Feast of All Saints

This is All Saints Sunday--an ancient festival commemorating faithful Christians who have died.  This morning a dissonance is created as this group of children goes downstairs for children’s church. We see the future before us, even as we bear witness to our past. These candles on the altar are symbols and reminders of our loved ones, those saints who have died. We see the past and the future intertwined in this space, our confined mortality stretching out in both directions.
  In ministry I’ve had a privilege: I’ve buried a few people. Linda and Clair and Jim and Annabelle and Debbie and Jill and probably over fifty other people who have died since I was ordained into this service of Word and Sacrament.
 Every one of them has been meaningful to me. Even the weird ones with unfamiliar people or families, where words and prayers are not authentic reminders of relational knowledge so much as a task that must be done. We bury the dead
 customarily and when we do we pay some respects for life. There is an innate need to have meaningful closure, to make sense of the world and of life and of purposes and mysteries and our fears. There is a need to see our own situations, fragile and limited such as we are, in light of a grander scheme. Even science has the big bang theory to grapple with origins and ultimacy. Some who do not believe in God or Jesus or heaven simply take life at face value. Others posit their own thoughts on death. Either way, people are religious about life and death matters. One cannot escape the internal longing for more life. Who among us would not like to live longer and healthier? Who among us would not wish that a loved one might also have done the same?
We remember people who have died, we mark their graves with stones and tears and flowers and names and dates. We will join them. I never mind a funeral. In some ways they are the nearest expression of authentic Christian worship one can take part in because we will hear again that the mystery of the Christian faith is wrapped up in mortality, death, and the absurd promise of God to raise us up and give us life. The promise that we will somehow join a mystical communion of saints, of others, of deceased loved ones in a final divine and glorious reunion of sorts. We maintain their locations in burial sites. Cemeteries have always bred stories of ghosts and zombies because we are fascinated by the mystery of death and the hope of some afterlife or something beyond mortal existence.
In the gospel of John chapter 11, Jesus goes to a cemetery. He goes because a sick friend died. He goes there weeping and disturbed. Jesus is not impervious to the realities of mortal life, in loving relationships, experiencing loss and grief. Jesus is like us. And Jesus is also not like us. He goes there to take action against the one power that threatens the entire creation---death. And so with the story of the raising of Lazarus, we have a symbolic act that gives hope to any who might believe it. Jesus is the resurrection and the life. The same GOD tied to life’s origins is the one whose power is at work in reversing or overcoming the power of death as enacted by Jesus and as Jesus will himself reveal in his own dying and rising to life. Its amusing how we forget that Halloween is the celebration of the eve of all saints day and reminds us of the truth about our flesh and blood mortality just so that we might laugh in its face, make fun of it, confront it. Last night and today are inseparable expressions of the Christian life. Those Christians who avoid all hallows eve are avoiding a deep mystery expressed in the heart of the gospels---we are vulnerable to the threat of death—a grotesque reality. And we are impervious to death’s claim to have the last word on life. Even taken as a pagan festival, we are reminded that Christian people are those who defect, have been called out of a former way of life and into a new way of life. We were dead in our sins, but made alive in Christ---says the writer of Ephesians. We are a new creation in Christ Jesus. To be who we are as Christian people is not to deny who we were, have been, and in some sense continue to be. We are dying sinners. And we are living saints. Luther said, “The holy Scriptures call Christians saints and the people of God. It is a pity that it’s forgotten we are saints, for to forget this is to forget Christ and baptism.
You say that the sins which we commit every day offend God, and therefore we are not saints. To this I reply: Mother love is stronger than the filth and scabbiness on a child, and so the love of God toward us is stronger than the dirt that clings to us. Accordingly, although we are sinners, we do not lose filial relation on account of our filthiness, nor do we fall from grace on account of our sin.”
Jesus enacts a deep mystery---beyond that of personal salvation from sin and death is a bigger story. GOD is at work to rescue a decaying world, rescuing broken relationships, rescuing our beautiful planet from threat of destruction at the hands of his own creation. GOD will make all things new. Has GOD done this before in various eras and epochs and ice ages and floods and devastations unrecorded and remembered? We do well to always remember one thing, dear saints. It is our relationship with GOD that makes us who and what we are. Because GOD is the center, the beginning and the end. GOD is the one reality that transcends our limited spaces and times. It is toward God that we are moving and from GOD that we come. And in between GOD is here in the cemeteries and wedding banquets and births of our lives. Amen.