Trinity Church in the City of Boston
The Rev. Morgan S. Allen
March 22, 2026
V Lent, John 11:1-45
In you, O Lord, have we taken refuge; for the sake of your name, lead us and guide us.1From Psalm 31. Amen.
As I have previously professed from this pulpit,2The sermon entitled “I Believe In A Path,” from November 10, 2024, the Sunday after the elections of that year. I love that wonderful weirdo and punk-rocking theologian, Nick Cave. Despite his oddity, you might recall or have read of the Australian-born artist’s question-and-answer site, “The Red Hand Files.”3The Red Hand Files: “You can ask me anything. There will be no moderator. This will be between you and me. Let’s see what happens. Much love, Nick.” Through the simple web form, he responds with remarkable sincerity and wisdom to fans’ inquiries about life’s curiosities, great and small.
In a 2023 interview with the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, Cave shared movingly of his return to regular worship in the Church of England after suffering the deaths of two sons.4Williams, Rowan. “Nick Cave: My Son’s Death Brought Me Back To Church.” The Times, March 4, 2023. Following the interview, Josh from Chicago posted a question: “I can’t work out whether you believe or not? Did you have a conversion?”5From The Red Hand Files. The interview with Justin Welby followed the Williams conversation. Cave replies:
I have never experienced what one might call a ‘conversion.’ At times I wish I had, as it may have made things a little easier. What I have experienced is a slow and gradual flowering of a religious impulse that has always been inside me, in my blood and [in my] bones. What this amounts to is a heightened [susceptibility] to the strangeness of things – the mysterious, the holy and the absurd – combined with an instinctive resistance toward what often feels like the ploddingly rational … And I would say that [this] wild dance between belief and doubt [is] the very essence of religiousness – and creativity too. I have found within its push and pull an extraordinarily fertile and imaginative betweenness, where the interesting work gets done.6Ibid.
Perhaps Cave found himself engaged in that extraordinary “betweenness” when he wrote the title track of his 2008 album, Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!7Cave, Nick. Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!. Anti/Epitaph, London. 2008.. Pointing toward our Gospel lesson,8John 11:1-45. that song gets rolling:
[Larry] came from New York City, man,
but he couldn’t take the pace,
he thought it was like a dog-eat-dog world.
He went to San Francisco, and
spent a year in outer space
with a sweet, little San Franciscan girl …
I can hear my mother wailing
and a whole lot of scraping of chairs …
I can hear chants and incantations,
and some guy is mentioning me in his prayers.
I don’t know what it is,
but there’s definitely something going on upstairs.
Dig yourself, Lazarus!
Dig yourself, Lazarus,
(I want you to dig)
back in that hole.9Cave, Nick. “Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!” Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!, Anti/Epitaph, London. 2008.
In an interview at the time of the song’s release, Cave shares: “I wanted to explore, in a comic way, what happened to Lazarus after he was raised from the dead – you kinda never find out. And I thought I’d put [him] in a super-contemporary environment, in the biggest, baddest city there is …”
With an unclear chronology, the song shifts from third-person to first-person narration. That is, the listener cannot immediately discern whether Lazarus’ decision to leave his New York life occurs before or after his first death. The next verse clarifies the location in time:
Larry grew increasingly neurotic and obscene –
he never asked to be raised up from the tomb!
No one actually asked him to forsake his dreams!
Anyway, to cut a long story, short,
fame finally found him.
Mirrors became his torturers, and
cameras snapped him at every chance …
He ended up, like so many of them do,
back on the streets of New York City,
in a soup queue:
a dope fiend … then prison,
then the mad house,
then the grave –
oh, poor Larry.10Ibid.
Cave explains: “Christ digs up [some] guy after being dead for [four] days, and that always struck me, I mean it strikes me now as obscene in its way, as well, but as a little kid, that did creep me out … No one asked [Lazarus], right?”
I appreciate Cave’s engagement with today’s Gospel.
Instead of either wondering the mechanics or magic of bringing a dead person back to life [that’s one trajectory our tradition traces to emphasize the fleshy historicity of the account]; or metaphorizing the moment as only allegory [another trajectory our tradition chooses, this one to emphasize scripture as airy verse]; Cave carves an imaginative entrance into the story – not simply a middle way, but a different entry altogether. He joins the meaning-making endeavors of the Johannine community, the Gospel’s authors, asking neither “How did it happen,” nor “What do the details represent,” but what does it mean for us who claim membership in a community of the risen Jesus to tell a story like that, during these days and in a place like this? … what does it mean for us who claim membership in a community of the risen Jesus to tell a story like that, during these days and in a place like this?
Leaning the Lazarus tale against this moment and entering its meaning-making through the creative entryway Cave cuts, what incongruities – stark as a dead man raised to life – what incongruities do we recognize in the world around us?
For me, “ploddingly” banal as it may seem, I become aware of my evening comforts, where I sleep in a well-appointed bedroom set at the temperature I find most comfortable. I lay myself beneath covers of a weight and texture I prefer, and I arrange any number of pillows (of varying densities) as I might choose.
I set the ease of my nighttime experience against those at this very hour who suffer a war our government has chosen to wage, where evening brings not rest, but a terror I cannot imagine – bombs and blasts, destruction and death.
Considering those incongruities, I encounter at least two ideas, both true at once.
One: military service can be a noble work, undertaken by peace-hearted, honorable leaders willing to sacrifice themselves for the welfare of others, for the defense of a nation, for the protection of those who cannot protect themselves from violent, unjust forces. I admire their commitments, and I recognize my dependence upon the sense of safety they have cleared and continue to provide. One of my closest friend’s sons enlisted in the Army last year, and though I pray he stays clear of combat, I am proud of him in any case.
Two: though faithful Christians through the ages have made their cases for “just war,” the ministry and model of Jesus leaves no room for such an oxymoronic enterprise. Even as the authorities crept close and his mortal end neared – indeed, as close as next Sunday, as Friday next – Jesus did not muster ranks to battle the Empire. Jesus submitted to the higher calling of Peace and refused to take up arms against his oppressors.
Reconciling these ideas’ incongruities by prioritizing only the most superficial conveniences of the first, we find officials who claim a Christian mandate for waging war. These agents of the Empire cherry-pick Old Testament and Revelation verses to present themselves as under threat and to justify that rush of their gross violence, the power they feel in their command. Wrapping their munitions in psalms, their apostasy not only offends the Church, but diseases the honorableness of their institution and endangers those they claim to protect.
Reconciling these ideas’ incongruities by prioritizing only the most superficial conveniences of the second, we find congregations who claim a Christian mandate for opposition. Feeling powerless, fearful, and angry, these communities find relevance and status in the common cause of other resistors – a common cause delivering a rush in their shared protest, the power they feel in their camaraderie – until the content of their coalition’s objections becomes incidental. Wrapping their defiance in carefully curated Gospel verse, they adopt the polemics and aggression, the shaming and bullying of not only their chosen consociates, but the systems and situations they once intended to oppose.
Daring to set ourselves in the uncertain intersection of these ideas, where the slope between righteousness and rage proves slick and steep, we join with Mary and Martha, “poor Larry” and all the Johannine authoring community. And there we encounter “the strangeness of things – the mysterious, the holy, and the absurd” – and we take up Cave’s “wild dance[, that push and pull] that is the very essence of religiousness … where the interesting work gets done,” where we hear the very voice of Jesus who asks us and all people to live by the impossible and inscrutable standard: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”11John 11:25-26.
Do you believe this?
Do you believe this?
Appreciate, too, that our presence in this Lazarus space cannot baptize inaction. Yet as surely as our faithful movement cannot end in these pews, neither can we delegate its inauguration to a partisan organizer’s office, where the stakes and inevitable self-interests can so swiftly set us at odds with our vocation.
Should your conscience call you to the Common or to any act of resistance, I urge you align yourself unwaveringly with the life-giving Christ as your vanguard.
In whatever action you choose, do not domesticate the difficulty of Jesus’ model, and unbind12John 11:44b. those with whom you labor.
Buoy your protest with the values of our Christian inheritance, have a second thought should you feel the energies swing,13As my mentor ML would tell me: “Do not give other people permission to determine how you’re going to behave.” and do not let loose of Love as your lead.
Realize that God’s hopes exceed small-d – and capital-D – democratic aims, and hold honestly our shared complicities and dependencies, our common callings and concerns, our competing interests and our conflicting ideals.
And as we at Trinity in the City of Boston and the whole Church throughout the world approach the wild incongruities of Holy Week, leave room for the mysterious … the holy …. and the absurd … that we might summon a belief that the dead – stone cold and stinking with their gluttonous hate – can be made to live, and we with them, until all the world declares, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”14John 11:27.
Praying for grateful hearts and gracious lives,
Amen.