5th Sunday in Lent
9 March 2008
THEME AND SUGGESTED SERMON TITLE: MYSTERY AND MERCY:
LIFE AGAINST ALL ODDS
LECTIONARY TEXTS
Ezekiel 37: 1-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8: 6-11; John 11: 1-45
Ezekiel 37:1-14
The hand of God came upon me, and brought me out by the Spirit of
the LORD and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of
bones. 2The Spirit led me all around them; there were very many lying in
the valley, and they were very dry. 3Then God said to me, “Mortal,
can these bones live?” I answered, “O GOD, you know.”
4Then YAHWEH said, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O
dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. 5Thus says GOD to these bones: I
will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. 6I will lay sinews
on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin,
and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am
the HOLY ONE.”
7So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied,
suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together,
bone to its bone. 8I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh
had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath
in them. 9Then God said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy,
mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord GOD: Come from the
four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may
live.”
10I prophesied as I was commanded, and the breath came into them, and
they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude. 11Then God said
to me, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They
say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off
completely.’ 2Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the
Lord GOD: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your
graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel.
13And you shall know that I am God, when I open your graves, and bring
you up from your graves, O my people. 14I will put my Spirit within you,
and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you
shall know that I, the LORD, have spoken and will act,” says the
LORD.
Psalm 130
1Out of the depths I cry to you, O God.
2Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my
supplications!
3If you, O God, should mark iniquities, who could stand?
4But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be revered.
5I wait for my Deliverer, my soul waits, and in God’s holy word I
hope;
6my soul waits for God more than those who watch for the morning, more
than those who watch for the morning.
7O Israel, hope in YAHWEH! For with God there is steadfast love and
great power to redeem.
8YAHWEH is the One who will redeem Israel from all its iniquities.
John 11:1-45
Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary
and her sister Martha. 2Mary was the one who anointed Jesus with perfume
and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. 3So the
sisters sent a message to Jesus, “Lord, he whom you love is
ill.” 4But when Jesus heard it, he said, “This illness does
not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory, so that the Son
of God may be glorified through it.” 5Accordingly, though Jesus
loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, 6after having heard that
Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.
7Then after this he said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea
again.” 8The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were
just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?”
9Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those
who walk during the day do not stumble, because they see the light of
this world. 10But those who walk at night stumble, because the light is
not in them.” 11After saying this, he told them, “Our friend
Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him.”
12The disciples said to him, “If he has fallen asleep, he will be
all right.” 13Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death,
but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. 14Then Jesus
told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead. 15For your sake I am glad I
was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.”
16Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to the other disciples,
“Let us also go, that we may die with him.”
17When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the
tomb four days. 18Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away,
19and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about
their brother. 20When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and
met him, while Mary stayed at home. 21Martha said to Jesus, “If
you had been here, my brother would not have died. 22But even now I know
that God will give you whatever you ask.” 23Jesus said to her,
“Your brother will rise again.” 24Martha said to him,
“I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last
day.” 25Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the
life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, 26and
everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe
this?” 27She said to him, “Yes, I believe that you are the
Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” 28When
she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary, and told
her privately, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.”
29And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. 30Now Jesus
had not yet come to the village, but was still at the place where Martha
had met him. 31The Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her,
saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they
thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. 32When Mary came
where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him,
“If you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
33When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also
weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. 34He said,
“Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Come and
see.” 35Jesus began to weep. 36So the Jews said, “See how he
loved him!” 37But some of them said, “Could not he who
opened the eyes of the blind have kept this man from dying?”
38Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave,
and a stone was lying against it. 39Jesus said, “Take away the
stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him,
“But already there is a stench because he has been dead four
days.” 40Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you
believed, you would see the glory of God?” 41So they took away the
stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “I thank you for having
heard me. 42I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the
sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent
me.” 43When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice,
“Lazarus, come out!” 44The dead man came out, his hands and
feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus
said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”
45Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen
what Jesus did, believed in him.
A CALL TO WORSHIP
ONE
We thought we had no place, no past, no future
But yours is the voice that calls from the silence.
We thought we had no value, no worth, no sense of belonging
But yours are the arms that hold us in our emptiness.
We thought we had no vision, no hope, no dreams
But yours is the light that shines from the darkness.
Jesus Christ
You bring hope out of despair, freedom from captivity and new life from
death.
By your grace, bring us once again into your eternal presence.
ALL
God of mystery and mercy
Grant us new life with you
as we seek you against all odds during this journey of Lent.
Amen.
A CONTEMPORARY LESSON
On the Possibilities by Rainer Maria Rilke
www.mythosandlogos.com/Rilke.html
We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can;
everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. That is at
bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the
most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may
encounter. That [hu]mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done
life endless harm; the experiences that are called "visions," the whole
so-called "spirit-world," death, all those things that are so closely
akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the
senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say
nothing of God.
But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence
of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another
has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the
riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the
bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is
responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to
case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any
sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think
oneself able to cope.
But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing,
not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as
something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own
existence. For if we think of this existence of the individual as a
larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to
know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of
floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain
security.
MUSIC
Hymns:
What Wondrous Love is This
#223 in the NCH
There Are Some Things I May Not Know
#405 in the NCH
Choir:
I Love the Lord, Richard Smallwood
arr. Tom Fettke.
SATB acc. Pepper 8068698. Psalm.
This is also in New Century Hymnal as hymn 511, unfortunately with
some
simplifications that weaken it.
What Wondrous Love is This
SA, Pepper 8071178
or another 2-part arr. Burkhardt, Pepper 3170107
In the Silence, Wondrous Love, Schram
Pepper 8063479.
This combines the Eucharistic hymn Let all Mortal Flesh with Wondrous
Love.
A CONFESSION
We confess, O Mystery, that we take too much at face value.
We’re
skeptical of anything we can’t perceive with our senses. And
yet we believe!
Our minds want plausible explanation, but our spirits want
hope. Set us free to experience your mystery and mercy, your ways
in our world. Keep our need to understand from interfering with
your power in us. Help us to believe in your wondrous ways without
rejecting the capacity for reason with which you created us.
Overwhelm us – that we may know that you are God. In your
power beyond all imagination we pray, Amen.
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