Will the Lord be with you? As Luis said, uh, my name is Brian Keepers, and I am going to be joining the staff here as the new executive pastor. So uh so excited to be a part of this. Oh, thank you. So I'm I'm kind of in this strange in-between place right now where I'm I'm not sure how the math of this works, but I'm three-quarter time at Trinity Reform Church, where I'm the lead pastor in Northwest Iowa, and one quarter time here as executive pastor. Um and what that has meant is that I come out here these last couple months, I've come out for just a week to get to spend time with the staff. And then my my wife and I will be moving at the end of June, and July 1, I'll start um full-time here. Um but just a tremendous gift to get to be with you this Sunday. I feel like I passed my first test as the executive pastor when John called me up a week ago and said, Hey, while you're out here, would you be willing to preach on Sunday? And Chris DeVos gave me good counsel. I said, Yes, John, I would be happy to do uh whatever you would like for me to do. But I do count it as a gift to share with you in the ministry of the word. Let's pray. God, we give you thanks for your grace, for your faithfulness to experience, to experience these promises embodied in the sacrament of baptism. And then in a bit to get to come to the table. What a gift. Lord, I pray now as we engage your word together, that the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts together would be pleasing and acceptable in your sight, our rock and our redeemer. And all God's people said. Amen. So we're in Easter tide. And as many of you know, Easter is not just one day, uh, it's it's a season. And last Sunday, Resurrection Sunday, so now we have 50 days of Easter that take us all the way up to Pentecost. Last Sunday, if you were on this campus, uh you heard John chapter 20, kind of moving towards the climactic parts of John's Gospel. And uh for this for this Sunday, for this morning, I want to go back into the middle of John's Gospel. And I want to share with you a resurrection story from John chapter 11. And I want you to hear it in light of Easter today. But let me set the context before we hear it. So in John chapter 10, uh, Jesus and his disciples are at uh in Jerusalem gathered for the uh festival of dedication, which was one of the important Jewish festivals. Things are starting to heat up between Jesus and the religious leaders. They're pressing him on his identity, saying, like, just tell us plainly, are you the Messiah or are you not? And Jesus responds to them. He tells the truth, but as Emily Dickinson says, you know, he tells it slant. And he says that he's the good shepherd. Uh, he says that his sheep will hear his voice, that they know uh his voice and he knows them, that he is the one who gives them life, and no one can snatch them from his hands. And then he says this the Father and I are one. And that's what set them off. That pushed him over. They charge him with blasphemy because they hear what he's saying, that he is claiming to be God in the flesh. So they pick up stones and they try to stone him to death. Jesus and the disciples escape out of Jerusalem, they cross the River Jordan, and they go out and they find John the Baptist. You remember him. He's hiding out in the wilderness, they spend some time there, and it's while they're there with John the Baptist that a tragic message comes to Jesus. It's from a family that he loves in Bethany. Martha and Mary, two sisters, and it's about their brother Lazarus, Jesus' close friend. And the message is something like this Lazarus, our brother, your friend, is very sick. Come immediately. But strangely enough, Jesus doesn't go. He stays for two days. Does he not care? Is he too busy? Well, we've we've heard John, the gospel writer, say that Jesus only speaks what the Father tells him to speak, and he only does what the Father tells him to do. And the Father has told him to wait. So for two days they wait, and then after two days, the Father says, It's time. So Jesus says to his disciples, we need to go. We're gonna go back to Bethany, and and they say to Jesus, Are you are you kidding us? Like, remember that they tried to kill you back there. Like this is a death wish. And Jesus says to them, Lazarus is dead. Not just sick, but he's dead. And it is good for your sake that I was not there, says Jesus, because what's about to happen is the Father is going to reveal his glory. So let's go. And Thomas, you know, ever the optimist, I'm kidding about that, um, says, All right, let's just all go there to die. Right? There's always that guy in the group. And he wasn't wrong. But they set out, and this is where the story picks up, John chapter 11, beginning at verse 17. I invite you just to listen to it. When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Now, Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles away, and there were some Jews there who came to the house of Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she got up and she went to him, and Mary stayed home. When she saw him, she said to him, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will do whatever you ask of him. Jesus said to her, Your brother will rise again. She said to him, I know he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day. Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life. And those who believe in me, though they die, will live. And everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this? And Martha said, Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world. Now, when she had said this, she got up and she went back to her house and she called for her sister Mary, and she said to her in private, the teacher is here, and he's calling for you. So Mary got up and she went out to Jesus, for he had not yet arrived to the village, but he was still in the place where Martha had met him. When the Jews saw Martha or Mary get up and go out quickly, they followed her, thinking that she was going to the tomb of Lazarus to weep there. Now, when Mary came to where Jesus was, and when she saw him, she knelt at his feet and she said to him, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. When Jesus saw her weeping, and when he saw the Jews who were with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in his spirit and deeply moved. He said, Where have they laid the body? And they said, Lord, come and see. And Jesus began to weep. Some of them said, Look at how much he loved him. But others of them said, Could not he who opened the eyes of a blind man have kept this man from dying? Jesus came to the tomb, once again greatly disturbed. It was a cave, and there was a stone that was lying against it. Jesus said to them, Take away the stone. But Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, Lord, the stench. He's already been dead four days. And Jesus said to her, Martha, did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God? So they moved the stone away. Jesus looked upward and he said to the Father, Father, thank you that you have heard me. I know that you always hear me, but I have said this aloud for the sake of this crowd gathered here, that they might believe that you have sent me. And after he said that, he cried out in a loud voice, Lazarus, come out. And the dead man became walking out. His hands and his feet were bound with strips of cloth. His face was covered with cloth. And Jesus said to them, unbind him and let him go. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Now that's a resurrection story. Yeah. I'll never forget the phone call. August 26, 2021. It's a hot, humid, sticky northwest Iowa day, the kind that you would expect, kind of at the end of August. And the phone call comes from the Orange City Hospital. That's where I live. The other person on the phone says, Reverend Keepers, we need you to come down here immediately. There's a family from your church. They're going to need pastoral care. I say, Can you tell me a little bit more? They say, just come quickly. We'll tell you more when you get here. So I get into my car and I live about two miles from the hospital. And I drive to the Orange City Hospital. I come around the back end. I go running in through the emergency area, through the sliding glass doors, I take a sharp turn to the left, to the emergency wing, and there is a nurse that's standing there. And also Pastor Ben Voss, who's our youth pastor. He beat me there. He lives closer. And the nurse ushered us into a private waiting room adjacent to the lobby there in the emergency. And in that private room are two families. Rick and Polly Shaw and Larry and Afton Sanson. It's a blended family. Larry and and Polly had been married at one point, and then there was a divorce, and they remarried, and so these two families are trying to co-parent a number of kids. You many of you kind of know the complexity of that sort of thing. And they were navigating it pretty well. Most of the kids were there with them. Trevor is a senior, or not a senior, but he's in college and he's at USD, so he wasn't there, but the two younger boys, um, Isaiah and Ezra, are there. All the siblings except Maddie. Where's Maddie? Maddie was 17 years old. A month earlier, she's a junior in high school. A month earlier, she had had a baby. Sweet baby boy named Josiah. They did a C-section, and something went wrong. An infection. And a month later, that morning, she had collapsed, and her father and stepmother rushed her to the emergency room, and now she's fighting for her life, 17 years old, a new mom. The doctor slips into the room where we're all waiting, and he shuts the door, and we can see it on his face. And he says, I'm so sorry. There was nothing more that we could do. Suddenly, a wave of shock and grief fills that room. I watch a father collapse to his knees and cry out to God. And a mother bury her face in her hands and she sobs so hard her whole body shakes. Pastor Ben is over here with this part of the family trying to comfort them. I'm over here with this part of the family trying to comfort them. But there is so much pain, so much loss in this moment. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she got up and she went to him and she said to him, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. If you had been here, I want you to, do you hear the emotion in her voice? Do you do you hear the disappointment? Lord, if you had been here, why why didn't you come? Where have you been? If you had been here. When I was with Maddie Sanson's family in that moment in the hospital room, I felt that. Lord, if you had been here. Why didn't you come? You ever felt that? If you haven't, there probably will be a time in your life when you will. If you had been here, where are you? It's a lament. Martha and Mary both ask this question, and it's a kind of embodied lament. And I'm so grateful that they do this because I feel like it gives us permission to as well in the midst of our own pain and loss. I mean, it's interesting to me. I mean, I've been a pastor for 25 years, and it's interesting to me how for so many of us in the North American church, we still tend to think of lament as a lack of faith. You know what I'm talking about. These prayers where we cry out to God with our rawest emotions, we bring to God our biggest questions, we express our disappointment, our sadness, even our anger. And I think for so many of us, like the kind of faith that we're given is this faith that says, you know, just grin and bear it. Just trust God. And yet when we look to the scriptures, we see that lament is not a lack of faith, it's a courageous act of faith. Amen? I mean, if it's not, we've got at least half of the Psalms in the Psalter, maybe arguably two-thirds, that could fit the category of lament. God invites us to bring to him our big emotions, our burning questions, not just the parts of us, the parts of us that we like, but all of who we are. And we see Martha doing this, we see Mary doing this, they bring their disappointment and their heartache to Jesus. If you had been here, we see Martha's faith in the next thing that she says too. She says, but even now, I love that, but even now, in this place of death, in this place of heartache, even now, Jesus, I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him. Even now, Jesus, you can do something about this. Jesus says to her, Your brother will rise again. And Martha replies and says, I know he will rise again. I mean, Martha, like the majority of the Jewish community, believed in a resurrection of the dead. Most did, except the group called the Sadducees. But in their mind, the resurrection of the dead was something that would happen at the very end of time. It was far off in the distant future. And when God's new age came and the old age passed away, when the kingdom came, when the new creation came, at that moment God would raise all of his people at one time, at the end of time. But what's so remarkable about what Jesus says here is that that resurrection hope that they're waiting for is not just far off to the distant future, but it had come to meet them in the present. Jesus says, Martha, 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. Do you see what he's saying there? That resurrection is not just some abstract doctrine. That resurrection and new life, it has a name and a face, and that name and that face is Jesus of Nazareth. And in the midst of death, in the midst of heartache, in the person of Jesus, resurrection and life comes into that place. And Jesus says to her, Do you believe this? And she says, Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world. Let's keep moving with the story. I I love John's Gospel. I was telling Pastor John that we were both talking about this because we're both preaching on John's Gospel. We have been through Lent and into Eastertide. And I told him that there's been something about going through at this time that is just connected with me in a way that it hasn't. I mean, John's storytelling is brilliant. And I love the way that he weaves all of these themes from beginning to end. So the story continues where Martha goes back, goes back home, finds Mary, says to Mary, the teacher, our rabbi, is here. And he's calling for you. There they are in their home, they have their community around them. People had come over to comfort them in their grief. I like to imagine them all bringing their casseroles and kind of sitting, because that's what we do, right? That's what we do in Northwest Iowa. Do you do that here too? Yeah, you know, you bring casseroles and you sit around and you're with each other in grief and pain. And in this particular culture, like so many other cultures in the world, grieving isn't something that you can rush. It takes days, it takes weeks, and you don't do it alone. You do it in community, you do it with your people. They're there with her. They see Mary get up quickly and go out. They think that she is like going to Lazarus' tomb to weep there, like that this parade of mourning is now going to go to the tomb. And it's fascinating to me. They think that she's taking them to the place of death when Mary is really leading them to the one who is life. That's where she goes. And she says to Jesus the same thing that her sister said, falls to her knees. Jesus, if you had been here. And I love this part. I think so often we skip this part because we want to get to kind of the dramatic action in the end. But don't skip this part. It tells us so much about the heart and the character of God. John tells us that when Jesus saw Mary weeping, and when he saw her community around her weeping, that he was greatly disturbed in his spirit and deeply moved. Greatly disturbed in his spirit. The Greek there is not that he was very sad. I mean he was sad, but did you know that the Greek word actually carries with it this idea that he was angry? He was angry. Why? Not at them. But to see the way that sin and death defaces God's good intention, what it does to people that he loves. I think that Jesus knew what he was about to do. I think that like it wasn't going to be a surprise to him that he was going to raise Lazarus from the dead. And still it strikes me, I love this so much about Jesus, that he is not just this messianic robot who kind of goes through the motions, but we have a God who enters into our pain and into our sorrow and who feels with us what we feel. Compassion, suffering with, empathy, putting yourself in somebody else's shoes. Jesus enters into their pain and their heartache. And John tells us, and Jesus began to weep. What a powerful picture. Where is God? In the midst of our pain and heartache. Even when we can't feel him, even when we're not aware of it. We have a God who is with us. How does Isaiah 53 say it? He is one who has borne our griefs and he carries our sorrows. And by his wounds we are healed. There's some of you today who find yourself in a place where you're wondering, how do I get through this? And I know what that feels like. I've got a whole other story of my own. I know what it feels like when you're a place when you're thinking, I don't know how to get to, like, I don't know how to get to the end of the day today, let alone to tomorrow. And I want you to know, I want to speak to your heart today. I want you to know that you have a God who is with you today. And I want you to know that you have a God who carries you and a God who promises to hold you and to bring you through. This is who Jesus is. But that's not enough. At least it's not enough for me. Probably not for you either. I'm grateful that we have a God who is empathetic and who enters into our sorrow and pain. I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful for a God who shares in our sorrow, but I need a God and a Messiah who can actually do something about our pain and our sorrow. Are you with me? Yeah? Like I that's it's beautiful. It's beautiful that Jesus shares in our sorrow and in our suffering, but I need a God and Messiah who can triumph over it, who somehow can bring life from death. And that's what Jesus does. The last part. He goes to the tomb of Lazarus. Again, John tells us he's greatly disturbed, right? Things are stirring up in him. He tells them to roll away the stone. Martha says the stench is going to be awful. Are you sure you want to do that, Jesus? Like he's been in there four days. It's a long time. Jesus says to her, Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God? Remember, this is why he waited to come. Not because he didn't care, not because he was too busy, because God was going to do something unexpected. He prays to the Father, thanks the Father that he has heard him, and then says, you know, Jesus is always doing this in John's gospel. Father, I'm saying this now, not for my sake, but for the sake of all of us who have gathered so that we can know that he's the Messiah. And then Jesus calls out in a loud voice, calls Lazarus by name. Lazarus, come out. Do you remember in John 10 when Jesus says, I know my sheep, and my sheep know me by name, and when I call their voice, they come. And the dead man comes out alive. It's the last of seven signs in John's gospel that Jesus gives us to point to who he is as the Messiah and what it means that new creation is here. And John saves the best for the last. Of course, Jesus is pointing to his own resurrection. I mean, we heard that story last week. This story points to that, that death will be defeated because of his own death and resurrection. I mean, there are similarities in these stories of Lazarus being raised and Jesus being raised, but there are significant differences as well. And John wants us to see that. They have to roll the stone away for Lazarus. They have to unbind the wedding or the grave clothes, but of course, for Jesus on the third day, nobody needed to roll that stone away. Nobody needed to unbind him with the grave clothes. The power of God and God alone had already done that. Right? Christ is risen. And that changes everything. That changes everything. From the stench of decay, we now have the scent of new creation. From the darkness of the tomb emerges the light of the world. From the bondage of sin now is the resurrection and the life who can unbind anyone and everyone who puts their faith in him. He is the living one. He is the one who is alive and among us. He is the one who can heal your broken heart. He is the one who can set you free. Let me close with this. I began with the story about Maddie this morning. And, you know, as I finish up, and I would appreciate your prayers for this, as I finish up nine years of being a pastor in the congregation, I'm looking at a number of your pastors. You know what this, Taylor, you know what this is like. When you love people and you carry their stories in your soul. And I'm wanting, I'm wanting to try to end well with Trinity, even as I'm wanting to begin well here with you. And so I've been thinking a lot about the gift of the people that God has given me, uh, the gift of walking alongside people over these last nine years. And I was thinking about Maddie Sanson, the story I began with, and I went back and I read the sermon that I preached for her funeral from Romans 8. I titled it Jesus Has Overcome. Last minute for her funeral, her mom and dad, Maddie's mom and dad, both asked if we could insert a song that we weren't planning on. They wanted the song to be played, I Will Rise, by Chris Tomlin. Do you know that song? Some of you might. He's a songwriter. And I'm so glad that we did. Here's the chorus: Jesus has overcome, and the grave is overwhelmed. The victory is won. He is risen from the dead, and I will rise when he calls my name. No more sorrow, no more shame. I will rise on eagle's wings before my God, fall on my knees. And then I said this in the sermon, and you can put Maddie's picture up there. Her family gave me permission to share this with you. Isn't she beautiful? Here's what I said in the sermon. Yes, Jesus has overcome. And this heart of the gospel was the hope of Maddie's heart. As her father, Larry, said so beautifully, Maddie belonged to Jesus, her faithful Savior, in life and in death. God's got her, God's got all of this. Maddie's victory is one, her future is secure. And even now, she is in the presence of her Savior and King. Even now. Even now. These are Jesus' words for you today, wherever you're at. I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, though they die, will live. And everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this? Do you believe this? If your heart is anything like mine, then maybe it's saying this, yes, I believe. But help my unbelief. God, we give you thanks that the tomb is empty. That we are in the season of resurrection. That Christ, you have overcome, that you are with us even now in our pain and our heartache. And that you promise us that in the end all shall be made well. All shall be made well. All manner of things shall be made well.