When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. 18 Bethany was a little less than two miles from Jerusalem. 19 Many Jews had come to comfort Martha and Mary after their brother’s death. 20 When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went to meet him, while Mary remained in the house. 21 Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died. 22 Even now I know that whatever you ask God, God will give you.”
23 Jesus told her, “Your brother will rise again.”
24 Martha replied, “I know that he will rise in the resurrection on the last day.”
25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though they die. 26 Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
27 She replied, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, God’s Son, the one who is coming into the world.” (Common English Bible)
“The Whatabouts: Responding to Questions with Faithfulness,” Week Nine
I look up at the crucifix statue of Jesus at the front of the hospital chapel. I am silent for a while, but then the words start pouring out at God:
“Tell me what I have to do, and I will do it. This is the one thing I have tried to create for myself after years of training and years of serving you. Why are you taking this away from me? I know taking the punishment for the sins of the father out on their child was a thing once, but I was not expecting that from you now. I know I am a snarky and gruff servant, but I have dedicated and baptized your children, all out of love of you and them. I have watched them grow, I have married and buried them. You entrusted them to me, why will you not entrust me with a child of my own?”
Then came the hardest part: “I know I do not get preferential treatment just because I am your servant. Do I need to settle for not having a child? Do you need to hear me cry uncle? I love you, I still love you, but enough with whatever wrath of yours this is that you are taking out on me. Enough of it. I am through with it.”
I was far closer than I was willing to admit to saying “I am through with you” to God on that sunny August day three years ago, in 2017, when Carrie and I had just received the news that the child that was about to complete its first trimester of gestation was, in fact, dead. That began a very painful, trying season of both our lives that thankfully transitioned a little over a year later to us having Sadie.
It would be easy to say that Sadie was my miracle in that season, easy because it is surely also true. But I also needed, and experienced, a miracle to get me to the miracle of my daughter’s birth—I needed to be moved from despair to a place where I could fully be a loving and doting father. And while much was taken from me, and from Carrie, much was then given as I experienced the miracle of being moved by the Holy Spirit from mourning and grieving into celebration and anticipation. It did not feel necessarily feel like a miracle then, in real time. But it does now, in hindsight.
This sermon series is my first as your new minister here at Valley, and I arrived at it after multiple conversations with the search committee about how and why evangelism came to be noted as so important a trait in the congregation’s search and call profile. And specifically what I heard was a need to be equipped to talk to people about faith in a way that could answer their questions—questions to which we may or may not have all the answers, or not feel comfortable answering.
The way I experienced doing evangelism on the West Coast would sometimes come in the form of fielding questions from folks skeptical of the nature of my faith in God as revealed in Jesus Christ, and I came to think of those questions as “the whatabouts,” as in, “Well, what about…?” Being honest in those moments was vital for my own integrity and for my friendship with the person asking me. I crafted this sermon series to tackle many of these questions a way for me to share with you what evangelism has looked to me and in my ministry, by trying to answer those whatabout questions, and as a way to let you into my own theology and faith.
Today’s whatabout question is, “What about miracles (or a perceived lack thereof)?” It is a question that pops up from that God School word “theodicy” that we talked about several weeks ago in this series. Miracles are purely good, but why do some people appear to get them while others appear not to? And can we really attribute everything as a miracle, and by extension to God?
Here in John 11, one of the most famous stories in all the New Testament with the raising of Lazarus, the implication is clear that we are not able to, and therefore should not, try to create a universal criterion for what does or does not constitute a miracle. Lazarus is dying of illness, and Jesus, we know, is fully capable of healing any such illness. Yet He does not. He takes days to arrive in Bethany, and by the time he does, Lazarus is not only dead, he has been dead long enough for his body to begin decomposing. There can be no doubt that he is only comatose or unconscious.
The miracle according to the timeline of Lazarus’s sister Martha, then, would have been for Lazarus to be healed while he was still among the living—she tells Jesus upon His fashionably late arrival, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” She does not give up hope, though, because her timeline still leaves room for that—she knows that her dead brother “will rise in resurrection on the last day.”
Jesus then responds with one of His most famous quotes: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though they die, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”
It is a paradox on its face, but within that paradox is the miracle: death does not have the last word, even if death is able to manage a word. The miracle is not the erasure of death, but the eventual reversal, the moving away from, death. This movement away is a key part of the miracle to follow.
In the moment, in real time, that can be a bitter comfort, as it surely was for Martha, because she is processing not only the loss of her brother in who he was, but in who he could continue to be, or even become—his future as well as the memory of him. She is mourning both these things.
The miracle for Lazarus is pretty straightforward—he is dead, but by the end of the chapter he lives again. For his sister Martha, though, the miracle is twofold. It is not solely in having her brother restored to the living from the dead. It is also in moving her from accepting the timeline of not having her brother until the last days to rejoicing in God’s timeline of having her brother restored, even if that timeline did not mean that her brother was healed earlier.
Lazarus’s miracle is defined by life. So is Martha’s, but it is also defined by movement—of her being moved from resignation to rejoicing, and from expectation to realization. Her understanding of God has been realigned (and, it should be noted, this still takes place entirely within the context of Judaism, because there was no Christian Church--this story should not be a call for replacement theology). That is the core of the Lazarus story. As Jesus’s prayer before Lazarus’s tomb makes clear, the resurrection by itself is not enough. It must have an impact on us, the hearers.
In her book The Practice of Pastoral Care, psychologist, minister, and seminary professor Carrie Doehring shares the concept of the dream child, a mental construct created by parents who lose a child in utero or during childbirth as a reaction to their loss. The dream child represents what the parents had hoped for their child—their wishes, dreams, and fantasies of who their child might become, their personality, their endearing quirks, all of it. There is a double mourning, then, that can take place for such parents—the mourning of the biological child they have lost, and the mourning of the dream child they have lost.
I learned about this concept in seminary, but did not understand it—note the difference between learning and understanding—until our own miscarriage three years ago. I had no way of knowing then that God would be delivering Sadie Lou to us just over a year later. I did not know when, or if, we would become parents. I was in pain. I was upset. I needed a miracle. The obvious miracle would have been the restoration of our child. But what I needed to be moved from my timeline back to God’s. Because in that moment in 2017, I could not see the birth of Sadie. But God could, and God, through the Holy Spirit, moved me over the course of the next year to prepare for and expect Sadie. In so doing, God helped restore me to right relationship with God. And that was—is—a miracle.
So, what about miracles, or perceiving a lack thereof? I think the traditional understanding of a miracle would have meant the restoration of our dead child. But a restoration of one’s relationship with God should also be called a miracle, and I was need of that. To be moved as a human being from the deepest valleys back to the highest peaks should be called a miracle, and I needed that too.
Perhaps you do as well, right now, or anticipate you might in the future—to be called back from the wilderness by God when you have found yourself there and brought back to the fullness of the Holy Spirit when you fear you may have wandered away. However you found yourself in such a situation, you can be both as Lazarus, called back from being dead to the world, and as Martha, being called back from a distant expectation of resurrection and restoration. Whenever, wherever, and however Christ appears in your life, He gives you the chance to moved into new ways of understanding Him.
You could well call that a miracle, and you would not be wrong to do so.
Quite simply, what if our definition of what does and does not make a miracle has become much too narrow to do justice to the ways in which God can work *and* in which we need God?
Can we make a miracle out of reimagining our understanding of those miracles?
Can we reimagine resurrection, so that it, like Lazarus’s, happens not on our timeline, but on God’s timeline?
Let us hope so.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
November 8, 2020