13th Sunday after Pentecost 2025

Blessed be God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Join me in praying, all vulnerable God, to you all broken, all desires know, and from you no secrets are hidden.

Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Let us pray.

Grant us, O Lord, to trust in you with all our hearts.

For as you always resist the proud who confide in their own strength, so you never forsake those who make their boast of your mercy.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

Amen.

Please be seated for the lessons.

As you being seated, our children, grades five and below, are invited to join godly play with Miss Julia there.

Children of the grade are invited to go to godly play with Miss Julia.

Because God chose you as the first truth for salvation, through sanctification by the Spirit, and through belief in the truth.

God called you through our proclamation of the gospel, that you may obtain the glory of our Saviour Jesus Christ.

And then friends and Kingdom, standard and hold apart to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by the spoken word or by our letter.

And now may our Savior Jesus Christ Himself, and God our Maker, and Lord, and through grace gave us eternal comfort and good hope.

Comfort your hearts and strengthen them in every good work.

Every good work and the word of the Lord.

Now then a certain man was sick, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary, and her sister Martha.

Mary was the one who anointed the Messiah with perfume, wiped to sweet with her hair.

Her brother Lazarus was sick, so the sister sent a message to Jesus.

Yet when Jesus heard it, he said, This sickness is not unto death.

Rather, it is for the glory of God, so the Son of God may be glorified through it.

Though Jesus dearly loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after hearing Lazarus was sick, Jesus then stayed longer in the place where he was.

Two days.

When Jesus arrived, he found that for four days Lazarus had already been in the tomb.

Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles away.

So many of the Judeans had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother.

When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she met him.

However, Mary remained at the house.

Martha said to Jesus, Rabbi, if you'd been here, my brother would not have died.

Yet even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.

Jesus said to her, Your brother will rise.

Martha said to him, I know he'll rise in the resurrection on the last day.

Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life.

The one who believes in me, even though they die, they will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.

Do you believe this?

She said to him, Oh yes, Rabbi, I believe you're the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who comes into the world.

The gospel of the Lord.

Now, I've said this before.

The compilers of the lectionary presume you know the story already.

Otherwise, the little snippet doesn't make sense.

So just to remind you of a story you probably already read, uh Lazarus indeed dies.

He's in the tomb for four days.

We have this exchange between Jesus and Martha.

Mary comes out and says something really similar.

Jesus, if you've been here, my brother would not have died.

And then we get the shortest memory verse in the Bible.

Jesus wept, right?

He goes to the tomb and he weeps.

He says, roll away the stone.

And Martha says, No, he'll stink.

And Jesus says, do it.

And he calls Lazarus out and he says, unbind him, take off the grave clothes you put around him.

Legendary authors also presume you know the tradition, which is that some of the scribes decide to kill Lazarus.

Because he's a walking sign of God's power, and hey, without the signs, maybe people won't be such a fan of Jesus.

Which is why it's really helpful to be a little precise linguistically.

I'm sorry I'm going to bore you if I do.

Resurrection.

It means you come back from dead to be alive, right?

Except there's only one person ever been resurrected biblically, and that's Jesus.

Resurrection means you come back from dead to be alive in such a way that you will never die again.

Lazarus, strictly speaking, is not resurrected.

He's resuscitated.

He gets his life back.

And then he's murdered.

That's the tradition.

Like he dies again.

Lots of people get resuscitated.

Only one person gets resurrected.

And it's really important to get the difference between the two.

When you're resuscitated, whatever your mortal wound is, it has to be healed.

But you don't get your life back.

When you're resurrected, you walk around with mortal wounds forever.

Like disabled.

How could I say the resurrected Jesus is disabled?

When you have spikes driven through your tendons, your fingers won't work right again.

Maybe you've never heard that in church, or maybe you heard it on Easter Day, but I just want you to consider the resurrected Jesus will never die again, and he is always going to be disabled.

It's important to have some more vocabulary in front of us.

We're waiting to do someone said the lesson in this way.

But Jesus says something really interesting, and it only happens in the Gospel of John.

Only in John.

John is probably the most theologically sophisticated, like he's writing probably last of all the other gospel writers, and his stories, his events are actually fundamentally different from the others, as is his use of language.

So it is only in the Gospel of John that Jesus says seven times.

Gospel of John, Jesus does seven signs, turns water into wine, brings Lazarus back from the dead temporarily.

And then each one of those miracles is followed by a teaching in which Jesus talks a really long time.

So he does the wonder, and then he talks about how the wonder has earned him the ability to talk about who God is and who he's called to be.

And seven times in the Gospel of John, Jesus says this thing.

He says, I am.

I am the good shepherd.

I'm the vine.

You're the branches.

I am resurrection and life.

Particularly important.

The way John does this is Jesus actually says, I am, I am.

Which in Greek is ego in me.

I am, I am.

The translator doesn't do it because that would seem like nonsense.

I am, I am, resurrection.

John's trying to do something really theologically sophisticated with this language.

What he's trying to do is have Jesus say the divine name of God, which you can't even say in Greek.

You can only say it in Hebrew, but John's not writing to a Hebraic audience.

He's writing to people who only read Greek.

If you've been here long enough, you've heard me say this, but here's the TLDR version.

God's name.

Remember, if you've seen this in a movie or you've read the book, when Moses goes up on top of the mountain, God says, You're going to go to Pharaoh, and you're going to say, Let my people go.

And Moses says, Well, what's your name?

And God says, in your English Bible, I am who I am.

I am, I am.

But in Hebrew, what God says is, kind of like in Genesis 2, when God creates the human being and a clay.

This is the fun, precious moment, figurine that's lifeless until God goes, and the clay goes, our Jewish brothers and sisters have decided this breath of life is God's very name.

And they decided a long time ago, like 2,000 years ago, that God's name is so sacred that one does not write it and one does not pronounce it.

Because nobody knows how to say it.

There are some Christian folks that use this word that begins with the letter Y, and maybe you've heard the word Jehovah before, which is a nonsense word Jewish scribes made up, so we wouldn't say God's name and thereby defile ourselves?

If you've ever been to a synagogue, maybe you know that our Jewish brothers and sisters, they don't even touch the holy writings with their hand.

It's always on a scroll, the Torah.

That's because God's name is written on it.

And the paper is sacred and holy, so one can't even touch the paper.

So you wind it up.

I mean, still today, but we have books.

It's still on a scroll, and the reader doesn't use their finger, they use a pointer.

Lest they defile themselves with the absolute holiness of God's name.

Not said, not written, I am I am.

Another fun point the rabbis say, even though we are not to intone or write this word, it is absolutely the first thing that comes out of our mouth when we're born.

And it is the last thing we say before we pass.

Into larger life.

We say God's name, we breathe out the breath of life, and we die.

So even though we are not to say or write this word, it's keeping you alive right now.

The breath of life.

Which I think is why we have this particular reading from Isaiah, the word of the Lord endures forever.

That's not talking about the Bible, that's talking about the holiness that is God's very name, that is your breath.

So what is Jesus saying?

Initially, he's saying, we all get this, this is Orthodox theology.

God's name, God's whole being, the breath of life, which we call the Holy Spirit, is resurrection and light.

Great.

But John's telling the story after all the events have unfolded, after Jesus has died, been resurrected, been resurrected with his permanent disability, and so we're invited to hear the story in a different way.

We know how the story ends, so John's telling us, think about the ending when you hear this particular version.

See, I've heard before that Martha is the one who says, ah, she knows who Jesus is.

This is a conversation about faith.

But I invite you to reconsider that Martha gets Jesus completely wrong.

Just like frankly, most of my church teaching has got Jesus wrong.

Most.

Do you believe your brother will rise?

He will, at the general resurrection, when this life is over.

Jesus, if you've been here, my brother wouldn't have died.

I just want to really challenge the veracity of that claim.

I don't want to spoil your narrative.

You're all going to die.

Nobody gets out alive, including Jesus.

So if Jesus had been there, Lazarus was still going to die.

Maybe not that week.

But Jesus didn't come away, come to take away our mortal death.

He did it himself.

So how it is that we've decided the death of our body is our enemy is beyond because it doesn't make any logical sense.

It's actually a corruption of Christian teaching to think that we're going to get out of this alive.

My brother would not have died.

Absolutely, he would have died.

Well, okay, fine, but he'll live again when this life's over.

When Jesus says, and I am the resurrection and the life, we're supposed to hear not only, is there a general resurrection of the dead, but that resurrection and life, particularly in the human personage of Jesus, can be embodied in this lifetime.

See, somehow we decided as a church that death is our enemy, and that, hey, the way this is supposed to work is life is bad and hard, the world is an ugly place, and our beautiful spirit has been put in this frail body.

And if we can survive all the right tests and temptations, we won't go to hell when we die.

We'll go to heaven and be with God.

That life is pretty much going to be garbage.

And so the whole reason for the Christian life is to get out of jail free, even though you're going to live in a concentration camp now.

If you haven't grown up with this spiritual teaching, I envy you.

I don't even care if you've grown up episodic.

Somehow we've decided as a church that it's all about what happens later and not now.

And so I invite you to hear that part of what Jesus is saying to Martha is I am resurrection now.

There is life now.

And I hope that you'll hear that the enemy of the Christian life is not the physical death, you will die, or that I will die, it is death with a capital D.

No translator does this in the scriptures, and I don't know why, because the truth is God created death with a small D.

God created it.

What's the proof?

If God didn't want us to die, if God wanted us to be immortal, God shouldn't have used dirt.

God should have used iridium or diamonds.

We are not made of those things.

We're made of dirt.

Death is not our enemy.

No, our enemy is death with a capital D, which looks a lot like isolation.

It looks like being stripped of our dignity.

It looks like loneliness whether we're alone or not.

It looks like participation in things like ageism, sexism, heterosexism, transphobia.

It looks like those things, those are death with a capital D, and they corrupt and destroy the creatures of God, which is why I think I'm talking to everybody in this room instead of a select few.

If you have never interacted with death with a capital D, you've already flown away.

I think.

If you've never known what it is like to feel broken, if you've never participated in the breaking of others, I'm not convinced you're telling the truth to yourself.

And Jesus has the audacity to claim that not only is the breath of God, resurrection and life, but that that breath is available in our embodied state.

Now, somehow the church has missed that, or many churches have missed that.

Like I grew up in a church that said to me that, hey, the sooner we destroy the planet, the sooner Jesus will come back in all his glory.

So drill, baby, drill, so we can blow it up and then bring Jesus back sooner.

Somehow I grew up in a church that said, God loves us so much, God will send us to hell forever because we're bad and unlovable.

Unless you do the right things and pass the test, and then your spirit flies free out of your heart.

It's really weird because it doesn't even like take the Bible seriously.

Because I sure remember on the seventh day, God looks at everything God makes, and God says it's, oh, you're wrong, exceedingly good.

Exceedingly good.

Exceedingly good.

Everything, even naked mole rats, that's really confusing if you've ever seen one of those.

God loves those, which means God can love me.

Yeah, I've got a good chance.

So I think theologically, what I hope you hear is this major move that a lot of us have forgotten.

The Christian life is to be lived now.

And frankly, God's going to live it for us later.

So, what do we get to do?

We get to experience resurrection and life now.

And we're invited to embody it as the body of Christ on earth.

And please hear, this whole moment about disability does not mean that pain and suffering go away.

In fact, those things seem to be part of the resurrected Jesus' infinite existence.

He ascends to heaven with wounds that don't go away.

It just so happens that those wounds don't take away the opportunity to live life that God continues to breathe in us.

Now, great theological point.

So maybe what you're asking, Sean often asks me, well, why don't you tell people how to do that?

Like people probably agree with you in principle.

So how do you do that?

Well, I don't know.

If I knew, if I knew, I would probably write a book and it would sell better than my last one.

If you bothered to read either one.

So here's what I want to say is, and I'm going off the scriptures, all I can do is think about things that have helped.

Things that have helped.

So one of the things that there's a lot of research beyond, this is going to sound really weird, and I want to back my way into it, because I want you to hear first that Judaism is not a Western religion, it's an Eastern religion.

I want you to hear that.

We don't like to believe that, and it's the case.

So now that I've put that to you, where did you learn that your soul lives?

I know I'm an unstable church because nobody said anything.

I've got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart.

That's a Western idea.

In the Hebrew Bible, I mean the first half of the Bible reread, your soul is in your throat.

Why is that?

Because that's where the name of God comes in and out of you and keeps you alive.

In Hinduism, they call that Atman, and it's the most important of your senses because without your breath, you're not alive.

We know that there's brainwaves and heartbeats and all that, but the Eastern idea is that your breath is where your life comes, which is why when you do yoga, if you treat it like an exercise class, you're doing it wrong.

It's a spiritual discipline in the Hindu world, and it's meant to teach you how to breathe the breath of life when you're in all kinds of weird configurations, right?

Because if you can do that, you have a chance when you go to Costco of parking without losing your mind.

It's embodied practice to be in weird positions like a Costco without losing your mind.

In all the major research I've read, it's that whenever you start to lose your mind, the single most definitive helpful practice there is is focusing on your breathing.

That could be box breathing.

Do you know this one?

Where you breathe in four seconds and then you hold it for four seconds.

And then you exhale for four seconds, and you hold your exhale for four seconds before you breathe again.

So it's like a box, right?

It's a four count.

And some of us breathe in and hold it longer than us.

It actually doesn't matter what your count is as long as it's even.

Right?

A lot of research just says if you're having trouble falling asleep, you breathe in two, you hold it two, you breathe out four.

You hold it four.

Right?

It's all about breath control you're going to miss.

Right?

How do you artificially lower your heart rate and artificially lower the blood going through?

A lot of research.

And I actually think there's some mystery to this, that God wired that into us when God went and we went, because it's the name of God.

And it only works because that's where our life is from.

Is resurrection and is life.

And one of the things that's been most helpful in practicing resurrection of life when I'm wired up is to take a breath before I do something.

Renee Brown says it a different way.

She has a ring that spins three, that spins freely, and she makes herself spin it three times before she makes any decision.

And I think the reason she does that is that she can breathe the breath of life before she just goes on autopilot, which looks a lot like flight, fear, freeze, fight.

We make a lot of our decisions that way, and we miss resurrection of life when we do it.

I'm sure that's true in my life.

You know, I think another thing that probably helps us in resurrection of life is a community in which we're loved, no matter who we are, and in a community in which we're so loved and we're held accountable to be the best version of ourselves.

And it looks a lot like somebody saying, I wish you love yourself as much as I love you.

And because I love you, I want you to grow.

If you don't have a community like that, I think you can find it here.

I I think that I didn't know that you find it by coming to a service and leaving.

I I don't I don't know that.

Because I'm here more than that, I found that community here.

And I know number of you have.

It's not a one-to-one, it's not perfect, but I think it helps us find resurrection, and I think it helps us find life.

And sometimes we put ourselves in a place that doesn't come that day, and we say, Well, I give up, I didn't come that day, but you know, nothing really comes when I will it, no, no feeling comes when I will it.

If I put myself in a posture, I'm more likely to get it.

I mean, I think that's true.

And that may not be Sunday mornings, that may be small groups, or that might be spiritual direction, which you'll hear a little bit more about in a moment.

But like I've I've found those moments by making myself be with other people and taking a risk.

Again, I haven't read the book because I don't know.

I don't know.

I just know where I've found some resurrection in life.

And I think to be honest, we don't really get to have resurrection in life until we're willing to admit the capital D death that's infiltrated our lives and to hear it with other people.

So maybe it's not a community.

Maybe it's somebody who's just willing enough to say, Jesus, you look like you're sitting in the tomb on Holy Saturday where Jesus himself lay, I'll keep good you let it too.

I may not need to say anything, but I'm here if you want.

You can pretend I'm God and you can yell at me.

God can handle it so I can too.

Because you're not really yelling at me.

I've found resurrection and life in people who are willing to listen to all kinds of blasphemous feelings I have and say, God can take care of that.

I'm just gonna love you.

By the way, God can take care of your blasphemy.

You know who allowed you to do it in the first place?

God.

Because God went like this when you were born.

God went, and without the breath of God, you can't say anything against God.

So God gives you the ability to protest and be upset.

And God gave us two obeyus so we could hear it.

Now, I want to say that a lot of things that keep us from resurrection and life, frankly, are this is this fear that we're gonna be judged by God when we die.

Like a judge not good enough.

It's the strangest thing if you've ever been a parent.

I mean, you might have been a great parent.

I just know that every parent I actually have a relationship with is terrified about the parenting they're giving.

Are they enough?

Did they make the right decision?

Should they have entertained a different way in their kid's life?

Tell me later if you're exempt from those.

I don't think I'll believe it.

Here's what I believe.

Even though we're afraid of those things of Tarpley, we'll never say them out loud.

Because we were taught not to enter in to admitting we're flawed or afraid.

Which parent among you has not been struggling?

And then you heard somebody else's struggle and you told them exactly how to fix it.

Here's what you should do.

Have you tried this?

Have we tried shutting our mouth and saying, oh my God, it's lonely and terrifying?

Your child is not my child.

I've got two.

They're completely different from each other.

My dad had eight siblings.

Not one of them was in any way alike, and they all had a different kind of mental illness.

I'm I just have a different mental illness from my brother.

I mean, just let's be honest about this, right?

Why are we afraid to say we're afraid?

But I'll tell you, when my kid was going off the rails, my older one, and I mean, really going off the rails.

I would say things and people would say, you shouldn't talk like that about your son.

And I realized there was going to be no resurrection or life in that relationship.

When I said that my kid had done this or that, what I heard is, oh, I used to struggle with my kid too.

They were making a C in math, but they turned it around.

I'd have been grateful for a C.

But we were not willing to sit at the tomb with each other.

Because we didn't believe there was resurrection or life.

I mean, I think that's what it comes down to.

I can't hold your pain if I don't believe God can redeem it.

And I can't even hold my pain if I don't believe God can be present in it.

And frankly, most of us just don't believe that much.

Most of us don't believe that much.

And here's how you know if somebody says something you don't like and you try to correct them or fix them, you don't believe that much.

Your priest doesn't believe that much a lot of the time.

Nope.

There's not going to be resurrection in life.

There's going to be fixing.

Jesus, if you've been here, my brother wouldn't have died because you're not going to let us die.

Jesus is going to let you die.

Jesus is going to die like you and with you.

That happened.

And part of this weird business, right, is in our glow is if we say things like, God, please be with me.

Even though our faith tells us God is already with us.

I mean, why do we pray like that?

Because we think God can't handle death with a small k.

At the end of the day, I think we believe that to our detriment.

So I don't know what kind of difference the resurrection and life would make in a friend, an apparent church go and a voter that you are, and I'm convinced it would make a pretty big difference in my life.

And I am pretty convinced that since Paul says we are the body of Christ on earth, we're invited to be the resurrected and the life-giving body of Christ on earth.

And all of our capital D death experiences.

Now I'm not preaching that, and this isn't my own practice, but I want to offer it to you because I read about it this morning.

You know, a lot of clergy, when they leave the building, they bow either to the Lord's table or they bow to the cross.

I want to offer to you as your priest for ten years.

I bow to you.

The body and blood of Christ for my family, the body and blood of Christ in this community on earth as I know the resurrection and the life.