Lazarus – Wicomico Presbyterian Church

Advent 1: Being Present with Hope

Mark 13: 24-37 Every year I begin the season of Advent feeling the urge to apologize about the scriptures. This text from Mark. It’s not very cheery, is it? But there it is, with its words of dread; one calamity after another. The sun will be darkened, the moon will lose its brightness, the stars will fall from the sky. It’s like a horror movie. And we can treat it that way if we want to. My son Joe spent some time in Mississippi when he was a young man and attended a church where the pastor preached in the fire and brimstone tradition. Every Sunday he stood in the pulpit breathing threats and terror against the disciples in the pews. Every week he would end with, “come back next week and I’ll tell you more about how it’s all going to end.” And Joe kept going back. He didn’t […]

The Liberator

John 11:1-45 I was once a guest at a family’s dinner table, when they were talking about people they knew. And when the name of one particular person came up, the tone became sharply negative, critical. The matriarch of the family looked up with surprise and a little bit of confusion. Apparently, she had not received the memo: this person is on our bad list now. She looked around and said, “Oh, we don’t like them anymore?” She shrugged. “Okay.” And that was it. The unwritten rule in the household was everyone had to think alike, because disagreeing led to conflict. And “our family,” they would say, doesn’t have conflict. To be fair, all families desire agreement, want harmony in the home. Even if we are willing to harbor some disagreement, we pick our battles carefully. We don’t want conflict for the sake of conflict; if we are going […]

Heart to Heart Talks, Part 4: Grieving Alone Together

John 11:1-45 When so many things seem to be happening so fast we begin to lose our ability to gauge the passage of time. Something that happened a week ago may as well have been two months ago, because it feels like forever ago. How long have we been “social distancing?” It feels like forever. At the seminary I attended, every student was required to participate in a cross-cultural trip. The destination varied from year to year but the length of the trip was always the same: three weeks. When we asked why three weeks, the answer was this. During the first couple of weeks it just feels like a vacation. You feel like a tourist abroad; you are a foreigner in a strange land, observing the natives in their habitat. But when you get into that third week, you begin to push past that barrier and something shifts. You […]

The Scent of Sacrifice

Philippians 3:4b-14 John 12:1-8 You may recall that this scene made it into the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. Judas, growing increasingly outraged at the direction things are going, just loses it here. He sings essentially the same words that are in the text. Meanwhile, Mary and a chorus of women are singing a soothing song to Jesus, urging him to relax: try not to get worried; don’t you know everything is alright now, everything’s fine. We want you to sleep well tonight. Let the world turn without you tonight. In the play, Jesus needs soothing because he has become overwhelmed by the masses coming to him for healing. But in the actual biblical text in John’s gospel, if he needs soothing, we can probably attribute that to what has happened just before this text. In the previous chapter, Jesus has raised Lazarus from the dead. And for Lazarus and […]

Living Through Our Tears

Isaiah 25:6-9 John 11:32-44 Not long ago in our Tuesday Bible Study we discussed a text from the book of Ezra in which the people of Israel are gathering at the site of the new temple. The young ones cheer for joy and the old ones cry. And the cheers were loud and the weeping was loud, and you couldn’t make out the crying from the shouting because it was all mixed up together. Sort of like a school playground during kindergarten recess. And we mused about why the old ones were crying. Possibly because they felt a fresh wave of grief over the loss of the old temple, and all the loss that had gone with it. But it’s also possible their tears were expressions of joy and gratitude, because they were given a chance to begin again. Tears can have many meanings. Quite likely, these tears were a mixture […]