Sermon for March 22, 2026
Lent 5 A
John 11:1-45 & 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14
Rev. Karl-John N. Stone
When you’re driving and you hear that wailing siren of the ambulance and see those flashing lights moving fast behind you, you and all the other drivers know to pull over and stop so the ambulance can get by easier. The few seconds this shaves off their response time might mean the difference between life and death for someone. Sometimes those ambulance crews perform modern miracles. I’m thinking of my friend from back in Pennsylvania, Mike Lesher. Sadly, Mike passed away a couple years ago, but he loved his career as a paramedic and he helped a lot of people. One day—I think it was early spring when it was still cold—Mike and his partner were called out to a farm. A little boy had wandered out of his house to play by the creek, where he fell in and apparently drowned. When Mike and his partner arrived, they immediately began CPR. The boy had no pulse. They kept doing CPR continuously the whole ambulance ride, until they got to the hospital. Still no pulse. They kept at it, until the hospital staff took over—if I remember correctly it was over an hour—until the boy regained his pulse, and in a few days he rejoined his family, and went on living his life as a healthy boy. They think that since the creek he fell in was so cold, it preserved the boy’s organs, which in turn preserved the chance for the boy to be brought back to life.
But in those intervening moments—from when his family first noticed their son was missing, until the paramedics arrived, and finally until the hospital staff revived him—I can only imagine the grief that the little boy’s family was feeling. Their experience, while dramatic, is still just one instance of a process that every single one of us must go through, usually many times over the course of our lives: the stages of grief.
Today’s gospel from John 11 is a deep dive into the reality of grief. Even though this story about the Raising of Lazarus ends in a unique miracle—with Jesus calling the dead man out of his tomb and giving him a chance (like that little boy in Pennsylvania) to continue living his earthly life—it is still a relatable story. That’s because everything leading up to Lazarus being called out of his tomb are things that all of us experience, to one degree or another.
The psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote a classic book called On Death and Dying. She outlines what she called the 5 Stages of Grief, which are: Denial, Bargaining, Anger, Depression, and Acceptance. Others have described as many as 10 stages of grief [such as Granger Westberg in his booklet Good Grief], and you might experience all of the stages, or only some of them, but the point is that there are several common, strong emotions that we must work our way through in response to loss. [https://health.clevelandclinic.org/5-stages-of-grief]. Grief comes from loss.
Mary, Martha, their friends, the disciples, and Jesus himself all experience some of the stages of grief. When Jesus hears that his friend Lazarus is ill, Jesus responds by saying “this illness does not lead to death…” and then he waits two more days before leaving for the village of Bethany where Lazarus lives. That sure sounds like “Denial” to me. Denial is the difficulty we have in understanding that, because of a loss, my life is not going back to the way it was. After two days, when Jesus tells his disciples, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep”—fallen asleep is a euphemism for death—the disciples also respond with Denial: “If he has fallen asleep, he’ll be all right!”
Then there’s Mary and her sister Martha. Both of them, at different times, tell Jesus the same thing when he finally arrives: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” This is a form of “Bargaining”. Bargaining is attempting to undo something that can’t be undone. Or perhaps they’re expressing “Anger” instead—depending on the tone of voice they used when talking to Jesus, it seems what they said could be either bargaining or anger, or maybe both. If they’re angry, they want to blame someone or something because their beloved brother Lazarus has been taken away from them and it doesn’t seem fair.
Jesus expresses anger, too. Twice we see him being “greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” Maybe he’s even angry at himself, since he could have hurried up to visit Lazarus when he was still sick, and healed him. Even the most devout of people can, at times, be overcome by anger in the face of painful loss, and might say things they feel sorry about later.
We also see “Depression” sweeping over almost everyone in this story. Mary weeps. Her friends who are with her weep. Jesus weeps. What an amazing sign of God’s love that our Lord and Savior weeps with us in our grief! We sometimes resist weeping ourselves, but more than a sign of feeling depressed, weeping is also a step towards healing. God has created us with the ability to weep when we feel sad or depressed or overwhelmed—and usually you feel at least a little better when you’re done. But if you bottle your weeping up and don’t give release to your emotions—eventually your emotions will “leak” out in unhelpful ways like irritation, annoyance, resentment, passive-aggressive behavior, or even in the worst-case hatred.
Another really important part of grieving we see in the gospel is the support of the community. Mary and Martha’s fellow Jews come to console them. They give the sisters space to do what they can for themselves, but they are also close at hand when Mary and Martha need someone to lean on. We all need a community like that, and we have one here at House of Prayer!
Like Mary, Martha, and the community of faith and friendship they were part of—and like the disciples, as well as Jesus himself—the “stages of grief” is our human reaction to loss of any kind. Death is the most obvious and painful kind of loss. But grief can be triggered by things like: a job loss, a divorce or end of a relationship, financial distress, or a lengthy illness. You might grieve for something you’ve chosen, like when you move to a new community, because you’ve been uprooted from your familiar places, connections, and routines. Even life events that we usually celebrate and have big parties for—like retirement, or your kids graduating high school or going off to college, or getting married—even these big milestones might bring grief in some form because the good things you gain go hand in hand with losing other core parts of what you’ve known life to be.
Often, we might think something along the lines of “I can’t wait ‘til I’m done with this grief stuff so I can get back to normal life”. But when we look at how common and far-reaching grief is, I think it’s fair to say that experiencing grief is normal life.
And the good news of Jesus is: 1) He knows grief himself, he’s been through and been brought to new life on the other side, and therefore he grieves with you. And 2) By his grace, the newness of life that comes when we work through our grief leads finally to “Acceptance”—that both joy and sorrow can somehow co-exist in our “normal” lives, and we still have the chance to keep “writing the story” of our earthly lives.
St. Paul puts it well in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14: “We grieve—but not as those who have no hope! For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.” We grieve; but not as those who have no hope. So, when those times come, you can go ahead and grieve, knowing that our hope lies in Jesus, and he accepts us all in his merciful and loving care. Amen.