THE FIFTH SUNDAY IN LENT 2002

We are nearly at the end of our Lenten journey, this journey from brokenness into wholeness, from darkness into light, from death into life. As we have made this journey together, we have encountered in Scripture, and most especially in the Gospel according to John, God's call to us to move deeper into the heart of God, to move out of the darkness of sin into the light of God's redemptive love. Nicodemus came to Jesus in the darkness and began a slow journey that would lead him on Good Friday to the risky action of providing with Joseph of Arimathea for Jesus' burial. The woman at the well came to Jesus in the full light of mid-day, but in the darkness of her own doubts, and came quite quickly with her fellow Samaritan villagers to see Jesus as the savior of the world. And in last Sunday's Gospel, the man born blind had his sight restored and came to worship Jesus the true light which the darkness of this world can never overcome.

This morning we hear of the darkness of death and the tomb and the breaking into that darkness of Christ's light. There are so many rich elements in this story, but there are three that strike me as being particularly important for us in our life together here in the community of Saint Matthias Church.

When Jesus finally came to the village where Mary and Martha and Lazarus lived and Martha came out to meet him, she began to chew him out for being late: "If you had been here, my brother would not have died." But you notice that Jesus didn't respond as one of us might have done - "How dare you speak to me like that!" - but instead shared with her the Good News: "Your brother will rise again." And when Martha responded with "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day." Jesus tells her that in him is the promise of resurrection and new life is already present. C.S. Lewis said of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings that it was good beyond hope. The promises of God are good beyond hope, good news that is far beyond our hoping or our imagining. Martha and Mary were angry at the loss they had suffered. And many of us are angry at the loss that we have suffered, both her in this parish and in the United States since September 11. But we are Christians and think that we shouldn't be angry and so we bottle it up inside. God calls to be honest about our anger, about our grief, honest with God and with one another.

The second striking things about this story is that when Jesus spoke the words that accomplished God's purpose - for after all, when God speaks, things happen - when Jesus spoke it was an invitation to one who was free to respond or not. Jesus said, " Lazarus, come out!" and Lazarus was free to come out or to stay in the tomb. You may recall the story of the blind beggar Bartimaeus who met Jesus at the city gate in Jericho. He threw off his cloak and came to Jesus and Jesus asked him, "What do you want me to do for you?" Now what kind of a dummy was Jesus, not to see that Bartimaeus obviously needed his sight restored? But Jesus left him free to ask for whatever he wanted, left Lazarus free to stay in the tomb, leaves us free to respond or not to the invitation to new life. Sometimes we feel that it would be easier to stay dead, for coming back to life again can be painful. Some of us in responding to the pain of the past year and a half have walled off parts of our lives and let them die. Some parishioners can't even come into this building because it's too painful. And though we might not like to admit it, some of us aren't talking with one another now the way we did two years ago. We have become dead to one another and God invites us to come out of the tomb into the light of God's love and new life.

The third thing that struck me was that when Lazarus came out of the tomb, neither he nor Jesus unwrapped the burial clothes so that he could be free. It was Mary and Martha and those who loved him that unbound him and let him go. It was those who had bound him for burial who had to unbind him for life. It may be a stretch of interpretation, but I think it had to be that way. We must unbind those whom we have bound. Some of us during the past year have wrapped others us and put labels on them, and not only here but in this country as well. We have labeled some people the parish as not to be trusted, just as some have labeled all Arabs or all Muslims as terrorists, as sand people, as ragheads. Only we who have bound those people and labeled them can take off the labels and unbind them and let them go.

We may feel, like the people of Israel in the dry bones story in Ezekiel, that things will never be different here in the parish from the way they are now. But God wants us to know that that's not true. God wants us to be honest about the hurts that we have suffered and our anger and grief and God wants us to come out of the tombs, out of the walled up dead places in our hearts, out into the light of God's love for us, and there God wants us to unbind one another and let each of us go free.