March 22, 2026

What are the places of new life in your life?

For me, food is one of those. Of almost anything else in my life, I am more open and more interested in exploring different cuisine and trying to cook it as well. There’s not yet a food profile or cuisine that I have shied away from. There are probably some parameters on that, but I’ve pretty much been open to everything I’ve encountered.

But one of the places of kind of staidness in my life is my musical proclivities, my musical tastes. I tend to have a set of artists, a certain musical genre that are my limitations, and I don’t really push myself or expand my horizons much outside of that. But that’s not true of my father. My 69‑year‑old father, almost 70, is constantly finding new artists, new music that I have no awareness of.

Several years ago, he very excitedly texted me and Julie from the Library of Congress. He was on the floor in the main reading room doing some research, and Lizzo had come in and was in the main reading room playing James Madison’s flute, and he surreptitiously got his phone out and snapped a couple of images. Well, I had no idea who Lizzo was. I had only kind of become aware of her a day or two before when Julie mentioned that she was coming to Capital Arena.

And so it was just yesterday, actually, that he texted me and said, “Have you listened to Dax’s new song that references Psalm 130 that we will say today?” And I said, “Who’s Dax?” Apparently, Dax is a 31‑year‑old Nigerian‑Canadian rapper who has begun getting some real attention and prominence in his music over the last couple of years. And so, dutifully, I went and tracked down this song called God Can You Hear Me? It’s quite a profound song, so I appreciated him sending it along. At the beginning of this song, he quotes Psalm 130: “Out of the depths have I called to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice.”

Dax really taps into the lament that we hear in the psalm today. “God, can you hear me?” is a plea—a desperate plea—for God to come through, to break through all of the barriers of noise and distraction and complication that we are constantly surrounded by. Those things external to us that kind of keep us rooted in the matters and physical, material things of this world, and not the things of the Spirit—the internal things that nourish and sustain us.

He picks up on the lament that we hear in Psalm 130 today. And yes, if we read the full psalm toward the end, we get this sense of redemption. But it begins again out of the depths—it begins in this place of despair, of uncertainty, anxiety, of inner turmoil.

And it’s interesting, too, that we have this psalm today, because in a way it’s kind of incongruous with our other readings, is it not? We have the famous and wonderful story from Ezekiel of these dried bones returning to life, the promises of Christ made manifest in resurrection, and the words of Saint Paul in our epistle reading from Romans. And then this incredible story of resurrection and new life in the Gospel of John as Jesus comes to the tomb of his friend Lazarus and calls him forth.

I want to suggest to you this morning that we basically have two major points that come out of our readings today. One is this promise of redemption over despair—that the place of departure for Psalm 130, that utter despair and uncertainty, the weight of the challenges of the world, are not the end of the story. That there is new life even beyond those places of brokenness.

But that new life is not just a kind of ethereal, promised revelation of resurrection in a future time, but a reality of resurrection in this very moment—a true resurrection.

You know, Martha says to Jesus when he comes to her, or when they meet one another, that she knows her brother will be raised again in the resurrection. So often when we think about resurrection in our own lives, we kind of dismiss it in a similar fashion. We see resurrection as making do the best we can with the realities of the world that we encounter around us. We accept resurrection in this kind of limited way that Martha does—that yes, there may be some goodness, some glimmer of new life, some joy that we will encounter down the road. But this can’t actually happen. People can’t come back from the dead.

True resurrection is not a reality in the here and now; it is only the thing that will happen in the eschaton, at the end of all, when God finally rights all of the wrongs that we are so frequently mired in. And Jesus counters that argument with this incredible gift of new life—with the miracle of Lazarus being raised from the dead.

True resurrection is not just a thing of mystical promise, some point over the horizon, but it is a reality that we have before us each and every moment of every day—an opportunity to be renewed, restored, and truly resurrected from the depths of our despair, cynicism, and brokenness.

Modern science is interesting, because just 15 years ago, when I was studying to be a psychotherapist, we were taught that you max out at something like 25 or 26 years old, and then it’s all downhill from there—that your brain stops developing, you begin to atrophy. You can hold that at bay if you stay athletic and mobile, but it’s just a process of death. There’s nothing left to do.

And just in these last 15 years, that narrative has been broken. It’s been liberated with the recognition that even those of us of advanced age can have a renewal of life—that neural pathways after a stroke can begin to knit themselves back together, that new growth can happen even in times of advanced age or deterioration in other parts of the body, that we can truly experience new life biophysically. It’s an incredible revelation, but it speaks to the reality that we so often have this limited material perspective—that we know how this is all going to play out.

We can affirm things like the resurrection as incredible moments in the ministry and life of Christ, but we often fail to see their sustained import for us in the ways we live in the world around us. Ultimately, even when we are rooted in our faith, we unfortunately fix before us the cold reality of the grave and the earthen tomb.

We are reminded this Sunday that it does not have to be that way—that we can embrace new life, we can embrace the power and truth of the resurrection even in the here and now, even in the brokenness and despair that we encounter in these days.

And I was reminded of how that manifests just this week as well. Some of you may have heard that Bob Mueller passed away just at the end of this week. He’s not just some big‑name former FBI director who had all of these various hats that he wore in his life—he was my former parishioner.

One of the most incredible parts of my journey with him, and with the congregation I was serving at the time, was that in the midst of all the drama and all of the political posturing in the years that he was leading the special counsel’s investigation, his wife and Bill Barr’s wife participated week in and week out in a Bible study together at my church. And he and Bill enjoyed a deep and close friendship.

That new life, that new growth, that opportunity to see resurrection even in the midst of death was not just some hoped‑for future reality but a promise of real and true transformation even now.

And so today, as we encounter this great story of Lazarus, as we prepare ourselves for these moments in just a couple of weeks in which we will face head‑on the realities of death and the tomb, I want to remind us that the story does not end on Good Friday. The story does not end with the material, physical things of decay.

The story—even now, on that journey to the grave—is a story of resurrection, of new life, and of transformation into the kingdom of God.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.