Lazarus

July 12, 2020

Last week while visiting my brother, he gave me a birthday card featuring a hillbilly saying, “I didn’t know what to git ya fear yer birthday, and then it hit me.” Opened up, he’s holding a dead possum and saying, “Actually, I hit it. Happy birthday and pass the gravy!” He added a note: “Just thinking of you and Annual Conference at Houghton in a room with no ventilation. Subject: Lazarus.” Lazarus...it took me back quite a few years, perhaps twenty or more. It wasn’t Annual Conference, but the School of Mission sponsored by the United Methodist Women...mostly older women, I might add. Back then, I hadn’t myself yet attained the status of old, which explains a lot about how things got out of hand.

I had been asked to teach the Bible sessions, lessons on the Gospel of John. I didn’t want to just lecture, so I put the old imagination into gear to come up with some of what I hoped would be memorable object lessons. These many years later, no one remembers me flinging flour around, talking about Jesus, the Bread of Life, or of the liberal application of water to illustrate Jesus’ statement saying, “I am the Living Water.” No. All they remember is Lazarus.

The point of the whole lesson was that though Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, he came out from the tomb still wrapped in the putrefying, stinky grave clothes, and needed to be unwrapped. In the same way, it’s not enough for Jesus to raise us from spiritual death and give us new life; those smelly old clothe-habits from our former life need to be unwrapped and discarded, or we, even though having been given new life, will stink. 

It was a hot, dry, summer, and the ride to Houghton took two hours. I could have arrived sooner, but I had to make a few stops along the way. In the back of the truck I had a black plastic garbage bag and a shovel. Every time I saw a roadkill on the berm or in a ditch, I stopped, shoveled it into my bag, and drove on. By the time I had reached my destination, I had an assortment of woodchuck, possum, squirrel, and something unidentifiable. Upon arrival, I tied the bag up and tossed it on top of the cab of my truck where it cooked in the sun for about four days.

On this particular lesson day, I carefully placed my garbage bag in a box, donned a cape, and clutching a magic wand, strode into the room, where I waxed eloquent about the resurrection, but also of our need to rid ourselves of the old grave clothes if we don’t want to end up turning people away from the Gospel. Youth camp was meeting on the upper campus, and I had invited them to join us for this lesson. 

Having told my audience that I had Lazarus entombed in my box, I jumped up onto the table, waved my magic wand, shouted “Abracadabra!” and proceeded to open the box and unwrap the garbage bag. Peering inside, I exclaimed, “Something is wrong!” I tried a second time, then a third, before inviting the youth to come and see what had gone wrong. They came forward, single file, looked inside (which also gave them a hefty whiff of roadkill perfume), and ran off, gagging. Years later, I still had people approaching me at Annual Conference, with these words: “I remember Lazarus!” I bet they did. Strangely enough, they also remembered the grave clothes. Lesson learned.