We're in this together

Brad Sullivan
Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year A
Sunday, March 9th, 2008
Emmanuel, Houston
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 130
Romans 8:6-11
John 11:1-45 (only reading 11:17-45)


In our Gospel story today and in the passage from Ezekiel, we have two different stories of people being raised from the dead. In Ezekiel, we heard about the entire nation of Israel being raised from the dead, and then in John, we heard about the individual, Lazarus, being raised from the dead. The story from Ezekiel was a corporate story of the dead being raised, and the story from John was a seemingly individual story of the dead being raised. These two stories together, then, speak to the nature of our lives both as the corporate body of God’s people and as individual followers of God.
In the first story, Ezekiel was taken in God’s spirit and given a vision of the whole nation of Israel reduced to nothing more than brittle, dry bones. There was no life left in Israel. God’s chosen people by whom the nations of the world would be blessed were gone. God’s blessing then, it seems, was gone from the earth. His people had utterly perished, but then, God gave them new life. God restored them, gave them new flesh and a new spirit. God would not let his people utterly perish. God would not abandon the people of Israel to the grave, to this valley of dry bones.
Now, as we know, through their history with God, the people of Israel continually abandoned God though worshipping idols, through disobeying his commands, but in thinking of the nation of Israel abandoning God, realize the nation abandoned God through the actions of individuals. The people abandoned individually as a part of the corporate body of Israel. One person abandoning God affects the whole body of people. Individual action is tied to corporate action. Individual obedience is tied to corporate obedience as is individual disobedience tied to corporate disobedience.
Now, if one person out of one million people disobeys, can the whole body of people be said to disobey…maybe not, but also, maybe so? How does a nation abandon God? On the one hand, if only one person abandons God, then the rest of the people are still faithful and can help bring that one back to God. With just one person abandoning God, certainly the nation, the people as a whole would still be considered faithful. The faith and obedience of the people would help support the one person who has turned away.
On the other hand, however, if everyone has abandoned God except for one person can the nation still be said to be faithful to God? Presumably not, if we look at the history of the people of Israel. The prophets, for example, were part of the Israel, were faithful to God, and yet were often preaching to a people who were not faithful God. So, do 50% of the people or more have to disobey before the whole nation can be said to disobey? Well, God was never that specific, but the point is our corporate faithfulness to God is tied to each of our individual faithfulness to God.
Each one of us affects the Body of Christ for good or for ill, helping the church to remain faithful to God or helping the church to abandon God. Our thoughts, our actions, our faithfulness, and our unfaithfulness have ramifications beyond ourselves. As with the people of Israel, God’s covenant is with us as a people, not just with us as individuals.
On the flip side of that coin, we see God’s action towards individuals affects more than each individual person. Whereas in Ezekiel we heard about God raising the whole nation of Israel from the dead, in John, we heard of Jesus raising just one man, Lazarus, from the dead. While Jesus’ immediate action was toward an individual, the effects of Jesus’ action reached many, for as John tells us, many of the Jews believed in Jesus because they had seen him raise Lazarus from the dead. (John 11:45 – paraphrase) Lazarus was physically raised from the dead, while many others, it seems, were spiritually raised. Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life,” and then he proved it. He gave faith to those who witnessed the raising of Lazarus, and by doing so, he gave them life.
After all, Jesus came not to help one man or one family, but for the salvation of all. Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead was far more than one man being healed. Notice, however, what happened in verse 35 of the passage, “Jesus wept.” (John 11:35) God’s covenant is with a people, not just with individuals. Jesus came for all, not just for individuals, and yet when this one person died and his family was crying, Jesus wept. Jesus came for the salvation of all and yet still cares for us individually. God made a covenant with us all and yet still cares for us individually. God is heartbroken with his people as a whole turn away from him, and he is also heartbroken when individuals turn away from him.
God grieves when individuals turn away from him because, as we have already discussed, individuals can turn the whole body away from God, but God also grieves for the sake of the individual. We are each important to God as the specific persons God made us to be and as members of the Body of Christ.
Looking then at our life together, I am briefly going to address our prayer life which is, of course, the topic of our adult class today. Just as God cares for us individually and corporately as his people, we also pray individually and corporately. I spoke earlier about individual faithfulness helping keep the Church faithful, and individual unfaithfulness leading the church away from God. Prayer works the same way. When we pray as individuals, we pray not only for ourselves, but for the whole body. The act of individual prayer is a corporate act.
If as individuals we rarely pray, then obviously our individual relationships with God suffer, but the whole church suffers as well. If we, as individuals, find ourselves setting our minds more and more on the flesh and less and less on the spirit, then we become a church whose mind is set on the flesh and not on the spirit. When we neglect our individual prayer lives, the church suffers for it. Sorry to be so gloomy, but…it is Lent.
On the other hand, the fact that we’re not Christians as individuals is also a joyous thing. We have a responsibility to each other, but we also have each other to lean on and to depend on. There will be times when individuals find faith very difficult to have, when prayer doesn’t easily or at all, when God seems distant, if not completely gone. In those times, the individuals have the rest of the Body of Christ to lean on. The rest of the church can pray for those aren’t able to pray. The rest of the church can have faith when some find faith difficult. Then, those individuals who were finding faith difficult, having been carried through those times by the faith of the rest of the church, can then help carry other people through when they are having a difficult time with faith.
When some of us find faith and prayer difficult, we have the rest of the church to have faith and to pray for us. When some of us are weak, the rest of us can remain strong and so we can carry each other in times of weakness. In this way, no one of us has to be perfect in our faith because we have each other. Together, we remain faithful, faithful to a God who will never abandon us. We remain faithful to a God who loves his people as one body and will never abandon them, and we remain faithful to a God who also loves each individual person and will never abandon any of us. Amen.