March 17, 2025
• Rev. Mindie Moore
The Prayers that Jesus Prayed Week 2: Praying With Gratitude
John 11:1-6
Huge thanks to our students and Shelby for doing our reading today, and for all the different ways that our students have participated in our service.
I hope as you heard them read that story of Jesus and Lazarus that you noticed all the different emotions present IN this story. Because this is a story that, as we talk about the specific prayer that Jesus prayed today, I want you to FEEL even more than I want you to HEAR.
I want you to feel the grief that people are carrying as they mourn Lazarus’ death.
I want you to feel the many layers of confusion happening in this moment. The disciples don’t get it, Martha is perplexed, the onlookers don’t know WHAT to do!
It’s an exceptionally chaotic scene. And I want you to feel that chaos...and think about when YOU have felt that kind of turmoil. Think about when you’ve been in a situation where you haven’t really known what’s going on, where you have been stressed or sad or just unsure.
In the middle of that moment...were you thinking about gratitude?
This Lenten Season, we are exploring the different prayers that Jesus prayed. And today we’re looking at a moment in Jesus’ life where it was overwhelming, chaotic, challenging...and he turns to God with gratitude and faith in this really public way.
This theme feels especially timely to me TODAY, because this week marks the five year anniversary of the Covid 19 pandemic. It was this week that we were shutting down offices and schools, church moved online “For two weeks”, and we all watched life take a chaotic and dramatic shift.
I know we all had our own experiences during the pandemic...some of us lost people we loved, some lost jobs that provided a livelihood, some just lost a sense of what was normal. No matter what your experience was like, we were all grieving something and we were all trying to make sense of a very confusing set of circumstances. Our family had an added layer of this as March 13, 2020 was the day our son was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. So the world as a whole didn’t make sense and OUR world didn’t make sense.
And I remember trying so hard to find gratitude and be an encouraging, or at least just calming, presence during that season and how hard that was. One really specific time stands out in my memory, as we got closer to Spring Break.
It was clear by then that not only had the pandemic not wrapped up in the promised two weeks, but we didn’t know WHEN it was going to wrap up. And so we knew we weren’t leaving the house, much less going anywhere out of town for that break. And so to try and create something that felt good for my family, we made a “virtual spring break” itinerary. (SLIDE)
And it was so precious. I posted about it on social media. We were going to make snacks and watch YouTube videos and how cute that we were going to France and China and Mars and Disney World and apparently this fantasy placed called Soft Pretzel Land. We really did make soft pretzels (SLIDE)
It looked really cool...and on the inside, I felt really empty. It was a struggle to feel any kind of gratitude for the situation we were in, even though we knew our circumstances were so much better than the things so many people were facing. But we had our own kind of challenges. We were barely sleeping because of middle of the night blood sugar checks and when we were all awake, it was the same inside the house routine, day after day. My mental health was in a state I didn’t know it could be in, and it felt impossible to believe in God’s faithfulness when we were in the middle of the hard thing.
That’s what makes this story we’re looking at today, of Jesus’ prayer of gratitude, so powerful. Because he’s praying it when every single thing is less than ideal. We might think about this as a story of resurrection, and it absolutely is, that’s the culmination of the whole thing...but it’s what happens BEFORE Lazarus is raised from the dead that really has something to teach us, especially when it comes to what it means to pray like Jesus prayed.
Because when we see Jesus pray this prayer of thanksgiving, Lazarus has been dead and in the tomb for several days. It’s been so long that Lazarus’ sister Martha tells Jesus that this has devolved into kind of gross situation. Dead bodies don’t keep. And it’s when they roll away the stone, and Jesus is confronted with the reality of his friend’s death...THAT’s when he says THIS: (SLIDE) “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me.” (John 11:41-42)
He’s thanking God...essentially for BEING God. He’s praising God before the miracle even materializes. And he’s acknowledging God’s goodness and faithfulness in front of all of these people as a way to reshape the chaos that’s unfolding, as a way to tell a different story than the one that the people gathered are sure that they’re living in.
And I wonder if he’s also thanking God in this moment in order to reshape himself. Because it is chaotic on the outside...but it’s also chaotic on the inside for Jesus. He is ANGRY and a whole mix of emotions. He’s feeling heartbroken over what this family he loves is going through, but he’s also having to deal with these random onlookers and their commentary—oh, he’s done all these miracles, couldn’t he have saved Lazarus? He’s had to defend himself to his disciples on the choices he’s making. He’s being criticized with questions about where he was and why he didn’t get there on time. AND there’s one more added layer, that only Jesus can really have a handle on...Jesus knows that the minute he brings Lazarus out of the tomb...he’s going to begin his own path towards one. His own path towards death. The miracle that is going to bless this family is going to be the thing to sound the alarm for religious leaders. They’ve been watching Jesus as he heals and does all this stuff that pushes them beyond reason...but THIS. This is a bridge too far. This is the thing that could draw just a bit too much attention to Jesus and could cause the Roman government to come down hard on the Jews. And so these leaders, they’re not going to let that happen. And when they start coming for Jesus after this...they’re not going to let up until they stop him.
So ALL of that is happening for Jesus when he publicly voices this prayer. It puts gratitude in a different perspective when we look at it like this. It’s not really THAT hard to look back and thank God for the good stuff that’s happened. I mean, I do it every time I drive down these roads right now—I miss the pothole I didn’t quite see...thank you Jesus! When it all works out, I am FULL of gratitude and faith!
It takes a different understanding of who God is and how God shows up to pray like Jesus prayed when we don’t know how it’s all going to work out and to say thank you in the middle of turmoil. So maybe the invitation we have from Jesus’ example in this prayer is to let our (SLIDE) gratitude be independent of our circumstances.
Because conditional gratitude can feel good in the moment, but it is really shaky ground to stand on. I think that’s part of why Jesus gives thanks before the miracle takes place. To remind himself that God’s goodness exists—period! And it exists independent of a resolution to Lazarus’ death and his family’s pain. The challenge of this story is that Jesus could have said those words, declared God’s faithfulness...and he could have walked away. He could have not done any healing at all. Those things that he said about God still would have been true, even if the heartbreak had held.
Kate Bowler talks about this in her book Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved, where she chronicles her journey of being diagnosed with stage 4 cancer in her mid 30s. Everything is going great in her life—she’s starting a family, she’s finished her PhD studying the prosperity gospel...talk about having a deep understanding of conditional gratitude...and she has a great gig as a professor at Duke! And then the bottom falls out. She very likely might die. But then she enrolls in a clinical trial...and it works. Her life is saved.
And praise God for that AND ALSO...this whole thing becomes a very complicated exercise in gratitude. How does she thank God for saving her life, when another friend in the trial doesn’t make it? Is God good to her and harmful to someone else? OR is it less of a black and white dichotomy like that...and maybe there’s a deeper understanding of what it means to trust God and be grateful, no matter how life might unfold?
This is one of those theological things that most of us will wrestle with forever. But probably the first step to engaging gratitude in a consistent way is to simply cultivate a life of prayer as a regular practice. To let ourselves go to God in the good times, the bad times, the blah times...to just invite God into all of those places, again and again. To become more
and more familiar with who God is and what God’s presence is like and the ways that God is faithful in every single season we go through.
Someone in our St. Luke’s family who lives this out is Gustanna Moss-Chaney. You may or may not know Gus, she usually attends the North Indy Campus, and she has one of the most powerful prayer lives of anyone I know. When she prays for you, or speaks a word of truth over you—and I’ve gotten to experience this many times—you feel the Spirit move. This is a person who is IN COMMUNICATION with God, without a doubt. Pastor Jen sat down with Gus the other day to hear more about her prayer life and what it looks like to pray with gratitude and faith, no matter what. Let’s hear her story:
(SHOW VIDEO...2:08) This is the kind of faith and prayer that helps sustain us throughout our lives. And besides giving us a constant foundation of gratitude, this kind of faith also sets us up to experience the way that gratitude can change us when we do encounter miracles or significant moments of hope. We might not want to reduce gratitude to ONLY those situations...but let’s not discount those moments completely and how powerful they can be in our faith stories.
We don’t get a lot of information about how Lazarus responds to his resurrection. After Jesus gives him the command to get up, he comes stumbling out of the tomb, all wrapped up, and Jesus tells the stunned onlookers to unbind him and let him live his life...end scene. But Eugene O’Neill wrote a play called Lazarus Laughed that picks up where the biblical narrative ends and uses a little imagination about how this whole encounter would have changed Lazarus’ perspective from that point on. The Lazarus that O’Neill dreams up is a totally different person because of what he has experienced. He isn’t afraid. He’s not worried about what he might lose or what will happen if things don’t work out. And he moves through the rest of his life with this lightness and joy. He laughs when he sees people consumed with trivial things because now he knows what really matters. His gratitude has changed him. So I wonder, as we sit with this example of Jesus and his prayer, as we imagine who Lazarus might have become after he experienced this miracle, I wonder (SLIDE) Are we letting gratitude change us? Not just in the biggest moments but in the everyday, small, even difficult times of our lives. Are we STARTING from a place of gratitude, even if we can’t see
what God might do? And how would our prayers and our connection to God change if gratitude could be this starting place?
Today as we close, I want to lead you through a prayer practice to try this. Because this feels like one of those messages that can resonate with us in theory but can be a little tricky to actually put into practice. Like, how do we actually pray like this when we’re going through something difficult?
And so I want to invite you into a posture of prayer. Maybe you close your eyes, maybe you could hold out your hands to receive...maybe you want to place your hands over your heart as a reminder of God’s closeness. But I want you to locate something that is challenging right now. It could be a concern you’re working through, it could be a person you’re worried about, it could be a diagnosis you’re facing, it could be a loss you’re grieving. It could really look like anything. But allow yourself to hold whatever that is in front of you right now.
And as you hold that, join me in this prayer:
God, here is what I am holding: This situation. This person. This loss. This heavy burden that is wearing me out.
And, Jesus, I have to admit that as I hold this...gratitude is the last thing I can see.
I see the pain.
I see the struggle.
I see the worries that keep me up at night and that distract me throughout the day.
I see every single thing that I can’t control.
I see the grief that feels all consuming.
But God...in the middle of it all...help me see you.
Help me trust that you are here, even in this.
Help me trust that you are doing a million tiny beautiful things all around me.
Help me trust that gratitude can be part of my story, even now.
Help me know that you are good and if that is the ONLY thing I can say thank you for right now...let that be enough.
Thank you, Lord. Even here. Even now.
Amen.