Month: March 2023

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on the Fifth Sunday in Lent. Based on John 11:1-45.

---

Today is not Easter. Lazarus was just one man who was raised from the dead. In today’s story, Jesus did not usher in the messianic age. So why did Jesus bother raising just one man to just a few more years of life?

For that matter, why was Jesus born? Next week, I’ll talk about why he was killed, and then on Easter we hear about his resurrection. We have lots of theology built around his death and resurrection. But remember: Once Jesus was born, he was destined to die. It was a matter of when, not if. So he must have lived for a reason.

Paul wrote in Philippians,

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he existed in the form of God,

    did not regard equality with God

    as something to be grasped,

but emptied himself,

    taking the form of a slave,

    assuming human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a human,

    he humbled himself

    and became obedient to the point of death—

    even death on a cross.

Philippians 2:5-8

Jesus emptied himself so that he could be like one of us. He came down from heaven to experience humanity and everything good and bad about it that we must also experience. In the process, he showed us how to live, and how to deal with the brokenness of the world.

We often talk about and idealize a transcendent God, one who is remote, removed from this world, emotionally distant. Jesus showed us an immanent God, one who is right here among us, in the messiness of real life. One who experiences the full emotional range of the human condition. In this passage, we see Jesus riding a rollercoaster of emotions.

First, when he hears that Lazarus is sick, Jesus seems a bit dispassionate and even cold. “Oh, my dear friend is sick? I’ll just stay here and keep doing what I’m doing for a couple of days.” He doesn’t even seem to acknowledge the gravity of the situation. But then he decides that he needs to do something, that he needs to be present with his grieving friends.

When he encounters Martha, he is a calming influence. He reminds her of the coming messianic age, and also that he himself is the Messiah who will usher it in, someday, just not today. He seems to defuse Martha’s anger, and the story could have ended there. But then when Mary confronts him, he gets it: death is a reason for sadness, and anger, and all of those other emotions.

In verse 33, we read, “he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” The two Greek words used here are kind of tricky to translate, but convey a troubled emotional state, maybe indignant, maybe angry. One is the same word used for Jesus’s emotional state when he says that one of his disciples will betray him. Here these two Greek words convey a sense that Jesus is angry at the presence of death in the world, and particularly this specific death. Mary is weeping and wailing, and Jesus is angry that death has that kind of power over us.

As the story continues, we encounter the shortest verse of the Bible: “Jesus wept.” A great sadness came over him, but it’s a quiet grief. Not the wailing grief of Mary, but a quiet weeping. What made him so sad? Was it the loss of his friend Lazarus? Was it the contagious grief of his friends? Was it the thought of his own coming death? Maybe all of those things. He was overcome with the reality of death and its power over us.

I recently listened to a podcast about death. The guest pointed out that in modern Western culture, we try to avoid the topic altogether. In fact, we try not to even say that someone has “died.” Instead, we use euphemisms: They passed away, or they’re in a better place, or they kicked the bucket, or they have entered the Church Triumphant. These are all ways of avoiding the simple fact that life ends in death. Jesus knew this, and was overcome by its reality and its close presence, and he broke down. He was not a distant, dispassionate God, but one who humbled himself and became truly human so he could know what it felt like to lose a friend.

The story doesn’t end there, either, though. Jesus once again becomes indignant over the power Death has to disrupt our lives and relationships. He is compelled to act. He cannot sit idly by while his friends grieve. So, he takes control of the situation, raises Lazarus, and is calm once again.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross broke down grief into five stages. A common misunderstanding is that people think the stages are sequential. In reality, it might be better to call them modes of grief. Each person handles grief differently, and most people jump back and forth between these modes over a period of time that could be days, weeks, months, years, or decades. There is no fixed timetable or sequence. But it’s still useful to think of the different modes: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. We see these all in today’s passage. The disciples don’t believe that Lazarus is really dead. Martha is angry at Jesus, and Jesus is angry at Death. Both Mary and Martha seem to be bargaining with Jesus and wanting him to turn back time. Jesus weeps, and the others are also weeping in their own ways.

The only mode that we don’t see is acceptance. Jesus cannot accept that death is the end. He cannot let the story end with Mary and Martha trapped in their grief and suffering the loss of their brother. In fact, on that podcast I mentioned, the guest pointed out that every time Jesus encounters a dead person, he raises them. He is always, always indignant over the power of Death to disrupt relationships.

Yet his miraculous raising of Lazarus is ultimately temporary. Lazarus will die someday, just not now. So will Mary and Martha and everyone else in this story. Everything is temporary. Jesus solves the problem of the day, but doesn’t solve the ultimate problem of death and brokenness in the world.

Or actually, he does, just not in today’s story. As Martha says, Lazarus will rise again in the resurrection on the last day. Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” Jesus is proclaiming the coming messianic age, the age that comes after this one, the age in which we are all restored to life and wholeness. This life is temporary, but death is as well. Death is just a waypoint on the journey of our eternal lives.

So, what’s the point? Lazarus is dead; Lazarus will be raised on the last day, along with Mary and Martha and all those who loved him. Someday, they will all be together in Christ’s eternal kingdom. So why does Jesus bother to raise Lazarus from the dead? Why force him to die a second time?

I’m often reminded of a scene from “Moonstruck.” Who has seen that movie? OK, well, if you haven’t, I apologize for a few spoilers here. Cher plays a widow who is dating a man who proposes to her. Foolishly, he doesn’t have an engagement ring. I mean, what man proposes marriage without a ring? Well, Cher calls him on it, and he happens to be wearing a pinky ring. So she makes him give her that one as a temporary measure. She goes home and tells her father that her boyfriend has proposed, and shows him the ring. Her father says, “It’s a pinky ring, it’s stupid, it’s a man’s ring.” She says, “It’s temporary!” He says, “Everything is temporary! That don’t excuse nothin’!”

Everything is temporary, but that’s no excuse. Jesus could have just said, Yeah, sorry your brother is dead, but someday you’ll be dead too, so just suffer without him until you’re raised together on the last day. But he didn’t. He knew that even though this life, and the death that comes with it, is temporary, each one of us must do what we can to resolve the pain and suffering of this world. And later on, he promised that when he departed, he would send a Helper, the Holy Spirit, to be with us as we strive to follow his healing example.

Life is temporary. Life is change. When I look back five years, or ten, or twenty, I can see how much things have changed. Some for the better, some for the worse. Almost exactly three years ago, all our lives changed dramatically, and we all had to live with a succession of temporary measures. Think about the way we have worshipped in that time. We started with Lou Ellen preaching on her iPhone from her camper, then moved to pre-recorded worship services that I pieced together, then came back in person but with pews taped off for social distancing, and eventually got back to where we are today. There is still a sense that what we are doing is temporary, for example, that Susan and I are just placeholders. At any point along the way, we could have just said, Oh well, we can’t worship the way we used to, so we’re done here. After all, God doesn’t take attendance, and we can love God and be loved by God no matter what we do. But no, we chose to deal with the reality of the present—not the past, not the future, but the present—and find ways to continue to worship. We chose to find ways of joining together to show our love of God and our love of our neighbors.

That was the message of Jesus’s life. He knew that his time on earth was short. His active ministry may have been as short as one year or as long as three years—not very long to teach us everything we need to know. He knew the path he was on would lead to conflict with the religious and civil authorities, likely ending in his death on a cross. He didn’t give up, though. He made the most of the time he was given. He healed the sick, raised the dead, and fed the hungry. He took care of the problems of the day. He taught his disciples about the kingdom of God. He showed everyone how to live. And he sent the Holy Spirit to help us all to follow his example.

Everything is temporary. But that doesn’t excuse us from doing all that we can, every day, to serve our neighbors and help them to know God’s presence in their lives. Someday, all will be well as we enter Christ’s eternal kingdom. But in the meantime, we have work to do, today and every day, healing the brokenness of this world. Let’s get to work. Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Sermon preached March 5, 2023, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on John 3:1-17. Podcast link below, or check it out on my YouTube channel!

---

Who was Nicodemus? As far as I know, the only evidence of his existence is the Gospel According to John. His name means “victory of the people.” It’s a Greek name, which is a bit unusual but perhaps indicates that it’s a nickname like Peter or Paul. We learn here that he is a Pharisee and a member of the Jewish ruling council, the Sanhedrin. He shows up in three places in John’s Gospel. First, he comes to Jesus by night, seeking illumination. Remember how I said that humans aren’t moths, right? He doesn’t come to Jesus because he wants to stare at the light, but because he wants the light of Jesus’s words to show him the Truth. The Book of John uses light and darkness motifs extensively, so we should pay attention here that he comes by night. Nicodemus may be ashamed to be seen with Jesus in the daylight, or perhaps we are supposed to recognize the darkness of his ignorance that is illuminated by the Word of God.

Then the next time we encounter him, Nicodemus is trying to get the other Pharisees to just hear Jesus out. He says, essentially, let’s not judge Jesus on the basis of what people are saying about him, but on the basis of what Jesus himself says in his defense. Something that Jesus said in this midnight encounter planted a seed and made Nicodemus wonder if perhaps Jesus is the Messiah. Perhaps.

The last time we hear of Nicodemus, he is helping Joseph of Arimathea prepare Jesus for burial. Nicodemus bought a hundred pounds of spices to prepare the body. Curiously, the other three Gospels don’t mention his role at all. Hmm.

I think Nicodemus is an amalgam. That is, he is a stand-in for several people, Pharisees and members of the Sanhedrin, who were on the fence about Jesus. The other Gospels hold up Peter as the bumbling buffoon that we are supposed to see ourselves in. John does some of that, too, but I think he includes Nicodemus for the sake of Jews who were trying to figure out just where they fit in the history of the world. Jews who were trying to determine whether following Jesus was really the right thing to do.

OK, let me ask, who here was born of the flesh? I hope everybody is raising their hand. We are all born of the flesh. That birth situates us in a certain place and a certain culture. Nicodemus was born of the flesh—a Jew, and so an inheritor of the covenant God made with Abraham, and with Jacob, and with Moses. He grew up to be a Pharisee, which was a relatively progressive sect of Judaism. We often speak unkindly about the Pharisees because of the way they are portrayed in the Gospels, but remember, Paul was a Pharisee, too. The Pharisees were progressive in the sense that they believed in the “oral Torah,” and they believed that God was still revealing the Truth to God’s people. This progressivism enabled the Pharisees to survive the destruction of the Temple, while the Sadducees and Essenes and other minor sects did not. Modern Judaism carries on the legacy of the Pharisees, continuing to grow and change.

We ignore our fleshy birth, and the fleshiness of others, at our peril. I recently listened to Prisoners of Geography, a book about the impact of mountains and plains and rivers and seas on the development of cultures and nations. Why is the Middle East so screwed up? Because Britain and France decided to divvy up the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, and they drew lines on a map with no regard for the people who lived there. They arbitrarily assembled Iraq from three distinct people groups, arbitrarily split the Kurdish people among three different nations, and smushed together other nations that had no shared history. They thought, “They’re all Arabs and Muslims, right? No problem.” Well, actually, there are Arabs and Turks and Kurds and Syrians, and there are two major branches of Islam, and there are further ethnic and religious divisions that are opaque to outsiders but very clear to the people who live there.

Here in America, we tend to trivialize these inherited relationships. We tend to follow the philosophy of John Locke, who developed social contract theory. The idea of a social contract is that people live together in society in accordance with an agreement that establishes moral and political rules of behavior. The idea is that we each choose to give up certain freedoms in order to have a functioning society. This is clearly false. There are only a few people in our church who chose to live in America. The rest of us were just forced to accept whatever rules our parents, and their parents, and their parents agreed to.

In the same way, Nicodemus was born to the covenant established generations earlier. But Jesus said, being born of the flesh is nothing. The flesh is temporary. Everything we see with our human eyes is temporary. If you think about everything that happened in the twentieth century, you can’t help but recognize the transient nature of human constructs. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the vast majority of travel was by horse-drawn cart or steam-powered train. Electricity and the telephone had been invented but were not universally available in America, let alone around the world. The sun never set on the British Empire, and much of Europe was ruled by a handful of other empires—Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and German. Then came the automobile, airplanes, and space travel. Two world wars and a revolution in Russia redrew all the maps and alliances, and then the end of the Cold War redrew them all again.

Everything is temporary. Now, I don’t mean in the sense that these restrictions caused by the pandemic are temporary and we’ll go back to the way things were. That past was also temporary, and now it’s gone. The present state of the world is temporary like the border between Lebanon and Syria. Everything built by human hands is temporary. This church is just over sixty years old, and its predecessor that served our congregation for ninety years is no longer functioning as a worship space. Those of you who have lived in Rolla for a while can surely drive around town and think, “That’s where such-and-such used to be.” Even in just the fifteen years we have lived here, I’ve seen businesses come and go, new buildings built on campus, a big hole in the ground where the power plant used to be, and so forth.

But Jesus says, what matters is to be born from above. To be born of water and Spirit. How can this be? Like Nicodemus, we wonder how we can be born again. Growing up in the 1980s, I remember “born-again Christian” being a specific belief system, one that didn’t really fit with the beliefs I inherited as a United Methodist. We typically thought of being “born again” as having some sort of profound experience, maybe like Saul had on the road to Damascus. Maybe after a car accident, or someone trying to quit drinking or drugs, or something like that. As someone who was baptized as an infant and grew up in the church, where did that leave me? Is the kin-dom of God only open to those who live a life devoted to sinfulness and then have a dramatic conversion?

No, I don’t think that’s what Jesus meant. I think he meant that God can claim us whether or not we are born under the covenant of Abraham. God can claim us whether or not we choose to follow him. We do not choose to be born of the Spirit any more than we choose to be born of the flesh. In his farewell discourse, Jesus said, “You did not choose me, but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.” Jesus has claimed us, each one of us, and chosen us to be part of something bigger than ourselves. We have been chosen to be in God’s kin-dom, children of a new covenant.

We do not choose membership in God’s kin-dom, but we can choose how we respond. We can choose to ignore it. We can choose to focus on our birth of the flesh. We can choose to pay the utmost attention to the web of relationships we were born to, the culture and customs we inherited. So often, what we think of as Christian values are actually cultural values with a Christian veneer. The Bible is a thick book, so we can find justification in it for whatever cultural belief we hold. Want to subjugate women? There’s plenty of support in most books of the Old Testament and Paul’s disputed letters. Whatever you believe, you can find a Bible verse to support it.

Or, we can choose instead to embrace our birth of the Spirit. We can choose to see the kingdom of God instead of the kingdom of man. We can choose to see people as Christ sees them. Indeed, we can see Jesus in each person we meet. When we do that, we live out our new birth of the Spirit into the new covenant of love that Jesus instituted.

More than that, we can create a new culture, a new legacy. Instead of perpetuating stereotypes, or the rules that privilege someone because of their birth, or the cultural beliefs that prevent people from seeing God’s love, we can create a new world for the next generation. We can love people because God loves them. Indeed, we can love people as God loves them. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son. God gave everything they had. Jesus in turn gave everything he had, laying down his life for the people he loved. He did not condemn the world, but came so that the world could be saved through him.

We have inherited some good things and some bad things. We cannot choose what we receive, but we can choose what we pass down to those who come after us. Let us choose a legacy of love, a legacy of community, of self-sacrifice, of membership in God’s eternal family. Let us choose our birth of the water and Spirit as our highest calling as we enter God’s kin-dom today, right here, right now, and create a place where God’s love can grow. Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download