THE FIFTH SUNDAY IN LENT
Year A
April 6, 2014
John 11:1-45
Pastor David Tryggestad
Concordia Evangelical
Lutheran Church
Duluth, Minnesota
The boy didn’t make the cut. He has skated hard all season.
He never misses a practice. He has never even been late. He always makes the
extra effort. As often as not, he is at the puck before anyone else. But he doesn’t
hog the puck; he is a team player. He is as happy to make the assist as to
score the goal. Yet he doesn’t make the cut. A heavy band is winding tightly
around him.
She got the lead role in the school musical, an
every-other-year event. She is younger than most of the girls who tried out,
all of whom got lesser parts. She practices hard, has learned all her lines,
works on her singing. The directors are very pleased. Then she starts getting
bullied on line: comments on Facebook, nasty text messages. The upperclassmen begin
to avoid her in the hallways at school. She wonders how she can do her best on
stage when everyone else seems to be undermining her self-confidence. She wonders
if it might be best if she would drop out of the musical. A heavy band is
winding tightly around her.
The father wants more than anything to be a good parent. But
he comes home frustrated a lot. There is tremendous stress on the job; there have
been cut-backs and reassignments. He works all the harder to perform well on
the job. When he comes home, it seems his son never follows through on what is
expected of him. The father’s temper flares. Often. His verbal admonitions
cross the line to become verbal abuse. Verbal abuse becomes emotional abuse. The
son is becoming a bully to his middle-school friends. This scenario is becoming
a pattern. A heavy band is winding tightly around both father and son.
The bills are piling up and the phone keeps ringing, until
the phone company cuts off service. Hours at work have been cut for one while
the other has had to miss a lot of work because of an accident. The injured one
has had to go without some of the medications prescribed because the co-pays are
more than they can afford. The landlord is becoming impatient. They don’t know
how long they will be able to stay in the apartment that is so close to the bus
line and the services downtown. A heavy band is winding tightly around both of
them.
“I don’t love you anymore,” her husband of ten years and
father of their children announces out of the blue, or so it seems to her. She
does not see it coming. No one does. “It’s nothing you did or didn’t do. It’s
just not the same. It’s not what I thought it would be. It’s not what I
expected. It’s not what I had in mind. I’m not even sure I know what I had in
mind. . . . I don’t love you any more.” A heavy band is winding tightly around
the wife, the children, and the husband.
The man gets a message from the doctor: “Can you come back
for a follow-up? We want to do another test.” The soonest he can get in is a
week later, and then it takes over the weekend to get the results. “This is
what we were feared. I’m afraid it’s malignant. And it’s very aggressive.” What
will his family do? He still had school loans. His kids are little. He will
never see them grow up. A heavy band is winding tightly around him and his
family.
The woman is afraid that she is losing her faith. She has
been raised in the church. Her mother taught Sunday School and her father was
on the Church Council. She had gone to Bible camp every summer for many years.
She had had a good and long marriage until her husband died. Her children are
grown and gone, having moved far away. She is watching her friends get old and
frail. Many people in the obituaries are much younger than she. She is feeling
that all the assurances—all the pillars—of her faith are being eroded—are being
dismantled—one by one by one. She isn’t sure she believes any of it any longer.
She feels alone. A heavy band is winding tightly around her.
All of these scenarios and myriads upon myriads of others
can collectively entomb us. Individually, each scenario is like one of the
bands of cloth that bound the dead man Lazarus. Except that these bands bind us
while we are still alive. Each band that has been bound around us seems to be
wrapped more tightly than the one before until we wonder if we will ever be
able to breath. We become bound so tightly that we become paralyzed—with fear,
with dread, with bitterness, with grief. Some of the bands are wrapped around
us by others. Some of the bands are self-inflicted—we bind ourselves by our own
words, by our own actions, by our own indifference.
In time we become indistinguishable from our friend Lazarus,
dead in the tomb four days, so long that, by the time Jesus comes, there is a
stench. We are wrapped and bound and all that remains of us is stench.
Jesus comes, declaring, “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.”
Then Jesus approaches our tomb and commands, “Roll away the
stone.”
They roll away the stone.
Then Jesus shouts in a loud voice, “Lazarus, Marcie, Ted,
June, Sally, Billy, Tony—Mortal—come out!”
And we all come out. Our hands and feet are bound with bands
of cloth, and our face is wrapped in a shroud.
Jesus says to those around us, “Unbind them, and let them
go.”
We are unbound. We are given new life.
But that does not mean that all of the factors and
situations that bound us and put us in the tomb are suddenly alleviated,
suddenly and miraculously “fixed.”
The skater who didn’t make the cut does not have to let this
disappointment kill his love of the sport or discourage him from keeping at it.
“I am the resurrection and the life.”
The girl in the musical can play her part and sing her songs
confident that her identity and self-worth do not rely on the approval of her
so-called friends, but rather on the image of God that is within her. “I am the resurrection and the life.”
The verbally abusive father still goes into a stressful work
environment, but he carries within himself the peace of Christ, which he also
brings home to his family. Not only is the father unbound, so also is his son. “I am the resurrection and the life.”
The couple with the overwhelming bills that are still piling
up is emboldened to leave their shame behind and to seek help from various
resources, including their brothers and sisters in Christ, to address their
multitude of health and employment issues.
“I am the resurrection and the life.”
The wife and mother whose husband has announced, “I don’t
love you anymore,” finds that she can move beyond the paralysis of shock and
grief and fear to attend to her needs and the needs of her children, buoyed up
in the power of the resurrection to make all things new. “I am the resurrection and the life.”
The man with the terminal diagnosis takes hold of Jesus’
promise, “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.” He becomes a witness to his family. “I am the resurrection and the life.”
The woman who is afraid that she is losing her faith has her
faith restored, just as Lazarus was restored from the tomb. She, like Lazarus,
can live her days, how ever many she has remaining, telling what the Lord has
done for her. “I am the resurrection and
the life.”
“Unbind them, and let them go!”
The Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra and Chorus performed
Verdi’s Requiem last night at the
DECC. A Requiem was originally a
liturgy for a funeral service and, over time, has become a large work for the
concert stage. Our choir director, John Pierce, sang the tenor solos, and his
voice soared over the stage full of singers and instrumentalists.
The program notes for the concert tell of the Verdi Requiem being sung in a Nazi prison
camp:
Prisoners in the concentration camp
Theresienstadt (Terezín) performed the Requiem . . . 16 times between 1943 and
1944. They had only a single vocal score with piano accompaniment, so every
part had to be memorized; they practiced in a dark, cold and damp basement with
only a broken piano after long days of forced labor; and because it took place
over an extended period of time, some of the singers were removed by the Nazis
and had to be replaced. The final performance provided a basis for dignified
self-expression as well as a way o symbolically communicate the circumstances
at the camp to a visiting International Red Cross delegation in 1944. As part
of the Prague Spring Festival in 2006, [the Requiem
was performed] in the same hall that the Red Cross performance had taken place.
The choir rehearsed in the same basement where the original inmates practiced
and learned their parts. Survivors from the camp were in the audience with some
of their children singing in the chorus.
“I am the resurrection
and the life.”
“Unbind them, and let them go!”
Thanks be to God!
