Gerald Mann is the pastor of the Riverbend Baptist Church in Austin.  He recently told the unbelievably tragic story of a young Afghanistani mother and her baby who were killed one night while lying in bed asleep, but not by bombs or bullets.  They were killed when an American aid package dropped from an airplane crashed through their roof and crushed them where they lay.  Aside from the question about how much tragedy one nation can endure, it made wonder.  How many times have we all said or done something fully intended to help but, because of the way our care package was delivered or because of where it landed in the life of another, it hurt more than helped?  It also brought Jesus’ words to Martha, “‘I am the resurrection and the life,’” into sharper focus. 

“‘I am the resurrection,’” Jesus said.  Two things those words mean for certain.  First, the resurrection is not just something that happened to Jesus at a point in time in the past.  It’s who he is.  This is the gospel.  When God got ready to deliver salvation to humanity, he didn’t FedEx it from heaven.  “In the beginning was the Word . . . in him was life . . . and the Word became flesh and lived among us (John 1:1, 3, 14).”  The resurrection power of God from life to death is personified in Jesus, who was born, lived and died among those he came to save.  The salvation of God is not a care package dropped on us.  It is a care person delivered to us from the womb of a woman to live where we live and die where and how we die when we sin.  God delivered his salvation in the person of Jesus who, having suffered the death of sin for us, was, by the power of God, raised to new life (Acts 2:23-24).  That is at least one thing Jesus’ words, “‘I am the resurrection and the life,’” mean. 

They also mean that to know Jesus is to know more than just something God did in history.  Jesus’ words are timelessly present tense.  Salvation is not just something God did for his son when he raised him from the dead in the past.  Salvation is the life of God in the person of Jesus now.  The resurrection is present tense good news.  It is what God is doing, will do, for all who believe.  All of which brings me to the internal struggle I face every time we celebrate Easter.  How to communicate that, what God did in history, he will do for all of us?  If all we do today is celebrate ancient history, we’ve missed the point of Jesus’ words.  How can this story of what God did in history become our story? 

Part of the pressure I’m feeling this morning has to do with the enormity of this moment.  For Christians, this is the Sunday of all Sundays.  This is Christianity’s Superbowl.  The pressure to perform is enormous.  Somewhere, in the struggle to say something meaningful this morning in telling story we’ve heard many times over, I realized that it’s not my job to make the resurrection and the promise it holds personal for any of us.  It occurred to me that death will take care of that.  It is likely that the resurrection promise of Jesus, “‘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,’” will never become truly personal to us until death becomes personal, first. 

Which is why the story of Lazarus’ resurrection is so helpful.  Lazarus was more than just a faceless, nameless statistic like all those we get out of Afghanistan when an earthquake buries people by the score.  We know Lazarus’ name.  We know his address, Bethany.  We know he had at least two sisters, Mary and Martha.  We also know that he was a close personal friend of Jesus.  In Lazarus, death drew close to Mary, Martha and Jesus.  Close enough to know it by name. 

It likely won’t be until death draws close and calls us or someone we know by name, like it did Lazarus, that it will likely mean anything to us that Jesus’ resurrection is more than just a fact of history.  Jesus made his promise to Martha and then asked, “‘Do you believe this?’”  She went on to say that she did.  But, she was standing just outside a fresh grave when she did.  Death had come close enough to call her brother by name.  Sometimes, in our youth, when our conscience is still fresh and pliable, God can get through to us.  But, for many, it’s not until death draws close that the story of Jesus’ resurrection becomes something personally meaningful to us. 

The resurrection promise of Jesus means more to me now than it ever has.  That’s partly because death has drawn closer this past year than in any one previous year.  It’s getting harder and harder to deny the fact that the time is growing closer when death will know my name.  And, if I ever forget that, God has ways of reminding me.  Several of us were sitting in a meeting the other night when the subject of Senior discounts came up.  I was protesting the fact that I get offered those more and more these days and not because I’ve asked for them.  Simply because of how mature I suppose I look to people who apparently tend to think of age in terms of broad classifications, birth, youth and death.  Anyway, I asked Christina Martin, of twenty-somethings vintage, “Do I look like I’m over sixty to you?”  I should have known by now that unless you enjoy hearing painful things, you shouldn’t ask anyone under sixty that question.  But, I asked Christina, “Do I look like I’m over sixty to you?”  In all sincerity she said, “No.  Are you?” 

God has ways of reminding us.  Sometimes death becomes his messenger.  Death has drawn closer this year.  Fresh graves hold people I knew by name who, this time last year, were celebrating Easter.  I’ve played Martha’s role more than once this year.  “Send for Jesus,” I’ve cried.  “Someone he loves and I do, too, is sick.  Send for Jesus!”  And, Jesus didn’t quite make it in time to keep death away.  Or, is that our problem?  Time. 

We tend to alter our broad classifications of time as we get older.  When we are young they are youth and death.  The older we get, the more classifications we add.  Birth, pre-school, school-age, adolescence, young adulthood, adulthood, median adulthood, senior adulthood and, as someone has said, the final stage is “Don’t he look natural?”  But we only do that to keep the truth at bay as long as possible.  As though the more we can subdivide our way away from the end, the longer we can keep from getting there.  We actually think that when death calls has something to do with what time it is in our lives.  We want to fix things in time.  Jesus’ resurrection in the past, eternity in the future.  We think it’s about “time.”  Like the older we get the closer we get to what we call “the end.”  That’s what had Mary and Martha panicked if Jesus didn’t get there in time. 

So, Jesus lingered a little while before going to Bethany.  He said, “‘This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory.’”  He later used Lazarus’ death as the opportunity to call him back to life to prove that the power of God to overcome death isn’t limited by time.  Death for those who believe wouldn’t be the end, after all, Jesus said.  When we believe, Jesus was saying, the death that should have been our end cannot divert us from life that never will end.  Eternity, Jesus was saying, is not something out there in the future, it’s a journey we’ve already begun, a life without end, the moment we believe.  Dallas Willard puts it this way.  “Our future, however far we look, is a natural extension of the faith by which we live now and the life in which we now participate.  Eternity is in flight now and we with it . . ..”  (Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, Harper, 1998, p. xvii)

That’s one way of looking at hell, too.  If you have rejected Jesus’ offer of eternal life, you shouldn’t think of hell as a place somewhere out there in future time toward which you are headed, you’re in hell already.  When Jesus came and took our sin and the death that comes with it upon himself, he transformed what should have been an exit from life into an entrance to eternal life.  His words again, “‘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.’”  Hell is nothing more or less than refusing Jesus’ offer to transform death from an exit into an entrance in this very moment.  The resurrection is not just ancient history.  It is present tense and future tense forever for all who believe.  Jesus wants to know, “‘Do (we) believe this?’” 

That belief is what makes this day significant and even gives significance to those deaths we have witnessed since this time last year when we celebrated Easter.  Deaths that, in many cases, seemed out of sync with “time” because they happened too early.  On our timeline, Nancy’s cousin, Sharon, died earlier this month, just shy of her 47^th birthday.  She and John started dating when they were only sixteen.  They married three years later and stayed that way for twenty-seven years.  They found the cancer three years ago.  She had hoped to make it until Erin graduated from high school this May.  She really tried.  And, everyone who knew her by name prayed, “Send for Jesus!  Someone he loves is sick.  Send for Jesus!”  The interesting thing is, he actually showed up.  But, not when any of us expected.

John was with her that morning after the doctor had said the time had come.  He and Sharon had a good visit.  Then, all of a sudden, she turned her head on the pillow and started talking to someone else in the room.  John couldn’t see who it was.  But, Sharon carried on quite a conversation and then, just as suddenly, turned her attention back to John.  John looked at her and said, “It’s time to go, isn’t it?”  Sharon said, “yes.”  A few minutes later, she died, or, depending on your perspective, started living again.  Remember, Jesus said, “‘Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.’” 

When Gerald Mann was talking with his wife just before she died a couple of years ago, she could tell he was having more trouble accepting it than she was.  As so often happens with people of faith, the one doing the dying ended up comforting the one who was apparently more alive.  Mann’s wife comforted him with these words.  She said, “Mann, you’re problem is that you are still struggling in the land of the dying.  I’m going to the land of the living.”

It’s always harder being the one left behind for a while.  But, it’s interesting to listen to the way John asked Sharon about her impending death.  “It’s time to go, isn’t it?”  It was his faith speaking those words.  Death, for those who trust Jesus, is never anything less than a time to go, as much as or more than to leave.  A time to go further in the journey we’ve already begun, not limited by time.  When John was telling me the story, he knew quite for certain who else was in the room with just he and Sharon when she died.  Everyone had prayed, “Send for Jesus!”  And, everyone’s prayers were answered.  Not because she was healed of her cancer.  But, because Jesus had come, in that very room, to take Sharon from the land of the dying to the land of the living.  Everyone prayed, “Send for Jesus!”