Bowie, Coldplay, and Lazarus

Transition is hard.  No matter what kind, good or bad, transition is hard.  Bowie sang it well, “Ch-ch-ch-changes!  Turn and face the strange.  Ch-ch-changes!”  Even when it is a good transition: starting a new job, moving to a new area, moving into a new house, having a new baby, etc.  All wonderful things in their own right and all very stressful too.  You’re turning to face the strange, stepping into the unknown (thank you Elsa), which is exciting and also frightening.  What will it be like?  Who will be my friends?  How are we going to pay for everything?  Where is the syrup aisle in the grocery store?  Important questions to which the answers might be a while in coming.  There is a major adjustment time that can be full of delays and little frustrations requiring a lot of patience and gentleness towards one’s self.  Two commodities that are not easy to come by, I can tell you, when, for example, you’re already exhausted from packing up all your things into a truck and hauling your family across 6 states only to temporarily settle-in to a kind of holding spot for almost 3 months while you navigate multiple “hiccups” in the process of getting your permanent home.  Not to be too specific.  Patience and gentleness…yeah, right.  Where is that freaking syrup?! 

Waiting can be tough.  Pair all of that with the grief that comes with transition and it’s quite frankly a miracle that you are able to put your pants on straight in the morning.  Changes always come with goodbyes, and they are the obvious hard parts in a transition.  It is sad to leave the familiar, the known.  Saying goodbye to a home, a neighborhood, a church community, a work community, a friend, a family member.  The excitement and uncertainty are married to the pain and sadness.  And there’s nothing to do except feel it all and walk right through it. 

Sounds simple enough, but man, it is not.  I have now had three full-on crises of faith during our recent move from South Carolina back up to New York (all during a pandemic mind you)…existential melt-downs where I was not sure which way was up, where I wondered if God was going to abandon us, and I was not sure I was going to make it.  But, my amazing wife, Kate, who seems to have been given an extra portion of grace through all of this, preached the truth to me again, that though I am faithless, God remains faithful for he cannot deny himself (2 Timothy 2:13).  She brought me back to the truth that the Reformer Martin Luther rediscovered in his own existential melt-down 500 years ago, where he realized that “despair is so very near to grace” (Outlaw God by Steven Paulson, 167).  Reaching our end feels like the absolute worst thing that can happen to us.  That’s because it is a death.  It is having no more answers, no more energy, no more reserves for “just one more push.”  You’ve got nothing left.  Coldplay sang it well, “When you try your best but you don't succeed.  When you get what you want but not what you need. When you feel so tired but you can't sleep.  Stuck in reverse.” (Fix You)

You find yourself asking, “What do I do now?”  And the answer is what we all dread: nothing.  You can do absolutely nothing.  Not. One. Single. Thing.  You’ve already tried everything you know, and it didn’t fix a thing.  You are as good as dead.  You despair of yourself.

Jesus had a really good friend named Lazarus, and he heard that Lazarus was really sick.  The Gospel writer, John, tells us that because Jesus loved Lazarus so much he decided to wait to go see him for 2 days…and let him die in his sickness (John 11:1-44).  What kind of love is that?!  Certainly not the kind any of us are looking for.  Jesus finally went to Lazarus’ house after he had been dead for 4 days.  He found Lazarus’ two sisters, Martha and Mary, grieving with many of their friends.  To say they were going through a transition is woefully understated.  Their brother was dead and all they could say to Jesus was, “If only you had been here maybe you could have done something.  You might have been able to heal him.”  They had seen enough to know that Jesus had power over sickness, but they thought it was too late, as we all do when confronted with death.  We have no answers for death, and we assume there are none.  We think it is the end of the story.  Jesus hadn’t come in time.  Game over. BUT, he waited because he wanted to deal with the dead man.

Jesus walks with Martha and Mary in the grief.  He experiences the loss with them.  He weeps and is deeply moved.  He hurts with them.  He is immanent in their pain.  Not distant, not removed, but with them.  This is the kind of God he is: God with us (Immanuel).  When he reaches the grave he cries out and preaches to his dead friend, “Lazarus, come out!”  And because death has no power to resist his word, that same word that created everything out of nothing at the very beginning of time, Lazarus got up and walked out.

Jesus walks us right into death, right to our end.  He takes us right to that place we are most scared to go, the place where we have no answers, no options, where we can do nothing.  He takes us there often kicking and screaming, just like a little child who is over-tired and fights her parents every step of the way to bedtime insisting that she’s not tired at all through the tears.  We think we know what we want, but it’s not what we need.  And Jesus takes us there because he loves us.  He takes us into death so that he can raise us up to new life.  Grace is so near to despair.  In so doing he opens our eyes to the fact that he is God. 

“He is the life and the resurrection.  Whoever believes in him, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in him shall never die.” (John 11:25-26) 

Amen.

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