Waste of toilet paper

John 11:32-44

When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, “Take away the sone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

*******

I’m going to need your help with the sermon today. Maybe I’ve had too much caffeine with the new Starbucks job, or maybe I’ve gotten some leftover holiday spirit from Halloween, but I have with me the makings of a costume, and I need your help getting dressed for the occasion of today’s Gospel reading. Now, I only have four rolls of this store-brand toilet paper, so if I’m going to be a presentable mummy we might have to get creative. Who’s going to help wrap me up today? Kids? Now, who knows anything about mummies? Why do we wrap up mummies? Do you ever see zombies who have leftover mummy wraps on? What do you think of that? Zombies don’t smell very good, do they? Well, why should they? They’re dead meat! For real, dead meat smells bad. If you think not taking a bath for a week or two smells bad, death smells even worse. That’s why Mary and Martha put their brother Lazarus in the cave with a rock over it, because he’d been dead four days and was starting to look and smell more like a zombie than like their brother.

But you know what happened next? Jesus came! Jesus came to see his friends, and Mary and Martha were sad, and angry, and the neighbors were upset that he hadn’t come sooner and made Lazarus better before he’d died. When people we love die, even when people we don’t like very much die, sometimes we’re sad, sometimes we’re angry, sometimes we’re confused or afraid, sometimes we’re relieved they’re not in pain anymore, sometimes we’re all of these things at once! We might be mad at God, or we might be mad at our friend who died. We might only tell the good stories about the dead person, and not the hard stories. We might forget some things and remember other things not quite as they were. Death is weird for the living who get left behind. Especially when we try to forget about it, or hide it, or get over it before we’re really ready.

That’s one of the reasons we have Halloween. It’s called Halloween because we said “All Hallow’s Evening” all smushed up in one word and it got shortened to “Halloween.”
We know that sometimes it feels like the line between alive and dead is blurry, like the almost nighttime has all sorts of secrets we almost know, like life is bigger and more mysterious and there’s a chill in the air and we can see our breath in the cold for the first time of the season. Sometimes time and space feel so holy, so much more alive than we can see, and we think that maybe it’s because alive and dead aren’t as different as they seem, and maybe the dead are walking among the living, or the living are walking among the dead. So some of us dress up, to confuse the dead who might have a grudge against us, or just to be silly, to laugh at death like it’s a game, because we know we don’t have to be scared of it.

In the Christian church, we know this moment of the dead and the living all gathered in one place and time because we celebrate it every time we share communion. We pray at the Eucharist about all the saints, cherubim and seraphim, hosts above and saints below… because at God’s table, when we say all are welcome, we mean all - living and dead. So those grandparents you love and haven’t seen in years, they’re here at the Table with us every Sunday. It also means the absent father you haven’t forgiven or the friend who went off to war and died even though you came back alive, they’re here, too.

And this is the great thing about this morning’s story of Lazarus. I’m going to need your help again. Now that I’ve been all wrapped up like a dead man, I’m going to read this last bit of the Gospel lesson again: [Jesus] cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

The same people who had wrapped Lazarus up to be buried now got to unwrap him, got to untie him, so that he could live again like Jesus told him to.

When God gives us this incredible gift of new life, it’s not for us alone as individuals, but it’s for the whole community. Everybody’s welcome, everybody’s involved in freedom and new life and forgiveness. When I’m wrapped up in guilt, or anger, or shame, or death, I can’t unwrap myself very well, can I? Especially if I’ve been guilty or sad or angry or ashamed or dead for days and days. If you think it’s tough to walk after your leg had fallen asleep, trying to walk when you’ve been wrapped up or sitting still for a couple of days is even harder. We need each other to get out of this mess, we can’t get out of it alone. We don’t get out of it alone. Because Jesus calls us. Anybody else could call us, or yell at us, or bribe us to do what they want us to do, but it’s the voice of Jesus that really brings us back alive again.

Not only that, after Jesus calls Lazarus alive again, Jesus himself gets hurt by angry people with a lot of shame, and he dies a horrible, terrible, painful death. He doesn’t get properly wrapped up, because it’s so late when they take his body off the cross, and they didn’t have flashlights to see after the sun went down, and it was a holy day for no working. So the women came back after the dark was over, after Jesus had been dead for awhile, to wrap him up properly. They come back to that cave with a big stone, just like when they showed Jesus where they had buried Lazarus… and Jesus is not there any more. Jesus didn’t stay dead. And neither will we, and neither will the people we love, or any of the people God loves (which is everybody). 

See, now, when you’ve finished helping me get all this toilet paper off and I’m all unwrapped, I’ll put back on my worship robe, called an ‘alb,’ that is a sign, a reminder, of baptism. Everybody is unwrapped from shame and death, then clothed with Christ, in Baptism, and we can’t ever have the death wrap on forever again. I just get this robe as Pastor to mark that I’m leading in worship, but it doesn't mean that I’m any more special, it means I'm just like you. That’s why I wear it, as a reminder that I’m representing you and representing Jesus, sort of both at the same time, just like we do when we leave Sunday morning and go to school or to work or to a football game. We carry Jesus with us wherever we go, because Jesus carries us when he died and when he’s risen from the dead. That’s what today is for. All Saints Day, the reminder that all who have died in the love of God are not dead forever, that we are all safe in God’s love, no matter what or where or who we are.