Sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Lent (March 22, 2026)
Transcript
This transcript was generated by YouTube AI and edited for clarity.
May only truth be spoken here and only truth be heard. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
It hadn’t quite registered for me until Friday, when a colleague wrote a letter to their church and said, “It’s been a heavy week.” And I said to myself, “Oh yeah—it has been a heavy week.”
We lost a beloved member of our congregation, and generally the world has a deep heaviness about it.
It’s in that light that I find myself in this gospel story, looking not at the ending—which is the resurrection of Lazarus, the command to come out, the command to unbind him and let him go—but instead returning to the heart of the story, which is that shortest verse in the Bible:
Jesus wept.
Jesus wept.
And I find myself attending to the pain, the grief that the sisters of Lazarus bear. I imagine that even in his coming to life again at the command of Jesus, that pain cannot quite be erased. The grief they feel must still be carried forward, even as life begins again.
I think we know how this feels in our own lives.
Every single one of us has been struck by some grief, some loss, or some fear—that even as we have been led through our relationships, through our prayer, through our nourishment in Christian community, even as we are led into life again, the grief and the pain and the weeping are never quite lost.
And you know what I’m speaking of.
And it is true for us as individuals, and I think it is also true for us as a collective humanity. Many people have spoken to me over the past year and a half, and I think there is a certain comfort to be taken in knowing that human history moves in cycles—that we live through cycles of destruction and rebuilding, that we live through cycles of war and peacemaking, that we destroy one another, and then we find or seek our way toward repentance and redemption and healing.
And there is a certain comfort in saying, as we heard in our book that we’ve been studying in Lent, “This is not the first end of the world.” And there is a comfort in saying, “This too shall pass.”
And I think there is also a part of my own heart that stamps my foot and says no.
Because the people who have died no longer have their lives. The people who have been harmed bear that harm. And the people who are grieving and suffering because of what we do to one another—through war, through policy, through cruel and lying words—those hurts and those griefs and the destruction… there is a sense in which it cannot be undone.
And Jesus weeps.
And so do I.
And so I think do we all.
I think of St. Matthew writing, after Herod destroys all the little children in Bethlehem on his murderous rampage: “A voice is heard crying out, Rachel is weeping for her children; she will not be consoled.”
I find that weeping—that refusing to be consoled because the weight of what is lost is too much.
But there is a deep truth in that. We had a resurrection happen this week—a new life.
We learned that one of our brothers in our diocese, a refugee who had been living here in the Hudson Valley and who in October last year had been illegally detained and had been ever since in prison—we learned that he was released this week, and now he’s home.
And his family and the people in our diocese and the people in our community who advocated for his release—you’ll notice that I’m not saying his name, because we’ve been asked not to publicly name him, because there is such great risk that if attention were drawn to him, he could be imprisoned again.
And what happened to him and to his family is not smoothed over by his release. We are weeping. He is weeping. His family is weeping. Because what happened was wrong, and we cannot be consoled. And his release does not make his detention right.
It is a lot.
And I said to someone, “Do you know what my job is? It’s to proclaim the Good News.” And I said, “If I talk about this, there is a danger that I will go right down into the grave and lay there weeping and refuse to be consoled—and then everyone in the church is going to have kind of a gray day.”
“Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice.”
There are times in our lives—there are seasons in the life of us together—where we weep, where we cannot be consoled, where we find ourselves lying down in a world like that field that Ezekiel saw, where everything is dried up, where hope is lost.
That is what the prophet hears the people say: “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.”
Here in our inconsoleness:
“Out of the depths have I cried to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication.”
As Jesus, at the grave of his friend for whom he weeps, says, “I thank you for having heard me. I know that you always hear me.”
Even in the depths, God hears.
And God says: “I am going to open your graves and bring you up from your graves, O my people.”
Oh my people.
It is maybe in the depths, where we cry to God for ourselves and for our sisters and our brothers, where we most truly know the love of God.
In the place where we feel most sorrowful, and where our weeping is greatest, and where we cry to God, “Hear my voice,” we hear the response:
“Oh my people, I am in there with you. I weep with you. I came down into the grave with you. For I so love you, O my people.
And out of the depths I am going to open your graves, and I will bring you up out of your graves, and I will put flesh on you, and I will fill you with spirit, and you will stand again.
For I so, so love you.”
And people, friends, my people—it is our love for one another that has us in tears.
And it is our love for one another, which is God’s gift, that brings us back up from the grave.
By my love, stronger than death, I am going to open your graves, and I will bring you up out of your graves.
Oh my people—hear the word of the Lord.
Amen.