Fifth Sunday in Lent, April 10, 2011
John 11:1-45
Kathleen Norris tells a story in Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith:
[Here I read an excerpt from pp. 18-22. Too much to reprint here, but to summarize, it’s the true story about a small town cowboy whose life goes off the rails. Only when he found himself in a car with a murderer, did he realize that he was on the wrong road. He had only just come home to work out what to do next, when he told the author this story. “And that is salvation,” Norris wrote, “or at least the beginning of it.”]
….
And in Have a Little Faith, Mitch Albom tells the story of Henry Covington, a man whose life journey took him from his childhood in Brooklyn to dealing drugs in Detroit, through reform and recovery, and then a new life, as pastor of a poor congregation which met in an old church building with a leaky roof. The congregation, despite its poverty, housed the homeless, fed the hungry, and tried to bring the dead drunk back to life.
How many of us know the living dead? How many of us have grieved for brothers or sisters, friends or relations, who have become dead to the world, cut off from the land of the living by addiction to drugs, alcohol, gambling or the thrill of crime? People who were our childhood companions, whose life took a strange turn, who are unreachable, dead to us?
For some folks like Henry Covington, the Jesus experience is like coming back from the dead. Returning from a hell on earth, given a second chance at life. It is possible that our brothers and sisters will rise again, in this lifetime.
It isn’t easy to make that journey. A man doesn’t go from prison to the pastorate overnight. There are many steps from the grave to the arms of family. Many metaphorical stones to roll away.
When brother Lazarus comes out, where will we be?
I have heard recently from a local counselor who works with recovering addicts, some of whom have been released from prison on parole. Employment is a condition of parole. If a person cannot find a job, it is back to the tomb of prison. When unemployment is near 15%, who hires the parolee?
Lazarus had his sisters, his sisters had their friends, who congregated outside the tomb. Who will be there for the next Lazarus?
Let us contemplate what the Holy Spirit is saying to the church.
