Death is loose in our world.  If that sentence seems abrupt, harsh, or overstated, maybe you weren’t paying attention last week.  Or maybe, like me, you’ve grown so accustomed to the stories of death’s grip on our lives that you no longer notice. But make no mistake.  Death is loose in our world; indeed, death is the preeminent power of our world. Consider our week just past.

On one of the news broadcasts this week, after reports about the two Democratic campaigns and a piece about an exhibition of a bit of temper from the now assured Republican presidential nominee, one short sentence noted that 68 people had died that in Baghdad that day.  And on Saturday morning a weekly news summary noted that Monday’s car bomb south of Iraq’s capitol had killed more than a hundred civilians, more people than any such attack thus far in that tragic war.  The power of death, a power we as a country unleashed on that distant land, is at work in the world.

And not just overseas, but here, too, death holds similar power.  Last Sunday, Jamiel Shaw, Jr. – a fleet-footed high school junior, the star of his football team, a running back sometimes called “a Houdini on the football field” – was gunned down by gang members. Shaw had been talking on a cell phone on a street near his South Los Angeles apartment.  His mother, a Sergeant in the army stationed in Iraq, returned home this week to bury her son.  His father lamented Jamiel’s death:  “You should be able to walk down the street without getting killed.”  (“California High School Football Star Gunned Down in Random Gang Attack”, Tuesday, March 4, 2008, www.foxnews.com.) Death is loose in our world, stalking us and our children.

And on Tuesday, also in Los Angeles, a six-year-old boy was shot in the head while his family drove through a Los Angeles neighborhood.  In a report on NPR, a reporter noted that after years of such violence, children in South Los Angeles know what it’s like to live with bullets overhead and death nearby.  They hear gunshots all the time, and they know what to do.  Nine-year old Miguel Gonzales told the reporter, “When they shoot, we get down – lay down – on the ground.  And we put our hand on our heads.”  The interviewer, a bit of surprise in her voice, then asks the nine-year-old, “How do you know how to do that?”  Miguel’s answer is eerily matter-of-fact:  “They told us in school.”  (“City Leaders Seek Answer to L. A. Violence,” Morning Edition, National Public Radio, Thursday, March 6, 2008, www.npr.org.)

Miguel’s calm acceptance of bullets as normal shouldn’t come as such a shock, I suppose.  We rightly intuit that in our world, power derives from death, whether it is sought by gang-bangers or generals. And occasionally, we overcome our persistent denial of our own mortality.  Lawyer and Episcopal lay theologian William Stringfellow noted during that decade that death “is what all [people] truly have in common with each other and with the whole of creation.  Death is what you have in common with me and the only reality, it seems, that we have in common with everyone else and everything else in this world.”  (Instead of Death, The Seabury Press, 1963 (rev. 1976), page 18.) 

To be human is live in awareness of being mortal.  And, Stringfellow says elsewhere, to be human is to live in nations that seek legitimacy and control not by granting life, but by wielding death.  Ultimately, every state exercises authority by a coercion drawn ultimately from the power to kill – whether via war, or prison, or economic and social policy.

Given its preeminence in our world, it should come as no surprise that the author of John’s gospel addresses this power of death in the story that is today’s lesson.  This is the last of John’s many signs – each pointing to a different aspect of the power of Jesus, the Messiah of the world.  The first sign was Jesus changing water into wine, making all life a sacrament of joy.  Then follow other signs, including the feeding of the multitude, where Jesus announces, “I am the bread of the life.”  The healing of the man born blind, which we looked at last week, is another Johannine sign, pointing to Jesus as “the light of the world.”  This week, in the last and greatest of these stories, Jesus returns Lazarus to life, confronting both death and every empire that claims deadly tools of power.  In the face of this power, Jesus proclaims:  “I am the resurrection and I am life.”

John the evangelist wants all followers of Christ to know above all else that Jesus is the Christ of God – precisely because in him God confronts all the dominant idols of the world. And this confrontation, says John, sows the seeds of Jesus’ crucifixion.  Because they both depend on the power of death, neither the religious establishment nor the political empire can tolerate the confrontation at Lazarus’ tomb.  There, Christ affirms not death, but life, and the whole world is changed.

For Jesus to say, “I am the resurrection and the life,” means the demise of death.  Of course, its effects linger, and death is still worshipped by kings and tyrants and presidents and gang-bangers.  Both death and its attendant power are idolized still by the rich, the well-connected, the powerful, and the rest of us who lean for protection on the old system, a system we refer to, perhaps ironically, as “life as usual.”  Christ is not about the same life, but new life.

Friends, we who follow Christ are called to cease our worship of death, and the world of cards built upon it. We who claim the name of Christ are called to claim his life as well.  Not in heaven only, but here; not when we die, but when we come alive to Christ as our life, now.  We are to live with compassion – the very compassion that Jesus shows in the lesson, as he weeps at the tomb for Lazarus and for a death-weary world.  We are to live with hope.  We are to live with purpose.  We are to live in freedom.  We are to live with a sense of wonder, aware of the beauty of life all around us.  And thus we live with praise, for all God’s goodness, in spite of death.

Bill Stringfellow makes this very point.  “Of all the worldly powers,” Stringfellow says, “death is the most obvious, but death is not the greatest power in the world.  Death is not the last word.  … The last word is not death, nor life after death; the last word is the same as the first word, and THAT word is Jesus Christ.  He has, holds, and exercises power even over death in this world.  And his promise is that a person may be set free from bondage to death in this life here and now.”  (Stringfellow, Instead of Death, page 22.)

Here and now, friends we live in Christ, not in our own egos.  Here and now we give kindness, forbearance, forgiveness, instead of pettiness, gossip, and slander.   Here and now we live in Christ, instead of death.

Amen.