Co-missioners,
Once again we send you an item a few days late—late, that is, if you happen to be a preacher who was looking for a fresh take on the Gospel text appointed for this past Sunday. Then again, not so late if you’re someone who sat through a sermon on this text—John 11:32-44, the climactic finale of the story about Jesus raising Lazarus—and caught yourself wishing for more than you heard.
What you’ll find here is an angle on this account that isn’t heard so often. It comes from our editor, Jerry Burce, who didn’t tumble to it himself until six years ago. He shared it recently with one or two of us. We quickly encouraged him to share it with the rest of you.
Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community
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“See Lazarus Walking”
A Sermon for All Saints Sunday (Abridged)
Text: John 11:32-44
by Jerome Burce
As I recall—it’s been a while—the first word I ever learned to read was the word “look.” And really, I couldn’t help but learn it; I had no choice. That’s because it hogged the spotlight in the first lesson of the first book in a whole series of reading books that were standard issue in the late 1950’s, so standard that they made it all the way to the back hills of far-off New Guinea where I grew up.
Again as I recall, that first-ever reading lesson went like this. Page one: “Look.” Page two: “Look, look.” Page three: “Look, look, look. Page four: “Oh, look.” (Ah, progress.) Anyway, the pictures on those pages featured three children, a brother and two sisters named Dick, Jane and Sally, as we quickly discovered, and with them their dog Spot. There are other people here this morning old enough to remember them.
Which brings me to Lesson Two. It featured the word “See.” Not sea as in ocean but see as in use your eyes, synonym of look—and before you knew it we were reading things like “See Dick run.” (Major progress.)
I bring this up today because looking and seeing is what God wants to accomplish with all of us this morning. Here’s how Christ our Lord just put it to sister Mary, and through her to all of us: “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God”—that’s “glory” as in something about God and what God is doing that will make your jaw drop.
Or how about I put it this way: “Look. Look, look.” Look, that is, with two eyes, both peering through a heart that’s straining to trust Jesus—and now use those eyes to see. See, that is, what Christ sees, both in you and in the people all around you.
See Lazarus walking.
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Most all of us, I think, first encountered today’s story way back in Sunday School, and a lot us have heard it many times since, often at funerals. For the longest time—until only a few weeks ago, to tell the truth of it—I thought of it myself chiefly as a funeral text, a signal only of things to come—a promise of the final resurrection, body and soul, that all of us are headed for according to God’s Word.
Still, there was something in this story that always nagged at me. It didn’t seem to fit. It was this detail at the end where Lazarus comes out of the tomb looking like something of a zombie, still wrapped in the cloths he was buried in.
You’ll recall that in St. John’s great account of Easter morning the cloths are left behind. When Peter and the other disciple rush to the tomb to check things out, they find them lying there. I have no idea what Jesus was wearing when he appeared to Mary Magdalene an hour or two later, but it wasn’t what they buried him in.
And here’s what finally hit me about this a few weeks ago—it was like the penny dropping as people used to say when a penny was all you needed to work the gumball machine:
Today’s account and the Easter account are about two different things, or more sharply, about two different aspects of God’s great power at work in people God has set his heart on. God calls all of them his saints.
The Easter story is about saints as they will be in the age to come when all things are new, and death is no more, and God has wiped the last tear from every eye of all his dear daughters and sons, as we heard in the other readings this morning (Is. 25:6-9, Rev. 21:1ff.). In that day we will look like Jesus.
By contrast, today’s story is about God’s saints as they are this very morning; and as we listen God is asking all of us to look around, and after that to look again through trusting hearts, and finally to see the impossible miracle of how the people we’re sitting with in this very moment all look like Lazarus—Lazarus at the end of the story, Lazarus shambling from his tomb, Lazarus no longer dead, anything but dead, but even so, Lazarus still wrapped in the rags they buried him in; Lazarus returning as a sign of God’s power in Jesus Christ to the same old world of sin and death that killed him in the first place. It will kill him a second time, by the way. In the next chapter of John’s Gospel we catch some people plotting to do just that. And even so, in that next chapter we also catch sister Mary at her brother’s coming out party, so to speak, and we see her using a bottle of outrageously expensive perfume to thank Jesus with all her heart for the miracle she’s enjoying today.
So please, God says. Make like Mary right now. Look around. See Lazarus walking.
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I have spent my whole life long wrapped in a cocoon of Christian people. That’s what comes of being a pastor who went to Lutheran schools from start to finish.
Looking back, I find it all too easy to be unimpressed with the Christian people I have known. They all come draped in the rags of sin and death. I’m draped in them too. See the bags beneath my eyes, the hair on my head, the stoop in my back. What you don’t see so much are the blunders and follies I commit or some of the smellier thoughts I think. I do my best, like every other sinner, to hide them from you, and with God to pretend that I didn’t think them. God laughs at that, he always does, and it’s not a pleasant laugh.
After that God tells me—he tells us all—to look in the mirror every morning; to make the sign of the cross, the one a pastor traced on me when I was baptized; and when I do that, to open my eyes and see the miracle of Lazarus walking.
God asks me to do the same thing whenever I look at you.
Long ago when I was serving overseas, I had two seminary students, one laid back and lazy, the other a jerk, to put it frankly. Those were the rags they wore. One day the two had a quarrel that almost came to blows, the kind you walk away from vowing never to talk to that creature again. With the help of my closest colleague I got the two in my office. We talked the matter through. We reminded them of who they are in Jesus Christ our Lord. By the end the two were apologizing, forgiving each other, and shaking hands. What I saw that day was Lazarus walking.
In the first American congregation I served there was a crusty woman of very firm opinion and a fairly sharp tongue. It took me a long time to spot the lively faith and very large heart that was hidden beneath. When at last I did, I saw Lazarus walking. She told me once about standing on a sidewalk one night as a little girl, watching with the family as their house burned down. Her mother wrapped the children in her arms and said a prayer of thanks to God that all of them were safe. Don’t be afraid, the mother said. We’re in God’s care. That mother for her daughter that night was Lazarus walking.
Later in this service a bell will toll for twenty-one members of this congregation who died this year. I could tell stories about them all. I won’t. There isn’t time. They all wore rags of one kind or another—those signs of sin and death that drape us all. At the same time each of them sparkled in their own particular way with faith and hope in God. A few blew me away, so deep was their kindness, so great their generosity. When they were with us, we saw Lazarus walking. When next we see them they’ll look like Jesus after Easter.
I hope all of you will look around this morning and see Lazarus walking again. Watch as people shuffle down this aisle to register their faith in Jesus Christ. They’ll do that by committing their financial resources to Jesus’ mission in this congregation next year. They’ll do it too by coming to communion where Christ, as always, is waiting for them.
Lazarus walking. It’s who you are. It’s what you do. And the glory goes to God in Christ who keeps calling us all from the graves of sin and despair that an unbelieving world would trap us in.
One last story, and then I’m done. It happened only yesterday. I heard from a mother whose daughter is attending kindergarten at a Catholic school this year. The week’s lesson in her Faith Formation class was about the love of God and the hope of heaven. The little girl came home talking about this; then she sat down to make a card for the great-grandmother she barely knows. The woman is in a nursing home, her memory all but gone. On the front of the card she drew Great-Grandma in the middle, God at her side, the little girl herself sitting behind—all of this done in kindergarten style of course. And then the message inside, which Daddy helped her to spell: Grandma, God loves you. I love you too. Have fun in heaven.
That little girl, suddenly alive in her little girl way with faith and hope in God and a care for someone she scarcely knows—that little girl is Lazarus walking, called from the dead by the Spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ. The teachers at our own parochial school could tell stories of that miracle being replicated every week. God grant us all the faith to look, to look again, at last to see—and after that to thank Almighty God for his power at work right here, right now, in Jesus Christ our Lord.
