Fifth Sunday of Lent
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Romans 8:6-11
John 11:1-45
Psalm 130
Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
“Out
of the depths I call to you, O Holy One. Lord, listen to my voice. Let your
ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications.”
I couldn’t help but think of the
missing Malaysian Airlines plane as I thought about these words from Psalm 130
this week. I pictured the ill-fated flight’s two-hundred-and-thirty-nine
passengers still strapped to their seats in the wreckage of a cabin hidden
somewhere on the ocean floor. Their laughter and their tears have been
silenced. Their voices are now captured only in the tiny “ping” of a black box.
Yet even that electronic voice tires and grows faint, its supplication for
justice and truth lost beneath the waves of the remotest ocean on earth. I can’t
even imagine the pain of the friends and family of the passengers and crew on
that flight: the wrenching separation and powerless despair that they must
feel. Like the psalmist, they must strain with all their being for any glimmer
of hope, waiting for answers like that night watchman trembling in the dark for
a glimpse of the dawn.
For me, though--I who have no
personal relationship with anyone on that flight--it is not the separation of
death that haunts me. It’s the sinister mystery surrounding the lost flight
that troubles my thoughts. It’s the suggestion that human sin, rather than some
mechanical failure, caused the tragedy. That’s what nags at the serenity of my
daily prayers. The drowned flight is a sign for me of the haunting and
mysterious wreckage of goodness. Perhaps that, more than the deepness of the
water, is what brings the crash to my mind when I read Psalm 130. For today’s
psalm is a lament over the sea of sin that overwhelms us in life. It’s not a
psalm about death. It’s a psalm about the separation from God that is a part of
life. The psalmist feels sucked into chaos, into the turbulent chaos that
churns and overwhelms our lives in this world: the chaos of injustice, the
chaos of fear, the chaos of power-plays, the chaos of war and violence and
suffering that we bring upon ourselves. The psalmist lies with the chained
Africans in the fetid hold of a slave ship. He cries with Jewish prisoners at
Dachau. He holds the hand of the little child at Fort Hood who is told, once
again, to “shelter in place” as senseless bullets kill those around her.
As the psalmist cries out from the
depths of sin, though, he remembers to remember. He remembers that there is
hope in God’s word, in God’s word that is action and command. He remembers that
God is steadfast love, loyal love, and that with God there is abundance of
redemption, no matter how black the night, no matter how hopeless the sin.
Psalm 130 dwells on sin not because of the desperation of our wrongdoing, but
because of the sure and certain hope that the presence of our faithful and
loving God brings to our lives. Psalm 130 is like our prayer for the
forgiveness of sins that we say every week: we say it not to beat up on
ourselves, but to remind us that we are, by God’s grace, forgiven indeed. As
Martin Luther wrote, in his famous hymn text based on today’s psalm: “Wherefore
my hope is in the Lord, my works I count but dust. I build not there, but on
His word, and in His goodness trust. Up to His care myself I yield, He is my
tower, my rock, my shield, and for His help I tarry.”[1]
The hope that Jesus brings to Lazarus
and his family in our Gospel lesson is also the hope of the redemption of the
world, of the abundance of God’s grace. I imagine that Lazarus was glad to be
returned to his family, and that his family—and Jesus—were overjoyed to touch
him and laugh with him again. But that is not the point of the story. Lazarus
was not resurrected, like Jesus was, to inaugurate a new kind of existence. His wasn’t
the resurrection that Martha expected, either, of the new creation at the end
of time, when all the dead would rise again. The story isn't just all about Lazarus. Though Jesus gave him life, Lazarus will return again to the grave, as do we
all. As the Malaysian flight represents for me the captivity of sin, the story
of the raising of Lazarus serves for John as a sign—a representation—of the new
life that God wants to give to all creation in Jesus Christ. In Jesus, God’s
Kingdom of light and life is launched on earth as in heaven. Jesus’ words to
Lazarus, “Come out [of the darkness of the tomb!]” are addressed to us, as
well, when we read about what happened that day in Bethany. Jesus’ words, “Come
out” are the words of the dawn in which we can put our hope. They are an invitation to a life of grace and forgiveness, a
life that shares with others what we have received from God.
You might have seen the new TV show
that is now advertised ad nauseum on
ABC: It’s called Resurrection and is
about dead people who come back to life, like Lazarus … Except that these dead
people have been in the tomb not for four days but for some 30 years … And that
Jesus does not raise them—the viewer has no idea why they are returning. I
watched part of the pilot episode and was not impressed. I was interested to
learn, though, that this new show is the American remake of a French TV series
called The Returned. Because I like
any excuse to watch a show in French, and because the French version is
supposed to be better than its American cousin, I watched a few episodes of
that one, too. On one hand, the name “The Returned,” is a much better title
than “Resurrection.” Remember, resurrection is an entry into a new kind of
life, not just the return of a dead body. And to call the resuscitated bodies in the show, “the
returned,” creates a suspenseful, haunted atmosphere, much more fitting than
the obviously misunderstood pious overtones to the title “Resurrection.”
On the other hand, despite the ABC title, the
main plot of both of these series is not the joy of new life in Christ. The
plot concerns the trouble that the return of the dead causes to the lives of
the living. The plot instead is the persistence of chaos. The plot lurks in the depths
of human sin and tragedy, without the dawn offered in Psalm 130. A child murdered by burglars, a girl killed in a
school bus crash, a young man who committed suicide on his wedding day … all of
these people and more show up again in town as if nothing has happened,
encountering family members who have already undergone the grieving process.
The Returned are not zombies; they are human beings fully alive, although they
do start to decompose over the course of the series, pointing to the mortality
of their flesh and the temporary nature of their return. They definitely do not glow with the
light of heaven. And the results of their return on the community are not life-giving.
Their return results in upturned and unsettled lives, even murder, crime,
chaos, and anguish unbounded. The French village in which the dead start coming
back to life is on a lake—and as more and more dead people return to their
loved ones in this village, the water level in the lake mysteriously drops. It
is as if “the depths” are getting more and more shallow as life returns.
However, not even this symbol turns out to be a hopeful one. At the end of the
season—spoiler alert!—the waters of the lake suddenly and without warning rise
again, drowning the entire village. Will Season 2 bring redemption, or only
plunge everyone deeper under the depths?
Both of these shows reflect our society’s
obsession with the chasm between life and death. We dream of what it
would be like to get our loved ones back. We dream of keeping life in our
flesh, even when we let our spirits wither and die from lack of care. Like Mary
and Martha, we reproach God for allowing the separation of death to enter our
lives. Yet we ignore the equally heavy separation from God caused by evil that
is heavy enough to push airliners to the bottom of the sea and to turn joyful reunions
into a horror movie. We look for salvation lounging on the clouds in heaven, forgetting that Christ’s
offer of deliverance from Evil begins right now, today, on earth.
“Out of the depths I call to you … Listen
to my voice. Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications.” Wait!
Is it just our voices that float up to God from the depths, or is it Christ whom
I hear calling from under the deep sea of sin? Is it Jesus’ voice that I hear, a voice full of love and choked with grief, begging me
to listen, pleading with me to “come out” like Lazarus, to come out of the
darkness that entombs me and to be set free?
[1]Martin
Luther, “Out of the Depths I Cry to Thee,” verse 3, trans. from the German by
Catherine Winkworth.
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