings people to a deeper faith in the power of God and the identity of Jesus as the Messiah.  Lives are transformed on a number of levels.  The coming Kingdom of God means that we have a King, Jesus, who is already making the power of his rule and his life felt today.  So much of what we do as a church is an sign of that power and life, at least when we are letting God work through us.    

Paul writes that if there were no resurrection of the dead, we of all people are most to be pitied.  He’s right.  All our faith, our love, and our hope would be for naught if we had nothing to look for beyond this existence or if Jesus no longer had the power to shine into our lives.  But we have hope.  We proclaim the good news of the resurrection.  We have seen the Kingdom of God breaking into our lives in around us.  These are the answers we can give in the midst of tragedy and death.  The power of Jesus Christ is transforming the various nightmares that beset our present reality into the dream of God, and God’s vision includes an important place for each and every one of us with him for all eternity.  Gary and so many others whom we love and see no longer are with him now.  In our own time, we, too, will join them, moving from the struggle to claim the in-breaking Kingdom of God in this life to its fullness in the next.