Dear friends in Christ: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Prepare our hearts, Lord, to receive your Word. Silence in us any voice but your own that in hearing we believe and in believing we obey your will revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Amen.
All Saints Sunday can evoke a strange mixture of sensations—both emotional and spiritual. It’s a time set aside by the Church to help all of us to . . .
ponder the perplexing persistence of death—in our world and in our lives;
and it’s a time meant to help all of us
– hold fast to the promise that one day we will
– hold fast to all of our loved ones and together sing,
O Death, where is thy victory? O Death, where is thy sting? (I Cor. 15:55)
FEARS:
…Because right now, we still feel a terrible sting in our experience of death in almost every situation. Even when a loved one dies in the most peaceable process possible, there is an ending, a separation, a point from which we will never again be able to . . .
– look into their eyes,
– hear their voice,
– feel their touch, or
– experience their living, breathing presence.
Death divides us…it puts between the living and the dead a chasm across which we can neither move nor see nor hear.
It’s a painful and perpetual principle of death that fills us with fear . . .
– that we won’t be able to survive without our loved one;
– that we don’t know exactly “where they are”;
– that we didn’t say or do the “right things” before they died;
– that all too soon we will forget—how they looked, sounded, felt, smelled.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, in his dramatic poem Break, Break, Break, captures these feelings about death in his immortal words: “O for the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still… I may be wrong, but it seems to me that our greatest death—fear—is not so much our dying, but the grief and struggle it takes just to survive a loved one’s demise.”
Yet all our fears about death—our own, our loved ones’, the world’s—are meant to be laid to rest. In the 15th chapter of I Corinthians, the Apostle Paul assures us that the living, loving Christ will defeat all enemies, the final one of which is death itself (I Corinthians 15:26).
TEARS:
But today we pause to remember and give thanks for the lives of those who have preceded us in death—loved ones in our family, our family of faith, our family of humanity. Part of that pause is to mourn—to honor the heartache we feel for those same loved ones whose voices have been stilled, whose touch has vanished, whose memories we cling to in grief and in love.
It’s good to do that anytime, but especially today with the way that All Saints Day follows directly the celebration of Halloween—or All Hallows’ Eve as it used to be called. Hallow is the old English word that means saint or holy, as we pray every Sunday:
Our Father who art in heaven…hallowed be thy Name.
Obviously, our cultural experience of Halloween is quite commercialized, but in years past it was seen by many as an opportunity to play a trick on the powers of death. In various times and cultures, people dressed up and went outside in scary costumes as sort of an act of defiance.
Some thought it kept them safe by allowing them to have fun while hiding among the “real” goblins and spooks. Others dressed up as ghosts and ghouls to mock the supposed power of evil in our lives. It was seen, in a poetic sense, as a chance to stare death in the face and say, “You cannot harm me for I belong to God!”
And the truth is that death cannot harm us, is unable to possess us, will never, says Paul, be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:38-39). But…for the time being, it can cause our hearts to ache, our tears to flow, and our spirits to be filled…with the emptiness of grief.
This is why today’s lessons are so appropriate, especially our Gospel. It’s one of the most moving stories in the Bible of tears and fears…and cheers. One day Jesus hears that his good friend Lazarus is sick unto death. He waits a while…then starts the journey to visit his friend. Yet before he arrives, a messenger comes with the sad news that Lazarus has died.
The man’s sisters, Martha and Mary, both greet Jesus with their fears and tears, their sadness and grief. One at a time they say the very same words: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died!”
Next, Jesus meets the whole Jewish community that has gathered to grieve. While many weep, a few echo the sisters’ same sentiment: “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”
In response to all their tears and fears, says the scripture, Jesus, who also
was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved…
began to weep (John 11:33, 35).
CHEERS:
The good news here is that, in a very short time, Jesus destroys the shroud of death that is cast over Lazarus and wipes away the tears from all their faces (Isaiah 25:7-8)…Jesus speaks. This Word-made-flesh utters a dramatic Word of Life, and in that moment, Jesus demonstrates God’s power over all things, especially the grave, by raising his friend Lazarus from the dead.
That is good news—certainly for Lazarus—and it’s good news for Mary and Martha, and it’s good news for every-one, every-where, ever-since. We, who must wrestle with the fears and tears caused by our constant companion called death, cling to this comforting call to life. I can only imagine the tears and cheers that must have followed in that family reunion.
But as dramatic as was that death-defying demonstration, I’m thinking that the really good news in this story happens before Lazarus is called forth from the tomb. Does anyone want to guess at what strikes me as the REALLY good news in this story? (hint: it’s found in one of the shortest verses in the Bible…John 11:35 says: Jesus began to weep.) Now, WHY do you think I would rank Jesus’ TEARS as even BETTER good news than the family’s CHEERS when the Lord raised Lazarus to new life?
Don’t get me wrong: God’s gift of resurrection from the dead is absolutely essential. Without it, life would only be a matter of tears and fears. At birth we would be set on a path to, as Intern Pastor Mark said last week, “pay taxes…and then die.”
So it is that between those points of birth and death, the question with which we wrestle the most is this: Does God care for me—for my loved ones, my life, my heartache, my pain?
And here, in these scant words from Scripture, we have, I’m convinced, all the encouragement we need to have faith that the God of all creation…
– cares for us passionately,
– loves us deeply,
– and is dying for us to trust that in Christ, we have life, and have it abundantly (John 10:10).
On this All Saints Day—and every other day for that matter—we are encouraged, entreated, exhorted to offer to God our fears, our tears, and our cheers as the One who gives us life. Amen.
Pastor Scott Fuller