All of us find ourselves at some point with a dead life. At these points, we cry out in desperation for God to save us from death. Most of us have come to expect death and the fear it has over our lives – so much so that we settle for just barely living. On this Easter Sunday we discover that Jesus refuses to abandon us to the tombs where we are losing our lives.

Prayer

The Bible tells us that Jesus was good friends with Mary and Martha, and their brother Lazarus. Lazarus had died, and his sisters came begging for Jesus to raise him. Jesus had taken His time getting there, and now Lazarus was gone. When He heard that His friend had died, John tells us that Jesus wept. Grief is difficult, and Jesus felt it as much as we do when we lose a loved one or a friend to death. It must have been agonizing for the sisters of Lazarus to watch Lazarus slowly slip away, and then to place him in a tomb and roll the stone across the door.

If you have ever watched someone die, you know that death is not pretty. It doesn’t smell good. It hurts. It certainly hurts the loved ones who sit by the deathbed to watch someone they love die because they are powerless to stop it. That feeling of powerlessness in the face of death – of it being beyond our control – that’s one of the reasons we don’t like to talk about death very much. Just try to hang around the copy machine at work, and get a good conversation going on death and dying. It just doesn’t happen. The machine will be yours in no time. But despite our refusal to talk about it, or to clean it up, or to try to overcome it, we experience death all the time. Life is a matter of enduring one loss after another, and it’s never pretty. There is not one of us who has not witnessed the death of someone, or something, that we cherished. Death comes in many forms, but it always is about losing something we held dear.

What have you succeeded in holding on to in your life? Did you get to hang on to your children? Or your parents? Did you get to keep your health, work, youth, body or your plans for life? Even if you are still holding on to these, you know it is only a matter of time before you have to give them up.

After a while all the losses start piling up on you. The day you realize that you have lost more than you’re still holding is a dangerous day. The danger is that this will be the day when you are tempted to give up on life and settle for what you can squeeze out of it.

It isn’t just Lazarus who is in the tomb. It is you and me. We entered the tomb the day we gave up on life, the day we gave up for adventure and settled for security and for a life without passion, risk, or a mission. We entered the tomb the day we settled for a world where hunger, AIDS and poverty are accepted as inevitable. We entered the tomb the day we said, “That is the way it is and you can’t change it. Life is hard but at least I have my little life in shape. I had better not take any chances with it. I won’t risk getting involved. I won’t let my heart get wounded again. I will never be vulnerable again. Instead, I will just hang onto my neat, orderly, lonely little life.” That is the day we just walked into a tomb and rolled the stone shut.

The only problem with walking into the tomb and shutting the stone is that our hearts desire more – so much so that we will do anything to avoid this death. We may have settled for the tomb, but God has made our hearts to crave life. So we try to find our way back out of the tomb – to live in but temporarily live above it – with little vacation plans, schemes for making a little more money, with retirement plans, with an affair, with alcohol or drugs, or with plans to redecorate the house . But to be clear, this is little more than just redecorating our tombs. You’re still in the tomb.

Jesus does not settle for tombs as easily as we do. He has no interest in helping you remodel your tomb. So He stands before the tombs and the deadness of our lives, and He says, “Take away the stone.” You have been dead long enough. It is time to live. Remember Jesus did not prevent Lazarus’s death for the same reason that He does not prevent your losses either. It is not because He does not love you. It is because He loves you so much that He wants to give you a new life that you can only have when you let go of the dead one to which you are clinging.

“Take away the stone,” Jesus says. Martha remarks, “Already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Nice. Martha already has settled. Everyone knows death. It stinks! But you can’t do anything about loss – it is just the way it is – “it stinketh.” Jesus responded, “Did I not tell you that if you believe you would see the glory of God?”

If we can only believe in what we see, we would have to submit to the power of the tomb. But if we believe in who we see, the Savior standing before the tombs of our lives, then we have found a power greater than the tomb. That is why we worship today, and why I want to invite you back to worship with us each Sunday. Worship is how we renew our vision of the inapparent but real Presence of the risen Savior. So we come here again to believe that we are going to see more than we can see – that we will see the glory of God.

A few years ago, I traveled to Bethany and visited the tomb that by tradition was the place where Lazarus was buried. It is a small, cold, dark place. I remember huddled around the room, and we read the Scripture text for this morning. Even if you have never been to Bethany, I bet you have been in that tomb at some point in your life. Maybe it was when you came home to tell your children that you had lost your job. Maybe it was when the doctor tried to explain that he had found cancer in your body. Maybe it was when someone rejected you, or a friend hurt you and broke your heart. Maybe it was when you found yourself grieving over the loss of a spouse or parent or a child. I think you know exactly how a tomb feels. It is a cold, dark and fearful place. The question is not how you will avoid the tombs – you can’t – not even death itself. But once you are there, can you still see the Savior? Can you still believe?

The best part of this story is that Jesus is not limited by our unbelief or our half belief or our belief mixed with unbelief. According to the text, surrounded by so much doubt, Jesus still steps up to the tomb, He calls you by name, and He says, “Lazarus, come forth.” Come out of your grief, come out of your fear, come out of your cynicism and comfortable despair, come out of your loneliness and rejection, come out of your boring dull life. Come out of your constant complaining. Aren’t you tired of that? Come forth from the places that you’ve been nurturing addictions and hurt? Come forth from your anger and fear. Why are you settling for that? This is a tomb. Come forth – He is risen! He is the resurrection and the life. He is calling for you by name, and He is bidding you to come back to life.

Now what? The Resurrection and the Life has pulled back the door from your tomb and has called you to return to life again. Will you? Do you believe? You have a choice to make. When Jesus comes to the door of your tomb, and invites you into a new life, you can either choose to stay in the tomb, or you can believe there is a new life waiting outside of it.

Maybe you think you don’t have that much belief or faith. Maybe resurrection seems impossible to you – you can’t prove it or know it empirically, after all. But I suggest to you that you shouldn’t wait for faith as if it will show up on your door one day like a stray dog that has come home. No, the power isn’t in your faith. It is in the One who stands outside the tomb calling for you. Garrison Keillor of 'Prairie Home Companion' has written that faith is like the nose on the end of your face. “If you focus too closely, it will make you dizzy.” Don’t focus on the faith. Focus on Jesus who knows your name and persistently calls you to come forth from the tombs. “Lazarus, Jane, Ruth, Todd . . . time to quit living in defeat, fear and doubt. Come out of the tombs!”

“Then the dead man came out, his hands and his feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him and let him go.’” It is striking that Jesus gives this man new life, but he doesn’t unbind him. That was a task for his sisters, and that is the calling of all of us here – to help you unbind the clothes of death from you once you have taken the step out of the tomb. No one has enough faith to leave a comfortable tomb by themselves. “My faith” is never enough, and that is why a faith community or a church is important for your life if you ever are going to rise above your dead life. We need the great faith of the church that unbinds us. But you can only find a great purpose and God’s calling for your life if you have abandoned your own tomb.

Your disappointment and grief have been great. Death always stinks. But the stone has been rolled away – not just yours – most importantly, His. The Savior is calling for you. Isn’t it time to come forth? Life is waiting. All that it costs is giving up death.

When you walk out of your tomb, you will find yourself doing the most extraordinary things. What would you do with your life if death was not a limit, a fear or a factor? The good news of Easter is: Death no longer holds you captive! The fear that you might die, the fear that you might lose something or someone, the fear that you might get hurt – that fear will no longer have power over you. You will get caught up in a crazy, exciting and breathless adventure called the Kingdom of God, or the mission of God, in your life. You will find yourself feeding the hungry or serving the poor on streets where before you feared you would die. Your home will be open to strangers because you don’t fear loss. Your fears for your children will give way to praying God’s blessings over them. You will find yourself befriending people not at all like you. You will give your money away lavishly for a need because you are not obsessed with your retirement or the inheritance you will leave. You will know you are out of the tombs when you can make an ethical business decision knowing it might be risky, when you give up your petty complaints about life and the hand it has dealt you. You will know you are out of the tomb when your life is surrounded by people who unbind your clothes of death and who accept and love you until you can breathe and live again.

The Easter story tells us that the tomb could not hold Jesus, and now your tomb can no longer hold you. Come forth. The Savior calls you. He is the Resurrection and the Life. The voice of God still echoes through the ages, from the tomb of Lazarus, to the tomb of Jesus Christ, all the way to the tombs that hold you, “Arise!”

» Back to top