Well, I am very thankful to be a part of a very progressive congregation and for lots of reasons. Because the truth is, whatever our limitations are as a very small church are insignificant compared to our upside, which is basically we always put people before rules, we have absolute positive regard for all God’s children, and we think our spirituality is way more important than the institutional church. I also have always thought that our slogan should be “Providence: where you can be a Baptist without being embarrassed.” I am proud to be a Baptist here, even though some of you are from other backgrounds (and we don’t really care one iota what your brand is), for those of us born Baptist this is a very freeing context. I have lots of memories and as a result lots of hangups growing up in the Baptist Church. Now it certainly wasn’t all bad, in fact it was mostly good or I guess I wouldn’t be here today.

But I do remember we did some funny things (I will save the stupid evil things for another day). We used to sing happy birthday to people who would proudly walk down the isle and put money in a little white church on the altar that went to missions. So on my birthday I would stroll down the isle (probably all part of indoctrinating young people so we would get used to making our way to the front of the church while people were singing just in case we needed to get saved or to redecorate our lives) and drop a quarter in the roof of the church while they sang to me. Hey, I know what you are thinking, a quarter was a lot of money in 1964! I also remember that we used to have those offering envelops with all kinds of little check boxes on the back. Things like “Sunday School attendance,” ” staying for church,”” contacts made” on behalf of the church, and “Bible brought.” But there was one that kept me from getting a hundred percent (OK, I usually didn’t do church visitation either as I was about eight years old when I remember filling out my envelop, so there were at least two) and that was “Bible read daily.”

Now some weeks I read my Bible daily, but mostly I couldn’t even find my Bible, I still have that problem, which is about as anti-Baptist as you can get. However, maybe not as bad as coming home last week to find my favorite NRSV Bible in a million indiscernible pieces as the dog had chewed it up and ate up the leather cover. And they say all dogs go to heaven! But on not having my Bible in church, I remember my Sunday School teacher saying to me, “would you go to battle without a sword?” Actually, if you go to the average battle with only a sword your going to get blown to bits, so I could see myself leaving the sword behind, give me a machine gun, please. Especially if it is a Benny Hinn autographed Holy Ghost Machine Gun. It was an interesting metaphor, even in my young mind.

And as a kid, we drilled down on Bible skills. We had a speed contest where the teacher would call out a book, chapter, and verse and the first one to find it was the most spiritual. I was very slow, and to make it worse that guy would always throw in Hezekiah 1:2 and that would slow me down (for you non-Biblicist out there, there is no book of Hezekiah). We would all look forever for it to only discover the teacher shaking his head at us potential heathen. I was never very fast at the speed drill.

But I had another chance to excel. Part two of the Bible drill down involved scripture memorization. And as a child and young man I had an exceptional memory. Yeah, I know dear, I now go to the store for a loaf of bread and buy 30 bucks worth of stuff and forget the bread. But once upon a time in a kingdom far away I had uncommon recall of facts. So the scripture memorization was where I got my revenge on those who were not so intellectually blessed. I was able to whip the quick but stupid. But there was one verse that every single person always got right. Care to guess which verse? OK, sure, John 3:16, shoot we were Baptists after all. But that is not the answer I am looking for. It was John 11:35, “Jesus Wept.” Of course the verse has the dubious distinction of being the shortest verse in the Bible, and therefore a favorite of scripture memorizers everywhere.

I remember my dad telling me the story of how everyday when he was in elementary school the teacher went down the roll and made each person stand up and quote a scripture verse. Can you believe that? That seems so foreign to us today in schools, unless you go to UCA where they pray to Jesus before every football game. Heck, maybe the Razorbacks ought start doing that, UCA is pretty good. But when I asked my dad about it, he reminded me that he went to school at Moro, Arkansas. I wondered about the significance of that statement, and he said that morons were from Moro. That has explained a lot for me.

But that possibility aside, he said one kid in the class every single day would simply get up and say, “Jesus Wept. John 11:35.” He said it usually brought guffaws from the other kids, all three of them, but after giving this answer day after day after day the teacher finally asked the boy a question. She said that it was her favorite verse in the Bible and did he have any clue of its significance and of its depth? Of course, he did- NOT!! My dad said she spent the whole class talking about the power of a God who cries. He remembered it as being influential indeed. I am sure that kid from that point on quoted whatever is the second shortest verse in the Bible. He probably never got around to Esther 8:9 (I can assure you that I would never get around to that verse) which is the longest verse in the Bible weighing in at 81 words. That is unless you count the first 14 verses in Ephesians which in the Greek are all one sentence, Paul never takes a breath. Now that is a long winded preacher.

Indeed, “Jesus wept” is full of meaning, and it also happens to be in our lectionary gospel this morning. You know the story as the raising of Lazarus from the dead. The story is full of meaning, I could preach a whole series of sermons from this text. That is, if I am ever inclined to be a series type preacher. And I am not, although the fact that a guy that preached every Sunday for 17 years from the Song of Solomon kind of interests me. Wonder how long I could go with the verse about the talking Jackass? Well I won’t so you don’t think I am one.

But back to our story. Lazarus is very sick, Mary and Martha are relieved to know that they are loved by the biggest miracle worker since Moses parted the Red Sea, and they summarily summoned him. He basically kills (no pun intended) a couple of days and blows off their request and in effect says, hey he is not going to die, no need to rush. The disciples were taken aback by this (surprised, huh?) and they asked what the deal was. All of a sudden Jesus knows Lazarus is dead, but uses the euphemism “is sleeping” for being dead, and he eventually has to spell it out to the dull ones. So he gets there and there is a mob present, and Martha rakes him over the coals for taking so long to be there. She says, if you could have been here, he wouldn’t be dead, its your fault, heck we gave you plenty of notice. He in turn said he was the resurrection and the life, which probably made no sense to anyone, but when he saw Martha crying he cried, which made sense to everyone. So Jesus wept. And those two words contain nothing less than the gospel of Jesus Christ.

So Jesus Wept. It is an interesting concept. One wonders why he cried. OK, a friend died, we all understand that. Crying is the most human thing we often do, and Jesus was truly a man, we get that. But he is almost in denial at first (we get that too), he seems to say “big deal.” Jesus gets there and meets an angry family member, he refuses to say Lazarus is dead even though he is deader than a door nail, says he is just sleeping, one of those euphemisms that we used to avoid the “D” word, and he probably knows that he is going to raise him up and give him and his family their lives back. So the crying is a bit of a surprise. And a big deal is made about Lazarus being the guy whom Jesus really loved. And of course he loved Martha and her sister, that other woman. We only cry when we are assailed by our own hurt. And we only hurt if we love, that is the only reason, it is as simple as 2+2=4. We cry because we care deeply. And Jesus cared deeply. But I think it significant that he cried only when he saw Martha crying and the crowd of mourners. That is when he as we say “lost it.” Maybe we should instead say that is when he found it. And maybe when the crowd found it too.

Crying is a funny thing isn’t it? We cry at movies or sad TV shows, we cry when our kids graduate anything, we cry at weddings (y’all get ready for that one), we cry at inspirational stories, we cry at sporting events. I have done a lot of crying at Razorback games in recent years. We cry when we are extremely happy, or profoundly sad. We cry when we are afraid and alone. Some people are social criers, and others cry only in the privacy of their own space. Some people are ashamed to be seen crying, and others wear their tears as a prize possession. Some people cry at the drop of a hat, and others almost never cry.

I know such a guy who never cries. He just doesn’t do it. He doesn’t see anything wrong with it, he admits its therapeutic value, but for whatever reason he doesn’t cry. He has seen more than his share of heartache in life, and maybe he can cry no more, who knows. For him it is a blessing and a curse. He didn’t even cry at his own mother’s funeral. And several years later, still has not. This fact bothered him for a while as he is in a helping profession where he sees tears from others every single day. He has held many a hand and offered enough Kleenex to fill this room. Maybe someday this guy will cry, not sure I want to be there when the dam breaks lose.

But Jesus did cry, Jesus wept. And it made a big impression on all those there, enough so that they said, “see how he loved.” So I ask you this morning, why did he cry knowing full well he would bring his buddy back to life? But again, in light of his resuscitating Lazarus, why cry? Because honestly what happens next is remarkable. We have a heck of a miracle, the resurrection of a man dead, for some four days. Jewish belief was that if a person had been dead for four days, then there was no hope of their body and soul ever being reunited– it was a hopeless situation. This would have to be the most impressive miracle ever, even better than opening blind eyes as we saw last week. Why did Jesus wait a couple of days after hearing the news of Lazarus’ illness? Why did he wait until he was dead dead dead before traveling to Mary and Martha’s? There is a lot of underlying tones of anger in this most human of passages. Mary and Martha seemingly were angry at Jesus delay. Jesus was angry at the insincerity of the wailing mourners that were there. Perhaps Jesus was most angry at death, the mortal enemy of us all. Or maybe he was angry at the unfairness of it all, which we often are when life deals us a blow. Maybe, he was angry at their lack of faith. Maybe he was angry because he was put on the spot, and had to perform yet another miracle to prove himself. But in the end, I suspect that his anger was the anger that often accompanies grief.

But in the midst of the emotion of it all, Jesus wept. There is a different verb of his crying than the ones used for the other mourners there. They were wailing and moaning, he shed tears. Was he crying out of his love for Lazarus, or at least his family Mary and Martha? Was he crying because the others were hurt and grieving and his empathy caught up with him, the tears being contagious, sort of like a yawn is suggestive? Or was he crying as theologians down through the century have suggested (usually ones that can’t get a grip on the humanity of Christ), over their lack of faith?

Well today, I would like to suggest another reason that he was crying. He was crying for himself. That’s right, crying for or over himself. Take it from one who has seen thousands of people die in a thousand different ways and never really be all that happy about it. I have cried with total strangers who have had understandable deaths, for people who have been sick forever and were a hundred years old who are in fact better off dead. Yet still we cry. We cry over people we don’t even know who die in a movie, or in a tragedy somewhere else around the globe. We hear of a sad story of an incredible grief and we grieve. And the only explanation for our tears in these cases is we are not crying for them, or at least not just crying for them, but we are crying for ourselves. Because when we are confronted with our great enemy death, we can’t help but think about our own mortality, our own finitude, our own demise. Its human nature. We can’t help but feel the sting of the enemy of every single one of us. The one that robs our joy and steals our very life and joy from us.

I think Jesus was crying about death and the human condition. Life is tragic at best, and as the old saying goes will end badly for all of us eventually. It is enough to resonate with the writer of Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities, it all is vanity,” or in other words life can be such a foolish waste of time.

We have in the hospital Muzak. You know what Muzak is don’t you? Its elevator music. It is played in elevators, shopping malls, public rest rooms, airports and while you are on hold on telephone calls. It like Montavadi, Lawrence Welk or some other easy listening group playing pop tunes instrumentally. But it is music in the background, music that we don’t ordinarily pay attention to. It is also played in hospitals. One day, an emergency code was called over head at my hospital. “CODE BLUE, Room so and so.” Now to call these codes, the volume is turned up about four times on the overhead system so that all those on the emergency team might hear and respond. After the code was called, the operators forgot to turn the volume back down. We had Muzak blaring overhead at four times the volume for about five minutes. Everyone said, where is that awful music coming from? Many had never heard it. Well, my friends, the thoughts of our own death, our own mortality is always in the background and we don’t pay attention to it. But every once and a while something comes along and turns the music up on us, to deafening levels and we come face to face with our own humanity and mortality. I believe that Jesus had the volume turned up on him big time, when one he loved died. He came face to face with our biggest fear and our most human of limitations.

I also believe that he came face to face with his own impending death. Because you see, in the end, the only way for him to raise his friend Lazarus from the dead, and to quell his and Mary and Martha’s grief, was to give up his very own life in Lazarus’ place. The only thing that gave the resurrection and the life his power to raise Lazarus was his own mortality, his own finitude, his own death, which this event foreshadows. And those drops of blood that he sweat and cried in the Garden of Gethsemene were echoed with the ultimate “If only” in history, let this cup pass from me, please God, if only there could be another way. So to let Lazarus live he remembered that he too would die. Maybe he dreaded going to Bethany, maybe that’s why it took him four days. Because raising Lazarus from the dead drove another proverbial nail in HIS own coffin.

We don’t know what Lazarus did with his second chance, and frankly it doesn’t matter. My guess is he wasn’t any different at all, that why we never hear from him again. I mean, he didn’t write any gospels, he didn’t become an apostle, he may have only taken time to smell the roses a bit more and enjoy life, who knows. Maybe he lived for 40 years, or 40 days after this. But that is not the point anyway. Because this story is not about Lazarus, its not about Mary, its not about Martha, however it is about those insincere whalers and mourners, it is about all people who are afraid or angry at death. Its about you and its about me. It is about a people who don’t have to second guess because we have been given a second chance, and it was bought with a price. Just like Lazarus, we have been raised from the dead, raised to walk in newness of life because the one who knew no sin became sin for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. Because when grief overtakes our lives, we have only to know that the resurrection and the life gives us all an everlasting second chance. And while you don’t hear me preach this much, it is our great hope.

I do believe this and take it for granted at times being busy as I am at ushering in the Kingdom of God in the here and now, which is my emphasis and mission in life. I cannot relate to the pie-in-the-sky-by-and by- concept. However, I do believe that the Kingdom of God has to be about now, but it also has to be about tomorrow. Death is an enemy of us all, Jesus knew that. He cried for Lazarus and for all the Martha’s and Mary’s every where who hurt because they have lost a love.

In the end, my friend who never weeps is on my mind every time I read this passage of scripture for two reasons. One, I need to tell him it is OK to cry and it is OK to hate death and the pain it causes in those we love, it is OK to feel like the belief in an afterlife is inadequate consolation for losing a love. Our tears simply mean that we love deeply, and who is afraid or ashamed of that? The second reason I think about this is the fact that I am that poor schmuck. It is I, Stan Wilson. Now, I don’t cry despite the indescribable tragedy I see day in and day out working at a major hospital system where three people die every single day. I just can’t get caught up in that. I know my emotions are chasing me, and if I slow down they will catch up.

But my mother is another deal. I am in a couple of weeks looking at the fourth anniversary of her death, and of course, that has me thinking too. She was very stoic. She never ever said that she loved me, although I could see it true everyday of her life. She never cried either, at least not for herself. She had Multiple Myeloma, and suffered greatly the year she had it. But she never once feared death She said it over and over and over again. I am just like her. I have seen the worse ways you can die in my 26 years at the hospital and I am frankly not impressed. My mother was stoic, she gave me that gift, and it has become a great strength for me as I have walked with thousands of people communicating the grace and love of God to those who hurt, the God of all consolation whose compassions, well, they fail not. Not ever.

Because this one thing I know and I believe whole heartedly: because Jesus wept, he is imminently qualified to literally wipe all of our tears away some day. And because he lives, we shall also. Because my brothers and sisters, his grief and shame was nailed to a cross. And the Good News that we can never forget is that our grief has been too. And that very Good News makes me happy enough to cry, because it is the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God! Amen.