MORE THAN RESUSCITATION

 Sermon preached by the Rev. Michael Anderson Bullock

[Ezekiel 37:1-14; Romans 8:6-11; John 11:1-45]

Bev and I have become enamored with watching the HBO television show, The Pitt.  It is an Emmy-Award winning drama, staged in the Emergency Department of the University of Pittsburgh’s Medical Center.  In its two seasons of life, The Pitt’s mode of storytelling has been to focus on conveying the events and experiences of one day in the life of an urban Emergency Department and its staff.  The writing and acting are superb, to the point of causing binge watching.  The riveting authenticity of the show is augmented by the incorporation of actual medical terminology, and I am impressed by the actors rapidly speaking what reviewers say is real medical diagnosis and analysis.  Personally, the medical dialogue usually leaves me in the dust at the word “Stat”.

Nonetheless, the part of the hospital story that particularly rivets my attention centers upon the depicted encounters with death.  Specifically, those times when someone’s heart stops beating and urgent attempts to resuscitate those hearts is applied with great vigor.  (I personally have had one such experience: On an airline flight from Kansas City to Boston.  My seatmate stopped breathing.  Things worked out for him – and for me! – but it was a -- sobering experience.)  

Which is to say that when the patient’s pulse returns (either on the program or in the center aisle of the airliner), there is palpable relief for all involved.  Yet, when those efforts fail to intercede, only the crustiest staffer or bystander easily walks away. 

So it is that I wonder about the story of Lazarus and his experience of Jesus calling him back to life.  I wonder what his response was to this stunning event.  I say this because unlike the people in The Pitt’s ED who have only precious minutes to restart their patient’s heart, it is very plain from the gospel text that Lazarus had been dead, wrapped in burial cloths, and sealed in a tomb for four full days.  It seems to me that this is the reason that Martha gently but sternly tried to put Jesus in the know. When he announced his plan to open Lazarus’ tomb, Martha, her voice quivering with whispered anxiety, reported the obvious: “Lord,” by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days.” [11:39].  For searingly forthright affect, I much prefer the translation of Martha’s assessment of her brother’s condition from the “King James Version” of the Bible.  With its Shakespearean directness, it has Martha saying, “Lord, by this time he stinketh…”.  Indeed.  Any questions?

But as we all know, this did not impede Jesus and what he knew he had to do.  To everyone’s astonishment, Jesus called Lazarus from the grave, not merely to provide a profound “sign” to that sign-seeking generation, but to reveal God’s “glory” – that is, to reveal what life with God is like. 

I’ll return to this point in a moment.  But for now, I want to address a few of the questions I posed for your consideration in my “News of the Week” article of last Thursday.  Specifically, there was no mention of an odor, no gagging stench of putrefying flesh when Lazarus emerged from his tomb.  What do you make of this undescribed detail?  What might this have to do with Jesus revealing God’s “glory”? 

Very clearly, Jesus’ action was a “show-stopper”; and it can be seen as a direct response to the grief-stricken request of Lazarus’ sisters: that if Jesus had only been present to Lazarus’ need, their brother wouldn’t have died.  And for a moment (if we can contain our modern cynicism and stand in the Bethany sisters’ shoes), we have to acknowledge that Jesus calling Lazarus from the grave is what each and every one of us wants him to do for us: Keep death away.  And in calling Lazarus from death – even four days of death – what many of us implicitly want from our Godly faith is for God to keep death away.  And I get this.  I’m often there, too.  We want to be delivered from death, from its painful sense of loss, from its haunting power. 

When death appears and rips our hearts apart, we want a reset, a redo, a return to what was normal and familiar – in this case the return of the one we have loved.  As I say, I understand this

Just as in a dramatic scene in a hospital ER, we want the heart compressions to work.  We want the electric paddles applied that shock the heart back into sinus rhythm.  “Bring him back!”  “Bring her back” is what our hearts say.  And in Lazarus’ case, that is what Jesus did, and how he answered Martha’s and Mary’s indicting request.  “If only…”

But as I say, I wonder – I wonder about Lazarus.  What was his experience of all this? 

The late cleric, teacher, and literary theologian, Frederick Buechchner, imagined Lazarus’ experience at the moment of Jesus’ beckoning call from the grave and what the formerly dead man might have seen when the burial cloths were unwound from his eyes.  Buechner writes: Interviews with people who have been resuscitated after being pronounced clinically dead reveal that they all get a glimpse of a figure in light, waiting for them on the other side; and they are reluctant to be brought back again to this side.  When Lazarus opened his eyes to see the figure of Jesus standing there in the daylight beside him, he couldn’t tell for the life of him which side he was on.[1]

And this, I believe, is the telling and directing point.  Jesus resuscitated Lazarus.  He brought Lazarus back to life -- this life.  This is important to say because Lazarus was not resurrected, just …just resuscitated, albeit – and unbelievably so -- after four days!  And I wonder – say the next morning, upon awakening to an unexpected dawn – I wonder what Lazarus was thinking, as he reached up to give a big yawn and stretch the kinks out of his body.  On one level, I suspect that he was shocked and amazed, and then perhaps overjoyed.  He might have thrown the covers off himself and leaped up in celebration to jump on his bed. promising never-ever to take such an awakening for granted.  Isn’t that what you would do?  I’d like to think I would! 

So, I wonder when it hit Lazarus.  After he absorbed the fact that he was alive and not in the tomb, I wonder how he felt and what he thought about the unassailable fact that he would have to die – again. 

To put it in terms of The Pitt’s medical context, how many times can one be resuscitated and call it a life?  Theologically and spiritually put, how many times does Jesus have to show up – sooner or later – to resuscitate us?  And is this the unnamed, operating, under-the-table content of our unspoken faith?   Do we functionally view Jesus as our “get-out-of-jail card” -- our “Fix it!” Savior when it comes to facing the reality of death and our dying?  “If only…”

Maybe the grace of God is not so much a shield that protects us from all that we loathe as it is an energy that changes everything – including us.

The point of this aspect of today’s gospel story is that Lazarus was resuscitated by Jesus to God’s glory: that is, so that folks like us might see life – our life – beyond the cataracts of our fear and death.  But resuscitation is not resurrection.  Lazarus, in his second chance (as it were) will still face death – just as we do.  Given this, might he have been angry at being pulled back into this side of life by Jesus; or did his resuscitation bring him a new and deepened perspective of how to live and what to live for?  I wonder.

I will close this sermon by answering the last question I posed to you in my NOW article.  In this marvelous and challenging story of the “Raising of Lazarus”, with all its poignancy and insight, I humbly pose that Lazarus’ being raised from the dead is not the climax of this gospel narrative.  Rather, the climax of the Lazarus event comes in an unusual place for a good story. 

For instance, in Shakespear’s tragedies the format of the playwright always contains five scenes, with the third and middle scene holding the climax of the performance.  But when Jesus is the author of the God-life story, the ending of the narrative is where the apex is found.  (Remember this on Easter Sunday.) 

In the case of the “Raising of Lazarus” and for those who stubbornly ask what the “moral of the story is”, the curtain of this play immediately drops in unpretentious triumph as Jesus utters the text’s last words: “Unbind him and let him go.” [11:44].

“Unbind him…Let my people go!”  Jesus echoes the dramatic and liberating command that Moses spoke to Pharoah: a command of transformation and liberation.  “Remove what holds him in death” and “let him go” to be free to be what God created him to be.  And I wonder what difference this proclaimed directive made in Lazarus’ life.  More to the point, I wonder what difference it makes for us.

I am sure that Lazarus was grateful and glad to see his sisters again.  He might have even enjoyed being famous for a time.  (You know even today that the Aramaic name for Bethany is al-Eizariya.  Lazarus’ name and experience became a place-name because people remembered that something important and astounding happened there.)  Yet, we all need more than resuscitation to be alive, to have life. 

I think the key for Lazarus and for us lies in the meaning of the word, “resurrection”.  “Resurrection” does not mean we go to heaven when we die.  The term means “awaken to”, as in “awaken to” what life with God-in-Christ is like: Unbound from the power of fear and death, and free, therefore, to live what we see in Jesus. -- all for the glory of God. 

All of which seems to mean that a person doesn’t have to wait to die before the larger life of God can be known, tasted, and trusted.  And that’s pretty good news.  Amen.

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[1] Frederich Buechner. Peculiar Treasures: Lazarus.