“Choose Life!”

John 11:38-44

Last fall, when I was on vacation, Doug Hayward preached here one Sunday.  Doug is a retired United Methodist pastor, and he’s a fine, fine preacher.  In that sermon, he asked a question that I’ve been thinking about ever since I got back from my trip and listened to the sermon on the church’s website.  Here’s what he asked, that has stuck with me all these months.  Imagine that you’re babysitting your niece or nephew or your grandchild, he said, and in the middle of the night that child you’re responsible for has a fever that is much higher than you know is safe.  What do you do?  A hundred years ago, Doug said, the most common answer might have been “Pray.”  Now, it’s more likely to be “Call 911”. 

Doug’s point was that in an age of so much scientific and medical certainty, we have to be able to find faith—and the need for faith—somewhere other than at the edge of what humans can do for themselves.  But as I’ve been thinking about this series on the Leading Causes of Life, I’ve also thought, more than once, that even though we go to doctors and hospitals and clinics, and depend on them, to avoid sickness and death—especially when there’s a crisis—they’re not the places we go to find life.  To find life, full life, abundant, joy-filled life, we look somewhere else. We look for life at home, at school or work, in church—the places where we find family and friends, the people with whom we are connected.  Because those connections with other people are what are often most able to bring life, and more life, to us. 

The story we just read from the Gospel of John is a story of life-giving…in a very literal sense.  If we came to this story as we were reading John’s Gospel as a whole book, we’d get to this chapter and say, “I know these characters.”  It’s a family we’ve seen before.  We’ve watched the sisters, Martha and Mary, squabble over who’s responsible for setting the table before dinner.   We’ve seen Mary lavish attention and expensive perfume on Jesus in a way that made her siblings squirm with embarrassment.  We’ve eavesdropped on dinner parties that included their friend Jesus.  These are real people, friends of Jesus that he saw regularly; and in a custom that was probably much more familiar then than it is now, these three siblings—Lazarus, Mary and Martha—live together. 

And now Lazarus has died. We don’t know much about how he died, but he must have been sick for at least a little while, because they had time to get a message out to Jesus that his friend Lazarus needed him.   And Martha (who I’m thinking must have been an oldest child, because I know something about how oldest children act) says to Jesus, “Maybe you could have moved a little faster; because now it’s too late.  He’s already dead.”  And Jesus hears this news with great sadness.  He is sad because his friend has died, and maybe he’s sad because Martha has been a little unfair to him, and he’s sad perhaps because it’s been a hard week, and this last thing—being misunderstood by someone who was supposed to know him well—just put him right over the top. 
It matters.  This death matters to him.  And so he gives it all that he’s got, and he takes a big risk, and says, “Lazarus, come out of the tomb.”  Come back—from death, to life.  And maybe Jesus was as surprised as everyone else was when Lazarus actually moved.  It’s not like this was a miracle he’d done before. 

But here’s the thing.  Lazarus comes out of the tomb all bound up in the cloths that they’d dressed his body in—bound him in, actually—when they buried him.  He’s breathing, but he can’t really live again until he gets those strips of cloth off of him.  And Jesus knows who needs to do this work.  And so he says to Mary and Martha, Lazarus’ sisters, the people who love Lazarus the best:  Unbind him.  You let him go.  And what Jesus didn’t say:  You’re the only ones who can do that for him. 

The work of resurrection was Jesus’; only God can raise people from the dead.  But the work of freeing one another to live again is what we do for each other.  So often, it’s connections with the people you love that can bring you life. 

Victor Loguntsov moved to Sacramento from a town just outside Moscow, Russia, with his wife Lyudmila and their daughters less than a year ago.  It didn’t take very long for them to find this church—less than a week, I think—and then for us to begin to love them.  Listen to Victor’s story of finding new life through connection. 

[Text for Victor's story not available.  Please listen to audio above for full sermon, including Victor's story.]

Family provides, perhaps, our most fundamental connections.  In the most central, loving relationships of our lives, we find the mysteries of kindness, tenderness, encouragement that matters.  We learn our best lessons about living with purpose and sacrifice in family.  We learn there that we can manage connections that are complex and often unexplainable to someone else.  A family is a living thing, and it sustains human life. 

But family is not the only place we find what we need to live.  Congregations can also connect people, beyond the lines of blood relationship.  They can provide the same sort of vital connections that give us life, and more life.

May it be so for us, and for this place.