Leaving the Tomb

Well again welcome we're so glad that you are with us and over the course of this summer we've been in a series called "Aha" and it's been so wonderful to hear the speakers that we've been able to listen to so far and this morning is gonna be one of those just incredible moments because the Reverend Dr. M. Craig Barnes has been with us now this will be his 11th time here at Twin Lakes which I think is a record for guest speakers and you know a little bit of his story he's the author of eight books he was a pastor still is a pastor but served in pastoral ministry and seminary professor for many many years before becoming the president of Princeton Theological Seminary all that is very impressive but what impresses me the most about Craig is his heart he has become so dear to me and my family over these last several years and so many of you feel the same way and so Twin Lakes Church let's give a very warm welcome to Dr. Craig Barnes as he speaks to us this morning.

Good morning. I'm always surprised when I get invited back a second time to speak somewhere. 11 makes me wonder about your judgment. I asked someone how long this will go on and he said till you get it right but over these 11 years I have found that the ministry and the people of this extraordinary church have made their way deep into my heart and you have no idea how many times in the course of the year as I'm about my work on the the other part of God's ministry on the East Coast that I think of you and your pastors and your leadership and that those fond memories turn into prayer for your work. I feel like I'm a part of the family here now especially because last night Mark handed me a pledge card for your capital campaign. Very invested in this church now.

Every year and usually she's wise and she sends the email sometime like in January which is just an interesting time to be in New Jersey and I get this email from Val saying well okay you can come back again and my first thought is yes another chance to preach in flip-flops. Just makes me tear up. It gets me through the cold winter. Part of my job as a seminary president is to work with other leaders in the larger church on themes of church health and so we're working on projects all the time trying to discern what is it that makes congregations healthy and what is it that turns them toxic. And one of the things that we've become clear about in our research is that healthy churches have healthy pastors and there's just no such thing as a healthy church with an unhealthy pastor.

I say this just because I want to affirm this congregation's commitment to giving its pastors sabbaticals. I know that René is about soon wrapping up one that's he'll be returning but I'm telling you he's going to return differently than he left. We've watched this practice of churches giving their pastors sabbaticals which has been going on now for many years and these pastors come back like Moses comes back from Sinai. I mean it's just they are it's that they have you know stuff written in stone that they're carrying but it's their souls have been repaired and renewed and made capable of receiving new visions. So this isn't something that you're doing just for the pastors to be clear. These sabbaticals are a long-term investment in the congregation. That's the real reason for having a sabbatical.

These things aren't vacations these pastors when they go away on these sabbaticals they're they're working hard in order to get their soul and prepared in order to think their minds in renewed ways led by the Holy Spirit so they can come back and provide long-term leadership for you as well. So you're to be committed for that. It's a way of making sure your leadership is healthy and therefore making sure that the ministries of the church will be healthy and continue to grow as this church has. It's a beacon of light that I'm telling you it makes it all the way to the East Coast and so I just wanted to commend you for being wise and setting forth this great investment in your future.

I want to turn now to our scripture text today which comes to us from John 11 beginning at verse 38. This is the familiar story about what happened in Bethany which is a suburb of Jerusalem where Jesus' friends Mary, Martha, and Lazarus lived. Jesus would spend time with them often when he was coming in and out of Jerusalem and he loved Mary and Martha and Lazarus. While he was out of town however Lazarus died. Then we pick up the story in verse 38. Then Jesus again greatly disturbed came to the tomb. It was a cave and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said take away the stone. Martha the sister of the dead man said to him Lord already there is a stench because he's been dead four days. Jesus said to her did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God. So they took away the stone. Jesus looked upward and said father I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me but I've said this for the sake of the crowd standing here so that they may believe that you sent me. When he said this he cried with a loud voice Lazarus come out. 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.

Let us pray. Holy God we've gathered here to put our lives in front of your open word. We ask that the same Holy Spirit who inspired the writing of this would now allow us to find our own lives in this sacred drama. May these words tell the story of your word of hope for us. A word made perfect in Jesus Christ in his name we pray. Amen.

I have been to the town of Bethany in that suburb of Jerusalem and I've gone to the place that tradition at least has said was Lazarus tomb. My guess is if you travel to the Holy Land you've been there too. This tomb is in fact a cave. It's a dark clammy cave that goes deep into the earth. You climb down into it. Whether you get to the Holy Land and see this tomb or not the reality is all of us all of us will spend time in Lazarus tomb and we'll be there more than once through the course of our life.

We enter Lazarus tomb on the day that we give up on the life we've been living. Maybe you were in a relationship that meant everything to you but it fell apart. You don't even know how that happened. You're not blaming the other person but it just and you are lost without this person. More to the point you have lost interest in your life now. It's like walking into a tomb. Or maybe you've come to the realization that you don't just have some health problems. You have problems that are going to be chronic at best for the rest of your life. That you'll never again gonna know a day of being perfectly healthy. The day that that hits you it feels again like you just somehow stumbled into this dark dark tomb.

Maybe the vast majority of your life up to this point was spent chasing a particular dream. It's why you went to school. It's why you stayed up late at night working so hard. It's why you moved your family from one place to another trying to chase this dream and for reasons again that weren't completely your fault the dream just fell apart. It just crashed on the rocks. You feel like you're too old to start over again. It feels like your whole life up to this point. It's just just crumbled and rolled down into the tomb.

Now when you start to see these things happen in your life, chances are great that you're gonna start praying. You may pray fervently. You may get down on your knees and pray. You may just pray along the way short little prayers but basically it all boils down to the same. Please God don't let this happen. Please God help. Please please God help. But then the thing that you were most afraid of happening does happen. You're not the first person to experience this. When Mary and Martha saw how ill their brother Lazarus was, they sent word to Jesus who was out of town. They said, "Lord, he whom you love is ill. He whom you love is ill. Not just can you throw down another healing, but this is your friend." Surely they thought Jesus will come back to heal Lazarus. He's healed so many people he doesn't even know. But if he loves Lazarus, of course he's gonna hurry back to take care of him.

The text tells us later that Jesus does in fact love Lazarus. But he told the disciples, "We're gonna stay right where we are for two more days." And as a result, Lazarus dies. Four days later, Jesus returns. He meets first with the sister Martha, then later with the sister Mary. Striking thing is both of them at different times say the exact same thing to Jesus. "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." They don't say, you know, things are broken between you and me now. You're no longer the Lord. They still affirm his lordship. They just don't understand his lordship because they know that if he had been there, if he had hurried back, that Lazarus would not have been dead.

You know this experience when you pray and pray and pray and you know that Jesus could heal, you know, that Jesus could fix this, you know, Jesus could save the day. He's done it for others. Maybe he's even done it for you in the past. But for reasons you don't understand, the Lord chose not to do what you pleaded with him to do. When you are disappointed like this, disappointed not just in what happened, but frankly disappointed in the Savior who did not prevent it from happening, that's when you head to the tomb.

We also enter this tomb whenever we just find ourselves settling. Settling is such an unchristian word. We settle for life without passion. We're just taking it from day to day, living carefully to make sure that at least we have, you know, our little garden to tend. Life without passion or life without risk. We're afraid of risk because we don't want to fail and so we don't try. We come and go from this planet and nobody even knew we were here. Or when we live without any real sense of mission, other than just trying to make sure bad things don't happen. We enter the tomb when we live day after day with dread.

Dread of what could happen. We live with the anxious fear when we find that we're not even able to sleep at night. We just we just lie in bed and we we look at the clock on the nightstand. It becomes kind of our grand inquisitor. It's like, "201, 202." We think about all the bad things that could happen. We try to figure out reasons that they won't happen. Then we come up with more reasons why they could happen. 203, 204. We cannot argue our way out of our fears and we might as well have just given up on life because now instead of knowing the joy of the Lord or as Trent was teaching us to shout for joy for the Lord, we're just thinking, "Oh God, please no, no, no, dread."

We also, I think, as a society, enter a tomb when we settle for the injustice that abounds in our country, not to mention our world. When we settle into the reality that again last night, maybe even somewhere around here, a homeless mother spent the night in her car with her children because she has no other place to go. Or when we live in a society where the haves have so much and the have nots have not a chance. When we settle, our souls are in jeopardy because we're settling frankly into despair. That's the problem with settling. It's despair which is the antithesis of the hope that we have in our faith. And when you live with despair, you start to die from the inside out.

A while back, the New York Times essayist, Makiko Kakatani, wrote a spectacular article about her concern with our society and its "designer despair," as she called it. Designer despair. What she means by that is that for reasons she doesn't understand, somehow despair has become cool. What she's worried about is Quentin Tarantino's "Cool Cat Killers." They're entertaining to us. She's worried about Marilyn Manson's "Adolescent Rage." She's worried about Jerry Springer, who she calls "South Park with Real People." That this is entertaining to us. This is despair. These are lives of despair. She's worried most of all, interestingly, about the models in the J. Crew catalog who always looked sad. She said, "When did that happen? That sadness got cool enough to sell jeans." Now I guess what she's talking about, when I was a kid, we had the Sears and Roebuck catalog. You look at the models there, there'd be some guy with a plaid shirt. He'd be like this. It was goofy, but the point was, "I'm happy. If you want to be happy, buy this shirt. It'll make you happy." Which is a lie, of course, but at least we had the right marketing strategy then.

Now the point is, I'm sad. All the cool people are sad. If you want to be cool and sad like us, buy these jeans. All the despair you want, just $200. So we've even figured out how to make despair comfortable. We settle for this. Jesus does not settle, certainly not for comfortable despair. Jesus came here to pierce through the darkness of despair. So he stands before the tomb. He says to everybody who's despairing around him, "Look, take away the stone. You have been spiritually dead long enough. It's time now to come back to life. Take away the stone. Let's make it possible for people to walk away from despair. Take away the stone."

Martha, who I think was probably the Presbyterian of the family, said, "Lord, this is gonna smell bad. This is not decent or in orders. It's not how we do things. There will be a stench, to use her term. Lord, there will be a stench. It's as if she's saying, "Look, death stinks." But we all know that. It's inevitable. If you had been present, you could have stopped it. You're about the only one we know who can, but for some reason you chose not to. We keep hoping that you will. We're hoping that you'll do something about the chaos in the world. For that matter, I'd settle if you do something about the chaos in my life. But you chose not to hurry back to help with this. And so we're just left with the inevitable. A despairing statement. We're just left with the inevitable.

Jesus didn't show up just to provide a few exceptions to the inevitable. Just what would have happened had he just one more time done an exception to the inevitable, inevitability of death. He came to break through the despair, even in the midst of death. So he's not gonna hurry to give us an exception. For that matter, Jesus never hurries. Read through the Gospels this afternoon if you want. I defy you to find a single time in any of the four Gospels where Jesus once was in a hurry. He doesn't run for us. He doesn't even jog. This actually kind of bothers me a little bit. I'm hustling all the time for Jesus. I keep thinking, surely you can keep up with me. But that's not really the question. The question is, can I wait upon the Lord whose timing is not mine?

The question also is, what do I do when Jesus does not hurry like I thought he should have? That's the critical moment of faith. What do you do when Jesus did not hurry for you? I grew up in a church that had Sunday night worship services. And one of the things I remember about those services is that every Sunday night we had a testimony. Someone would come up and give a testimony about what the Lord was doing in their life. And the classic typical testimony went something like this. Things were going from bad to worse to really bad and we were almost at the point of going off the cliff. It was gonna be horrible and we prayed and prayed and prayed and I thought we were lost and just at the last second Jesus showed up. And I am just standing here today to give thanks for this God who came to me in Christ and through the Holy Spirit saved things just in the nick of time. Praise the Lord.

We did not have so many testimonies where someone said, "I thought we were gonna head right off the cliff," and we did. And now I'm trying to figure out how my faith is going to be made strong through this. Those are the testimonies I find more interesting and this is why. When Jesus does not come in the nick of time, when he comes as he prefers to after the nick of time, then you have to make this critical choice. Do you still want Jesus? Do you love Jesus when he comes to you with no blessings attached? When he's not Superman who arrives like the speed of the speeding bullet, rescuing just in time. What if it's just Jesus? Jesus plus nothing. Would you still say that you love Jesus if he just gives you himself? Just Jesus.

We still believe when you don't understand. These are the questions that nurture a strong, great, sturdy faith. And it is faith that binds us to Jesus, not certainty. If Jesus came every time we beckoned, the way we asked him to come, there would be no need for faith. You just keep performing. You don't need to have faith in someone who always does everything you want. But when Jesus is the Lord God Almighty whose ways are not our ways, who's about things and processes far beyond our imagination, then you have to make a choice to believe. And Jesus loves to work in the realm beyond our expectations.

We expect we have this life. It ends in death, again that inevitability thing. If Jesus is gonna do anything, you better help right here. But Jesus loves to work on the other side of that limit, that liminal experience. This is what the resurrection message is all about, which isn't just meaning that Jesus will provide new life upon our physical death. It means that after every loss, after every disappointment, there is still Jesus who is not done, who will raise your soul up to new and exciting unimaginable good work. But the question is, rather than disappointment, do you still believe? This is what Jesus says to Martha. "Did I, did I not tell you that if you believed, you will see the glory of God. If you believe, you will see."

Believing and seeing are almost synonymous in the New Testament. To believe is to see. To see is then to learn how to believe. This is why every time an angel shows up, what is the angel's first word always? Behold, behold. Look, look, look, pay attention. See. You see, all week long we're retrained to say that what we believe and what we see. But that's not what we're about in the Christian faith. One of the reasons we come back to worship Sunday after Sunday is to believe in who we see. And if you're clear about who we see, that there's a Savior in our midst, even in the midst of our disappointments, there's a Savior in our midst.

If you're clear about who you see, you don't have to have answers to the other things. I don't always have answers as to why what happened happened. I don't have answers as to how it's gonna get made better or redeemed. I don't have answers as to what's gonna happen next. I don't know about the whys and the hows and the whats. I'm real clear though about the who. If you have clarity about who it is that's the Savior, who it is that is with you even in your heartache, even in your heartache about your disappointments over the Savior. If you know about who, you can handle confusion with all the other questions. And worship trains our eyes to see the who.

The who who is with us not only here but through all those ordinary days that happen once we leave the doors of worship. Who it is that is standing at the open door of the tomb which you may find yourself today. I know you've had it in the past, you'll probably have it again in the future. But who is it that is standing at the open door of the tomb called your life right now? Notice in the text, this is one of my favorite parts of this, that Jesus stands at the door of the tomb. He does not go into the tomb. That's what we were hoping for. When you find yourself in a tomb and you hear that Jesus is around, what you want him to do is to come into the tomb with you.

You want him to comfort you there. You want to hope he study his pastoral care classes very well. He's going to provide some good counsel for you in the tomb. You want him to take your hand. You want him to say, "They're there now." You want him to say, "You got robbed." That just wasn't fair. You want him to say that you were right and they were wrong. You want him to say, "This is just such a shame." You want empathy. You want some Holy Spirit empathy in the tomb with you. You want him to say, "You know there are a lot of other tombs around here, but I think you have it worse than everybody else." You are an overachieving tomb resident. You want to look around and say, "I've never seen a tomb this nice." Maybe he could do some redecorating of your tomb. Make your tomb a little more comfortable so other people want to come and see, "Oh look at her tomb. She's really had a rough time." He's not going to do that. Trust me, I'm sure about this. Jesus does not like tombs. He didn't spend much time in his own tomb. He's not coming to yours.

No, Jesus stands at the door and he says literally, "Lazarus, come out. Come out of there. Come out from this long, long period of grief. It was supposed to be a long process, but it was never supposed to be your soulmate. Don't settle into it. Come out from your fear. Come out from your cynicism. Come out from your addiction to the past." Through all my years of pastoral counseling, I've tried all that I know how to do to help people come out of their addictions to the past. I have in fact tried empathy. I have tried helping them through analyzing what happened. I've made referrals to therapists who have far greater skills than I do in sorting through the issues of their past. But about this, I'm absolutely clear. It doesn't matter how hard you work at it, how long you stare at it, how long you keep trying to analyze it and figure it out. You are never going to have a better past. It's not where your life is. We can learn from it. We can grow from it, but life is lived today and with the invitation of a Savior who's the only one who has the power to break the despair, to open the door to the tomb, and who says to you, "Now you can come out." You can come out from this dark place where you've been nurturing your hurt too long. Why are you settling for this? This is a tomb. It's a place of death. Why would you settle?

One of the things we have a hard time convincing our seminarians of, but they're gonna get it clearly when they become pastors, is that people prefer the misery they know to the mystery they do not know. We prefer the misery we know to the mystery we do not. Now that's not logical. Logically, you would think mystery would beat misery any day, but people are not logical about their hurts. No, over time we can even befriend our hurt where it's the only thing we really trust. In his wonderful book called The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis tells this fictional story about a bus trip from hell to heaven. And I want to be clear, someone last night talked to me afterwards and said, "Where in the scripture is this bus trip? It's fiction, okay? It's fiction. It's not scripture." But he's trying to make a point. These people have a chance to leave hell and to come to heaven, which is on the top of a mountain. So the bus stops at the base of the mountain. They have to walk up the mountain, and the closer they get to the top of the mountain, the more real they become. They come back to who they were created to be, and then they almost nobody makes it. Most people get back on the bus and say it's time to go home. Lewis's thesis here is that people are separated from God in hell because they want to be.

Well, one of these men who's trying to make his way up the mountain has a lizard on his shoulder. An angel comes by, the huge sword, and the angel is surprised that this man is walking up to heaven with this lizard. And so he asked the man about the lizard on the shoulder, and the man says, "Oh, let me tell you, I hate this lizard." He digs his claws into my shoulder. He hurts me all the time. He says the most vile things right in my ear. He never stops talking. And so the angel says, "Hold on, swordsman, would you like for me to kill him?" He says, "Well, let's not be hasty." The lizard says, "Oh, he'll kill me. He really will. He'll kill me." And then, "Who will you have?" We've been together too long. Besides, you don't belong in heaven. You know you don't belong. There's no place for you. Let's go back home to hell. Oh, oh, angel says, "Again, I'm willing to kill him for you." This conversation goes on, I don't know, maybe 20 pages than the book. Oh my gosh. About the time I get tired of how long this conversation is going on, I remember some more of my pastoral counseling. He's going round and round in circles. Finally, the man just is exhausted from the conversation and he says to the angel, "Oh, God help me. Go ahead, please. Remove the lizard." That's all the angel needs to hear. Whack! The lizard's head goes flying off. And in classic C.S. Lewis fashion, the dead lizard then turns into a stallion and the man rides the stallion all the way up to heaven. Here's the interesting point. Before the man jumped on the stallion, as soon as the lizard was killed, the man fell on the ground screaming. Lewis's point is, "It hurts to get better." And the big hurt of getting better is you have to abandon your friend called Hurt. The Hurt that's been with you so long.

In order to take advantage of this incredible invitation to come out of the tomb, you have to in fact leave the Hurt. Then the dead man came out, his hands and his feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. And Jesus said to them, "Unbind him and let him go." Now he's talking to the church. This is the church's ministry. When people have come to us out of the tomb that Jesus invited out, it's our job to unbind them. We don't get them out of the tomb. That's what Jesus does. We cannot defeat the power of death. We cannot provide resurrection after every lost experience someone has. That's what Jesus does. What we can do is realize that while they were in the tomb, they got all bound up. They got bound up with their guilt over what they've done and left undone. They got bound up in shame. They got bound up in fear that there's only going to be tomb from now on. They got bound up in despair most of all.

The way we unbind them is we bring them into our fellowship. We call them brother and sister. We say you are free from addictions. Now we're going to live fully alive. We bring them into small groups. We have them in discipleship programs. Show them how to worship. We invite them into mission where at long last they can think about somebody besides themselves. And all of that unbinds them, frees them to their full life. It's a wonderful mission. We do that as a church. You do that as a friend. You do that. Don't you want at the end of your life for someone to stand up at your funeral and say this person is just spectacular with people. And just every time I left this person I felt better that you were an unbinder of people.

But you cannot do that. You cannot have such a wonderful extraordinary mission to your life if you yourself are still in a tomb. You cannot give what you do not have. If you like to be a person who's known as one who gives love, you have to have been loved. You have to receive love. You have to have love in order to offer it to someone else. If you want to be known as a person who is just one who is always giving the grace of Jesus Christ to the people around you, then you have to have received the grace of Jesus Christ. You've got to be free in order to unbind someone else to help them be free. So one of the things you need to do for the sake of those around you, not just for your own sake, but the sake of those around you, you've got to get out of the tomb. They're counting on you to be free in order to help them.

Again, we're in the tomb more than once in the course of our lives. The disappointments, the heartache, the grief, it's great when it sends you there. I'm not saying it's wrong to be sent to a tomb. That's just the volatility of life. And when you find yourself in grief and heartache, it takes time. It takes time. I get that. Even the Lord Jesus is very patient with that. There's nothing wrong with being in a place of grief and heartache, sadness. My point today is just it's not your home. You can visit it for a while, but the door to the tomb is open and your home is with Jesus outside the tomb, the place we are able to be fully alive again, alive in Christ.

Holy God, we give thanks that the cross of Jesus Christ, you broke the power of death. That you have rolled back the stone that would seal us in our tombs. That you've given us the freedom to come out. Give us the courage of your Holy Spirit to hear this invitation, to make our way out into a place of new life. That we might be unbound and then enter into the ministry of unbinding others. We give thanks for such holy holy holy purpose. In the name of Christ Jesus, the resurrection and the life. Amen.