Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost
“All Saints”
Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Ecclesiastes 3:3-11/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (John 11:32-44/NRSVUE)
A couple of weeks ago, Valerie and I got to spend some time down in the Island in the Sky District of Canyonlands National Park, which was pretty awesome. This giant mesa sits more than a thousand feet above the canyon floor, which makes for some incredible views, but there’s a definite downside to this unique topography as well.
You see, the area up top has no ponds or lakes or reservoirs, and the Colorado and Green Rivers that meander below are really far away and beholden to the force of gravity, which means that this part of the park has no running water whatsoever. Now those of you who have been there before probably knew this already, but it was definitely a surprise to us.
We rolled into the park around eight on Saturday morning and figured we’d avail ourselves of the visitor’s center’s facilities before hitting the trails. Out of respect for you I won’t get too graphic, but let’s just say those holes in the ground posing as toilets were a real feast for the senses — particularly, the olfactory one.
Look, I’;l be the first one to admit that I, having spent most of my life in urban and suburban settings, am a bit spoiled and high maintenance when it comes to bathrooms, but these were positively awful by anyone’s standards.
As we were getting back in the car to begin our day of adventure, I saw one of the park workers out of the corner of my eye making his way toward the row of potties with a bucket full of cleaning products and a scrub brush, and while I suppose this was a welcome sight, I couldn’t help but think, “Where were you five minutes ago when I needed you?” It’s often said that timing is everything in life, and those words definitely rang true for me right then and there.
Now don’t get me wrong, we had a great time in Southern Utah going to some wonderful places to which neither of us had ever been before, but as we headed out of Moab to begin the long ride home, Val said to me, “The canyons were beautiful, but the one thing I will never, ever forget about this trip is the smell of those bathrooms; it’s permanently etched in my nostrils and in my mind.” If I ever get near one again it will always remind me of Canyonlands. It’s probably not the result the National Park Service was aiming for, but I can’t say that I disagree with her.
Smell has an incredibly strong link to memory, and the reasons for this are manifested in human physiology. Our noses contain hundreds of receptors that take in specific types of odor molecules. When those molecules meet their receptors, as Dr. Sandeep Robert Datta of Harvard Medical School explains, it’s “like a key being inserted into a lock.” This meeting of odors and receptors triggers neurons to fire and their electrical signals to be transmitted to different parts of the brain — eventually ending up in those involved in learning, emotion, and memory.
And if a smell were to be connected with an emotionally significant moment, the brain can away file away information about that connection indefinitely. As a result, even years later, a scent can just show up, unlock our memory banks and return us to the experiences from our past — good or bad or ambivalent — that are linked to them. The moral of the story for me: from now on, just vacation in places that have plumbing. The moral of the story more broadly: some things are really tough for us humans to leave behind, no matter how badly we might want or try to do so.
In today’s second reading, we hear part of the story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead — which is Jesus’s greatest and final sign in John’s Gospel. It’s such a humdinger, in fact, that the chief priests and Pharisees decide to implement their plan to execute Jesus to death right after it takes place.
It shouldn’t have be a surprise — I mean Jesus told them seven chapters earlier that this would happen, that “the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live,” but very few people actually thought he could be telling truth. But now that the previously-dead Lazarus has gotten up and walked right out of his tomb, inspiring the multitudes to believe in Jesus, the authorities decide that they need to put a stop to him once and for all (though, as we know, that’s not the way things are ultimately going to turn out).
Lazarus is the brother of Mary and Martha, who appear earlier in the story (Mary is the one who anoints Jesus with expensive perfume and wipes his feet with her hair). Lazarus falls ill and Jesus, even though he loves this family a whole bunch, takes his sweet time going to visit his sick friend. And, by the time Jesus arrives, Lazarus is dead.
Mary and Martha aren’t very happy about this because they know who Jesus is and what he’s capable of. In our reading, Mary takes Jesus to task as Martha has previously done, kneeling at his feet weeping, and saying to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
John tells us that, “When Jesus saw her weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” Jesus himself begins to weep as he asks Mary to take him to Lazarus’s tomb — and, on the way, bystanders pose the same million-dollar question that Martha and Mary already have posed, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”
When they arrived at the tomb, “Jesus said, ‘Take away the stone.’ Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, ‘Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.’” The King James Version’s rendering of this particular event is pretty memorable as well: “‘Take ye away the stone.’ Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, “Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days.’” Stinketh? Yeah, I bet he did.
And I wonder if that smell of death, having made the journey from their nostrils to their minds would ever really leave them; I wonder when that key might appear once again and unlock the vault of their memory, reminding them of their loved one who’d died, reminding them that they too would die one day, reminding them that death was always looming large, as this story reminds us that death is always looming large. Like it or not, death is just part of what it means to be human. I have no idea why this is true, but I do know that it’s true — we all know that it’s true.
You see, even though Lazarus is brought back to life here, his reprieve from death in this world is but temporary, for he will die again one day — as we all will. It may sound like splitting hairs but, it’s not: being raised from the dead and being resurrected are very different things — Lazarus experiences the former (which is fleeting), while the gospels tell us that Jesus experiences the latter (which is permanent).
Yet, Mary and Martha and the people lining the streets leading to Lazarus’s tomb raise an important question — one that crosses everybody’s mind at some point: If Jesus is the Son of God, if Jesus is Emmanuel — God with us — then why couldn’t he keep this man from dying? Why can’t he keep all of us from dying? I have no idea, only God truly knows the answer to that one.
And so Jesus’s raising of Lazarus might seem to some like a cheap parlor trick aimed at convincing impressionable rubes to believe in his power, to believe that he is, indeed, the Son of God. And the cynics in our midst might wonder why Jesus chooses to delay his arrival on the scene until after Lazarus is already dead. Is it purely for dramatic effect? Is he like a person who lights their neighbor’s house on fire so they can be praised on the evening news for putting it out with their garden hose? I’m not sure I want any part of a Savior like that, or of a God like that either.
Then again, perhaps Lazarus’s raising — this last and greatest of Jesus’s signs — isn’t even the most amazing thing that happens in this story. Maybe the real miracle here is a God who chooses to come to us, amidst the ubiquitous and horrible reality of death in our world, to receive willingly all of our sadness and anger and frustration about it: Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died, my sister would not have died, your Mom or your Dad, or your partner or your child wouldn’t not have died. Where the hell were you when they needed you, O God, where the hell were you when I needed you?
Right here. Walking beside you weeping as you weep, greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved, out of love for you.
When the reality of death comes your way, which it inevitably will, or when the memory of a lost loved one is somehow unlocked in your mind, may that same key open the door to this story — to the steadfast presence of a God who promises to accompany us through all of the pain this world has to offer until we can be together with one another and with God in a place where there is no more pain, no more suffering, no more sadness no more death — a place where the sweet smell of perfume wafts over the tomb, and things no longer stinketh.