The Fifth Sunday in Lent - April 6, 2025 - Sermon Preached by the Rev. Katie Hudak

Sermon Sunday April 6, 2025 The Fifth Sunday in Lent

Lessons: Isaiah 43:16-21

Psalm 126

Philippians 3:4b-14

John 12:1-8

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy

Spirit. Amen.

What person in your life has always been there for you?

Take a moment and think of that person. At least I pray that

there is someone who has been there for you, and if not,

there’s some good news that we’ll talk about in a

minute.How do you/did you know that person is/was always

going to be there for you? What is/are the kinds of things

that this person does/did that gave you the clues that they

would always be there for you, even in difficult times? What

surprises has or did this person bring into your life?

For me, that person was always my Mom, a blessing. I

suspect that for many of us, that is the person that we

immediately thought of when we heard the question who, or

what person in our lives has always been there for us, or

maybe it was a spouse, or a grandparent, or a teacher. The

way that I always knew that my Mom would be there for me

was simply by her presence. Even after my Mom died,

whenever I went back to visit my Dad, even after twenty

years had passed, I could still feel my Mom’s presence in

the house.

The kinds of things that My Mom did that let me know she

was always there for me were many. One of the most

memorable and most consistent things that she did

throughout all the years was always wait up for us at night to

make sure that we got home safely from whatever it was that

we kids were doing. She wouldn’t embarrass my brothers

and sisters and myself in front of our friends by waiting at

the door or in the kitchen, but we could hear her moving

around the bedroom, and that le us know that she knew we

were home safely. And it didn’t matter how old one of us

was. If we were still living at home in our early 20’s, she

would still wait up!

Now the thing that surprised me most as I grew older and

was in my first couple of years of college, was when my

friends would come over to visit, I often wondered if they

came to visit me, or to visit my Mom! They loved to hang

out, go sled riding on the big hill by our house, come back

into our house, drink hot chocolate, eat cookies, and then

spend several hours shooting the breeze and laughing and

telling jokes with my Mom!

Yes, I always knew my Mom would be there for me, even

when we fought like cats and dogs, which was almost every

day by the way!

What makes me think of these questions and of my Mom in

this way, are the lessons from today’s Scripture. The lesson

from Isaiah, the Psalm and to some extent Paul, and

especially the Gospel, all seem to speak of who is there for

us, and how do we know it. And most especially, what is the

surprise, or where is the surprise in that consistency?

The answer, I believe, is that it is God, Yahweh, Jesus, the

Holy Spirit, who is always there for us, and this is Good

News indeed. How do we know this? Well, it is certainly

through our own personal experience, but perhaps even

more, it is through our collective history as God’s people.

And it is this history that shows us that God is always there

for us, even in the most difficult of times, even when we

may not see it. It is this collective history that show us that

out of these most difficult of times that God leads us to and

works in us a new creation, a rising from the ashes as it

were. We know that this will happen in our present and our

future because God has always been there and done this in

the past. God is consistent. God doesn’t falter, God shows

up time and again. But it is a two-way street. We have to

hear God and act in our lives also for God’s presence to be

recognized.

We see this in today’s reading from the prophet Isaiah. The

time frame for this period of Scripture is when the Jewish

people have been defeated by the Babylonians and taken

away from Israel to Babylon. It is a difficult time for the

Jewish people who long to go back home to Israel. They are

wondering where is God in all of this difficulty? Has God

forgotten us? No, says Isaiah! Look back at how God led us

out of Egypt, out of slavery. It wasn’t easy, we wandered

forty years in the desert, but out of that experience God gave

us new life, a new purpose, a new creation! And God will

lead us again from this difficult situation in Babylon to a

newness of life, to something new and wonderful, because

God has done so in the past, will continue to do so, will

make us new, because God has always been there for us.

We see this echoed in today’s psalm, Psalm 126, “When the

LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who

dream.” And “May those who sow with tears, reap with

shouts of joy.” All this because we trust in God because of

our collective history with God.

In Paul’s Letter to the Philippians he tells us, “I want to

know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the

sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his

death… Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my

own, but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and

straining forward to what lies ahead.”

And this is the trick that Paul is teaching us. He says that we

remember God’s presence in the past and all that God has

done for us. Therefore, we know that God will be with us

always, but by saying forget the past, Paul is telling us that

things will NOT be like they were in the past. Rather, Paul

says we should strain forward to what lies ahead. And lies

ahead will not be like it was in the past. It will be new, and

exciting, and we can probably suspect that it may not be

easy, but we know Jesus will be with us, and it will be worth

the journey!

Today’s Gospel also tells us that while God leads us, we

have a part to play in the making what is old, new again.

This scene appears not only in today’s Gospel from John,

but we see a version of this story in Mark and Luke as well.

Today’s scene takes us to the home of brother and sisters

Lazarus, Martha, and Mary, AFTER Jesus has raised

Lazarus from the dead! What a wing ding that must have

been! They probably could have sold tickets like for a

Taylor Swift concert! Mary breaks a jar of nard, a very

expensive perfume, and anoints Jesus’ feet with this and

wipes them clean with her hair. There is certainly a

foreshadowing here of Jesus’ death and preparation of Jesus’

body for burial.

The point we may see in all of this is that Jesus is being led

by God into something startling, vibrantly new, but after the

crucifixion. This not to make light of the crucifixion, but the

delight and the joy and the surprise of God in the

resurrection that happens after great difficulty, and Jesus

understood from collective experience and history that God

was leading to something entirely new, to new life, to a new

creation, even though that new creation can’t be seen in the

present moment. Because he also trusted God even if he

couldn’t see the newness.

And just a word about the poor always being with us. Jesus

is giving us a challenge and not a condemnation, a forever

whoa is us statement. We are being challenged to serve

others, the poor in the world. It’s not a throw our hands up,

there is nothing we can do about it phrase. It is a challenge

for us to get off our rears and become integrated into the

Kingdom of God by that serving of the poor, the

marginalized, and the outcast.

The other trick for us is to trust in God; to trust that God is

there for us and will always be there for us; to trust that out

of the old comes something new and love-giving and life-

giving, even when we cannot see it yet. Even in difficult

times, even knowing that God, like the person who has

always been there for us, is waiting for us, helping us, to

find hope, faith, and peace. Amen.