Sermon Notes: The Fifth Sunday in Lent 2020

Psalm 130

Ezekiel 37.1-14

Romans 8.6-11

John 11.1-45

What Are We Waiting For?

What are we waiting for? That is a question we have all asked in the past several weeks! As we complain about, and perhaps even debate,  the shelter-in-place order and all the ways it has inconvenienced our lives and impacted our futures, we are left waiting. Waiting for the virus to run its course; waiting for the spread to end; waiting to get back to work; waiting for more bandwidth; waiting for the rain to stop so we can go outside; waiting for the day we can see our friends; waiting for the time when we can be together again and pass the peace after sharing in the life of God at the Eucharist table. 

Our texts for this Fifth Sunday in Lent remind us of what we are ultimately waiting for: the restoration of all things; the defeat of death; the promises of God to become actualized. The circumstances surrounding COVID-19 remind us that we are still in the wilderness. (In the prosperous age we live in, sometimes it is good to have this reminder.) We are still in the valley of dry bones, waiting for the breath of God to enter us and give us life that will last. 

In the midst of our waiting, Psalm 130 focuses us: hope in the LORD! Hope in his word, his promises. Put your hope in that which God is doing for this world. Wait for the steadfast love of God to appear, to make its surprising entry into our wilderness struggles. Psalm 130 reminds us that our wilderness of waiting is the culmination of personal, corporate, and systemic sins that are entwined in such a mess that it sees impossible to untangle; sins we have inherited, sins we have perpetuated, sins we have committed with word and deed, and sins we have committed by leaving things undone;  we are all both victims and victimizers--and like it or not we are all in this together. The good news is that God will redeem Israel, and the whole world of its iniquities (Psa 130.8). He will untangle our mess. 

Our texts from Ezekiel 37 and John 11 point us to the last chapter of that untangling--to the defeat of death, the the resurrection of the dead. The graves will be open, we shall live; we shall be restored to the land. What God offers us is not merely a spiritual salvation--deliverance from the physical world. Rather, he has tied himself to beauty of his creation project; his salvation must restore all things. Like Lazarus, our hope is not that we shall become disembodied spirits living in some otherwordly place, but that we too shall come out of our graves and live. 

This hope enables us to live differently in this wilderness of waiting. We do not have to take and keep. Death is not the ultimate force in the world, driving us to compete against one another for resources and life (as Darwin would have it). We know differently. We know that life is the last word--so that even death in obedience to God, death in service of neighbor, is not the end. So we we are freed to love, to suffer in a rebellious world. 

But to live in this way in our wilderness of waiting, we must set our minds on the Spirit, Paul says in Romans 8. That is, we must participate in this new life initiated by the Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead--a foretaste of the life that awaits us. We do not have to take and keep; we do not have to compete for limited resources; we do not have to live by the rules of the age (this is what Paul means when he talks about setting our minds on the flesh). Instead, we can receive and give. The Spirit, who dwells among us, is leading us to  see, to live, to love differently; He is conforming us to Christ and his faithful image-bearing; we no longer bow to our impulses, our instincts, and our desires that have been shaped by the age of Adam, the age of what Paul calls "flesh". Instead, we learn a new way of life in the wilderness as the Spirit already breathes life into our dead bones while we await, as Paul says later in Romans 8, the redemption of our bodies (Rom 8.23). 

The Spirit helps us in our weakness, in our wilderness, in our waiting. He even intercedes for us, working is us to will and work for God's kingdom, His good pleasure (Rom 8.26/Phil 2.13). So, let's focus our waiting. Let's wait in particular on what the Lord will provide for us now to live in the way that bear witness to our future hope. 

Paul's point in our Romans 8 reading is that we belong to Christ; the Spirit who raised Christ from the dead is giving life to our mortal bodies--now. We can walk in newness of life (Rom 6.4). We can bear witness to the life that is to come--by keeping in step with the Spirit. 

In this season of Lent, our homework is to explore what this means. Let's ask God once again what it means to "walk according to the Spirit", to "set our minds on the Spirit of life and peace". Alone. And together.