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Hope Beyond "The Great Sadness."; (sermon 4/10/11)
Topic Started: Apr 9 2011, 07:17 PM (144 Views)
Dewey
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HOLY CARP!!!
Ezekiel 37:1-14

The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.” So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude. Then he said to me, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act,” says the Lord.

=====

John 11:1-45

Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” But when Jesus heard it, he said, “This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was. Then after this he said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.” The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?” Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble, because they see the light of this world. But those who walk at night stumble, because the light is not in them.” After saying this, he told them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him.” The disciples said to him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right.” Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.” Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he 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. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary, and told her privately, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come to the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. The Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him.


=====

The man snapped back to attention. The world around him quickly came back into focus as it dawned on him that he’d been staring out the window for at least twenty minutes, which wouldn’t necessarily have been so bad except that he wasn’t really looking at anything. His mind, and his eyes, had just gotten stuck in neutral, thinking one long non-thought and not really seeing anything except a nondescript, unfocused blur somewhere out there.

He’d been doing that a lot, he thought to himself, ever since he’d lost his wife and young son in a tragic car accident. He’d be gong about his day the same as always, and all of a sudden, he’d snap to and realize an hour had gone by while he just tuned the world out. As bad as that seemed to him, at least it was better than the other things he’d been catching himself doing – getting angry, lashing out at other people for little or no real reason. Alternating between sleeping all the time, not even wanting to get out of bed, and not being able to sleep at all. Crying over the littlest thing, or even over nothing. Some days he felt like he was going crazy. Friends would try to offer him words of support – sometimes the right words, sometimes the wrong words, when the truth of the matter is that there just aren’t any words that could make him feel better – and he’d snap at them, and then feel guilty about it. He knew all these things were the result of him grieving over the loss of his wife and son, but the only thing he knew to do was to just push those feelings down and move on with life, because if he did actually focus on those thoughts then maybe he really would go crazy. But it seemed like the more he tried to push those feelings out of his mind, they kept cropping up in their own way – through the forgetfulness, the anger, the obsessing on the small stuff as if the fate of the world depended on them. He even found himself withdrawing from the friends and family that had been there to support him immediately after the accident. Every time he saw one of them, it brought the accident back into his mind. So he tried to change his life, change his patterns, so he even avoided them as much as possible.

That’s the face of grief. In the book “The Shack,” the main character, whose young daughter was murdered, referred to it as “The Great Sadness,” and his life would forever be divided into two parts, before the Great Sadness and after. The great writer and minister Frederick Buechner has spent most of his life coming to terms with the suicide of his father when he was a just a young boy, and in the midst of his efforts to deal with it, he’s brought us all along through some of the best and most thought-provoking Christian writing of the past two hundred years. We’ve all experienced grief. We’ve all tried to find ways to cope with it, to reshape our lives in the aftermath of a loss – and it isn’t necessarily a death. It could be the loss of a person, relationship, a thing, a job - even a pet. Whatever it is for each of us, the pain and the agony of that loss is real. It has changed our lives in some way that means our life will never again be exactly the same as it used to be. And trying to ignore that pain, that grief, by just not focusing on it, trying to push it out of sight, out of mind, and not coming to terms with it, will make any of us just like the man I was just talking about earlier.

The gospel story that we read today deals with this issue. Of course, everyone – the author of the gospel included – has as the main focus of this story, the fact that Jesus resuscitated his friend Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha, from the dead. In the gospel, this is a miracle intended to be a sign that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. But you can’t jump ahead to resuscitating Lazarus without first dealing with his death, and that includes the grief that comes along with it. In the story, you feel the grief that Mary and Martha, and even Jesus himself have over the loss of their brother and friend. Their pain and loss were real, even while Mary and Martha believed in a resurrection out there, some day. And Jesus’ pain was real, too, as he cried over the death of his friend and the pain that it brought to his sisters and himself. That says something about our ability to relate to Jesus - we can be confident that our Lord knows what we're going through in our lives, because he went through those same things himself. It also says something about the idea of grief, and how we shouldn’t ignore or deny it: even Jesus, the incarnate Son, second Person of the Trinitarian God, who most certainly knew better than any other human being that the promise of resurrection is reality, gives in to the gut-wrenching agony, and cries until he can’t cry any more. If Jesus allows his grief to overflow in a time like this, then it’s a good and right thing for us to do when we’re in similar situations, to. An important part of this gospel story is to point out to us that giving in to our grief is a God-blessed part of our eventual healing – not taking us back to the way we were before our loss, whatever it was; but taking us forward into a new, different existence, where our loss is always there and a part of our lives, and isn’t ignored, but in a way that it doesn’t consume us or define our lives, either.

There are times when, contrary to the hymn that we all know, it is not at all “well with our soul.” And as we cope with those times, we have to find a way to make it well with our soul again. Right now, our congregation is offering one very important way to do that. Last Tuesday, we started to cosponsor group grief counseling sessions, free of charge, and held right here at the church, every Tuesday for the next six or seven weeks from 6:00 till 7:30, for people who are dealing with grief over the loss of a loved one. Participating in sessions like this, and discussing your feelings and thoughts with a trained grief counselor and with other people who are having similar experiences, can be a great help in reestablishing your life given the new realities that you face. I can tell you that I’ve taken part in many similar sessions myself, and there really is no substitute for them. And if you’re experiencing grief like this in your life, I can’t encourage you enough to come be part of these meetings.

Jesus was able to raise Lazarus from the dead in order to ease the grief that he and Lazarus’ sisters felt. We obviously don’t have that option, but if you pay close attention to what happens in this gospel story, what ultimately brought about the healing of Mary and Martha’s grief wasn’t Jesus’ raising Lazarus from the dead, but rather, it came about because of the faith that they had in Jesus as the Son of God that brought about the miracle to begin with. In the same way, we can draw on, and lean on, our own faith in Christ as we go through our own grief and mourning. It isn’t easy; you don’t need me to tell you that. And often, it may take having God place additional help in front of us, like free grief counseling sessions in a familiar and supportive setting. But ultimately, if we have the same trust that Jesus truly is the resurrection and the life that Mary and Martha had, then gradually, over time, we’ll find healing on the far side of our own Great Sadness. Our lives won’t feel as empty and lifeless as Ezekiel’s dry bones, but will be reshaped and brought into a new, transformed life. God the Father, who is strong enough, powerful enough, and loving enough, to bring the Greatest Joy, Easter, out of the Greatest Sadness, Good Friday, promises us that this is true. And God the Son, who felt that grief himself, and who one day stood crying in agony over the death of his friend, will make that promise to us a reality.

Thanks be to God.

"By nature, i prefer brevity." - John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, p. 685.

"Never waste your time trying to explain yourself to people who are committed to misunderstanding you." - Anonymous

"Oh sure, every once in a while a turd floated by, but other than that it was just fine." - Joe A., 2011

I'll answer your other comments later, but my primary priority for the rest of the evening is to get drunk." - Klaus, 12/31/14
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bachophile
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HOLY CARP!!!
Quote:
 
Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act,” says the Lord.


inscribed on the entrance gate to yad vashem, israel's holocaust memorial.
"I don't know much about classical music. For years I thought the Goldberg Variations were something Mr. and Mrs. Goldberg did on their wedding night." Woody Allen
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Dewey
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HOLY CARP!!!
Yep. you sent me a pic of that that last time that text came around in the Lectionary, and I projected it on the screen over my head during the sermon. I read this Ezekiel passage during a class last year as an exercise in how to properly and effectively read scriptures publicly. The instructor said it was the best, most expressive and gripping reading of the text he'd ever heard - so it's become kind of a favorite of mine, although I'm not preaching directly on it this time around.

"By nature, i prefer brevity." - John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, p. 685.

"Never waste your time trying to explain yourself to people who are committed to misunderstanding you." - Anonymous

"Oh sure, every once in a while a turd floated by, but other than that it was just fine." - Joe A., 2011

I'll answer your other comments later, but my primary priority for the rest of the evening is to get drunk." - Klaus, 12/31/14
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