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A Sermon Preached at St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, Oak Park, IL
on the Fifth Sunday in Lent, March 9, 2008, (Year A, RCL)
by the Rev. Paris Coffey

"(Jesus) 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." - John 11:43a - 44

In the highly acclaimed 1999 movie The Hurricane, Denzel Washington plays the part of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a champion middleweight boxer imprisoned for life for murders he didn't commit. Based on a biography called Lazarus and the Hurricane, the story tells of the boxer's imprisonment and eventual release. It's a powerful, if somewhat fictionalized, account of Carter's struggle, but one of the most powerful piece for me springs from Carter's autobiography, The Sixteenth Round. Describing the boxer's decision to divorce his wife after exhausting every possibility for appeal, Carter urges her to get on with her life, writing, "I'm dead. Forget about me."

Carter and his wife did end up divorcing, after which the boxer refused any further contact with the outside world. Years later, though, his sentence was overturned with help from a ghetto teen named Lesara Martin who'd read Carter's autobiography and fought for his release. Comparing Lesara's name with that of Lazarus, Carter later confessed to the young man that he had been buried by hate but resurrected by love. "I was raised from the dead," the Hurricane said to Lesara, freed from prison just as surely as Jesus frees Lazarus. In today's Gospel we see that such freedom requires the dead or imprisoned one's cooperation, as Jesus reveals when he commands, "Lazarus, come out." It also, though, requires the help of others, as revealed when Jesus says to those near Lazarus, "Unbind him, and let him go."

Clearly, the raising of Lazarus is a powerful metaphor for release from the bondage in which we sometimes find ourselves or in which we put others. It's also more than metaphor, though, foreshadowing the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In fact, this story not only foreshadows Holy Week and Easter, but is THE event in John's Gospel that gets Jesus killed. We don't hear that part of the story in today's reading, but if we were to read on we would find that right after the raising of Lazarus the Jewish leaders plot to have Jesus put to death. They plot his death because they're terrified by the force of Jesus' power, which means the loss of their own as well if his work goes on unchecked.

Consequently, the high priests and Pharisees, after hearing that Jesus has raised Lazarus from the dead, ask, "What do we do now? This man keeps on doing things, creating God signs. If we let him go on, pretty soon everyone will believe in him and the Romans will come and remove what little power and privilege we still have" (John 11: 47a-48, from The Message). Apparently fear can be its own prison, particularly fear of losing power and privilege. The Jewish leaders, though, refuse to be bound by fear, seeking to silence Jesus instead. They seek to take back control, silencing or restraining another, much as a husband restrains his wife, for example, or vice versa, so that one holds economic or sexual sway over the other. Sadly, such attempts at restraint happen all the time: a parent restrains a child so that he or she follows the parent's dream, not her own; a boss restrains an employee's idea or gift because it threatens his own self-esteem; or - saddest of all - we restrain or silence ourselves, believing it's safer to think small and attempt little so that we don't fail, or worse, succeed.

We fear change - fear loosing control - and so like the Jewish leaders we try to silence new life, which in and of itself is a kind of death. It is, as the prophet Ezekiel says, a kind of death where "our bones are dried up, our hope is lost, and we are completely cut off" (Ezekiel 37:12). The good new, though, is that in death, new life is possible. Death itself is not the enemy, as Jesus suggests when he hears of Lazarus' illness and delays going to him. "This illness does not lead to death," says Jesus, "Rather it is for God's glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it." Nothing, not even death, is void of God's power and presence. Indeed, death - whether figurative or physical - offers new life in the hands of God.

This is what God came among us to reveal in the life and death of Jesus, but it is a hard truth to grasp. It's hard because death - especially physical death - is painful. Jesus understands this only too well as seen in today's Gospel where "Jesus weeps." He weeps after Mary has asked him to "come and see" where the body of her brother Lazarus has been laid. But he weeps not over Lazarus' death, as the Jews surmise, since Jesus knows that his friend is about to be raised up. Rather he weeps over the pain death causes humankind. He weeps publically, acknowledging that this pain cannot be minimized. At the same time, though, Jesus is angry - or as our watered-down English translation of the Greek says, "Troubled in spirit" - that human beings cannot or will not see that death is not God's final word. It's not God's final word for Lazarus, even when the time comes for him to die all over again, and it's not God's final word for us.

Indeed, as Jesus tells his followers a little later, those who are able to see and trust the power of God revealed in him will be not only be raised to new life, but will be able to raise others as well. "Very truly, I tell you," Jesus says in the fourteenth chapter of John, "the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do, and, in fact, will do greater works than these because I am going to the Father" (John 14:12, NRSV). Jesus' death and resurrection open possibilities for new life in more ways than one, but we must also open our hearts and minds to God if we're to share in God's work for a better world. And this isn't easy. In fact, it's downright difficult as our Wednesday Bible Encounter Group acknowledged when we began to talk about our own entombments.

Somewhat reluctantly I admitted that my mind is often the thing that binds me - my second-guessing, over-thinking, obsessively analytical mind. Oh, I don't mean it doesn't serve me well at times. It does. As often as not, though, I'm my own worst enemy, for although I'm capable of responding to God's voice, leaving the safety of the tomb like Lazarus, my knees are apt to buckle when my mind says, "You're a dead woman walking! You can't do that!" Actually, my usual identification is with Peter, who in a moment of radical faith gets out the boat to walk across the water to Jesus. Before you know it, though, Peter begins to think, "My God, I'm walking on water. I can't do that!" and he starts to sink.

Such radical faith is tough to sustain, particularly in an age of reason where the mind reigns supreme. It is, however, possible to sustain - or with God's help, to return to - when doubt kicks in and our knees buckle. It's possible to stand tall and to keep walking, coming out of the tomb into the light of day, which, in fact, is the call and promise of today's Gospel. It's the call to leave places of death and embrace life, promising something beyond anything we have ever thought possible - beyond the life we've lived, the world we've created or church we've imagined - beyond the tombs and prisons of our own making - to a place where, filled with the breath of God, we become hurricanes of hope and love in the world to God's glory.

Amen.