Lent 5 March 22, 2026 with Meredith Stewart

https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Lent/ALent5_RCL.html

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:01

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. Bones, funeral wrappings, dead bodies, the smell of decay, sinews, flesh, skin, graves. You might wonder whether you've walked into a haunted house this morning rather than a church. But this is Lent, and Lent begins with a reminder we cannot avoid. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return. We do not begin Lent with triumph or certainty, but with the truth about our frailty. The church dares to speak about death out loud, not to frighten us, but to tell the truth about the world we live in and the God who meets us there. In our Old Testament lesson, Ezekiel doesn't hear about death. He is set down among it, surrounded by bones bleached and emptied of life, not the valley of the shadow of death that we heard about from the psalmist last week, but a valley of death. These are very dry bones. There is no question whether the people to whom they belonged are well and truly dead. When the voice of the Lord asks if these very dry bones can live again, Ezekiel responds with what for my money is one of the best lines in all of Scripture. Oh Lord, you know. Oh Lord, you know. Whatever his tone, it seems acceptable to God who commands Ezekiel to speak to the bones. Ezekiel prophesies as God commanded, and suddenly there is a sound of very many bones from very many bodies rattling into place. Not a baby's rattle, not even a death rattle, but an earthquake of bones, a percussion section of skeletons. The bones are then covered with flesh, but there's nothing to animate them, to give them the movement that signals life. The Lord tells Ezekiel to call the four winds. Then comes another sound: not a gentle breath, not a quiet sigh, a rush of wind strong enough to breathe spirit back into corpses. The Lord tells Ezekiel to prophesy to the people of Israel that life will return to them and they will be set on their own ground. At the time, Israel did not yet speak of bodily resurrection. These bodies are not about the end of the world, but about the end of exile. God is promising that a people who feel as good as dead will live again. In Ezekiel, we know the bones are dead because we hear them. In the Gospel of John, we know Lazarus is dead because we smell him. Martha warns Jesus not to open the tomb. Lord, there is already a stench. A body four days dead in a warm climate would announce itself. Some of us have known the sign Martha names, that moment when loss is no longer abstract but unmistakable, when someone has been gone long enough that we cannot pretend otherwise. At the tomb of Lazarus, Jesus does the most human of things in the presence of death and grieving friends. He weeps. He stands in front of a grave that smells like loss, and he cries. Then he does the most divine of things. Jesus orders the stone rolled away and calls Lazarus out. Lazarus comes out wrapped in burial claws, more like a mummy than a man, and Jesus says, unbind him and let him go. Now it is not a nation's fate on display, but the power of the one who stands in the stench of death and shows that the God who sent him is not powerless. Lazarus' story is a turning point in the gospel, from Jesus' public ministry to a passion narrative. His friend's home in Bethany is only two miles from Jerusalem, a road Jesus will soon travel, accompanied by shouts and waving palm branches. The story of Lazarus is not the last time God's people have stood in the valley of death. Generations later, in the middle of the Great Depression, a black preacher and father of gospel music named Thomas Dorsey traveled from his home in Chicago to lead a revival in St. Louis. While he was away, he received an urgent message that his wife had died. By the time he returned home, his newborn son was also gone. The baby was buried in his mother Netty's arms. Like the people of Israel, Dorsey could lament, our hope is gone. And with Mary and Martha say, Lord, if you had been here. Take my hand, precious Lord. The song Thomas Dorsey wrote after the death of his wife and child was not intended to be a movement anthem. It was born of deep personal pain, but the raw honesty of the song led it to become one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s favorites decades later. On April 3rd, 1968, in Memphis, Dr. King looked down from the balcony of the Lorraine Motel and saw Ben Branch, saxophonist and band leader of the Operation Breadbasket Orchestra and Choir. He said, Ben, make sure you play Precious Lord tonight. Play it pretty. Then a shot split the air. Mahalia Jackson instead sang the song four days later at Dr. King's public funeral. You can hear the ache of grief in Mahalia's voice. She calls on a God who is not distant from loss, a God who is not ashamed of grief. The tomb is real. The grief is real. Death and loss are real. But so is the community gathered even in their midst, and so is the voice that breaks the silence, rattles bones, and opens graves. The voice of the one who wept at a tomb, the one who will soon walk toward his own. The one who stands there even now in places that smell like loss, and says, Come out, there is still life here. Amen.