John 11v1-45

Ezekiel 37v1-14

From Crisis to Resurrection

The Gospel reading is one of the longest in the lectionary.  The story of the raising of Lazarus is full of human emotion – love, family bonding, friendship, risk, deep sorrow, mourning, community support, feelings of neglect, faith, hope and joy.  It contains the shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept.”  The passage is so long because it goes into detail from the sudden death of Lazarus to him being raised by Jesus.  The detail in between.  As with the Death and Resurrection of Jesus, we miss out the period in between.  Yet many people find themselves stuck in the “in between”

Saturday People

The Rev. Donald Eadie was a Methodist Minister and Chairman of the Birmingham District.  Just after his appointment he was diagnosed with a degenerative spinal disease.  He had three major operations but for ten years his life was spent lying on his back in his “loved room”.

He wrote a number of books during that period and I was drawn to “Grain in Winter” in which he writes down his reflections of his solitude and the many visitors who came to see him.  He describes himself as a “Saturday person”, meaning that he is stuck between his busy old life dying and waiting for what God has for him in the future.  It is a period of waiting and no-one likes to be waiting.  He says “There is a long Saturday between Friday, the day of crucifixion, and the Sunday of resurrection… For Saturday people that day can last for years and not twenty-four hours and is rarely experienced as Holy in the way some in the organized church would have us understand”  He says, “Often the need for change emerges within one of life’s transitional periods; the early years of parenthood, ill-health, unemployment, redundancy, retirement, separation, divorce or bereavement.”  These are the Saturday people.

In this Coronavirus pandemic we all find ourselves as “Saturday people” .  The crisis has struck and we don’t know where it will go and when it will end.  We don’t know when we are going to be raised again.  We wait.

Waiting

Waiting is frustrating and annoying.  When Lazarus was very ill Mary and Martha sent word to Jesus and waited expectantly for him to come.  He didn’t come right away and in that time Lazarus died.  When Jesus finally came Lazarus had been dead four days.  You can imagine the frustration and probably annoyance that their friend Jesus didn’t come right away.  In our Old Testament reading we see the Jewish people in exile.  They had been there so long that they were feeling spiritually dead.  They were like dry bones.  When will God act?

Absence

Saturday people often feel that God has deserted them.  Its behind the words of Martha who said, when she greeted Jesus “If only you had been here my brother would not have died” (v10).  The sisters felt very deeply Jesus’ absence.  There are other instances of dejection in the Bible.  The two men on the road to Emmaus on the day of Resurrection said to the stranger who joined them on the road “We had hoped that he was the one….”  They were Saturday people caught in that time warp.   There is no need to feel guilty if you ever felt like that. 

Jesus uttered those words on the cross “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.”  As a human being going through suffering he felt isolated from God.

Don Eadie quotes Henry J. M. Nouwen, “To wait open-endedly is an enormously radical attitude towards life.  So it is to trust that something will happen beyond our imaginings.  So, too, is giving up control over our future and letting God define our life, trusting that God moulds us according to God’s love and not according to our fear.”  We need to put our trust in Jesus who is the resurrection and the life.

Presence & Resurrection

Resurrection is happening all the time and here are some examples.  Fanny Crosby (1820-1915) was blind from the age of six weeks.  She said, “It seemed intended by the blessed providence of God that I should be blind all my life, and I thank him for the dispensation.  If perfectly earthly sight were offered me tomorrow I would not accept it.  I would not have sung hymns to God if I had been distracted by the beautiful and interesting things of life.”  She was a member of John Street Methodist Church in Manhattan and gave us such hymns as “To God be the Glory” and “Blessed Assurance”.  Those hymns tell us of her rising above her disability. 

The valley of dry bones of Ezekiel tell us that raising can take time.  Ezekiel describes in great detail the building up of the dry bones to becoming living beings. 

Jonathan Aitken was an MP and Government Minister (Minister of Defence).  He told a lie about the funding of a period he spent at the Ritz Hotel.  It was funded by a Saudi prince but he denied it even under oath in court.  He was given a prison sentence for perjury.  In that time he lost everything. Now he is an ordained Anglican Priest.  The day after his ordination he spoke to 220 people in the Grand Hall at the Old Bailey.  He said, “I was trapped in a self-inflicted downward spiral of disasters which I have described as disgrace, defeat, divorce, bankruptcy and jail.  I was clinging by my fingertips to faith and occasionally to life itself.  But the love and shared faith I found here helped to steer me through the encircling gloom.”  God raised him up from that despair and he offered his life to God at the age of seventy to become a prison Chaplain.

Resurrection does not only happen with individuals it happens with institutions like the Church.

I remember in the 1970s going to Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and our Russian guide asked each person in the group what they did for a living.  I explained that I was a Methodist Minister and knowing she was a Communist I tried to tell her what that was.  She interjected and said, “I know all about Methodism - we were taught about it in our Atheism classes at School.”  So Russian children then had classes to encourage them to be Atheists and rubbish Christianity as a prop for people in the past.  All the Churches had been turned into Warehouses or Art Galleries.  Christians were persecuted.  Now, things are different.  In Russia there is a thriving Russian Orthodox Church and even Methodist Churches.  It was interesting to read that President Putin is going to include faith in God in his new Russian Constitution.  That is resurrection.

Many Churches in this country have resurrection stories to tell.  I know St. Mark’s Church in Battersea Rise which in the 1990s had a congregation of six elderly ladies.  Holy Trinity did a Church plant and that Church now is full at each of the three services on Sunday.  Its worship is not my style, but it meets a need among the young professionals in its congregation.

John Wesley spoke of Prevenient Grace.  By that he meant that God was at work in the world and in people’s lives even though they didn’t recognise him or were aware of him.  Thanks to that Grace of God resurrection is available and happens to people who are unbelievers.  “He makes his son to shine on the righteous and the unrighteous alike.”  Such is our loving God.

Conclusion

So we see in the story of Lazarus a whole range of human emotions.  We see in both our readings the way in which God is continually active in our lives and in the world even when we are at our very lowest.  He is there even when we feel alone and deserted.  But Jesus, as he said, is the resurrection and the life.    Mary and Martha went through a very trying time but Jesus came to them in his own time, but when they needed him most.  We may be Saturday people, but Sunday and resurrection will come to us all.  Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Sermon produced by the Rev’d Gordon Ashworth. Sunday 29^th March 2020