Welcome/Call to Worship
Good morning! I’m Pastor Ashley Dargai. To those here in the chapel and those joining us online: we are so glad you’re here!
This morning, we will sing songs of worship, pray together, hear from scripture and one another, as we move toward the pinnacle of our service: the table of our Lord, where we will take the bread and drink the cup in remembrance of our most Gracious Host, Jesus. The purpose of our time together each Sunday is to bring our hearts closer to the heart of God, so I invite you to participate as much or as little in our prepared liturgy as your spirit is willing.
A couple of announcements before we begin:
There are visitor cards in the pew in front of you—if you arrived during the pandemic or later, of if you have moved and have not updated your info with the church, please fill it out and drop it in the offering plate when it goes by later in worship.
If you are missing Sunday School while we await the final unpacking of the boxes and updated guidance from the Pandemic Response Committee, we have a Table Talk class for adults meeting at 10 AM in the Heritage. There is also a combined children’s and youth class available at the same time meeting in the parlor.
Today is Covenant Sunday. During our offering, you will be able to drop your covenant cards for 2022 in the plate. You can also fill it out online on our website.
Next Saturday, November 13, we will another church work day to get the church back in working order. Beginning at 8, but come when you can!
And next week on November 14 at 5 pm, we will gather at John and Sondra Williams’ house on their back porch for our first meeting of Bible and Beer, where we will mull over scriptures together as we drink home-brewed beer. Bring a snack to share, and we’ll provide the beverages—both alcoholic and non-alcoholic.
To keep with all the life we live together here at Azle Christian Church, make sure you follow us on Facebook and subscribe to our weekly e-blast and monthly newsletter. To sign up for the eblast and newsletter, go to our website, azlechristianchurch.org, and subscribe.
In addition to Facebook, you can also find us on Instagram and TikTok, both at @azlechristianchurch.
Now, a word from our Pandemic Response Committee:
The Pandemic Response Committee has advised the lifting of all safety restrictions *with the exception of masks.* Masks are still required at all times indoors.
Activities that have been suspended may resume at the consensus of each group. Worship will continue to be live streamed each week. Wednesday meetings will continue on Zoom for the time being. Thank you.
We continues series today: Wishin’, Hopin’, Prayin’: Longing for God in a Chaotic World. Today, we join Mary and Martha with our questions for Jesus.
Let’s pray to turn our hearts toward God for this hour.
Spirit of truth, open to us the scriptures, speaking your holy word through song, through the bread and cup, and through offering ourselves, and meet us here today in the living Christ. Amen.
Litany of Faith
One: Christ came and announced the Good News of peace to you who were far away and to those who were near.
All: For through Christ, we all have access in one Spirit to our God.
One: This means that you are strangers and aliens no longer. No, you are included in God’s holy people and are members of the household of God, which is built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, with Christ Jesus as the capstone.
All: In Christ, the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in our God.
One: In Christ you are being built into this temple
All: To become a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.
(Ephesians 2:17-22)
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you.
Since it is the first Sunday of the month, we will conclude our prayer today by singing the Lord’s Prayer.
Join me in prayer.
Miracle-Maker, Great Healer, Astonishing God, we’ve got some questions. We admit that You have done great things, mighty things, miraculous things. We need only consider the Red Sea parting, the migration pattern of the monarch, and the birth of the cosmos to stand in awe of what You can do.
But we also wonder about the things You didn’t do. For every healed person in our lives, there are ten who died. For every incredible miracle, there are a slough of tragedies, disappointments, and letdowns. What good is hope when it goes unfulfilled? What good is prayer when it goes unanswered all the time?
We stand at our own personal tombs with Mary and Martha, greeting your late arrival with questions. Where have You been? If you’d only been here. If only you’d intervened.
Who says we can’t hold the Great Holy One to account when our whole lives are based on promises, on covenants, on an understanding that You are supposed to be here with us?
Answer us, O God. Speak to the tenderness behind our despair, the soft places behind our anger. Hear us out, weep with us a little, stand before our tombs with us. See what we have endured waiting for You.
And as we are at the edge of hope that anything can be done, surprise us with a miracle again. Give us Your vision to see clearly not just the miracle we were hoping for, but also the miracle before us now.
It is with this plea that we sing together the prayer Jesus gave to us…
Sing Lord’s prayer (CH 310)
Sermon
John 11:17-37
When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. 18 Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, 19 and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. 20 When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. 21 Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. 22 But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” 23 Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” 24 Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” 25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, 26 and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” 27 She said to him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”
28 When 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.” 29 And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. 30 Now Jesus had not yet come to the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. 31 The 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. 32 When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” 33 When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. 34 He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” 35 Jesus began to weep. 36 So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” 37 But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
We are doing something this morning we shouldn’t be doing.
We’re hopping into the middle of a story and isolating a portion of it rather than reading it as a whole together. Normally, we try to read stories in their entirety so we get all the context: the characters, the conflict, the geographical information, the time stamps, the feel of the particular gospel. Matthew is talking to Jewish people specifically. Mark is in a hurry. Luke needs you to know every single detail and cheats off of Mark a lot. And John? Well, he’s a different bird. Some gospels begin with a story or a reference to the Hebrew Bible to set the scene. John starts with a poem about the beginning of existence, no big deal.
And reading stories in their entirety is important because we need as much help as we can get when approaching the strange stories of our sacred text. It’s a story written by and for people in a different millennium, in a different religion, in a different culture, on a different continent. Imagine trying to explain pagers to kids today. Not just what they are, but why we needed them, who still uses them, why they became mostly obsolete, the technology, everything, and this explanation is all because there is a story that mentions someone losing their pager. And then multiple the complexity of that task that by 200.
But we’re ignoring that wisdom this morning. I won’t tell if you won’t.
You know the story we’re in today. The miraculous resurrection of Lazarus. We don’t have to agree on the fact or embellishment of this story, we just have to nod that a miracle has happened according to John.
But considering this story is known as the resurrection of Lazarus, that his death is the main conflict of the story, the time given to the actual act of resurrecting is minuscule. What’s given the most time, instead, is Jesus’s conversations with Mary and Martha. What’s given the most narrative space is not the miracle, but the grief.
Lazarus and his sisters, Mary and Martha, are dear friends of Jesus. We didn’t read it, but earlier in the text, Mary is referenced as the one who anointed Jesus’ feet with perfume. She’s a legend.
And while traveling, Jesus gets word that Lazarus is sick and decides not to rush over but to hang out where he is for a couple of days. And by the time he visits the family, Lazarus has been dead for 4 days. Four is the magic number culturally to tell us that Lazarus is dead dead. Make no mistake about it—he’s very dead.
And when Jesus finally moseys on over to the family house, he has some explaining to do. Martha comes to him first: Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. Mary will say the exact same thing in a few minutes, which makes me think that these sisters had been having conversations over the past few days about the absence of Jesus.
They don’t make requests of Jesus, which I find interesting. They just present him with the facts: Lazarus died. We told you he was sick. You didn’t come. If you had, maybe Lazarus wouldn’t have died. You can hear their anguish in this haunting hypothetical.
Jesus responds, “something something resurrection” that Martha doesn’t quite understand, and that we don’t need to focus on right this minute. What is isolated in this exchange between Jesus and the sisters is they were both hoping for a healing from the Great Healer. The Miracle Worker. What’s the use of having a wonder-working friend if they leave you wondering where they are when you need them most? This seems to be the sentiment of the crowd at the end of our reading, too. No use in having special God powers if you can’t use them on your friends!
As Jesus listens to Mary, he is surrounded by the cries of the mourners around him. Wailing echoes in the halls of the home, and he seems to be overcome with what has happened. So he asks Mary, the Anointing Prophetess herself, “Where is he? Where have you laid him?” And they go together the tomb and Jesus begins to weep.
We know how the story ends, a part we didn’t read together today. Lazarus, come out! And stinky, formerly dead Lazarus stumbles out in burial rags with life in his eyes. We know where this story is going.
So I wonder why Jesus was weeping. Was he weeping for his friend? For himself who would taste death, too, soon and very soon? Was he weeping because of the reality of death in general and what it does to our lives? Who can discern the ways of God?
Rabbi Ariel Burger, a devoted student of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, tells a story of his son’s friend, Mason. His son and Mason went to Poland on a school trip and while they were there, they visited Auschwitz, the infamous concentration camp. And during their stay in the country, Mason disappears for a day and doesn’t return for dinner. The next morning, Burger’s son asks Mason where he was, and Mason tells him this story, “My grandparents were Jews in Poland when the Nazis invaded. They were married and three weeks later, they were detained at Auschwitz. The men and women were separated, and at the end of each day, my grandpa would sneak a potato or a piece of bread over the fence to my grandma.
Well, one day, my grandma was not at the fence. She had been transferred to work on a rabbit farm in the women’s camp, where the Nazis did cruel experiments on the rabbits. The rabbits were supplied by a local Polish rabbit farmer who quickly realized that his rabbits were treated more humanely than the prisoners, so he began to sneak in food to the prisoners whenever he could.
And while working on the farm, Mason’s grandma got a cut on her arm that became infected. It wasn’t life-threatening as long as one had antibiotics. But the Nazis were not going to provide any kind of medical care to the ones they imprisoned, and it seemed like she was going to die from this infection. So the rabbit farmer, realizing her condition, cut his arm, touched his wound to hers to get the infection, and the next day, went to talk to the Nazi officers.
He said, “I’m your best rabbit farmer. If I die from this infection, you will lose the work you have done.” So they gave him antibiotics, and the rabbit farmer shared them with Mason’s grandma, who recovered. He saved her life.
While in Poland, Mason found out that this rabbit farmer was still alive, and on the day he disappeared from the group, he was visiting this farmer. He went to say to the man, “Thank you for my life.”
What does it mean for someone to touch their wound to another’s? To share in the wound of someone we could so easily ignore?
We are collectively experiencing complicated grief—a kind of loss that has not had appropriate venues for mourning. Even in our normal times, what our culture deems as appropriate timelines and expressions of grief is anemic, but these two past years have been catastrophically bad.
So many people have died and we have not been able to have funerals or bring casseroles or visit hospital rooms. So many things have been lost and we have tried to grapple with it over Zoom and FB Live, doing the best we can, but knowing it’s not the same as weeping together in the same room. Our grief is quite backlogged. It’ll take us awhile to work through it, and it comes spilling out in weird ways. In desire for control, in accusations like Mary and Martha’s, in demands for a normal that will never be again, in constant activity, in emotional paralysis. We want some healing, we want a miracle, but we’re so tired of waiting.
But even with Lazarus alive again in later verses, it’s interesting to note that he will never be alive again without the touch of death. He was dead for days. His resurrection does not erase the experience of death for him or for his sisters. It is resurrection, after all, not preservation of what was. It was a miracle, not a recovery.
Perhaps, in John, the miracle is in the camaraderie, in the in-it-togetherness, in the fact that if we’re going to weep, we’re going to be surrounded by people weeping with us.
That the one who was there at the creation of the cosmos, as John tells us, is right there at the end, too, saying, “You’re right. It’s not fair. Death has wrought havoc and has marked you in a way that you will never be the same. And also. I am here with you, too.”
We all have our haunting hypotheticals, our if-onlys: if only they had not gotten sick, if only we had gotten there sooner, if only I had locked the door, if only I had said goodbye.
And Jesus takes them all, and says, “I know, I know.” And that is a miracle.
Amen.
Communion
Stewardship Moment
Rick will come up and talk about Covenant Sunday.
Invitation
If you’d like to become a member of this faith community, or if you’d like to become a disciple of Jesus, please talk to me after service or sometime this week.
Benediction:
Please rise in body or spirit for our benediction, the final song, and the Doxology.
Our benediction:
As we go out from this place,
May we trust that our questions bring us closer to miracles,
Our what-ifs closer to faith,
Our hope closer to resurrection.
And may we experience the radical and vulnerable presence of Christ in all of it.
Amen.