5 Lent A April 2, 2017
Luther Memorial Church Seattle, WA
The Rev. Julie Hutson
Ezekiel 37: 1-14 + Psalm 130 + Romans 8: 6-11 + John 11: 1-45
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
She had been ill for some time and we all knew this day was coming. News of her death was not a surprise. Word reached me first thing Thursday morning, that my mentor in ministry and in life and my friend, Jane, had died. Jane has touched your lives, as well, although you do not know it. She sent our intern Inge Williams to us. She sent me out on internship as well. For many years, she served the larger church in her role through Trinity Lutheran Seminary as what she described as an air traffic controller. In her flat Midwestern Illinois accent she described her ministry this way:
I have some students who are on internship…their flight is already in the air. Eventually I will guide them into a landing.
And others I am getting ready to take off….all systems are go.
In this way, although you didn’t necessarily know it, you partnerned with Jane when you welcomed Vicar Inge…make that Pastor Inge. When we were assigned Inge as our intern, Jane was so pleased and so sure that this…this was the place where she would learn what it meant to be a pastor.
I learned at Jane’s feet. She had been a pastor and an Assistant to the Bishop and now she worked at Trinity Seminary as head of the Contextual Education division…sending students out into the life of the church to serve on internship.
Jane had been diagnosed with PSP…”Google it” she said to me. “It’s not pretty. I know what I’m up against. I know I won’t survive.”
Last fall Pastor Inge and two other colleagues and I went to visit Jane in the care facility. Jane produced for us her “last sermon”, written for those she knew she would leave behind. She carefully eyed each of us, one by one…all four of us….eventually her gaze landed back on me “Julie”, she said, handing me her computer, “you read this…out loud…so you all can hear what I want to say to you.”
I did not want to be the one chosen to read it…but I think she sensed that I would be the one least likely to fall apart as I did so. And so I read while the others wiped tears from their eyes and your former intern sat in her chair weeping silently. Jane nodded as her words filled the room.
She told the story…her story…and how the place where she found herself and where we had found her on that bright autumn afternoon was NOT the place she would have chosen. A place where her mind still worked with accuracy and love and faithfulness and ferocious love for Jesus, but her body couldn’t speak the words. A place where her mobility, which had allowed her to visit students on internship and walk briskly toward you with love or reproach or whatever you needed to hear in that moment, had diminished to the point of needing to be pushed in a wheelchair to the dining room.
And yet, it was her reality. And, as the point of her final sermon soon made clear, while it was not where she would have chosen to be, God was still with her.
The irony was not lost on me when I sat to write this sermon, my heart still filled with fresh grief, that the readings assigned for this day were about death. The prophet Ezekiel is led to a valley of death….of bones that were so long dead they were dry. Very dry, the text says.
And the story of the death of Lazarus, brother of Mary and Martha, all of them Jesus’ beloved friends.
As I struggled with these texts in the midst of my own sadness, Bruce reminded me that the stories of death and birth are the only stories that are common to all of us. And so, you have him to thank for the truth that lies in this sermon and for reminding me of the truth in these texts.
Because what these texts both lead to is life….life that comes to dead places and people through breath and words.
In the story of the dry bones, the Lord God said to Ezekiel: “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.”
And in the story of Lazarus, it is Jesus’ calling forth of Lazarus that draws the man, who had been in the tomb for four days, well past the time when the Hebrew people believed that the soul had left the body, to come out. “Lazarus, come out!” was both call and command. It was an invitation to life anew.
There are places in this world where hope has withered and died and dried up. Places where it seems that there is no life left. Places where the promise of a new life seem so far gone from us that they have been in the tomb so long that there is no longer any spirit remaining.
A couple of weeks ago, I greeted a man who came for lunch. He comes here every single day, as he has for maybe the past six weeks. He looks tired. He looks as though he has lost all hope, he looks as though the signs of anything life giving in him are well past gone. On this particularly rainy day I noticed that we had a couple of Burger King gift cards still remaining from our drive at Christmas. I offered them both to him. He stood at the window of this church and wept as though I had offered him silver and gold. As though I had given him the winning lottery ticket. Why are you giving me these? He asked.
They are a gift from our congregation, I replied. We want you to have a warm meal in a warm place.
I could hardly bear to receive his gratitude because it seemed so abundant in comparison to what you, dear people of God, had given to him. But in that gift and in the meager words I had to share with him came a glimmer of hope for new life.
On Friday morning, after hearing of Jane’s death on Thursday, we received this news: we had a brand spankin’ new great niece. Little Davi Willow had come into the world at just the right time. The right time for her parents and her big brother, but also the right time to remind me that death never has the final word. Even when all is lost and all seems hopeless and the bones are dry and the body has been in the tomb for four days….the stories of God’s faithfulness and the word of the Lord have the power to bring new life. Our ultimate hope rests in the word of God.
The Psalmist in today’s Psalm said it this way: I wait for you, O Lord; my soul waits; in your word is my hope.
We put our hope in all sorts of things and we think that ultimately they will bring new life to our lives. Because it is true that throughout the span of our lives we will experience many losses….the loss of a dream or an idea or a relationship; the loss of a job or a home; the loss of a person we loved, no matter how that loss happens. The loss of an idea of a person…our parent or our spouse or our friend or our child or even our pastor doesn’t meet our expectations and the loss is deep and the wound is just as real as a physical scar. And we will grieve and lament and mourn and ask why. Why do we, like Jane in her last months, find ourselves in places we would never have chosen? I daresay that at some point in his life our lunch guest would not have imagined that he would be moved to tears by a $5 gift card to a fast food joint. That he might have imagined something better for himself.
But the word of the Lord is always a word of new life. Of another chance. Of life in the Kingdom, which is a place where the mercies of the Lord are new every single morning. And that is the good news for this day and every day….that we are called up out of our empty places by the God who loves us and unbinds us from all that is holding us hostage in the dead places….and that God calls us to new life and new hope…every single time.
Thanks be to God, and let the church say…Amen.