I’ve been to my fair share of funerals.  Between being a pastor and the fact that I worked at a funeral home in my former life, I’ve heard quite a few eulogies.  And at a lot of the funerals that I’ve either attended or eavesdropped on, the preacher might say, “You know, we shouldn’t cry.  Jim wouldn’t want us to cry.  He’d want us to be happy because he’s in a better place now.”

True, but maybe we want to cry, preacher!  Maybe the fact that our loved one is no longer with us makes us downright sad.  Maybe there’s a gap in our soul that this deceased loved one up until so recently filled, and we want to cry over that loss.  And didn’t Jesus say, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted?"

That same Jesus stumbles into a mournful situation in today’s Scripture reading from the Gospel of John.  A guy named Lazarus has died.  He’s the brother of Mary and Martha, the sisters who had befriended Jesus earlier in his ministry.  Jesus had heard that Lazarus was sick, so he raced over to Judea to help out.  But he was too late.  Lazarus had died.  He had been dead four days, but his family and friends were still so grief-stricken that they were gathered around Lazarus’ tomb crying.

This is the scene that Jesus encountered.  It was like the feeling a parent gets when they arrive too late to prevent their child from losing their balance and falling off their bike; or the feeling a firefighter might have when they arrive too late to save the house from burning to the ground—that feeling, only magnified ten fold.  Jesus sees this picture of human grief and he cries.  Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Savior of the World, the Son of Man, the Way and the Truth and the Life, the Shepherd of humanity, the Lamb of God—this Jesus cries.

But then you can almost see Jesus wipe away his tears with the sleeve of his robe, and then he says, “Alright, move the stone away from that tomb. Let’s go, people.  There’s no time for this cry fest.  Lazarus needs to get out of there.  He’s not dead.  He’s alive.”  And just like that Jesus performs a miracle, and here we have the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead.

But there’s a myth that we need to dispel this morning.  It’s tempting to think that Jesus was so overwhelmed by his own grief that he raised Lazarus from the dead.  It’s easy to imagine Jesus looking around at a crowd of sad people, crying with them and then saying to himself, “I can fix this, so I’ll perform this miracle.”

But that interpretation makes Jesus look like more of a superhero than a savior.  What’s worse, if we interpret the story that way, then we might be led to believe that if we cry enough, if we take enough licks, if we suffer enough, then Super Jesus will come to our rescue and everything will be OK.  That is a myth that Christians can’t afford to believe.  Still, in Christian circles, the story of Lazarus is such a big deal that it’s iconic.  All that people take from the story is the dead guy coming back to life.

A friend of mine told me about how his girlfriend wanted to surprise him with the gift of a tiny fishbowl holding a goldfish.  She left the gift on a table just inside his front door one night.  And when my friend came home, he didn’t bother turning the lights on and, as a result, accidentally knocked his miniature fishbowl onto the floor.  But he didn’t realize it until the next morning when he found this fish on the carpet next to the toppled fishbowl.  The fish was still alive, so he put him back in the bowl, fed him a pinch of fish food and said, “I think I’ll call you Lazarus.”

And on Halloween I got a kick out of something I noticed on TV.  I’m a slasher movie fan, so I was surfing around the TV for a horror flick and I happened upon Friday the 13th VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.  A boat is anchored above the watery grave of the killer, Jason, and when an electrical wire breaks, it sends a current down the anchor, which touches Jason, jolting him back to life, at which point he climbs onto the boat full of unsuspecting teenagers and goes on a killing spree.  And the name of the boat is the S.S. Lazarus.

The Scripture says that Jesus wept because he was deeply moved and troubled.  And the translation of ‘deeply moved’ comes from the New Testament Greek word ‘enebrimēsato.’  Enebrimēsato is customarily used to describe anger.  That changes things a little, doesn’t it?  Jesus was angry, so he cried.  What was he so angry about?

The New International Version of the Bible says that Jesus was also troubled, and the New Revised Standard Version says that he was disturbed.  Jesus was angry and disturbed, so he cried.

And the scene that conjured these emotions in Jesus was a gathering of people—people like you and me—crying and grieving over a loved one who had been dead four days.  And another thing that triggers Jesus’ emotions is Mary going up to him in the middle of this scene, clutching his robe and lamenting to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died!”

Part of the reason for Jesus feeling disturbed and troubled was that he was looking at that grave where Lazarus was lying, and what flashed through his mind was the thought, “O God!  That is going to happen to me.  That’s going to be me in there.”  After all, the very next story in John after this Lazarus story is the account of the people’s plot to kill Jesus.

But let’s get back to us: you and me—the people mourning.  This scene makes Jesus weep.  Why?  Grieving solemnly after four days.  Reminding Jesus that he could’ve saved the day had he arrived earlier.  Maybe Jesus was angry and disturbed partially because God’s creation had been ruptured at the death of this man, Lazarus; but maybe he was angry and disturbed because the grieving crowd could not let go.  At this point the grief had moved beyond sorrow and loss.  This grief was about what could have been, and the tears wept were tears of self-imprisonment.  The people were crying for the same reasons that our 21st century society cries: we cannot let go.

Can you imagine if Jesus were to stumble into our 21st century scene right now how angry and disturbed he would be?  We live in a culture where aging is a killer; not a blessing that is part of life.  It’s an age of skin cream and lifts and nips and tucks.  Ours is an age of my money, my property, my territory, my resources.  We can’t let go of those!

It’s an age of democracy being more about indifference toward diversity and securing the loudest opinion in the land instead of an embrace of differences to assure that the people’s voices will truly be heard.  We cling to dreams, goals, agendas and even to the people we love like an infant clings to our finger.  But an infant won’t let go because it doesn’t know better—not letting go is all the infant knows.

Madonna still sings Material Girl, KISS has been on the same farewell tour since 2000, and David Lee Roth still tries to squeeze into spandex pants.  Whether you look at it tongue-in-cheek or with a furrowed brow, this is our world that Jesus would see, and it would surely make him angry and disturbed.

Then he would see a world that clings to the grudges of history so much that walls are erected, not torn down; religions are intolerant of one another; racism is just as acceptable now as it was when Dr. King proclaimed that he had a dream; wars are waged; and nations like ours cannot let go of nuclear arms, even after we have seen the destruction they can cause.  Jesus sees this and cries.

The real miracle in the Lazarus story is not about the resurrection miracle itself, but what we can learn from it and do as a result of it.  When Lazarus comes out of the tomb, the first thing Jesus says is, “Unbind him and let him go.”  It was hard enough for Lazarus’ loved ones to let go of him when he died.  Now Jesus was telling them they had to let go of him in life.  “Unbind him and let him go.”

Friends, I think the real miracles are just waiting for us to discover for ourselves; and Jesus, our teacher, knows that.  Jesus knows that if we let go of the living as we see it, then they can live as God hopes for them to be.  If we let go of those things that take life, then God can give us life.

In the NIV Bible, Jesus says, “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.”  It seems there is attire for every occasion, including death, and that calls for grave clothes.  Believe me, you and I have grave clothes in our closets.  We might even have our grave clothes on right now.

But it’s not time to wear those clothes yet.  We’re alive, breathing in the Holy Spirit of God’s creation and breathing out the promises of new life.  Today Jesus stumbles into the scenes of our lives and says, “Take off those grave clothes.  Be unbound.  Free yourself.  Let the dead stuff go, because I am the way and the truth and the life!”

So, what are your grave clothes?  What is oppressing you?  What is keeping you in prison?  What is making you a walking dead zombie instead of a fully alive child of God?  Are you wearing a shirt woven from the fear of what people think of you?  Are you wearing pants stitched together by the mistrust of your neighbor?  Are you wearing a coat sewn by the fabric of what might happen if you fail in the eyes of your friends?  Are you wearing a scarf knit by the threads of anxiety over losing the people you love?  Under the weight of those garments, we suffer.  And this is our blessed assurance: when we suffer, God suffers under that same weight, and Jesus weeps and says, “Be unbound!  Take off those grave clothes and be free!”

It’s interesting that today marks the official kickoff of the 50th anniversary of the United Church of Christ, and it’s All Saints Day.  How do these two fit together?  They both have to do with celebrating what has happened before this moment—before us gathering in this sanctuary on November 5th, 2006.  It’s about celebrating the past so that we can live boldly and strongly in the present.

I think a verse from the prophet Isaiah captures this day perfectly: “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.  He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners.”  That’s Isaiah talking.  Isaiah: the servant of God.

To be a servant of God, one must be about liberating, empowering, freeing the imprisoned and the oppressed, whatever that situation may be.  Basically, (and this is very important for us to understand) servants of God are supposed to be life-giving, not clinging to death.

There was as method to his madness when Jesus said, “Let the dead bury the dead.”  We only have precious years—precious days—to live, and serve, and hope, and love, and be.  Isn’t that what our saints did for us?  Shouldn’t we pick up their charge mirrored after Christ’s service and continue that servant living?

The United Church of Christ of 50 years is looking on us this morning and wondering, “What will this community of faith do in the name of Christ’s liberation and empowerment in 2007?”  And our saints, the people we love who have died and left us with memories and material items and wisdom and grief, they are looking at us.  They’re hoping that we have been blessed in our mourning.  They’re hoping that we have learned something from their life, despite our anguish over their death.

Jesus was disturbed at the people’s sorrow, so he raised Lazarus from the dead.  And his instructions after that were simple: Unbind him and let him go.  It can be one of life’s greatest challenges for us to let go of our loved ones when they die, but why on earth does God want us to let go of the one’s we love when they’re alive here with us?

Letting go doesn’t mean saying ‘goodbye.’  Letting go means that we set each other free.  We help each other become all that God intends for us to be.  We serve each other as Christ served us.  And we take off those grave clothes that are all about how much our loved ones do for us; and we walk in the newness of life that is about how we can serve our loved ones.  That’s not only servant living, that’s saintly living.