My friend Lucas Mix, who is both an Episcopal priest (college chaplain at University of Arizona) and a PhD astrophysicist, explained it on his blog last week. Basically, this is the law that explains why your closet turns into a disorganized mess if you don’t stay on top of it with constant vigilance. Or, as Lucas puts it: “the disorder of a system can only increase or stay the same unless you put work into it. Properly, the law talks about heat transfer, but the practical effect is that order comes from organizing things – putting energy in – and if you don’t put energy in, they run down. Clocks run down. Closets become messy.” Or, if you drop a deck of cards, it sprawls in a heap on the floor, rather than spontaneously organizing itself into suits.
You may have guessed that physicists didn’t discover this rule by looking at their closets, but at the natural world, and Lucas says, “And, yes, even the physical universe will run down with time. We say that entropy (the measure of disorder) increases.”
At which point we come to a very interesting dovetail with Christian tradition, because the Creation story in Genesis 1 tells us that God created the universe by organizing it, by bringing order into chaos, by separating things from each other: darkness from light, earth from sky; water from dry land, etc.
Physics tells us that the universe that is now so carefully organized, with scientific laws that can be observed, is running down, very slowly, according to the law of entropy, and will eventually end in heat death, descent into chaos. Lucas says this idea should be even more of a problem for the Christian Right than evolution, if they knew about it. As a fictitious senator in The Onion article put it, “I wouldn’t want my child growing up in a world headed for total heat death and dissolution into a vacuum. No decent parent would want that.” (Not to worry – it won’t happen for billions of years.)
The fact is, however, that on a micro level, we all will die, the ultimate descent into chaos: Christian tradition is no denier of the obvious. Every human learns that death is as inevitable as taxes. And we humans develop a variety of strategies to deal with this fact. Some of them are good – taking care of our health, working on strong relationships with other people, developing a relationship with God. But many aren't so good – from the fabled midlife crisis, to killing each other, to grasping a number of false idols to save ourselves from death. An idol is something that can’t deliver on its promises, and our idols of money, alcohol, sex, appearance, success, and so on won’t help keep death away.
But – and Christianity gives us an enormous “but” to the Second Law of Thermodynamics – but God is still sovereign over the laws of nature. And our scriptures today say that the God who Created the universe by bringing order out of chaos has every intention of defeating the entropy that brings death and disintegration to humans and human societies.
One thing to understand about Jesus was that he was a Jew, immersed in 1st century Judaism – and in the first century, Jews were divided over whether there was such a thing as resurrection. One faction was the Sadducees, who were wealthy, powerful collaborators with Rome who controlled the Temple. They didn’t believe in resurrection, and if you don’t believe God will eventually judge you, it gives you all kinds of license to sin.
On the other hand, Pharisees were close observers of the law, and did believe in resurrection, based on some scriptures like Ezekiel’s vision of Dry Bones in the Old Testament lesson today. They didn’t believe that it had actually happened in the past, or even in the present, but they believed that it would happen on “last day”, the day the forces of entropy finally brought an end to the world, and God reversed them and brought about a new creation, reorganizing death and chaos into order and life. This is what Martha refers to in the gospel when she says, “I believe my brother will rise on the last day.” Jesus agreed with the Pharisees on this – he is close to their beliefs despite the fact that he often disagreed with how they put their beliefs into practice.
Where Jesus does something revolutionary is in saying that the resurrection has already begun, that God’s new creation is not just somewhere in the future, but has been brought into the present with the life and ministry of Jesus, and it applies in some way to ordinary people like us, here and now. There’s so much happening in this gospel story: it’s such a human story – full of the deepest truths of human life – delay, irony, bravery, love, grief, neighbors who care for the grief-stricken, blame as Martha and Mary both come out to Jesus to say if he had been there, Lazarus would not have died. These are words we’ve probably all said to God at some time – and this gospel tells us that God is big enough to take it.
It’s a real, genuine story, full of the stories of real, genuine people. Yet, at the same time, this is another story in John that is a “sign” – it points to something else. We are familiar by now with John’s technique of narrating a physical story as a symbol of an eternal spiritual truth. Now he tells a story of death, and of life brought out of death, to introduce us to the truth that in Jesus, life triumphs over death, and God’s order trumps death’s chaos.
In this story, we learn many important things, but I want to draw your attention to three of them. First, we learn that Jesus loved this family – and this is the key to what happens. It’s not that Lazarus was a descendant of Abraham, it’s not that Lazarus was particularly good, it’s not even that Lazarus loved Jesus. John doesn’t tell us anything about these things. It’s just that Jesus loved Lazarus and his family.
Second: Jesus’ love leads to a new creation for Lazarus, a reversal of the entropy of death, as we hear Jesus’ stunning statement that he is Resurrection and Life. Jesus himself is Resurrection – not just that he will be the resurrected one – but he himself IS resurrection and life, God’s new creation come alive in the world. Right here and now, Jesus says, resurrection has begun.
In John’s characteristic way, we have a reversal of children’s Show and Tell. John tells us that Jesus is Resurrection, and then he shows us. Jesus gives a great shout: Lazarus, come out! And from the darkness of the tomb, Lazarus emerges into resurrection light and life.
And the third thing happens: Jesus calls the community into action: Unbind him, and let him go. Jesus saves Lazarus from the entropy of death – but it is up to the church community to surround him and help set him free.
Like all of John’s “sign” stories, this one operates on several levels – it is a story that happened at a particular time and place, to particular people Jesus loved. On a particular day, long ago, Jesus stood outside a tomb and shouted, “Lazarus, come out!” Yet because it is a “sign” story, John isn’t trying to tell us that if we pray hard enough, the people we love will be restored from death now. Instead, this is a sign to what God intends for the future – a complete reversal of entropy, and a new creation that restores the world to its intended state.
Yet, it is also a story about each of us –WE are Lazarus, the ones Jesus loves. Because John always operates on several levels, this story applies not just long ago, and not just sometime in the future; it applies now. It still happens every day.
Jesus still stands outside the tombs that imprison us and gives a huge shout. Lazarus, come out! And we stand blinking in the sunlight, called into freedom, away from the fear of death that imprisons us with chains that make us cling to money, possessions, alcohol, sex, or other false idols as our savior.
Lazarus, come out! calls Jesus, and we emerge from the dark, called away from our fixation on our own self-love, and called into relationship with God and our neighbor.
Lazarus, come out! calls Jesus, and we stand in sunlight, called out of death itself, into the eternal, abundant life that is ours by virtue of our baptism, which was the moment when we died with Jesus and were raised to new life, made part of God’s new Creation that has already begun, right here and now.
The law of entropy and death has been reversed into a new law of order and life. The seeds of the kingdom of God have been planted by Jesus, the and those seeds are us. Like Lazarus, we are imperfect, we don’t deserve it, but we are loved by Jesus, and that’s what counts.
And like everyone who is invited into relationship with Jesus, we are released from the grave clothes that bind us by the beloved community of Jesus, the community that is called to love and care for each one of us, and we are set free to be once more the people whom Jesus loves.
John tells us that Jesus’ raising of Lazarus was the final straw for Jesus’ enemies. From then on, they plotted to put Jesus to death. In a very real way, Jesus gave his life for Lazarus. And in the same way, Jesus gives his life for us. We are on the road to the cross now, walking with Jesus toward Jerusalem. With Thomas in today’s gospel, we can say, let’s go with him now, so we can die with him. But the good news is: in our baptism, we have already died with him, and in the waters of baptism, we have already been raised. With Jesus, we can have confidence, even as we walk to the cross, that we live already in Resurrection life. Thanks be to God.
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