William H. Willimon - "Lord of Life" (March 28, 1993)

Download
- Rights
- Limited Re-Use
  CC BY-NC 4.0
  More Rights Info
- Files (1)
- MP3
- Please be patient with media downloads. They are often large files.
Share

Embed Code
<iframe src='//idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r42805c7t?embed=true' height='125px' width='100%' frameborder='0' marginwidth='0' marginheight='0' scrolling='no' allowfullscreen></iframe>
Permalink

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r42805c7t
Skip to Item Info

Loading the media player...

Files for this Item

Transcript

Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.

-	Our choir has just sung a portion of Benjamin Britten's	0:16
	war requiem, Britten wrote the war requiem	0:20
	as Europe lay in ruins after its most disastrous war	0:25
	and Britten said that he wrote the requiem	0:32
	so death and destruction	0:35
	might not have the last word in Europe.	0:38
	And I think that is related to our scripture	0:44
	and the sermon for today.	0:48
	Hear the gospel for this fifth Sunday of Lent.	0:50
	Now, a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany,	0:56
	the village of Mary and her sister Martha.	1:01
	Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume	1:04
	and wiped His feet with her hair.	1:08
	Her brother Lazarus was ill.	1:10
	So the sisters sent a message to Jesus,	1:13
	"Lord, he whom you love is ill."	1:17
	But when Jesus heard it, he said,	1:21
	"This illness does not lead to death,	1:23
	"rather it's for God's glory,	1:25
	"so the Son of God may by glorified through it."	1:27
	Accordingly though, Jesus loved Martha and her sister	1:30
	and Lazarus. After having heard that Lazarus was ill,	1:33
	Jesus stayed two days longer at the place where he was.	1:38
	Then after this, he said to his disciples,	1:42
	"Let us go to Judea again."	1:45
	The disciples said, "Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying	1:48
	"to stone you and you're going there again?"	1:52
	He told them, "Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep,	1:55
	"I am going there to awaken him."	1:59
	The disciples said, "Lord, if he's fallen asleep,	2:02
	he'll be alright."	2:05
	Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death.	2:07
	They thought he was referring merely to sleep.	2:11
	Jesus told them plainly, "Lazarus is dead.	2:14
	"For your sake, I am glad I was not there	2:20
	"so that you may believe, but let us go to him."	2:22
	Thomas, who was called twin, said to his fellow disciples,	2:26
	"Let us also go that we may die with him."	2:31
	When Jesus arrived, he had found that Lazarus	2:36
	had already been in the tomb four days.	2:38
	Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away,	2:41
	and many of the Jews had come	2:44
	to Mary and Martha to console them.	2:45
	When Martha heard that Jesus was coming,	2:48
	she went and met him, but Mary stayed at home.	2:51
	Martha said to Jesus, "Lord, if you had been here,	2:55
	"my brother wouldn't have died!"	2:58
	Jesus said, "Your brother will rise again."	3:01
	Martha said, "I know he will rise again	3:04
	"on the resurrection on the last day."	3:07
	Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life.	3:10
	"Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live,	3:15
	"and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.	3:20
	"Do you believe this?	3:24
	She said, "Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah,	3:27
	the Son of God, the one coming into the world."	3:32
	When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him,	3:37
	she knelt at his feet and said, "Lord, if you had been here,	3:39
	"my brother wouldn't have died!"	3:42
	When Jesus saw her weeping,	3:44
	and the Jews with who came with her also weeping,	3:46
	he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.	3:48
	He said, "Where have you laid him?"	3:52
	They said, "Lord, come and see."	3:55
	And Jesus began to weep.	3:58
	The Jews said, "See how he loved him."	4:00
	But some of them said, "Could not he who opened	4:04
	"the eyes of a blind man kept this man from dying?"	4:07
	Then Jesus, again, greatly disturbed, came to the tomb.	4:11
	It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it.	4:15
	And Jesus said, "Take away the stone!"	4:20
	Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him,	4:23
	"Lord, already there's a stench, he's been dead four days!"	4:25
	Jesus said to her, "Did I not tell you that if you believe	4:30
	"you would see the glory of God?"	4:33
	So they took away the stone.	4:35
	Jesus looked up and said, "Father I thank you	4:37
	"for having heard me, I knew that you always heard me,	4:40
	"but I have said this	4:43
	"for the sake of the crowd standing here	4:44
	"so that they may believe that you sent me."	4:46
	And when He said this, He cried out with a loud voice,	4:49
	"Lazarus, come out!"	4:53
	And the dead man came out,	4:55
	his hands and his feet bound with strips of cloth,	4:56
	his face wrapped with cloth.	4:59
	Jesus said, "Unbind him, and let him go."	5:01
	This is the word of the Lord.	5:07
	In his stoic meditations, Marcus Aurelius says	5:19
	that the goal of education	5:25
	is to produce somebody who is not world-about.	5:29
	Wisdom occurs in that moment in your life,	5:36
	according to Marcus Aurelius, when you are no longer tossed	5:39
	to and fro, and world-about,	5:43
	when nobody else is pulling your strings.	5:44
	When we ceased to be determined by external force.	5:49
	And we believe in that kind of freedom.	5:57
	I teach a freshman seminar,	6:02
	and in the seminar, we talk about freedom.	6:03
	And I always ask these first-year students,	6:06
	"Are you free?"	6:09
	and they always say that they are.	6:10
	They usually say something like, "Well, I was fortunate,	6:12
	"I was raised by a couple of enlightened parents	6:15
	"who trusted me to make my own decisions	6:18
	"and they fairly much let me do what I wanted to do."	6:21
	And then I usually ask,	6:27
	"Well, what if you had not wanted to come to Duke?	6:28
	"What if, say, when you finished high school,	6:34
	"you had said to your parents, 'I now feel called by God	6:36
	"'to work on Chevrolet transmissions the rest of my life.'	6:40
	"Would you have been free to do that?"	6:45
	And vaunted claims of freshman freedom wilt.	6:49
	And we start to think about the subtle, yet powerful ways	6:55
	that our strings get pulled in this life.	7:00
	So much that we say of ourselves, thinking that we're free,	7:07
	we're not really free.	7:11
	There is other determinism working among us	7:13
	than our own willing and acting.	7:16
	Thomas Hobbes mocked our claims of freedom when he said,	7:19
	"We are like a top that is spun by boys,	7:23
	and the top whirls around and it bounces off the furniture	7:27
	and ricochets off the wall, and if that top could think,	7:30
	that top would think	7:34
	that it was moving of its own volition,	7:35
	simply because it was whirling.	7:38
	Likewise, the philosopher Spinoza said that,	7:42
	"If a stone could think,	7:45
	"and that stone were hurled across the river,	7:47
	"undoubtedly, that stone would think	7:50
	"that it was going across the river because it wanted to."	7:53
	Free?	8:00
	Who pulls your strings?	8:04
	Who determines who we are, and what we believe in	8:10
	and work for the most?	8:15
	It was once the biggest,	8:20
	most overly-built building on this campus was this chapel.	8:21
	But not anymore, the biggest building is Duke Hospital.	8:26
	Now what does that tell you?	8:31
	Perhaps I should say, the biggest, most overly-built	8:33
	and ultimately ineffective building on campus	8:35
	is the hospital, because despite our best efforts,	8:38
	I don't think the hospital	8:45
	has come up for a cure for what really ails us.	8:47
	And when you get a people who put so much	8:52
	into the effort	8:56
	of health care, you may wonder, is it health care	8:58
	or is it death care	9:02
	because health care is one thing,	9:06
	but dealing with death is quite another,	9:08
	requiring the largest, most expensive building in town.	9:11
	And the greatest expenditure of our national product.	9:16
	And when that happens,	9:22
	something more than health care is pulling our strings.	9:23
	Ford Motor Company spends more each year	9:26
	on employee health care than it does on steel.	9:29
	The whole world has become a hospital,	9:36
	with Dr. Joe and Terry Graedon as our priests.	9:39
	I'm saying that we're not really as free as we claim.	9:43
	I'm saying that maybe death is pulling our strings.	9:48
	Maybe Bill will be able to tame the national deficit.	9:53
	But even Hillary's health care plan will not solve death.	9:58
	And if we can't do something about our dying,	10:05
	we really haven't done much about anything.	10:08
	I tell you, we're jerked around by death.	10:14
	The pharaohs had their pyramids.	10:19
	Not too long ago, we had our bombs against the Russians.	10:21
	Now we've got national health care.	10:26
	Because we build bombs, and we build hospitals	10:29
	for much the same reason.	10:32
	As we said right here, on the first Sunday of Lent,	10:36
	whenever we humans get together,	10:40
	and whenever we work and join together	10:42
	and use our creativity, the main agenda for us	10:44
	is what to do about our death.	10:49
	We're jerked around by death.	10:53
	And I have noted, as a pastor,	10:56
	that when I go over to visit at the hospital,	10:58
	and I'm visiting someone in sickness and pain,	11:00
	I've noted, I walk a little faster	11:04
	when I'm leaving the hospital than when I came,	11:07
	now why is that?	11:10
	And so, today's story begins with illness.	11:16
	Lazarus is ill over in Bethany.	11:20
	He's being cared for by his two sisters, Mary and Martha,	11:24
	whom you've met before.	11:27
	You remember Mary, she was the one, the impractical one,	11:28
	who later would pour oil,	11:32
	that sweet smelling perfume all over Jesus.	11:33
	And you remember Martha, she's the one	11:38
	who made her matza from scratch and was good in the kitchen.	11:39
	She was the practical one, Martha.	11:42
	And the sisters' message to Jesus is short and to the point.	11:46
	"Lord, Lazarus, whom You love, is ill."	11:51
	Now watch Jesus.	11:59
	Jesus responds by saying,	12:02
	"Ah, this isn't an illness unto death."	12:04
	Which is strange because he hasn't even seen Lazarus yet,	12:07
	how would he know?	12:10
	And then, more curious, after receiving	12:13
	this anguished summons to the bedside of Lazarus,	12:17
	Jesus hangs around where he is two more days	12:23
	before heading off to Bethany, now explain that.	12:28
	It doesn't say Jesus was in the middle of a lecture,	12:32
	doesn't say that he was busy where he was,	12:34
	he just hangs around there two full days.	12:36
	Now you'd think that Jesus, Mr. Compassion,	12:43
	would drop everything he was doing	12:45
	and take the night train to Bethany and get over there.	12:47
	It's not that he's in the middle of something important,	12:50
	John just says he stayed there	12:53
	two days longer in the place where he was.	12:55
	When Jesus finally gets around to heading off to Bethany,	13:00
	his disciples warn him, "Master, your enemies	13:04
	"are over there, and they are waiting to kill you.	13:07
	"You're going there again?"	13:10
	Jesus pays them and their talk about death no mind.	13:14
	He heads out.	13:20
	"Well," says Thomas,	13:22
	"I guess we'll go and die there with Him,	13:24
	"let's all go together."	13:27
	If you notice, death is just everywhere in this story.	13:31
	Lazarus is dying,	13:35
	the disciples are resigned to their dying,	13:38
	and yet somehow you get the impression that Jesus	13:42
	is somehow oblivious to this dying,	13:47
	He has a sort of cavalier attitude	13:50
	to all this death seeping up out of the pavement around Him.	13:53
	He's somehow free.	13:59
	Well, when Jesus finally gets over	14:03
	to Bethany a couple of days later, it's all over.	14:05
	Lazarus has been wrapped in his shroud,	14:09
	entombed like a mummy for four days.	14:12
	And Martha comes out first	14:17
	to give Jesus a piece of her mind.	14:19
	"Lord, if you had gotten off your Bible study	14:23
	"and gotten over here, Lazarus, my brother,	14:28
	"wouldn't have been dead."	14:31
	And Jesus kinda brushes it off,	14:34
	"Ah, your brother will rise again."	14:35
	And then Martha says, "Yeah, yeah, I know all about	14:39
	"the resurrection of the dead on the last day, someday,	14:41
	"I know all about that."	14:44
	And you get the impression here that Martha feels	14:47
	much the same way we might feel on a similar occasion,	14:51
	she doesn't want any pious talk,	14:54
	she doesn't want any theological platitudes	14:56
	delivered to her like, "Martha, this is just God's will	14:58
	"you've got to learn to accept it."	15:03
	Or, "Martha, he's gone on to a better place,	15:05
	"don't worry about it."	15:08
	She doesn't want any of that now,	15:10
	any of this talk about resurrection.	15:12
	She knows all of that stuff in her brain,	15:15
	but her main problem is, "What's gonna become of me now?	15:17
	"An unmarried woman, in this place, in this time,	15:20
	"with my brother dead, I'm as good as dead."	15:23
	Martha and Mary are now good as dead themselves.	15:29
	But Jesus isn't talking	15:35
	some abstract theology of the resurrection.	15:37
	He says to her not, "Believe that someday	15:40
	"your brother Lazarus will be resurrected."	15:44
	or, "You'll see him again in heaven."	15:47
	Jesus says to her, "I am the resurrection,	15:50
	"and I am the life."	15:55
	Not, "I have come to form a seminar	16:01
	with you about the idea of resurrection."	16:04
	but he says, "You're looking at resurrection, I am life."	16:08
	Do you believe it?	16:16
	That's what he asks Martha, "Do you believe it?"	16:19
	And even old, down-to-earth, pots-and-pans, practical Martha	16:24
	makes the most extravagant, effusive,	16:30
	explicit statement of faith	16:35
	in all the Gospel of John up to this point,	16:38
	"Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah,	16:42
	the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world."	16:48
	And then they go out to the cemetery, the city of the dead,	16:55
	the place of the dead, and when they get there,	16:59
	everybody in town is out there at the cemetery, weeping.	17:02
	And John says that for the first time when Jesus gets out	17:07
	to the cemetery, He gets greatly disturbed Himself.	17:10
	He is greatly disturbed in spirit, He is deeply moved,	17:14
	and when he saw the tomb of Lazarus,	17:18
	Jesus himself begins to weep.	17:22
	It's like I told you, Jesus, Mr. Resurrection,	17:27
	Jesus, Mr. Life, just hates death.	17:30
	This is the first time in the story	17:36
	when he's really worked up.	17:37
	He just hates to be there with all the death	17:39
	and the dying and the pain.	17:42
	"Take away the stone!" Jesus commands.	17:44
	And good old, realistic, practical,	17:48
	pots-and-pans Martha says, "Lord, there's a stench in there,	17:50
	"he's been dead four days!"	17:54
	And then Jesus	17:58
	with a voice loud enough to wake the dead says,	17:59
	"Lazarus, come out!"	18:03
	And the dead man comes out.	18:06
	His hands and his feet bound with strips of cloth	18:08
	and his face wrapped up with a cloth,	18:11
	he looks like a mummy, he's all bound	18:13
	and he's all tied up by death.	18:16
	There stands Lazarus,	18:19
	and then Jesus says in another loud voice, "Unbind him	18:21
	"and let him loose."	18:25
	Now with whom do you identify in this story?	18:32
	Mary, Martha, yes?	18:38
	Because there's always enough grief in this world	18:42
	to help you to identify with this,	18:45
	and even if right now, this Sunday,	18:48
	you are not going through the crisis of grief,	18:50
	you know down deep somewhere, that in the right moment	18:53
	and with the right word and the right occasion,	18:56
	that grief is ready to bubble up again.	18:58
	That's the way we are with grief,	19:00
	there's always a lot of grief,	19:02
	we're always having lots of funerals in our lives.	19:03
	Or maybe you identify more with Lazarus,	19:10
	because there's a lot of death in this life.	19:15
	There's a lot of binding and tied-upness	19:20
	and mummified caughtness and death.	19:23
	And the story says, Jesus just hates death.	19:29
	He will not be jerked around by death.	19:33
	He won't let dying, or the fear of it,	19:38
	or adjustment to it pull his strings.	19:41
	Death is not gonna control his calendar.	19:45
	At the cemetery, his words are, "Take away the stone!"	19:51
	and then, "Lazarus, come out!"	19:55
	and finally, "Unbind him, let him go."	19:59
	And we wonder if maybe Jesus is calling to us,	20:05
	because he's talking so loud, like he's trying	20:08
	to get through to us,	20:12
	like he's calling across some great abyss even unto us.	20:13
	Take away the stone, let him loose, let him go,	20:19
	and Lazarus comes forth from the tomb.	20:24
	But you know that in just two weeks, we're gonna gather here	20:29
	and Jesus will enter the tomb.	20:33
	The powers of death, the people at the Pentagon,	20:39
	the religious establishment, the fickle crowd,	20:45
	the guardians of the status quo,	20:48
	they will at last have their way with Jesus.	20:50
	And I	20:57
	Lazarus is a kind of preview, an Easter glimpse,	21:06
	an opening skirmish in	21:14
	the soon to be fought great battle between death and life.	21:17
	When Lazarus strides forth from the tomb,	21:24
	it provokes fierce hostility from Jesus' critics.	21:28
	And if you don't know why,	21:32
	then you don't know much about the powers,	21:34
	how the powers of death hold on tight	21:38
	to their grip over our lives,	21:41
	the ways in which death wants to pull your strings	21:43
	and make you pay every day.	21:47
	And I tell you, you'll never be free	21:52
	until you can do something about your dying.	21:55
	The whole world is a graveyard and death is omnivorous.	22:01
	In the face of such death, we, like the disciples, adjust.	22:08
	We crank down our expectations for life	22:15
	and we bed down with death, we adjust.	22:18
	But Jesus weeps.	22:24
	Jesus is greatly disturbed	22:27
	because Jesus just hates death.	22:31
	And maybe the only illness that leads to death	22:38
	is the illness of adjustment,	22:44
	of adaptation to death.	22:47
	Once dead Lazarus is raised,	22:52
	the deadly powers that be move into action	22:56
	and the serpent's egg plot to kill Jesus is hatched.	23:00
	And yet, Jesus is free.	23:08
	He's not going to be jerked around by death.	23:14
	He's free, even now He's dancing on to another episode.	23:19
	Earlier, Jesus had said, and I think He said it, likewise,	23:27
	in a loud voice, "I came that they might have life!	23:31
	"And have it abundantly."	23:36
	And then later on in the Gospel of John he says,	23:40
	"I give eternal life to them, they will never perish	23:43
	"and nobody is going to snatch them out of my hand."	23:48
	Jesus means to go head to head with the deadliness	23:55
	and the powers of death in our life,	23:58
	He means for us to be free.	24:01
	So my warning to you	24:06
	from this story of the raising of Lazarus today is,	24:08
	go ahead, try to adjust yourself to the powers,	24:10
	to the fixedness, the caughtness, the bound-upness of life.	24:16
	Go ahead and let them tell you that you're too young,	24:21
	or you're not well-educated enough,	24:24
	or you got the wrong color of skin,	24:25
	or you're the wrong gender,	24:27
	or all the ways that they kinda keep you bound	24:28
	in the big stone in front of the tomb and the death.	24:31
	Go ahead, but you take care.	24:34
	Because the lord of life has warned us,	24:40
	the hour is coming when all who are in their graves	24:44
	will hear His voice and they're gonna come out.	24:48
	John 5:28.	24:53
	Mr. Life wants to resurrect us.	24:57
	Not someday, someplace,	25:03
	but here and now.	25:09
	I got this friend	25:14
	and he's had open heart surgery,	25:17
	he's had a couple of open hearth surgeries.	25:20
	And I was in a meeting with him the other day,	25:24
	and it was a tense meeting, and there were people	25:28
	at each other's throats at the meeting	25:30
	and it was a tough meeting, it was a meeting,	25:32
	it wasn't a meeting over anything academic,	25:36
	it was a meeting over the budget, you know,	25:37
	people were ready to kill each other.	25:39
	And people were jockeying around for positions	25:42
	and people were weighing their words with care,	25:45
	and people were,	25:48
	but there he sat, calm, peaceful.	25:52
	And when he finally spoke,	25:58
	he spoke with such serene confidence, people listened,	25:59
	and we saw a way out of the dilemma.	26:05
	He was free.	26:10
	On the way out of the meeting	26:15
	as I was walking across the campus with him,	26:16
	I said to him, "You know, what is there about you	26:18
	"that no matter how tense and difficult things are,	26:22
	"you, you're at peace, you're in control of yourself,	26:25
	"what is that, is this in your personality,	26:30
	"is this something your parents taught you,	26:34
	"have you always been like this?"	26:35
	And he said, "Well, you forget, when I was laying up on	26:38
	"that cold steel table, I stared death in the face,	26:42
	"I felt his cold breath,	26:50
	and I died,	26:56
	"and right at that moment, he was there, saying,	27:00
	"'Peace, be still,	27:05
	I will not let you go',	27:10
	"and there I knew what was meant when Jesus said,	27:18
	"'Look, if the Lord of life makes you free,	27:23
	"'you'll be free.'"	27:29
	Amen.	27:33

Item Info

Title:

William H. Willimon - "Lord of Life" (March 28, 1993)

Description:

Sermon start time: 00:16. Sermon end time: 27:34.
Amid our illusion of freedom is the caughtness that has its roots in the pervasiveness of death and grief, and the only one who can truly set us free is Christ who is Lord of death and who hates death (Abstract created by Duke Divinity School staff.)

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r42805c7t

Date:

March 28, 1993

Speaker:

Willimon, William H.

Liturgical Calendar:

Lent

Biblical Book:

John

Chapter and Verse:

John 11:1-16, 17-44

Subject:

Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 CS-0639
ref9237_17y
uachapelsermaud
duke:320389
dcrau001431
ark:/87924/r42805c7t
9be529a8-8f7a-4854-b242-58b397e9ca6d

Digital Collection:

Duke Chapel Recordings

Source Collection:

Duke University Chapel recordings, 1954-2005

Related Resources:

See below

Language:

English

Location:

United States
North Carolina
Durham (N.C.)

Format:

Provenance:

The Duke University Chapel Recordings were transferred to the Duke University Archives beginning in 1970.

Rights:

Limited Re-Use

CC BY-NC 4.0

Rights Note:

This recording may contain 3rd party materials, such as music or readings that are therefore not covered by the Creative Commons license indicated here. For more information see https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/research/citations-and-permissions.

Sponsor:

Sponsor this Digital Collection

William H. Willimon - "Lord of Life" (March 28, 1993)

Transcript

Item Info

1. William H. Willimon - "Lord of Life" (March 28, 1993)

Duke University Archives

More Info & Options

William H. Willimon - "Lord of Life" (March 28, 1993)

Transcript

Item Info

Related Item

Duke University Archives

More Info & Options