Take your choice:  At the end it's all about me, or, at the end it's all about God.

It is one or the other.

Many, many people choose the first; but when we are hearing the Gospel, we can know that the second is best for us.

In the baptismal service we quote Paul who says “when we were baptized into Christ we were baptized into his death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” [Romans 6:4]

That baptismal service is not about the cuteness of the neophytes nor how quiet and nice they were (or weren't).

It is a matter of death and new life: “ we were buried with Christ...” Paul reminds us.

This is a serious matter indeed.

 

It gets tiresome for me to list all the ways that people have invented to say that life is all about themselves, and it is tiresome for us all to hear it.

For it is so drearily the same, year of year, century after century.

It is the same catalogue of sinful attitudes and sinful behavior.

We think that we are so modern and so different; but it seems that all we have done is to take the worst of the perversions of the old Roman empire and do them all again, in even worse ways and numbers, from murdering infants and abusing children, despising marriage, inciting hatred and bloodshed, manipulating economic systems, buying off the crowds with free lunch and entertainment (things that are never free) and on and on.

If it is all about me and what I want, then I'll grab as much as I can, for as long as I can, and my slogan is “the one with the most toys, wins.”

Wins what?

In the end, death, and then to whom will these things belong? Jesus asks in his parable about the man who built bigger barns. [Luke 12:16-20]

 

 Before death, all of us must face this situation : is life all about me, or is it all about God?

There are two very different ways to deal with it.

One way is to talk about immortality of the soul; the other is to talk about the resurrection of the body.

And they are not the same thing at all.

Immortality of the soul is the human way to try to say that I get to keep what is most important to me.

The body may be destroyed, but some little spark inside me gets to float off somewhere and keep on going.

The Greek philosophers spoke eloquently of that.

It continues to be present in every funeral home when someone says “Oh don't cry, for that is just an empty shell, and the real grandma has gone off now.”

 

The Christian says instead “Our tears are real; death is our final enemy...but Jesus conquers every enemy, including death, and lets us in on this new life.

God takes everything that we have and are and remakes us; it is a new creation.

That is what is promised and begins at baptism and continues throughout our life and into new life after death.

 

“Immortality” is attractive because it is about us and what we can do and continue to do all by ourselves, forever.

“Resurrection' is a humbling idea, because it is God's pure gift to us, something that God does to and with us.

“Immortality” assumes that we get to keep doing whatever we want to, forever.

“Resurrection” insists that God gets what God wants, and that includes what he wants us to be.

And that will be radically different from what we usually see and expect.

“See, I am making all things new,” the heavenly voice says in Revelation, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the ending.” (Rev. 21:5-6)

 

So what do we make of the Gospel story today?

We need to make clear a distinction here: the story about Lazarus is not resurrection, but resuscitation.

Lazarus was returned to the life he had previously, so it was not resurrection of the kind that we anticipate.

But still this incident makes important points:

(1)It was nothing he could do himself.

There was a popular myth that the soul would hang around for three days, but after that a person was really dead. 

Jesus came on the fourth day, so that being made to live again was certainly not his own doing.

(2)It is a real grief that we face, the situation to which Jesus speaks.

The Bible's shortest verse is one of its most touching: “Jesus wept.”[John 11:35]

(3)It is Jesus who will call us forth out of death.

We don't have to look for another savior; Jesus is it.

Jesus is teaching us these things through this story told in anticipation of his resurrection, so that we will be better able to hear that news with joy.

An 8^th century Easter hymn well expresses our appropriate reaction in anticipation:

The day of resurrection!

Earth, tell it out abroad,

The passover of gladness,

The passover of God.

From death to life eternal,

From sin's dominion free,

Our  Christ has brought us over

With hymns of victory.[LBW141.1]

 

That hymn-writer has it right: in the end, it is all about God, not about me.

About 15 years ago, a prominent pastor, Richard John Neuhaus, knew that he was dying, and he wrote:

When I come before the judgment throne, I will plead the promise of God in the shed blood of Jesus Christ.

I will not boast of any work that I have done, although I will thank God that he has enabled me to do some good.

I will boast of no merits other than the merits of Christ.

I will give everlasting thanks.

I will not boast that I had faith, for sometimes I was unsure of my faith, and in any event that would be to turn faith into a meritorious work of my own.

I will not boast that I held the correct understanding of “justification by faith alone,” although I will thank God that he led me to know ever more fully the great truth.

Whatever little growth in holiness I have experienced, whatever strength I have received from the company of the saints, whatever understanding I have attained of God and his ways – these and all other gifts received I will bring t the throne.

 

Those were words from one long-experienced in the faith, but they need to be learned by beginners in the faith and all the rest of us as well.

“We'll never forget this or that beloved person”, we say, but of course that is not true.

I doubt that many of us know much of anything about our ancestors four generations back, except maybe as a name on a genealogical list.

Eventually even the gravestones fade.

But the important thing is not that we remember those people, but that God does!

 

Another senior pastor wrote:

I shall be buried, forgotten, returned to the dust whence I was made, remembered for awhile only by a few who knew me well.

Whatever I accomplished shall tarnish and diminish.

And yet, on the basis of what I have known of God, I believe that what I have known of God, I believe that what seemed a conclusion will in reality be a commencement.

I fully expect God who so sought me in life say to me even in my death, “Yes, the face is familiar.

I remember you.

I've got a whole new world to show you.

Wait till you see this.

I'm not giving up on you.

Can we talk?

You haven't seen anything yet.

We've got all the time in the world.”

 

In the end, it's about God. 

Let us gladly say... Amen.