Jesus said to her, “I am the Resurrection and the Life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

Someone asked me if my sermon title today “A Matter of Death and Life” was a typo and if I meant the more common phrasing of “A Matter of Life and Death”. But I didn’t.

Death and Life, not Life and Death, is the proper Christian way of understanding our existence, the proper Christian way of keeping a holy perspective on God’s sovereignty in the Universe. Until and unless we have learned to deal with death we never really learn to deal with life, we never really live life.

When we think of things as being life and death we always end with defeat, we have our little dance here and then the music will stop and the lights will dim, however as we recognize the rhythms of death then life, we can dance and sing and love with those who are here, and then mourn and cry and miss those who are gone, all the time knowing that we will dance and sing and love again and that the great walls that we imagine in life are not as formidable as we might think.

Our two morning lessons provide us with that realization.

Let me start with Lazarus and Jesus and the promise of Easter that we are preparing ourselves for in this Lenten season.

“I am the Resurrection and the Life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

“Do you believe this?”

I don’t know, do we?

It’s not that we don’t have faith in his promises, otherwise we probably wouldn’t be here, there is – as we will see in a few weeks – something about the Easter message that pulls many into worship, yet the way that we believe in Easter is so narrow and there is so much more to Easter and to the preparations for Easter, then we have believed.

Howard Hageman, my teacher and my pastor, used to tell the story of a family in North Reformed Church in Newark who had inherited a grand piano. They placed it in their living room, polished it and had it tuned on a regular basis. But no one in the house know how to play it except for one child who knew only “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” and so this great instrument, which could have filled the house with wonderful music, was limited to one hesitant little song.

Dr. Hageman called this a parable of Easter.

This sacred day for which we are preparing ourselves, has the ability to fill our lives, all of the time, with a joy and triumph, that would be resounding and all we use it for is to plunk out the same one little tune every year in the spring.

Go to the story, Lazarus and his sisters, Mary and Martha, were the closest people to Jesus outside of the disciples. Word comes that Lazarus is sick and by the time Jesus and the 12 arrive, the funeral is over and they missed it. Martha is, well, annoyed at and disappointed in Jesus.

You know how we get when someone lets us down, when we think they could have done something but they didn’t. “If you had come sooner, if you had been here . . .”. The implication is clear: Jesus didn’t do his job. But Jesus wouldn’t let her put that upon him, the question of the moment wasn’t his actions or lack of actions, the question was her faith.

And Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again” and Martha nods politely and says “Yes, I know, in the final resurrection.”

And Jesus says, essentially this: “I am not talking about someday in the future, Martha, I’m talking about the present, I’m talking about the right now. I am – not I will be – “I am the Resurrection and the Life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

Here we are, 2000 years down the road and I don’t think we are much different that Martha in this.

Shake us down in two weeks and ask what we are celebrating and we will be predictable: we are celebrating the resurrection of Jesus, we are celebrating the promise of life after death for those whom we love and for ourselves.

Most of our Easter thinking looks backward to the morning when the stone was rolled away from the tomb and forward to the day of reunion in our Father’s house of many rooms, but it has little to say about the present.

We have our one little tune to play and so we are just not ready for Jesus to speak in the present tense “I am the Resurrection and the Life . . . Do you believe this?”

You see, Jesus came to bring life to a world that had died, like Ezekiel he saw dry dead bones. Read the gospels and you will find that it wasn’t that people died and went to a grave that bothered Jesus, it was that people died and went right on with their lives!

Oh, they still existed, just as they do all around us.

I see them all of the time, people who eat and sleep and laugh and cry and play and work, yet they are so insensitive to goodness, oblivious to love, unconscious of hope and unaware of God’s presence in their lives that they are as good as dead. For, you see, in everything that makes them human, in everything that makes them children of God – not just dry bones – they are dead.

And what Jesus – and I can’t help but think that his tears are part of the process - what Jesus does is to bring the world back to life.

I had a glimpse of that, a taste of that, this week.

I held life this week and I felt life returning to parts of me that had slipped into death.

And I thought of all those who won’t hold Michaela Elizabeth, but would have loved her so much, I thought of my parents, Debi’s father and our grandmothers, of all the friends and family who have died, and I realized my obligation to love her for them, I held life. I realized that everything that I have been in my life has changed. I know that there is much that I won’t be in my life. Not only will I not – as Chris pointed out a few weeks ago – not only will I not play centerfield for the Mets this year or any other year, but there are so many other dreams that have passed me by, I know the deaths, great and small, that I have come through, but I held life this week and it has allowed me to move beyond the deaths and disappointments and defeats that I have known.

We are too good at holding death, we fear it, we deny it, we let it build walls around us and limit us. But we are not created for the limitations of walls, we are created for the openness of love; we are not created for defeat, we are created for victory; we are not created to hold or be held back by death, we are created to hold and move forward with life.

As a poet once put it:

“I am the Resurrection and the Life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

And how do we hold and move forward with life?

Ezekiel spoke the word of God, and the bones came back to life and if you don’t think that you have seen that happen, think again. Recall a time when you were bottomed out with grief and sorrow and loneliness and failure and a friend or family member lifted you up and carried you with the words of love and forgiveness. That was the life giving power of the word of God.

Recall a time when you made a phone call or wrote a note to someone who was passing through a time of stress and anxiety and the next time you saw them, you saw a spark in their eyes that wasn’t there before, a glimmer of gratitude for your concern for them. That was the life giving power of the word of God.

We’ve all been Ezekiel, we’ve all been the bones.

We have all spoken the words to others, we have all had the words spoken to us.

We have all held life and we have handed life to others to hold.

We’ve all been Ezekiel, we’ve all been the bones.

I have come to the conclusion, over the years, that we who are Christians spend way too much time and energy and emotion on the questions of the nature of life in Heaven.

What will it be like? Who will be there? What are the entrance requirements? What will we do there?

Interesting questions, but unanswerable questions for now, and I think that we ask them so that we can avoid the question of the present tense.

Christ was much more concerned with the nature of life here and now.

What is it supposed to be like? Who are we supposed to be with? What are the requirements? What are we supposed to be doing here?

“I am the Resurrection and the Life . . . Do you believe this?”

And be careful how you answer.

For he is not asking if we think it is true or if we would like it to be true, this isn’t an opinion poll.

He is telling us it is true, and asking if we believe it.

Will you live it today? If you believe it you will.

Will you trust it, even when it seems to be failing, even when you and your hopes and dreams are hanging on a cross? If you believe it you will.

Will you stand by it at Eastertime when flowers bloom and bright colors abound and on the cold and lonely and gray days when your eyes tear up at the death – or the betrayal - of a friend? If you believe it you will.

Will you stand by it when the world tempts you to put power or success or popularity ahead of service and faithfulness and integrity? If you believe it you will.

You see, the Christian faith is not – as too many people seem to think - about how to endure this life so that we can get to heaven, the Christian faith is about living this life with the presence of heaven in it, to be experienced and shared, it is about how to hold life even in the middle of death.

When we gather in two weeks to celebrate Easter there are so many tunes to be played!

Yes there is the one about the empty tomb and it is an important one.

Yes there is the one about the future reunion and it is an important one.

Yes there is the one about the resurrection of life from death, and it is an important one.

But the deepest miracle is that in a world such as ours, goodness has been resurrected from evil, faith has been resurrected from doubt, enthusiasm has been resurrected from apathy, hope has been resurrected from despair and love has been resurrected from hate.

In a world such as ours, we can hold life.

And each of those resurrections, and a hundred others that I am not bright enough to recognize, can get played out in your life and your family and your job and your world.

This Easter thing that we are preparing for is the assurance that no dreams are too dead, no bones are too dry, no hearts are too empty for God’s redeeming and resurrecting love.

We’ve got two weeks to get ready, two weeks to measure where we need life, right now, two weeks to take all of that future thinking and plug into the present where it lives and belongs, two weeks to learn to take life and hold it and love it and belief in it all over again.

Jesus said to her, “I am the Resurrection and the Life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”