After the Thrill is Gone...Laughter!

Lent 5, Year A

Text: John 11.1-45

Although I was not a card-carrying fan of John Cougar in the 80's, as I get older I have to appreciate the wisdom of his “ditty” about Jack and Diane. How can you fault a chorus that goes “Oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone”? In my teen years I did not get what it meant nor did I care. 

Now, in my forties, it’s a different story, especially as I ponder my vacation reading of Angle of Repose by Wallace Steger, a novel is all about life going on, long after the thrill of living is gone. It’s about how a conflicted pioneer couple were able to find that angle of repose, that way of being together, long after the thrill of courtship and romantic hopes for the future had been buried deep in the mines of the West, long after failures and hurts, betrayals and tragedies, had eroded their lives together. In their later years they reached a point of surrender, a hidden grace to keep them together. Still, the reader wants more for them. Is the best we can hope for repose, a kind of malaise, life without the thrill?

Maybe it's a good thing that life goes on without endless thrill, and yet there are times when something pierces the daily routine and calls our attention to something greater. An unpredictable moment of truth and decision. That something happens in our readings today, as dry bones- a myriad of them – are re-knit together with flesh and muscle to become living, human beings with breath again. It happens amid the funeral routines of a small family as their loved one is laid in a tomb; and as all the trappings of death play the shrill tune we are all too well attuned to: death is final, and death is our destiny.  It’s the latent despair behind the saying on my Professor William Spong’s wall: “Life is what happens while you’re waiting to die.”

The despairing signs are there: Mary and Martha, pleading, “If you had only come earlier, he wouldn’t have died!”; the professional mourners, “If he can open the eyes of the blind can he not also prevent death?”; Martha, “Are you kidding me? Open the tomb? He’s been in there 4 days, he’s got to stink!” These are the words, our words, of those for whom the thrill has been gone, and the finality of death as seeped in, now our defining metaphor. One so defining we fail to see how confining it is.

I don’t know if it would make very good theater, but playwright Eugene O’Neil calls us on the confines we create in his play “Lazarus Laughed”, as he shows a returning Lazarus, having enjoyed 4 days of heaven’s delight, shouting “Yes!” in fits of laughter. In fact, Lazarus’s unstoppable laughter gets him in trouble – Judean leaders think he’s blaspheming God, followers of Jesus think he’s betraying their Lord.  Greeks try to idolize him as an avatar of Dionysus. Romans try to snuff him out, because if there is no fear of death then there is no imperial power. Yet despite all their attempts to silence Lazarus, he cannot help but laugh at the games we play in our attempts to tame life, to sap it of its wonder, and to drown out the din of God’s laughter with the droning hum of routine whose author is Death.

Lazarus knows firsthand the fulsome life God intends. But for us, it takes a raising of someone like Lazarus – and more profoundly still, of Jesus, to shake us out of complacency. Can we stumble on the thrill of living? We celebrate Easter every year not to place resurrection on a predictable timetable, but only to show that resurrection happens, in different ways, at different times in our lives. Paul Martinson of Luther Seminary once wrote that Christianity is a faith not of discovery, but surprise. We go to our tombs – those places where we are bound and tied up, the places of darkness and disappointment, failure and fear, places of hurt and betrayal and tragedy --places we hazard only by compulsion –as if sleuths or archeologists, asking “What happened here?” But as we dig we are surprised that someone has already been there before us, bringing life to dry bones, and calling us by name, shouting: “Be unbound, Be set free!”  We peer in. The tomb is empty, trappings of death are left behind.

If a reading like today’s causes our eyes to glaze over from familiarity (or length!) it’s only because we are so captive to the deathly repetition that we fail to see the resurrection before us. Even when the thrill of living is gone, Surprise! Resurrection happens! God’s laughing matter in the midst of our dead seriousness.