On this Fifth Sunday of Lent the church gives us the Gospel of John and the account of the raising of Lazarus from the dead as the focus of our meditation.  That passage of Scripture is one of my favorites. It has much to teach us and can be of great comfort to us when we confront death.

  I was reading recently from the memoirs of former president George Bush. I was struck by one particular passage in which he wrote about an experience he had when he served as Vice-President. He had been sent by the President to represent the United States at the funeral of the leader of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev.

  A few months after having attended that state funeral, George Bush spoke at an annual prayer breakfast. He chose to share his experience of the Brezhnev funeral with those who attended that breakfast. This is what he said:  "The funeral was as precise and stoic as the communist regime. No tears were seen, no emotion expressed or displayed - with one exception. Mr. Brezhnev's widow, who was the last person to witness the body before the coffin was closed, stood silently for what seemed a very long time. Then, in the middle of atheistic, communist Russia, she reached down and traced the sign of the cross on her husband's chest. With a tear running down her cheek, in the hour of her husband's death and burial she went not to Lenin, nor Karl Marx, nor Khrushchev. In the hour of death she turned to a Nazarene carpenter who had lived two thousand years ago, a man who had dared to cry out, Lazarus, come forth!"

  It struck me as I read those words that each of us,  that we who follow Jesus have a great gift. For when we find ourselves in the middle of dark, bleak or dire days we always have the comfort of knowing that Jesus, who reached out to his friend Lazarus when all seemed lost, will also reach out to us in our difficulties and say "Come forth!"