On the church calendar this is the fifth and last Sunday in Lent; at the other end of this week, Holy Week awaits—on the church calendar. The liturgical year of the church’s worship is tightly woven into the cosmic rhythms of the earth’s movement around the sun and the moon’s movement around the earth, and the ancient rhythms of seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night. This year, Lent will have a few more Sundays, and we find ourselves waiting for Easter with the deep longing of those who await the redemption of the world. This year, we don’t know when Easter will come, but we know it awaits us on the other side of this long Lent; and many of us can feel our souls reaching and stretching toward the dawn.
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning—
more than those who watch for the morning.
Looking out our windows, we are like watchmen on the city walls for whom morning meant that the threats and dangers of the night lay behind them. I am grateful for the psalms, the words of ancient witnesses, words of joyful praise and mournful lament we are invited to speak with our own lips, from our own lives, with our own faith, our own doubts, our own longing.
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.
Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!
Many of you are in the depths right now. You don’t know how you’re going to pay rent for April. You don’t know when you’ll be going back to work. You have a loved one in the hospital and you can’t even go and see them. You can feel depression creep in, your anxiety has flooded in like the tide and washed over you. You are in the depths right now, and I hope you hear the opening lines of this psalm as a powerful affirmation of your voice and your place before God, no matter how helpless you may feel in this weird storm. The depths can crush us, but crying out to God we continue to breathe the life-giving breath of God, and with it, hope and courage and faith.
Our ancestors in the faith invite us to affirm with them that with the Lord there is steadfast love, and … great power to redeem. Amid all the disruptions this pandemic has caused, the uncertainties and sufferings it has unleashed, and the divisions it has exposed, the ancestors tell us we can count on the steadfast love of God. This loyal love is solid ground to stand on and the power we can rely on for the world’s redemption.
Perhaps this whacky year will help us to know more fully that Easter is not a date on the calendar but a whole new reality: it marks the end of death’s reign over life in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Every Sunday is a little Easter, a joyful celebration of the new life given to the world in Jesus, a celebration of God’s steadfast love prevailing over all that might come between us and the life for which we have been created – be it sin, fear, guilt, shame, or any of death’s many other faces. God’s steadfast love is the power that redeems us and draws us into life that is nothing but life.
John tells a great story about this love. Lazarus was ill, and his sisters sent word to Jesus who had crossed the Jordan to escape his arrest. “Lord, he whom you love is ill,” they let him know. But instead of heading to Bethany right away, Jesus stayed two days longer on the other side of the river. And instead of healing his friend Lazarus from afar like he had done with the royal official’s son who lay ill in Capernaum when Jesus himself was in Cana, Jesus stayed two more days.[1] It wasn’t healing he had on his mind. Then he said to the disciples, “Let’s go across to Judea again,” telling them in the ensuing conversation that he was going there to awaken their friend Lazarus, who, he told them, was dead.
When they arrived in the area, they found that he had already been in the tomb four days, somebody must have told them. Martha heard he was coming and she went to meet him. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” she tells him. And Jesus says to her, “Your brother will rise again.” And she responds, “Oh, I know that, he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”
And Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
“Yes, Lord,” Martha declares. “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”
Then Martha went to call her sister Mary, and they were still not in Bethany, not in the village. So Mary came and knelt at his feet, weeping, and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Verbatim what her sister had said. But Jesus doesn’t tell Mary what he told Martha, he shows her.
They finally get to the tomb. “Take away the stone,” says Jesus, and Martha gets to say what everybody there already knows, that there is a stench because he has been dead four days.
The sisters’ grief, the neighbors’ weeping, the tomb, and now the stench – the story makes it quite clear that this is where death reigns.
And Jesus shouts, “Lazarus, come out!”
And he does. And it is Lazarus, not some zombie. And Lazarus laughs as he hugs Jesus and Martha and Mary and every neighbor who’s come to the cemetery four days after the funeral. He laughs while many of us wonder, “Could something like this really happen?”
He laughs, because the real question is, “Do we believe in God who speaks light and life into being?” Do we believe in God whose desire for life in communion with us is not temporary or conditional, but at the heart of who God is and who we are? Do we trust in God’s faithful love and power to redeem, and that they are indeed greater than anything that might come between us and the life for which we have been created?
According to John’s gospel proclamation, Jesus is not merely the recipient of God’s resurrection power, he is this power. He is the resurrection and the life of the world. He is the steadfast love of God incarnate. And through him, through the life he embodies, the life of intimate communion with God and with others and with all God’s creatures, the fullness of life, the true life that is nothing but life, is ours to live and to know, now and forever.
Easter is not just a date on the calendar. It is the triumph of God’s steadfast love over anything that might separate it from the wholeness and fullness it seeks. And so we will celebrate a little Easter on April 12 with all the joy our spatially distanced lives give us room for.
And we will celebrate the resurrection of the Lord at the end of this long Lenten journey, when the love that now demands that we do not gather for our neighbor’s sake, will again call us together – and we will be like those who dream. Then our mouth will be filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy – because nothing will come between us and the life for which we have been created.
[1] John 4:46-54