BELIEVE  

John 11:1-45

[Since spoken communication differs from written, some of the grammar and syntax of this transcript may seem awkward in written form. To keep integrity with the spirit of the original delivery, the transcript seeks to stay close to the exact words spoken.]

I want to begin my sermon this morning by doing a little show-and-tell.  And I realize you can't really see what I'm going to show you, but I'm going to tell you what it is that I'm showing you here.  This is a picture from a book called The Circle of Life; it's a coffee table book that was given to me for my birthday years ago, and it contains photographs of rites of passage from all over the world--around birth, and adolescence, and marriage, and death.  And this is a picture in the section on death.  It's a picture of a Biami tribesman of Papua New Guinea, and it says in the story below the picture that "He felt that sorcery had been worked on him, and that it was his time to die.  He lay down on a mat and over the course of a day literally willed himself to death."  So that's our show-and-tell item for this morning.

I lift that up for us to consider--the fact that a human being can, in a sense, believe himself into dying. I find that remarkable.  But the question that I want to raise for us this morning is this:  is it possible for a human being to believe oneself into living?   I think that's the question that emerges from this story that I read just a few moments ago.  This rather strange story about Jesus' best friend Lazarus, who he finds out is ill.  And when he learns it, Jesus intentionally stays where he is for a couple days to make sure that he's dead, and then goes to hang out with Lazarus' sisters Martha and Mary, and weeps with them, and then raises Lazarus from the dead.  Or…it might not be going too far to say that he believes him into life--he prays him into life. 

Can you believe yourself into living?  That question makes me think of Norman Cousins, who was kind of the poster child for the power of human belief, in the early 80s.  He wrote a book about his experience of having received a terminal diagnosis, and he wanted to test the theory that laughter had healing power.  And so he literally forced himself to receive massive doses of laughter every day.  He rented old Marx brothers movies in order to make himself laugh.  And lo and behold he defied the doctors' expectation that he would die soon.  He lived far longer because he was able to laugh and find healing power in that.  His books have a lot to do with the notion that what we believe--this software between our ears--has a lot to do with the state of the hardware platform that it's running--this human organism.

Can we believe ourselves into living?  That question assumes, as the New Testament does, that there are different ways of understanding what it means for human beings to live.  Namely, there is a difference between just being alive and living.  And actually the New Testament has two different words for those two modes of living.  The first word is the word bios, which of course we get biology from.  And that's used in the New Testament simply to connote what it means just to be alive--to have a pulse, to possess biological life.  So there's bios--and then there's another word for life that we find in the New Testament.  And this is a favorite word of the writer of John's gospel.   He uses it no less than 32 times--the word zoe ["zoWAY"]. John often likes to use that Greek word with the word for eternal--eternal life is a favorite phrase of John in his gospel. 

So there's a difference between bios,just having a pulse--just being alive, biologically--and zoe, which signifies what it's like to really live, as a human being is meant to live.  And we know the difference, don't we?  We know that we sometimes encounter people who may be alive, biologically, but are carrying quite a lot of deadness inside.  Certainly I'm in touch with that state of being at various times in my own life.  As I said at the beginning of the service, I'm with Woody Allen on this, most of the time.  You know, Woody Allen said that showing up is 80% of life.  I mean, that's reality, isn't it--that we're living in bios mode most of the time--getting through, and showing up?  But on the other hand, haven't we encountered people who seem to have this…life force in them?  This force that comes from somewhere beyond them, and goes through them?  And haven't we, at times, experienced that force ourselves, and touched it, and tasted it, and lived it?  That force that has us being, as George Bernard Shaw says, "A force of nature, rather than being a feverish little clod of grievances and ailments…to be a splendid torch, instead of a flickering candle."  That's what it's like to live with zoe--Life, with a capital "L."  And that's what the gospel promises--that kind of life, zoe.

So the question is, how do we get that kind of life?  How do we live that kind of life--this zoe sort of existence?  And John's answer is, I think, very clear--especially if you were paying attention to that story a moment ago.  He would answer that question with simply one word--believe.  That's another favorite of John in his gospel--the word believe.  He uses it 86 times--way more than any other writer of any other book in the New Testament: believe.  Often used with a preposition, as one of my New Testament professors taught me, that means something like, "to believe into…to believe into Jesus Christ."  Not just to believe in, but to believe into Jesus.  

You see, Jesus says this really crazy thing to Martha at that funeral.  Martha says something to Jesus not unlike what many of us might say or hear at a funeral.  Martha says, "I know that he'll be raised on the last day."  I know that he's in heaven--he's in a better place.  And then Jesus says this rather odd thing in response to that. He says, "I am the resurrection and the life.  Those who believe in me, even if they die, yet shall they live.  And everyone who's still living, and who believes in me, shall never die.  Do you believe this?"
 
There's that word again, 3 times--do you believe?  It's a question that John intends Jesus to ask each of us.  Do you believe that?  I have to be honest; I really struggle believing that at times--understanding what it means to believe that.  I struggle understanding what Jesus means by that really strange statement.  And we do well not to just pass it over, and make it a pious catch phrase.  What does he mean--I am the resurrection and the life, if you believe in him then you won't die?  I find that somehow hard to picture.  A bit mystical for 10:30am on a Sunday morning.

But here's how I guess I approach understanding it. An image that works for me.  When I was living in California, every year my buddies and I… all of us who were the sort of young Presbyterian men clergy, and we all had Mondays off--and we would drive up to the Big Sur mountains and descend into the Arroyo Seco River Canyon.  We called it the Iron John River Walk, and it was a tradition every year.  We would hike the Arroyo Seco Canyon--and do the same things each year; do the same traditions.  And the Arroyo Seco is pretty shallow in some places, other places it's rather deep--and every year we'd come to the same cliff.  And the tradition was that everybody had to jump off the cliff.  If you didn't, you weren't really a man.  You know, we left our clergy personas behind, OK? It was our day off. 

And I dreaded, every year, that cliff.  You know, some of the more macho guys went way high, and dove off.  And I remember--I'm not shy to admit I'm kind of afraid of heights--and I would sort of back up to this cliff and I would look down there, and I'd know it was safe--you had to clear a few rocks, and if you got enough of a start…you knew it was safe, at least rationally.  But my heart was racing, and every year it took me about five minutes to make that jump.  I had to really deal with my primary fears--my reptilian brain.  And finally, I'd manage to make that leap.  And I remember, though, what it felt like to be in freefall, just for a moment--to dive into the deep and warm waters of the Arroyo Seco River.  To be enveloped by them, just for a moment, to feel transcendent in that moment. 

And I think that's what believing in Jesus is like--believing into Jesus is like.  Dealing with all your fears and failures, and jumping into that deep river which is life, which is the life that Jesus seems to be offering us--a life that preceded us, and a life that will go on well after us.  But the point is, when you jump in, you're in it, and it's in you.  And we're all part of it.  We're part of it now, if we're living in it, but somehow we realize we'll always be part of it--all of us, even when our bios life is up.  To me that's what it means to live into life in the zoe mode.  To know that ultimate hope that comes from Jesus Christ. To live into it.

When I think of living in that mode of life, I think of Carol Driver.  I asked her permission to tell this story today. Carol Driver would be up there if she could, in the choir loft.  She's at home today, because she's awaiting a knee replacement operation, and if it were physically possible, she'd be with her brothers and sisters in that choir.  I was talking about a story regarding Carol the other day, with Jeanne and Bryce.  We were talking about how after she had this massive back operation--they basically reconstructed her whole back--and we were talking about the ambulance ride from the hospital in Philadelphia to St. Lawrence Rehab over here.  Apparently, Carol got talking about church to the ambulance driver--she started talking about her faith and the thing that she loves the most, which is singing.  And somehow she got the ambulance driver to sing hymns with her.  So they sang hymns the whole way from Philadelphia to the St. Lawrence Rehab Center.  I mean, her back is in pain, she's basically the bionic woman, you know, been almost completely reconstructed, and in a great deal of pain…and she's singing hymns with the ambulance driver.  And to me, that's what it means to live with zoe--to live the life that Christ offers us.

There's one last thing about living this kind of life--the zoe sort of life--the "jumped into the deep part of the river" life.  Because this kind of living seems to be the most prominent as we confront dying.  That, too, is part of the story that we heard this morning.  Confronting the death of a loved one, in this case Lazarus, Jesus best friend.  The thing that grinds the gears of our system of belief, of course, is when we experience death--when we confront death.  And this story is meant to say that the gospel is not something we use to paste over human pain. 

You know the ultimate parody of the gospel--I love the movie Life of Brian, I have to say--maybe I'm a heretic for that.  But at the end of Life of Brian you see Jesus on the cross singing, "Always look on the bright side of life." It's a parody of the gospel.  You know, the danger whenever we talk about the power of positive thinking, or the way our belief affects the quality of our life, is that it's a way to avoid and deny pain.  Because just since we're living with this kind of existence that Christ gives us as a gift…it doesn't mean that we get a continuous salary increase, and avoid pain and suffering.  Because in this story--what most every Sunday school student comes to know, and as Rich was pointing out in the children's message--the shortest verse in the entire New Testament is in this story, two words in the Greek:  "Jesus wept." And we might have a picture of a little, single tear trailing down the face of Jesus.  But the Greek tells a different story there--it implies, basically, that "Jesus burst into tears."  In two places in the passage, it speaks of Jesus "shuddering with grief and sadness." That's a much truer rendition of the Greek.  Jesus, who raises Lazarus from death, is at the same time grieving his death!

What this story says about God is very strange and ironic--it says that God both has power over death, and yet suffers it with us.  The irony of zoe life, eternal life, deep river life, is that it also means living deep into the full catastrophe of the human experience, and embracing it all--the joy and the pain.  It means seeing the beauty in a Brahms Requiem, and well as the joyful zest of a Vivaldi Gloria.  And it seems particularly strange that people who know this mode of life know it most intensely when they confront death. 

This past week one of our newer members, Adam Heide, sent me a video clip on the internet.  Now I almost never open those things, so don't send them to me!  But in this case I thought, what the heck?  He said, "This 11 minutes will be worth it."  And it was a video clip of a college professor named Randy Pausch, who teaches, I think at MIT it was. [Editor's note: correction, Carnegie Mellon; see the video clip here: http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/]  And Randy Pausch – in academia there's the theoretical final lecture.  You think of what you would say in your final lecture, if it were your final lecture.  And for this professor, for Randy Pausch it was not theoretical.  He said he had liver cancer, and it was clear that he was going to die very soon, and it was a goodbye to his students.  And he talked about dying.  He said, "This stinks.  I have three kids, and I don't want to die.  I can't do anything about the cards that I've been dealt, but I can do something about the hand that I play."  And in this lecture you get a sense that in confronting death, this man is living deeply into life.  That this man has, indeed, jumped into the deep part of the river.  And so for ten minutes he burns about the life lessons that he wants to share with other people. 

And it's tragic that at some point soon he will disappear from our view. That he will die, soon.  But what we affirm as Christians is that he's still in the river with us, even though we might not be able to see him.  He's still in this deep river that carries us all, that never ceases, the deep river that preceded us, and that keep flowing on after us, that will carry us home.

"I am the resurrection and the life.  Believe in me, and even though you die, yet shall you live.  And everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.  Do you believe this?" 

Amen.  

March 9, 2008
Fifth Sunday in Lent

The Reverend Jeffrey A. Vamos

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