Sermons from the Pulpit

Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 11:1-44

Suddenly there was a noise, a rattling. -Ezekiel 37:7
Lazarus, come out! -John 11:43

    Mortal, prophesy to these bones, and say to them, "Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord!"

    A fellow preacher who shall remain nameless once told me that's what preaching is: talking to bones, dry bones, and as one talks listening, hoping to hear a noise, a rattling.

    I thought that was kind of a discouraging way to look at it, not to mention kind of insulting to the folks who sit in the pews, and I said so. But my friend said he didn't mean it that way. He didn't mean the folks who come to church on a Sunday morning are all dead and just pretending to be alive. He meant there is in all of us, no matter how lively we are, something that needs resurrecting, whether we know it or not, whether we admit it or not, and the challenge is to speak new life to those bones.

    So let's listen, shall we, and ask ourselves if we can hear our own voices saying, as God helped the prophet to hear the whole house of Israel saying, "Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off."

    When God gave the prophet these words for the people, they were in exile, in the Babylonian captivity, their holy city Jerusalem in ruins, their temple torn down, their community life destroyed. Surely that is not true of us! We are the richest nation in history and the most powerful on earth. The only people who dare to attack us are madmen and fanatics. Our culture dominates the planet, our language is the one everybody must learn. We are in the catbird seat.

    And yet we do hear something, don't we, when we listen? All is not well. There is loss of hope. There is some sense of being clean cut off. And even though the sound is so faint that it seems to come from elsewhere, it's coming from us.

    God gave the prophet this vision of the valley of the dry bones so that the prophet could give it to the whole people of Israel, whose circumstances were such that they needed the encouragement it brought them. They listened and heard about the prophesying and the rattling and the flesh and the sinews, and the breath that came from the four winds so that this vast multitude of the slain stood on their feet and breathed and lived — and they themselves came to life.

    And now it is some two thousand five hundred years later, and we are on the other side of the world, and the chasm between then and now and there and here is humongous, but God is still giving that same vision to any people who need it, and God knows we are such a people, even if we don't know it or want to know it.

    O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord: You pile up assets and gadgets and trinkets, but they cannot fill the emptiness inside or wall out the chaos outside. You discard as waste enough to feed and shelter all the wretched of the earth, but you cannot shed your own despair. You are afraid your own neighbors are enemies, or at least aliens. You feel life, time, and energy slipping irretrievably through your fingers and wonder if you will begin to live before you die. Such is the word of the Lord as I imagine God commands the prophets to prophesy it to the likes of us.

    How dare I compare our situation to that ancient one? How dare I claim those are our bones lying there? I'll tell you how: because the Bible tells me so. Read it and weep. The poverty of the rich and the helplessness of the powerful are not new. Communal arrogance and the fear of the unknown are older than history. The Gospels are crawling with rich, powerful, healthy, miserable folks, and Jesus generally has a much lower success rate at helping them than he has with the poor, the weak, the frail, the grieving and the oppressed.

    Such as poor old Lazarus. When it comes to being dead, bones at least are dry and clean and durable, as you can see in any museum of natural history, but Lazarus is a mess. When Jesus tells them to roll away the stone that closes Lazarus' tomb, Martha says to him, "Lord, there is already a stench because he has been dead four days." The old King James Version is less delicate: it has her saying, "Lord, he stinketh." Mediaeval artists loved to draw pictures of the crowd gathered before the tomb of Lazarus all holding their noses. Nikos Kazantzakis, in his book The Last Temptation of Christ, has the newly raised Lazarus hiding in a dark corner of his and Martha's and Mary's house, unable to tolerate daylight, bloated and discolored, waiting for the smell to wear off.

    The author of John's Gospel does not want us theorizing that maybe Lazarus wasn't really dead in the first place and Jesus just rescued him from a premature burial. There was a popular belief at the time that the soul lingered near the body for three days after death and then moved on, so when Martha says, "Lord, he's been dead four days," you could translate it, "Lord, he's dead as a doornail." And the Christian community has obediently wallowed in that, been morbidly fascinated by it, even reveled in it, because the deader Lazarus is, the more wonderful it is when Jesus says, "Lazarus, come out!" and Lazarus does.

    But the really interesting thing I've just discovered is, there is a respectable body of scholarly opinion which says that Lazarus may be the unnamed disciple whom Jesus loved best, and Lazarus may even be the author of the Gospel of John! Which suggests, at least, that no matter how dead he was, he really did get a worthwhile second life.

    I mean, it's kind of depressing to think that Lazarus quietly dropped dead again as soon as Jesus left Bethany for Jerusalem, or that he never really regained any of what we call quality of life. Which explains the other thing I learned for the first time this week. There is a whole bunch of popular legends that have been circulating for two thousand years about what became of Lazarus after this.

    There is a story that the hostile religious authorities were so afraid of him, they put him in a boat and set him adrift in the Mediterranean, and he landed in Cyprus and became the first bishop of the place. Or else it was Provence in the south of France, and he was the first bishop of Marseilles. Or it was Asia Minor. There are even a few who believe he made it all the way to South America. It's as if Jesus didn't just resuscitate him but made him a superhero, a sort of Ulysses.

    According to tradition in the Cypriote Greek Orthodox church, Lazarus lived for thirty years after he was raised, and was a great apostle of Christ, but in all that time he never smiled, because of the awful things he had seen in his passage through the underworld. On the other hand, Eugene O'Neill caught the same bug and wrote a play entitled "Lazarus Laughed," and the gist is that he was a very joyful man in his second life, and his home became known as "the house of laughter," and when the Roman authorities heard somebody was having fun in their empire they arrested him and interrogated him, and all he did was smile at his inquisitors and tell them that after what he'd been through, he wasn't about to be afraid of them or anything else on earth.