"When Death Comes"

John 11:17-46

Emily Martin
Seminary Intern

March 9, 2008

             Mary Oliver, one of my favorite poets, has written a poem with the title “When Death Comes.”  I love it.  My mom loves it too.  In fact, she wants it read at her funeral.  In it Mary Oliver imagines death coming for her “like the hungry bear in autumn,” “like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,” “like the measles-pox.”  She imagines death coming to buy her taking all the bright coins from his purse and then snapping it shut.  She is determined to meet death the same way that she meets the world each day; stepping through the door to that “cottage of darkness” full of curiosity and wonder, full of gratitude and grace.  I wish we could all meet death in that way.  But in my limited experience when death comes, especially when death comes for a loved one we are not ready to live without, it’s not pretty or graceful.  Most of the time it’s inconvenient, it’s messy, and it hurts like hell. 

If there was one person I thought might be able to meet death with the kind of grace and wonder that Mary Oliver writes about, it would have been my friend Ginger Kaney.  She was a saint—kind and humble, hard working and honest, with a passion for the poor.  My first semester at Columbia Seminary she helped me get a panel of the AIDS Quilt on campus, and my second semester she helped me organize a weekend on the streets with the homeless.  She was the one person on campus I knew I could count on both for emotional support and real, practical help as I try to figure out what it means to be a Christian in the context of so much poverty.

The summer after my first year I went with her and two other students to meet a well known civil rights activist, and it was amazing except that it was clear that Ginger wasn’t feeling well.   She complained of headaches and dizziness, and when we got back to the Decatur metro station I ended up beside her on the floor holding her up as she vomited into a bag from a nearby trashcan.  It was not pretty.  Within two weeks she was diagnosed with a large brain tumor and had emergency surgery. 

In the weeks after the surgery everyone was positive and hopeful.  We just couldn’t imagine that Ginger wouldn’t recover.  She was only in her fifties, and she was a survivor—she’d been in remission from breast cancer for over five years.  She’d just been promoted to be director of the seminary’s Faith in the City Program.  But after a few weeks we got an e-mail encouraging us to visit in her home sooner rather than later to say our goodbyes.  I couldn’t believe it.  I didn’t believe it until I saw her in her bed.  She had a big ugly scar on her scalp, and it was clear that she was only partially aware of what was happening. 

It was all I could do to keep from bursting into tears right there in front of her.  She wasn’t peaceful at all; she was flustered and confused and anxious.  I managed to hold it together until I got out the front door, but then I lost it.  I felt robbed.  Robbed of my friend Ginger—the graceful, dignified Ginger that I knew and of all the plans we’d been making together.  And I was angry at God for the way this all seemed to be happening:  so sudden, so unfair. How ugly and undignified it all seemed.

For most of us neither death nor grief is particularly becoming. 

Which is why I had a hard time believing that on this last Sunday of Lent, our Presbyterian Calendar encourages us to celebrate the gifts of women.  Given my own experiences, I had to ask myself…“What gifts could the women in this text, Mary and Martha, possibly give us, mired as they are in their own grief and anger, with the stench of a body four days dead seeping out of the tomb?” 

But let’s start with Martha.  She seems like a take charge kind of woman.  She hears that Jesus is finally, finally responding to their message about Lazarus’ illness. She doesn’t wait for him to get to their village, she walks two miles to meet him.  I imagine she’s the one in the family who feels responsible for keeping it all together, for staying strong, making sure the funeral arrangements are all taken care of, and that everybody has a place to sleep and enough food to eat.  Like many of us do when some crisis or tragedy threatens to overwhelm us, she probably welcomed the opportunity to focus on these details and not on her own feelings. 

But when she sees Jesus, the truth comes out.  That nagging thought that lingers in the wake of untimely death, that haunts the scene of tragedy, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  

Not everybody has the courage to say those words out loud.  The courage, the audacity to say to God, you weren’t there when I needed you. 

We don’t say it because we’re afraid it might be true.

And yet, Psalm 130 says, “Out of the depths, I cry to you, O Lord.  Lord, hear my voice.”  Out of the depths.  The depths of grief, the depths of anger, the depths of utter incomprehension in the face of suffering. “Say it!” the psalmist says. 

Don’t worry if it’s not pretty, if it’s not theologically correct.  If it’s not something “a good Christian” would say.  Go ahead and say it.  God is big enough to handle your lament. 

God is big enough. 

That, I think, is the first gift that Martha, and then also her sister Mary, give us…permission to be honest with God. The courage to voice our lament to the only one who can really answer it: the Lord, himself.  That’s always where we have to start.

So Martha gifts us with her honest lament.  But she does not stay there.  Somehow, in the presence of Jesus, she is able to muster some hope.  Even though Jesus has just disappointed her.  Even though he didn’t come when she sent for him.  He didn’t save her brother from death.  He didn’t save any of them from the pain and grief that goes with being human.  And yet, there he is, and she is able to say, “But even now… even now that the bottom has dropped out from under me, I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” 

She is like the psalmist who cries out from the depths, but still says, “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope…”  She doesn’t ask for anything specific—I don’t think she can.  Her world’s been turned upside down.  Jesus has turned out not to be exactly who she thought he would be.  He hasn’t protected them from death and sorrow.  Their lives haven’t become pain-free.  Her brother is dead, so now she probably doesn’t know what to ask for, so she just offers up this vague hope she has that somehow, someday God can make things right again.   And Jesus does not reject it. 

What he does is take that vague, tentative hope, and pushes on it.  “Your brother will rise again,” he says.   I imagine Martha almost irritated, “Yes, I know my brother will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”  Yes, I know, one day, we’ll all be reunited with our friends and loved ones in heaven.  Yes, I know, Ginger is in heaven with God, and one day I’ll get to see her again.  But it doesn’t do me a whole heck of a lot of good right now I’m sorry.  But that doesn’t seem to be what Jesus is saying.

I AM THE RESURRECTION!  I hear him saying to me, “if you think that you know what resurrection means because you went to Sunday school or took a theology class, think again.  I AM THE RESURRECTION … and the Life.  The life.  Right now.  Yes, eternal life means in the future, after death.  But it also means abundant life right now.  Look at me—resurrection can happen, is happening, right now because of who I am.  Do you believe this?  DO YOU BELIEVE THIS?”

“Yes, Lord,” Martha says, “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” 

I wish I could say that she gets it, that all it takes is the right words, for someone to explain it to us just so, and then it all makes sense.  That we can say, “I believe in God the Father Almighty… and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord…” and, BOOM, eternal life. 

But what happens when later Jesus says, “Take away the stone”?  Do we leap into action or do our rational brains kick back in?  Our sense of propriety, what we’ve grown up believing—that some things are possible and some things simply are not.  Do we say, like Martha, “Lord, the stench… you can’t be serious…”?

Thank God for Mary.  Mary doesn’t even pretend to have things under control.  She literally falls down, collapses at his feet, and utters that same human lament, from the depths of her spirit, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  Then she weeps.  She can’t even muster the faith statement, the creed, that vague hope in the Lord, all she has is her naked grief, and so that is what she offers up to God.  And that is Mary’s gift.  And Jesus does not reject that either.

In fact, he goes there himself.  He does that with both Martha and Mary.  Martha deals with her grief by trying to understand it intellectually, and that’s how Jesus responds to her—he tries to help her understand.  When all Mary, and the whole community with her, can do is weep, Jesus’ insides start churning too.  He feels their grief and anger in his own body, and he says, “Where have you laid him?”  In other words, “I want to go to the tomb.  I want to see death.  I want to go with you to the most God forsaken place that you know.”  And they say, “Come and see.” 

It’s the very invitation to discipleship he uses to call the first disciples.  He invited them to come and see what God is doing in the world, and they are now inviting him to come and see what it means to be human.  To live day in and day out with the reality of sin and death, with everything that binds us, with everything that shuts out the light, with everything that brings us to the brink of despair, they say, “Come and see.”  Come and see what it looks like when death comes.

And that’s when Jesus begins to weep.  And that’s when I start to believe that he gets it.  That when Jesus chose to come and see what it was to be human, he meant it.  Even Jesus was not spared death coming, first for his friends, John the Baptist and Lazarus, and then, in the worst way imaginable, for himself.  And when he cries out like the Psalmist, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  I know he gets it.  When he himself is shut up and bound in that dark tomb, I know he gets it.  I know he gets what it means to be human.  He gets every part of it.  He gets every part.

Charge & Blessing:

Go forth into the world, confident in a Savior

who has gone before you into the darkest places

of fear and grief and betrayal and death,

and risen as proof of the promise of God and power of the Holy Spirit

to grant you eternal life, both this day and forevermore.

And now may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,

the Love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with you all.

Amen.