Following is a transcript of a sermon delivered by the Most Rev. Sean Rowe during the Nov. 2, 2024, service of Holy Eucharist and Investiture for the 28th presiding bishop of The Episcopal Church. Remarks have been lightly edited for clarity.
So here we are, with Martha and Mary. We know them best perhaps from the passage in Luke where Martha is rushing around doing all the work, and Mary is listening to Jesus, and then Jesus is on Team Mary.
Here in John’s Gospel, just a few verses before our reading begins, things are much more serious than that. Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha, the one Jesus loved, is dying.
Jesus gets word that Lazarus is ill, and that Martha and Mary want him to come, but he waits two days before he decides to show up. He knows the authorities in Bethany, where Lazarus is, are waiting to arrest him, and time is getting short. We’re almost at the end of the story.
Once Jesus is getting close to Bethany, Martha, true to form, runs out to meet Jesus; and I can only imagine Jesus being relieved and thinking, great, here comes Martha. She’s the one who always does her homework. I can slip in a good teaching here. And he says to her, “I am resurrection, and I am life. He who believes in me will never die.” He’s in a hurry, but he gives one of the most powerful statements in all of Scripture, one we will all of us take to our graves.
In this lesson, Jesus again reminds us that the kingdom is here, that it is near to us, right here, right now, among us. He is the resurrection—the future promise—and the life. The here and now, the not yet and the now; the life that we have right here and right now is among us, and Jesus can speak that word of life.
And then they go to see Mary, and it’s been four days since they laid Lazarus in the tomb, and she is weeping, and the people around her are weeping, and then the Scripture says, “Jesus wept.”
This time, instead of teaching, he commands, though, that the stone be rolled away, and at this point it’s not hard to be on Team Martha. Lazarus has been in the tomb for four days in the heat. You want to roll that stone away, right then, at that time?
Then the scene that has captivated poets and novelists and painters and icon writers for millennia emerges. Lazarus, in grave clothes, comes out of the tomb—because even in death he had access to the voice of life.
Even in death, he had access to the voice of life because Jesus is the Word, the one who came from the beginning, the one who brought life into the world. And so Lazarus is dead, but he can hear life. He’s dead, but he has access to life.
And now we see what this is all about. All of the proclaiming and the teaching and the dying and the weeping. Lazarus is restored to life, but he’s not restored to wholeness, like Jesus didn’t finish the job right then.
Instead, Jesus says to the gathered community, which must have been standing around terrified and bewildered, you do it. You unbind him, you liberate him, you set him free.
Friends, as we serve together over the next nine years, we will find ourselves again and again in this story. We will be the clueless disciples—I’ve got that mastered. We will be Martha, working so hard and so faithfully that we miss the point. We will be Mary, overcome with grief and sometimes anger. We will be Jesus, trying desperately to get people to understand. And I hope this doesn’t happen often, but I’m afraid at times we might be the religious authorities plotting to do what we should do with this troublesome Jesus. Because if you stop and think, sometimes the problem in the church is just that we find Jesus inconvenient.
But most of all, we will find ourselves, I believe, reflected in the crowd standing around Lazarus’ tomb. Over and over again, we will stand together, sometimes afraid, sometimes bewildered, looking for life, hoping for wholeness in all things. And over and over God will call us to finish the job, to wipe away the tears, to bear witness, to unbind the captives and set them free. To participate in the kingdom of God, to make it manifest in the world right here, right now.
Now this unbinding and liberating of ourselves and our structures and our hurting world will take all the resilience we can muster. It will require us to set aside our disbelief and our divisions, our attachments to the things of this world, and maybe our attachment to the way we think things ought to function.
But if we can be faithful in this work of unbinding, we will find that we can become the stewards that God needs us to be of our congregations and communities across our church. Because it is in these places—in the congregations, the institutions, and ministries we have all over this church–that’s where ministry happens. Where people are gathered today to be a part of this investiture. In those churches where you are sitting right now, in your parish halls, in your churches, where you’re watching this happen, that’s where it’s happening. That’s where ministry is taking place. It’s in these places where faithful Episcopalians gather day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, to worship God, to celebrate and mourn their sorrows and to care for God’s people.
In fact, I believe that it is in our gathered communities across our church where we come closest to glimpsing the real power of the story of Lazarus. Every time we feed the hungry, care for the sick, clothe those who have nothing, welcome the stranger, we are reaching out for life in the face of death.
We have access to life even when death is around us. Even when the nightmare of this world surrounds us. We have access to the life and to the dream of God. As we baptize and bury God’s people, as we make disciples and proclaim the Gospel, as we soothe the suffering and shield the joyous, we are unbinding our congregations and setting a hurting world free.
This sort of unbinding, though, is nothing less than standing against the lies of the enemy. This is the enemy who would keep us small and lifeless and hopeless. This is the enemy that would have us saying we can’t do any better than we’re doing. The enemy who would keep us bound and will keep us bound if we prize our own preferences, traditions, and comforts above the need to collaborate, to share, to work creatively, to proclaim the Gospel.
The days are over, if they ever existed, that dioceses and congregations and institutions of our church can just go it alone and do it their own way. For we must acknowledge our mutual interdependence, our need to do ministry together, to share what we have and to sustain one another. Especially now in this badly hurting world, we need to become one church.
We’re not a collection of dioceses and institutions, a collection of ways of doing things. We are one church, one church in Jesus Christ. God has given us the ability to share our resources and talents and invest in ministry happening on the ground—ministry in which everyday faithful people, Christians all around the world, are building communities, advocating for justice, and saving lives. Your ministries and your communities where you are doing the work of unbinding, of liberating, of being the risen body of Christ in the world.
This work, the work of proclaiming in word and deed that Jesus’ resurrection in life, is the work to which God has called The Episcopal Church, now and always, as one church, together. Friends, the kingdom of God is near, right here, right now.
