Waiting

John 11:1-45; Ezekiel 37:1-14

Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.

Martha says that to Jesus, and then Mary says it, too. The exact same thing.
It’s how they greet Jesus, today.

I suppose there could have been small talk and warm up conversation that got lost in transcription, but either way, one after another, the sisters see Jesus and get right to the point:
You would have saved him. If you were here.

Theologians sometimes imagine a tone of conviction and faith in those words: that Jesus holds God’s power over life and death, that Jesus is God. Many of us are more likely to empathize with a tone of accusation, or guilt, uncertainty, anger, hope… any or all of those emotions we feel when death comes close to home.

Whatever their tone, though, those words go straight to the heart of the story.

When Lazarus died, Jesus wasn’t there.

It never fails to irritate me when I read this story that Jesus hears the news that Lazarus is dying and consciously, clearly, waits.

The story of Lazarus is a miracle story; a story that reveals the power of God and the promise of resurrection.

But it’s also a story of God’s delay.

Of Jesus waiting to come in to a situation of loss and grief where God is very sorely needed.

That delay – that uncertain and apparently unreasonable waiting for God to come when we’ve called; that waiting for a miracle that doesn’t come – may actually be more familiar to many of us than miracles are.

We’ve collectively gotten used to the idea that God works on a different timeline, with different priorities than our own.  Both the history of faith and our own experience tell us that sometimes God doesn’t appear to act until we’ve quit hoping for miracles; when the feeling of need has basically dried up, like that valley of bones in Ezekiel’s vision.

Many of us know that God mostly doesn’t cure cancer or bring clean release – or solve hunger or poverty or a pandemic virus – when we first ask.

But that doesn’t diminish the grief when someone dies; when we lose identity, or support, or anything we love. Our general acceptance of God’s different timeline doesn’t necessarily soothe the agony of needing a miracle in our immediate lives, and not seeing it coming.

So I get irritated and irritable when I read this story,

and I recognize that there is a part of me looking out toward God and saying,

Lord, if you had been here, this virus wouldn’t have….

wouldn’t have….

I don’t know, honestly, but wouldn’t have something. Right?

I’ve been seeing lots of articles recently about the formless sense of loss and grief that we’re all more or less immersed in these days.

We’ve all lost something – a sense of freedom and space, a celebration or rite of passage that means the world.
We’ve lost time with loved ones, or the easiness of connection with one another in community. Many have the anxiety and struggle of concrete losses of jobs and economic security. Some have deaths or near-deaths close to us.

We’ve all lost a sense of predictability; we grieve uncertainly for the losses that may yet come.

I can’t be the only one feeling like God could heal this; if God only would.

And to know, at the same time, that this is going to go on for a while yet.

And in the middle of that need, today, we read stories of impossible miracles; stories of the resurrection of the dead. Stories about Jesus, about God, stepping into these situations of loss and grief, of sharp bereavement or long, dry desolation, and bringing life.

For some of us, those stories are enough, as a reminder of God’s power and grace, to heal the tears in our spirits, as we face uncertainty together, to bring back life within us.

Many of us may also long for more.

And Ezekiel and John, God and Jesus, know we need more.

When God tells Ezekiel to prophesy life back into those dusty, hopeless dry bones, it’s not just muscle and skin and breath that God cares about. It’s also the knowledge of God. “Then you shall live and you shall know that I am the Lord”, God says.

This knowledge of God isn’t an intellectual understanding. It’s a feeling in our very bones of the certainty of God’s love for us and our love for God.
Certainty in our bones.

When Jesus calls Lazarus out of the tomb, and when he waits those long two days for Lazarus to die, he does it, he says, so that we may believe.

Belief that’s not agreement on facts, but rather a certainty, a trust, embedded in our hearts, that God is walking around in our world right now, that God is coming close to us to heal us and draw us closer to God. 

Jesus waits for that for us, God wants that for us, so that we have firm ground under our feet, rich trust in our hearts, when dry desolation or sharp-edged loss or formless grief are all around.

God wants that for us – wants that deep rooted security and trust for us – even more, I think, than we can want it for ourselves.

Seeking God’s help in grief and loss – seeking closer connection with God in isolation, uncertainty, and exile – are things I’m trained for, and things all of us are always called to do; both for ourselves, and to help one another.

And if you’re here today [watching online], you’re already trying.

Many of you are actively working to stay connected to God. Many are trying to serve as God’s hands and feet to nurture and connect others; to take the edge off of the losses of separation and support that all of us are experiencing these days, as well as to help God and our medical professionals save lives by staying at home and washing our hands, long after we’re tired of both (and getting sore).

But these stories we read today are also stories of God’s intent and power to bring that deep, connected, trust in God to us when we are far beyond our ability to help ourselves, or those we love.

Resurrection is certainly above my pay grade, and probably above yours.

But it’s an adventure God is inviting us to anyway;

a confrontation with loneliness and uncertainty and loss;

a confrontation with the slow grinding of anxiety and everything else in this world that dries up hope and cuts connection;

a confrontation through which God brings us (or sometimes drags us) into that bone-deep certainty of God’s love that IS new life, even in the middle of that same uncertainty, separation, waiting and grief that feel like death or exile.

We’ll be here a while, you and I, in this strange uncertain landscape.

This story we are living is full of delays and is not nearly solved or sorted yet.
We’ve got a lot more waiting to do, complete with uncertainty and griefs, large and small.

So God is inviting us, in the shadow of death, not so much to wait for Jesus, but to wait with Jesus. To wait (and to act when we can) in that that steady, heartbeat of trust in God’s presence and healing that God is working to breathe into us. That trust that IS the miracle we’ve been waiting for, here and now.