Death Stinks

 John 11:1-45 All Saints  November 3, 2024

All Saints Shalom
Youram Raanan

 

Right before he gets to Lazarus tomb, Jesus talks to Martha.

She tells Jesus, “If you were here, my brother wouldn’t have died.”

She goes on, “But even so, I know that God will give you

whatever you ask of him” kind of easing any edge off anything

that might have sounded like anger in her first statement.

 

After a little bit of an exchange,

Jesus says to her: “I am the resurrection and the life.”

And then he asks Martha: ”Do you believe this?”

 

Martha says she does believe.

Of course she believes.

She does believe, but her belief is not

changing the situation here and now

where Lazarus is most definitely dead.

 

It says that Mary, Martha’s sister didn’t go out to meet Jesus at first.

But when he approached the tomb and he asked for her,

she came out. She says the same thing to Jesus that Martha did.

You can tell they’ve been complaining with each other.

“If you were here, my brother would not have died”.

She doesn’t follow up her question with anything,

She might have been angry. It was a good question.

They had gotten word to Jesus when Lazarus was just ill.

But Jesus waited to come to him. She had a lot of reason to be angry.

 

When Jesus finally gets to Mary and the rest of the mourners

that are there to support her, they’re in front of the tomb

and they’re all crying. Jesus doesn’t look at them and say:

“If you really believed, you wouldn’t be sad”

He doesn’t say, “Don’t cry, he’s in a better place.”

Or “God just called another angel home”

or any of the other platitudes people give at a time of grief.

 

In the face of the very real death that surrounded them,

Jesus wept.

The shortest, most succinct sentence in the bible.

In the face of death of his friend, Jesus cried.

 

Then it says that Jesus was greatly disturbed.

The original Greek is “embrimōmenos” more than disturbed,

it’s agitated, angered, boiling mad.

 

Now I read one commentary who said that Jesus wept

out of frustration and anger at everyone’s lack of faith

But that’s just silly, isn’t it? We don’t see that anywhere else.

Whenever Jesus gets mad, he gets mad at the proud

and haughty people, not the mourning people.

 

Jesus was sad and angry. Death does that.

That sadness mixed with anger, at the whole injustice of it.

And the situation we live with every day.

His friend Lazarus died. Martha and Mary were in sorrow.

Jesus was human. Fully human.

And Jesus knows what we go through

when someone we love dies. Jesus wept.

 

Then Jesus tells them to take away the stone,

Martha, always the good homemaker,

tells him that it’s too late. He’s been dead too long, the tomb

smells of death and everyone will smell it.

 

Jesus knows the smell of death.

He knows what that tomb will smell like, and the tomb stinks.

Jesus knows. Death stinks.

Experiencing a loved one’s death stinks.

Waiting for someone to die stinks.

Watching someone weaken and wither away stinks.

Knowing someone who was once vibrant and energetic

turn into a shell of their former selves stinks.

Cancer stinks, Alzheimer’s stinks, ALS stinks,

and sudden, unexpected death stinks too,

heart attacks stink, car accidents stink, natural disasters stink,

gun violence stinks, mass shootings stink,

war stinks, bombing stinks, military aggression stinks,

Death stinks.

And the whole situation is sadness mixed with anger.

 

Even though we might believe in the resurrection

and the life of the world to come with all our hearts,

death and the process and experience of death stinks.

Here in this world life has not yet won out over death

hope has not completely won out over despair

We still face the realities of this world.

 

In this world, we know death.

We know what it tastes like, what it sounds like and feels like.

We know from experience that every life will end at some point.

And we know the sadness and horror of life cut short,

by illness, by tragedy, by accidents, by violence.

We know death. And we know death stinks.

 

Sometimes religion pits belief against reality.

Sometimes religion pits belief against sorrow.

Some people act as if people of faith,

are supposed to turn off our minds, and our hearts and live in denial,

like we are supposed to look at tragedy and sadness

in the face and smile serenely and say “we’re blessed.”

As if people of faith should never be sad.

 

But that is not what Jesus shows us in this story.

In the mourning, and the sadness, and the loss and the stink,

Jesus is there with us. Jesus weeps with us. God suffers with us.

If this was the whole story, it would be good news enough,

But it is not the end of the story.

 

The whole story is that at the door of that tomb

in that in-between time when reality

was slapping them all in the face,

Jesus yelled, “Lazarus come out of that tomb”

and the dead man did.

 

When each of them were full of doubt, and anger and sorrow,

Jesus brought a bit of the Kingdom of God into that place.

Jesus brought the smell of hope into the

stench that was in the tomb for four days.

Jesus brought some of that life to come right into

the hard world of reality, in-between time they were in.

 

On All Saints Day,

we remember those people that we have lost in this past year.

We grapple with the reality of this world,

the fragility of it, the finality of it.

 

We take this time each year to remember

how death stinks, and grieving stinks,

The absence of those who have left us

never quite goes away from us.

We know the smell of death,

the inevitable consequence of all life.

We weep along with Jesus. And Jesus weeps with us.

 

And the good news is that even in the stink of death,

God has shown us that there is more.

We have seen the hope of new life after the floods of hurricanes,

After the destruction of war, and after the reality of death,

New life is possible.

 

We believe in the hope of new life.

We believe in the forgiveness of sins.

We believe that good has the power to conquer evil.

We believe that the arm of the universe bends toward justice.

We believe that God can overcome the power of death.

so even though we have one foot in reality, we still live with hope

of the life to come.

 

We do believe that God has the power to make life out of death.

Here and now, God has the power to make changes in this world

to make justice and peace and to rebuild lives

We have seen it and witnessed it, like those

people standing at Lazarus’ tomb have seen it.

 

And we believe that even after death,

God’s love and power doesn’t end.

We believe that a time will come when the saints

of all time will be joined with God.

When we will know fully of God’s love,

when we will all eat at God’s banquet table

united with one another again.

 

Right now, we are living with the stink of death.

But we are also living with the

one who is the resurrection and the life.

 

All the Cookies

 John 8:31-36 
Reformation Sunday 
October 27, 2024

 

Do you like cookies? Who doesn’t like cookies?

Did your mom ever give you a cookie when you did something good?

Parents do that: “You’ve been good. Here, have a cookie.”

Positive reinforcement.

And then, I guess it works the other way:

“You’ve been bad? You’re not getting any cookies.”

Maybe it’s not always cookies, maybe it’s video games or TV

or money or cell phones, sometimes it’s even affection,

interaction, attention, but the same thought is there.

 

“You’ve been good. You get a cookie.”

“You’ve been bad? No cookies.”

 

This cookie system works some of the time,

It’s one dimension of parenting, leadership, and other relationships.

Children, and even adults, can learn rules from it

But when it comes to relationships between people

the cookie system falls short .

 

If our relationships were always only built on a strict system of cookies -- 

of rewards and punishments –  

then where does that leave things?

Where does that leave our inner moral compass, our hearts?

Where is the trust, the compassion, the give and take of love,

Where is nurturing, spiritual development, the joy?

 

If it was all about rewards and punishments

then our relationships would only be about how many cookies we had.

 

So why am I talking about cookies?

Why am I talking about cookies on the day that we celebrate

Martin Luther Nailing (or mailing) those 95 theses to

the door of the church at Wittenberg?

Because the Lutheran Reformation was all about cookies.

 

Let me explain.

At the time of the Reformation,

the Christian church believed that God completely

worked on the cookie system.

 

They believed, basically, that God had a huge bag of cookies,

Which they called “God’s grace”

And God would give people a cookie when they did something

good to earn it and likewise,

God would take away cookies when people did something wrong.

If someone died with enough cookies,

then they could go to heaven.

But if they did not have enough cookies,

they went to all kinds of strange and horrible places

where there was wailing and gnashing of teeth.

God was only seen as the great big cookie dispenser

and TAKER in the sky.

 

In Martin Luther’s time,

this was basically the point of the church.

The leaders like priests and bishops and cardinals

were the powerful and important cookie dispensers.

They were there to determine why, what, and who

would get a cookie.

 

Going to church got you a cookie,

taking communion got you a cookie,

giving confession got you a cookie,

praying got you a cookie,

helping someone got you a cookie,

and giving money to the church got you a whole lot of cookies.

 

Of course the powerful priests and bishops and other

cookie dispensers gave themselves tons of cookies and 

were bound to go to heaven, because why not give yourself a bunch of cookies?

So they were happy.

 

But if you didn’t go to church because you had to work,

or you drank a little, or you took your neighbor’s wheelbarrow,

or you said a bad word about your boss,

or you took too much bread at dinner,

or you had an impure thought about your neighbor’s spouse.

Then your cookies were taken away.

And most people were in a cookie deficit all the time.

 

What Martin Luther saw was people

who were desperately afraid all the time.

They were afraid of the church. Afraid of God.

They were afraid that they wouldn’t

have enough cookies when they died.

They were afraid that their deceased relatives

didn’t have enough cookies and that they were

suffering in purgatory for thousands of years.

 

Martin himself, who was a monk, whose job was, basically, 

making cookies all day long – who prayed and worshipped constantly,

who went to confession every day, who studied the bible all the time –

Even he was living in fear that he didn’t have enough cookies.

 

The church was so focused on their cookies,

they didn’t care for the world around them.

They didn’t notice people suffering and hurting.

There was no room to notice God acting and the Spirit moving.

It affected people’s relationship with God.

 

Between God and God’s people there was a great chasm --

a great big pile of cookies -- that people just couldn’t get over.

 

Martin Luther looked at this situation and said

“This isn’t grace at all.”

This reward and punishment isn’t like God.

This isn’t Good News for the poor and oppressed.

This isn’t like Jesus he knew and read about in scriptures.

This isn’t the same one he knows who ate

with sinners and thieves and tax collectors.

This isn’t the one who told us not to worry because

we were more valuable to God than the birds or the lilies.

This isn’t’ the one who said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”

 

Martin Luther was a bible professor of bible.

He lectured on Psalms, and Paul’s letters.

The God that Luther read about in

scripture was the God of love and incarnation.

The God who loved the world so much

he became one of us and lived with us .

Not a God who sat up in heaven, removed from the people,

keeping a check list of what they did right

and what they did wrong just counting everyone’s cookies.

 

The God that Luther read about in scriptures

was a God who gave his very life for us on the cross.

  

And Luther read, and read, and re-read, the verse

in Paul that we read today:

For there is no distinction,

since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God;

they are now justified by his grace as a gift.

 

And then after a lot of contemplation, Luther understood.

There is no distinction.

We’ve all fallen short of God’s plans for us.

No one deserves the cookies.

But God still gives us all the cookies - as a gift.

 

Grace isn’t about giving cookies only when you’ve earned it.

Grace is about giving you a cookie when you don’t deserve it too. 

Luther realized that the real Good News of the Gospel

of Jesus Christ was that God gave us all the cookies up front.

 

All the cookies.

It is a gift to us, free and clear.

Given to us before we even started doing right and wrong,

To be opened and eaten when we need it.

When Jesus died on that cross, he gave us all the cookies.

Martin Luther and the 95 Theses reminded us all

that God has given us  everything.

All God’s love, all God’s promises,

all God’s gifts, and eternal life with God.

And no matter what we do, no matter where we go,

no matter what happens to us, that is our gift.

  

Will some of us misuse the cookies? sure.

Will some of us forget we have the cookies

and just leave them wasting away in a cookie jar? Of course.

But it’s a chance that God is willing to take.

To make us free and reconciled to God.

 

No more worried hours wondering if we have enough.

No more wondering whether we have God’s love.

No more wondering if we’ve done enough.

No more worrying about our eternal life.

No more spending all our spiritual time

focusing on ourselves and our own salvation.

 

We are free now to get on with God’s work in the world.

Free to love one another, free to care for one another,

Free to help the poor, release the captives,

Free to share this Good News with the world.

 

And free to see God for what God actually is:

the resurrection, the light, the hope in times of trouble.

A wonderful, kind, nurturing parent who wants to engulf us with love.

The God of love.  Unconditional love. All the cookies.

 

Now you might think this is all past history.

Some of it is surely. But lots of it still applies.

We still are preoccupied by cookies.

When we think, “I’m so blessed by God.”

Or “what have I done to deserve this?”

We’re talking about cookies.

Divine rewards and punishments.

We still judge other people by how many

cookies we think they have or don’t have.

We still need to be reminded over and over again.

 

Christ has made us free.

Free from the endless counting of our own cookies,

and free from counting other people’s cookies.

Free from wondering whether or not we are loved,

or saved, or going to heaven.

Christ has freed us from fear.

Christ has freed us from the fear of God.

 

This is the Gospel.

And if Christ has made us free,

then we are free indeed.