New Lives for Old

Sermon by The Rev. David R. Anderson

John 11:1-45

 

I suppose we could have guessed it would happen like this today. Last Sunday in John chapter 9 Jesus heals a man blind from birth, and the Furies of the Pharisees are unleashed on Jesus and the man who dares to see anew. By the end of the next chapter in John’s story the same crowd first tries to stone Jesus, and then to arrest him. So when we open chapter 11 and Jesus raises a man whose corpse is four-days rotten in the tomb, we shouldn’t expect this crowd to hoist Jesus on their shoulders and carry him down to the local pub for a party. They’ve had enough of this healing and new life and they’re not taking it anymore.

In the dramatic stories we’ve heard the last few Sundays, John shines a fascinating, realistic light on the human response to change, healing and new life.

John’s are not sentimental stories of miracles that send everybody into rapture. They’re signs that reveal not only who Jesus is, and what life in the Kingdom he brings is all about, but who we are, and our stubborn resistance to change, to life!

After Jesus raises Lazarus from the tomb, in the verses immediately following the passage we read this morning, people are running to tell the Pharisees that more intolerable signs are being wrought. So the leaders plot to kill the wonder worker; and a little later they plot to kill Lazarus, who’s a walking advertisement for Jesus’ new Kingdom.
The message is clear: We may say we’re all for resurrection and new life, but in fact we’re threatened by it. It scares us! We’re frightened by the prospect of anything new—even something as amazing as a second chance at life!—because in order to receive the new we have to leave the old. Picasso said, “Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.”

And the really intriguing question the story poses for each of us is, “In what way do I reject God’s offer of new life? What old thing am I unwilling to leave behind in order to take up the new? And the answer is, yourself. Your old self.

A psychologist in private practice in Pennsylvania told me a story I’ve never forgotten—about a woman who weighed more than 300 pounds, and her doctors were worried about her health, and her psychological and social welfare as well. And so after all the diets had failed they suggested a shunt and bypass in her small intestine. She agreed and it worked. She lost half the weight, and she looked like an average-sized person—and better yet, she had reduced the horrific health risks of obesity. All looked well.

Then one day she was in a department store in New York. She looked over and saw a woman who was wearing the same dress and shoes—carrying the same purse. And she thought, “How curious, that someone should be wearing the exact same outfit as I am.” Then suddenly she realized that she was looking at one of those mirrors on a column. She was looking at herself . . . and didn’t recognize it.
Well, this undid her. She ended up in a hospital psych ward. She demanded that they hook her back up again, so she could be the same again on the inside, the same again on the outside. And so, despite the risk of the surgery itself, and all the health risks and psychological problems of obesity, she was surgically “restored”—to her old self.

“I’d love to be a new person. I’d do anything to receive that new life.”
Would you really? Do I want the new life God is offering me, or am I secretly just a little worried what would happen if I received it? And am I just as happy, really, in the darkness of my own cozy tomb.
I watched a great movie last year called “Good-bye Lenin.” It’s set in East Berlin, on the communist side of the wall, in 1989. It’s about a woman, Christiane, who’s an ardent supporter of the communist regime. Her husband has fled to the West and betrayed his comrades (and their marriage, of course), but she’s a true believer.

Her son, Alex, however, does not share his mother’s adoration of the Party. In fact he’s secretly taking part in anti-government rallies. And one day, when Christiane happens to see her own son in one of these rallies, she has a near-fatal heart attack and falls into a coma. She’s hospitalized for a long while and then, sadly, Alex brings his mother home in a vegetative state.

Months go by and Christiane sleeps on. Meanwhile, the Berlin wall falls. Enormous changes sweep through East Berlin. Everything changes for Alex—a whole new world opens up. And then, eight months after falling into her coma, Christiane awakes. They’re all excited, but the doctor says, “She’s very fragile. The slightest provocation or disturbance could kill her.”

Well, if she knew that the old Soviet era was over—that the West had
won—she’d have an instant stroke! So he has to put all the old Soviet era drab furnishings back in the house. He has to put away his new clothes and bring back his dreary old communist duds. When he brings meals to his mother, he puts Western produce in the food jars of the old regime. He has to create the illusion that life has not changed, that the communist way of life is still dominant. And they’re doing pretty well until a Coca Cola banner is unfurled on the face of the high rise building next door. They have to quickly explain it away.
The whole tragic-comedy is all about keeping somebody in the old, dead world; the Herculean effort of keeping the old dead world on life support: all because someone cannot live in the new world of life and liberty.

Jesus is inviting us to live in the Kingdom, that place where the dead are quickened to life. Jesus’ command to Lazarus in his tomb—“Come out!”—is a command to every person. Come out of that place of torpor, our own coma…you know…where life is happening around us, and yet we feel as if we’re watching it in suspended animation.

What would it take to “Come out”? We’d have to shed the old self. Remember that Picasso insight: “Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.” And we so fear that. The Pharisees aren’t bad people, they’re just afraid. They see the eye-popping miracles, but they’re so afraid of what they’d have to leave behind to participate in that kind of riotous, untrammeled life. We’re all like that woman who sees her new self in the mirror and, in terror says, “Please! Give me my old self” Please!” We’re like Christiane in East Berlin. She can’t step into the new and say, “Free at last!”

What would it take? It would take faith—trust. This would have to be our prayer: Lord, I hear your call to “Come out!” But I’m afraid. Promise me I’m going to be all right if I come out. You already have? Yes, that’s right; you already have. Then help me, please, help me to trust your promise: I’m going to be all right if I leave this old self in this tomb and come out to meet you. All right. Here I come. I’m walking out now. Give me your hand—I need your hand . . . .