Ezekiel 37:1-14
Romans 8:6-11
John 11:1-45
Psalm 130
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?"
`Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.'
When I was reading the passages this week, there were so many different things to notice. You could write a sermon about any one of them:
- Why does Jesus weep outside of Lazarus's home? I wonder if this is a crucial experience to Jesus' life as a human. Aren't we all transformed by our first experience of the death of someone very close to us? Is this Jesus' first resurrection, as well? Does he come away from his experience of mourning a different man?
- What is life like for Lazarus when he comes back from the dead? There's a great article in Salon.com this week about Near Death Experiences. One of the things it mentions is that people who have them, re-enter their lives radically transformed in very similar ways.
- In both stories, God uses a human make the dead come alive. That has so much to say about how God can use us--maybe even, needs us?--to revive the dead.
I'm sure I grew up hearing the story of the Valley of Dry Bones, but the first time I remember hearing it, I was in my early twenties, attending the wedding of the man that I knew God wanted me to marry.
I'd met Samuel (name changed) in college my junior year, and by the time I graduated, I'd fallen, slowly and completely, in love with him. Samuel was everything I hoped for in a husband--smart, funny, breathtakingly attractive, and most important, deeply engaged with God and living out his faith in the real world. I needed him. He was the only person I knew who could let me question anything at all--anything--without feeling like God would break if I kept pushing. I knew that we were supposed to be together. Samuel did not seem to agree.
I would often bring our relationship up with God--one day, when I was lying in my dorm room, alternating between crying and praying, I had one of those moments preachers talk about right before they ask you for money. I felt more than heard a message from God in my head. God said, "Wait. You will be together, but now is not the time."
So I waited. I
I remember thinking that the reading was appropriate for any child of divorce. My own parents' marriage was in the throes of a painful and protracted death. It made me question everything I thought I knew about love. Their impending divorce made me feel defective, incapable of love, and destined to a life of singleness. A happy marriage seemed as impossible as getting bones to knit together, enflesh themselves, and walk, just because God tells a prophet to give the command. Being at the wedding of the man God had promised to me didn't exactly mitigate those feelings.
But I was putting on a cheerful face. I didn't think anyone knew I was at a funeral. Sure, I was wearing a mostly black dress, but it had lots of floral patterns on the skirt, and anyway, I was from the East Coast where people wore black all the time. I was happy for him. For them. Yes, I was wandering in the wilderness, watching the promise that God had made to me fall from my hands and dry up my future, but I think I was doing a good job of faking it.
I was watching, smiling, while the couple had their first dance, when my best friend came up behind me, put his hand on my shoulder, and asked how I was doing. It was like the touch of his hand pressed a button that released all of my emotion at once. The tears just sprang to my eyes. I may have even allowed a sob to escape, before he guided me from the reception hall. I don't remember anything else, except shame, embarrassment, and a burning need to keep this from the couple. I didn't want my feelings to be part of the story of their wedding. I think we went outside. I think I eventually went back to the reception and visited with friends. But somewhere in between leaving and going back in, I wept.
It's tempting to fast-forward to the present. Here I am now, in a marriage that is, at its core, exactly what I was asking God for during those confused and desperate prayers in college. I see that God fulfilled the promise so much more fully than I, in my funereal dress and plastered on smile, was capable of imagining. So God's promise was eventually fulfilled. For me. In this case. In a very different way from what I had imagined.
But it wasn't true for some ten or fifteen years, while I struggled, trying to understand if that promise was real, trying to understand if God was real, and if so, what was I getting right and what was I getting wrong? I spent at least a couple of years worrying that I'd been the one to blow it on the promise--if I had been part of the organization, maybe I would have been the one he fell in love with during summer training, maybe it would have been me up there at the altar, dancing to Etta James. (Well, OK, there's no way the Etta James part would ever have happened. I had a different song in mind.) But the reasons didn't matter. As far as I was concerned, the promise was dead. Dry bones. Rotting and stinking in the tomb.
This contributed to and coincided with a major crisis of faith, in which I spent a great deal of time wondering whether God listened to our prayers, or cared about us, or even existed at all. (You could make a case that I'm still in that crisis, but that's a discussion for another day.)
When you are stuck in the Valley of Dry Bones, it's very difficult to see any way that anything could be alive again. We've all been there. Whether it's the death of a marriage, a career, a friendship, or a dream we've given our lives for, we've all walked through the Valley of Dry Bones, with nothing alive for as far as the eye can see. It's easy to get stuck there, and very difficult to pick up the pieces. Only the most valorous of us are able to say to the broken, dead, dross of our lives, "God is going to make this good. You will live again."
Most of the time, most of us can't find the breath to say the words. We just can't believe anything will be alive again. So we bury our hope for the future and our belief in a God that cares. We hide away our dead relationships and our murdered dreams back behind a stone, where we imagine them rotting and stinking things up so bad that we don't ever want to look at them again.
Sometimes, the most we can do is to get up from where we are mourning our losses, and say to Jesus, "Where were you? How could you let this happen?" And Jesus says, "show me." So we take him, never daring to believe that even Jesus can make things right. And when we show him, Jesus weeps.
He sits there at the tombs of our greatest failures, our murdered dreams and shattered hopes, and before he gets about the business of transformation, he sits there with us, deeply moved, and weeps. We don't know how long Jesus wept. John 11:35 has enjoyed notoriety as the shortest verse in the Bible, but as any writer will tell you, you can cover an eon with two words. I think we can assume the crying went on for as long as necessary.
It's not until he has mourned with us what we have lost, that finally, we are able to hear his voice above our own sobs: "Take away the stone," he says. Like that's going to make any difference. Some time much later, after we have exhausted our own protests against getting what we say we want, Jesus calls to what was dead in us, and we watch it, dressed for the grave, lurching out into the light. The whole scene is so completely unthinkable, we just sit there, frozen, until finally, Jesus comes up behind us, puts a hand on our shoulder, and says, "Unbind him, and let him go."
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