Healing and Prayer: Finding Serenity When Facing the Hard Portions of God's Will

Being the Fourth Sunday of March, this past Sunday was our Healing Service.  The Scripture passage was the story of the Raising of Lazarus from John 11.  The sermon is going to be shared below but there are two prayers that I want to highlight that were integral to writing this sermon.

The first is The Prayer That Never Fails.  Yes, there is one.  It goes as simply as, “Lord, Your Will Be Done”.  To share the prayer is one thing, to live into the results is something else. 

The second is the Serenity Prayer,

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

And wisdom to know the difference"

The first line of the Serenity Prayer is a very human response and follow-up to the Prayer That Never Fails.  We are on the cusp of Easter, where Jesus dies for us in a more horrible fashion, to be raised again For Us.  The power of the story of the Raising of Lazarus is, in part, how deeply the grace and the grief of our Lord Jesus extends into the life of all God’s Children.

From the Lord’s Day, Sunday, March 22, 2026:

John 11: 1-45

SERMON    “All For The Glory of God”

In our faith, we have the prayer that never fails.  Simply put, it goes, “Lord, Thy Will Be Done.”  Having prayed this prayer, know that it can disappoint us, confuse us, back us into a corner, make us afraid, as well as liberate us, grant us courage, grant us peace, and align our souls with the Will of our Lord.  Because the Lord’s will is not our own.  I have seen most faithful Christians who have to painfully put their trust in Jesus afresh when struggling with this.  I have also seen tentative Christians whose lives of faith have deepened in aligning to God’s Will.

God’s Will Be Done, that might lead us to conclude that we ought to, anyone know this tune? “Sit back, relax, and let yourself go with the flow…”, because it’s God’s flow.

Which is nice, a comfortable sentiment, let God take the next steps.  But might that make us little more than passive?  I think perhaps the Serenity Prayer is a better guide if we are truly going to dare to entrust ourselves God’s Will.  You know the prayer, "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference"

I find both these prayers, the Serenity Prayer and the Prayer That Never Fails find roots in the story of the raising of Lazarus. 

Is the story a familiar one to us?  There are three siblings, Martha and Mary and Lazarus.  We’ve met the sisters before, but not Lazarus.  He is ill.  Word is sent to Jesus, to summon Him.  Already, there is evidence of ‘courage to change the things I can’…send for the Healer.  But Jesus delays, intentionally.  His words, “This illness does not lead to death, rather it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”

And then we have Jesus’ followers.  The Clueless.  Also known as the Disciples.  In the musical, Jesus Christ Superstar, I remember they have a recurring theme.  They are in the background singing “What’s the buzz, tell me what’s a happening, what’s the buzz, tell me what’s a happening…”  And they live into that role today.  First, well…if Lazarus is sleeping, like Jesus said, he’ll just wake up, right?  And it was Jesus who, maybe through gritted teeth, “No, you beloved morons…metaphor…sleep, death, sleep, death.  YES, HE DIED!  But that’s what is going to change.”

And second, they are fixated (with good reason) that the authorities are out to get Jesus.  To go to Lazarus is to go to Bethany, two miles from Jerusalem, the viper’s nest.  Where they are now is across the Jordan, a day’s journey minimum, after the events of the last chapter.  That is where the minds of the disciples are.  It is Thomas the Twin (the doubter) who says, “Okay, Jesus is going to die, lets go die too.”

When Jesus arrives, Lazarus has been in the tomb four days.  Jesus comes to each sister in turn.  To Martha, the “practical” one, He knows she understands she will see her brother again at the Second Coming.  But there is a caveat.  “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Then Jesus speaks some of the most powerful words in the Bible, “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.”  This Martha believes.

Then Martha goes on ahead to alert Mary and Mary meets Jesus at the tomb.  Mary is the “contemplative” one.  “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  But if Martha spoke in regret, Mary is speaking through her tears.  And Jesus does not try to explain himself, or his Messianic role, or the Hope of the Future.  Those are all true but useless in the face of the moment.  She’s lost her brother.  What she needed from her Lord were not words but presence.  And Jesus wept alongside her.

Some appreciated His presence, but others were nattering on the edges, “He healed the blind man, could he not have healed Lazarus?”  Or, where were you Jesus?

When Jesus, broken hearted, ordered the tomb to be opened, it was Martha, the practical one, who introduces that bit of humor, as inappropriate as it may feel, but how often do we suddenly find a moment of laughter in our own grief? 

Martha says, “Jesus, really? Its been four days.”  To quote her words from the King James Version, “By this time he stinketh.”  But Jesus replied, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?

Then the tomb is open and Jesus calls for Lazarus to come out.  And the way Jesus says, “Unbind him, and let him go…”  This is another moment of humor for me.  I always pictured Lazarus wrapped up like the Mummy from a Univeral’s 1950’s monster movies.

Up to now, the heart of this passage has always been the exposed heart of Jesus weeping alongside Mary and the others.  Despite His God-powers, our pain is His pain.  But here’s the piece that niggled at me this time around.  This was all for the glory of God.  Jesus says so at the beginning and says so again to Martha at the graveside.  And that bothered me.

Because we are going to torture this family, put the sisters through the grieving process, kill Lazarus outright, so that Jesus can make an example of resurrecting him?  For the glory of God?  That Jesus could have been there, could have done exactly as both Mary and Martha pointed out, healed him before he ever got to the point of death? 

The prayer goes, ‘Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”  Neither sister was serene in the moment.  We don’t see it explicitly, but each sister in turn greets Jesus the same way.  “Lord, if you had been here…”  It’s normally read with a certain basic respect for Jesus as the Son of God.  But what if Martha was speaking through clenched teeth, no ‘hello’, but “If you had been here, my brother would NOT have died!!”  And Mary, it says she was weeping, but what if she were beating her fists on Jesus’ chest as she greeted him with, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother Would Not Have Died.”

Lord, Thy Will be done…sure, but if you had been here…that’s not just a voice of two sisters, that’s a voice among of the community of the grieving.  Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…  That comes at the end of the process we call grief.  In the moment, the idea of this being done for the glory of God?  For God’s will to be done?  God’s will was to take my beloved?  In the moment of death, that can feel a mockery. 

The Serenity prayer goes on, an ask of God for the courage to change the things that I can.  We see Martha already moving in that direction.  She’s ready for the acknowledgement that she will see her brother at the Resurrection, the Second Coming.  She is ready to hear that Jesus is the resurrection and the life, she says it, “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”  Jesus does not press Mary on that, she’s not there yet.

It takes courage to grieve, to move into this painful process of healing.  And it is really only in the abstract that I can say grieving is a healing gift.  Because in the moment, it sounds like pandering.

The third piece is wisdom, to know the difference of what I can do and cannot do.  And knowing that which I cannot do, I have serenity in releasing for God to do.  Thy Will be done.  But this wisdom is not, like the song, to ‘sit back, relax, and let yourself go with the flow’.  Courage to do what I can is a call to action, to do what and everything I can.  We, people of faith, know that grief is not a pit but a process, not to be avoided, not to be denied, but to be journeyed through.

It may feel like we are endlessly reliving the pain of the moment, but there is more to it than that.  Every time we care to tell the story, in our pain, every time we begin to draw out the emotional poison of good and amazing memories of someone who is now in Jesus’ hands. 

I say this in funeral sermons, the Peace of Christ in times of death is of two sorts.  The first is the sure and certain knowledge of eternal life of Jesus’ own.  The second is that Jesus is with us every step of the way as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death.  That is the glory of God that Jesus is trying to get across to the Clueless, I mean the Disciples, at the beginning of this passage. 

God’s will WILL be done, whether we pray for it or not.  And, at the beginning, it can disappoint us, confuse us, back us into a corner, make us afraid, but if we can surrender to God what God can do, if we can embrace the courage to do everything that we can do, if we find the wisdom to understand where those are distinct from one another, God will liberate us, grant us courage, grant us peace, and align our souls with the Will of our Lord. 

Amen.

 

Pastor pete

Scripture Reading for the Lord's Day, Sunday, March 22, 2026 John 11: 1-45: The Raising of Lazarus

 This is the passage for Sunday, shared in the NRVS, the KJV, the Pirates Bible, and the Message Remix versions of the Scriptures:

https://youtu.be/3WORXa5JnF4

Pastor pete

Jesus Came for the Outcasts, Especially the Outcasts of the Outcasts.

Our Scripture Lesson is John 4: 5-42, Jesus speaking to the Woman at the Well:

 ⁵ So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. ⁶ Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.

⁷ A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” ⁸ (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) ⁹ The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) ¹⁰ Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” ¹¹ The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? ¹² Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” ¹³ Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, ¹⁴ but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” ¹⁵ The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

¹⁶ Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” ¹⁷ The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband,’ ¹⁸ for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” ¹⁹ The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. ²⁰ Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” ²¹ Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. ²² You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. ²³ But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. ²⁴ God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” ²⁵ The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” ²⁶ Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

²⁷ Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” ²⁸ Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, ²⁹ “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” ³⁰ They left the city and were on their way to him.

³¹ Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” ³² But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” ³³ So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” ³⁴ Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. ³⁵ Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. ³⁶ The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. ³⁷ For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ ³⁸ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”

³⁹ Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” ⁴⁰ So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. ⁴¹ And many more believed because of his word. ⁴² They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”

         While the woman at the well is not named in the Scriptures, in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, her name is Photini (or Photina), meaning ‘the luminous one’.  And Photini is an outcast person amongst an outcast people.  To take the last part first, she is a Samaritan. “Good Jews” don’t mix with people from Samaria. 

          Why are she and her people outcasts?  She says it in the passage, they do not worship at Jerusalem.  That’s a mark of a True Jew.  In the time of Jesus, True Jews lived in two sections of the Promised Land.  They lived in the southern region, what was the tribal land of Judah.  And they lived in the northern end, around the Sea of Tiberius out to the Mediterranean along the Jezreel Valley.  We know this area as Galilee.

          These regions are connected on the east side by the Jordan Valley.  But between them is the Hill Country of Samaria.  These people are ‘Jewish-ish’, but not ‘pure-bloods’.  In the time between the Assyrian Conquest of the Northern Kingdom and the Babylonian Exile of the Southern Kingdom (defining moments in the history of the Old Testament but WAY beyond the scope of this post…BUT well worth further study in the Scripture), other peoples were imported.  Because that is how things operated then, entire populations were uprooted, moved around, and swapped.

          These outsiders stayed and married into the remnant Jewish families in the region of Samaria, only to be subsequently outcast by the ‘pure-blood’ Jews who marked their purity by a few metrics including where God was to be worshipped. 

          Why was Jesus even in the territory of the Outcasts?  The ‘pure’ Jewish leadership was already plotting to kill Jesus.  Makes sense that they were watching the road to the Jordan, watching the route to Galilee in an attempt to intercept Him.  But it was not His time.  So Jesus took ‘the long way’, up through the Hill Country of Samaria, through the land of the Outcasts.

          But even the Outcasts have Outcasts.  We get the first hint of this at the time Jesus met Photini.  Noon.  The heat of the day in a heat-filled climate!  People of good repute came for water at cooler moments, like dawn and dusk.  Outcasts came in the heat of the day, when the odds of meeting others were at their lowest-unless the Lord had a meeting in the works.

          Bad enough that she is an Outcast, but she is a SHE.  Photini is a woman.  At the time of Jesus, in the popular culture, women are second-class at best, exploited property at worst. 

Photini is an Outcast among the Outcasts because she has been married five times and is presently living with a man who is not her husband.  That actually sounds tame by today’s standards, but in the time of Jesus, this was scandal upon scandal.  Enough that she could not mix in polite company for the activities of everyday living, but had to come out at midday to get water.

          Where she meets Jesus.  And her life is changed. 

          It has been argued that her ‘outcast’ status should be made worse by the fact that she lied to the face of Jesus when she said she was not married (without any of the ‘juicy’ bits).  That feels like overkill to me.  Do we really expect her to admit all her sins to the Lord Jesus?  Well, when we put it that way, yes.  But she didn’t know who He was, at least not in the moment.

          But it was precisely her ‘outcast’ status that was Jesus’ way into her life and faith.  He walked her through her life choices that led to this status, but not to condemn her or make fun of her, but to lead her to the truth.  Note, Jesus begins by speaking to her of the living waters, the promise of new life, of salvation.  Then they discuss her life choices, which leads to a discussion of the differences in worship styles between the Jews and Samaritans-not shock nor condemnation over her lifestyle. 

          Jesus meets her respectfully in her place, an Outcast from polite society as well as a Samaritan Outcast from his place, as a Jew, and guides her to know that something bigger is in the works.  Then she makes the leap, admitting that there is a Messiah who is coming who is supposed to share all things with them.  Only then, when she is in the right place, does Jesus share the reality of His own identity as the Messiah.

          And the Outcast is brought in from the cold fringes of polite society.  She is so overwhelmed by the loving truth spoken by Jesus that she ignores her own status as shunned outcast and goes to proclaim His presence to the rest of the Outcasts, her fellow Samaritans. 

          In the meantime, the disciples come back and are taught an important life lesson on the place of Outcasts in their work.  They are people, just like everybody else.

          Then back comes the Outcast with her fellow Outcasts and over the next two days, there is a revival meeting the likes of which had not yet been seen in the ministry of Jesus.

          Because, as they share the truth, Jesus is the Savior of the world and all the Outcasts to be found within it (and WE are all Outcasts as sinners against God).  Thanks to Photini, a living lamp of Jesus unto her own people.

 

Peace

Pastor Pete    

Our Scripture for Sunday, March 8, 2026

 https://youtu.be/mI9nHyaYXfw

Our Scripture for Sunday is John 4: 5-42, the story of Jesus and the Woman at the Well.  Find the story shared here in the NRSV, the KJV, the Pirate's Bible, and the Message.  Let these words lead you this week.

Peace

Pastor Pete

https://youtu.be/mI9nHyaYXfw