Good morning, friends. It is good to be back with you this morning, especially after an extra hour of sleep! Today is the Christian holiday known as All Saint’s Day, and it’s a pleasure to be reflecting with you on what it means to be a part of the community of saints, particularly in light of the opportunity we’ll have in a few moments to welcome new people into our local church and into communion with us. Will you pray with me?
Loving God, your grace is everywhere. You walk with us in every circumstance of our lives, even as we approach the end of life. Bless us, we pray, with the gift of faith, God. Calm our fears, heal our wounds, and open us to your new life, fully lived, in your kingdom without end.
I recently read the story of Kate Braestrup in her book Here if you Need Me. She is a chaplain to park rangers in Maine, and before she went to seminary her police officer husband had been planning to go into the ministry himself. But one day when he was on the road in his patrol car, he was hit by an oncoming truck and killed instantly, leaving behind his wife Kate and four children under fourteen. Knowing her husband Drew would have wanted it that way, she decides to be the one to prepare his body. Braestrup writes:
Tom, my mother, the two sergeants, and I dressed his body gently in a Class A Maine State Police uniform, crying a little, but laughing a little, too. It’s absurdly difficult to put clothing onto a body that cannot cooperate, and what was there to do but imagine Drew’s amusement at this necessary indignity and laugh with him?...
I washed Drew’s face with a soft, damp cloth. This is what Drew would have done for me, I thought. And in all the time that I shall live without him—time roaring and tumbling at me like some merciless, black avalanche – I will be able to tell myself that I bore our love with my own hands all the way to the last hard place. “Semper fidelis” I told him, washing him tenderly around the mouth and jaw and closed eyes, then smoothing his hair with my hand. Leaving the cool room where Drew’s body lay was harder than it was to enter it.
In our gospel lesson for today, we can imagine Mary and Martha, sisters to Lazarus, carefully washing his face and body, gently wrapping his hands and feet in bands of cloth, covering his face with a cloth, bearing their love with their own hands to that last, hard place. It is difficult for them, because of what could have been. “If only Jesus had been here,” they whisper to one another, sobbing. “If he had been here, our brother would still be with us.”
It is a new phenomenon that people in the United States rarely care for the bodies of deceased loved ones. Before the Civil War, people usually died in their beds at home. But with the trauma of the war, thousands upon thousands of young men were killed on the battlefield. Families began to pay undertakers to retrieve and preserve their son’s bodies, bringing them home for the last goodbye at the funeral.
I know most of us would not feel equal to caring for a loved one’s body. But I wonder if something is lost when we have so much distance from the facts of death and that final chance to show care once more to a loved one’s body, personally. I wonder if a certain amount of distance increases the fear death can command, since it has become less and less a part of day-to-day life.
In any case, as Christians, we have a unique perspective on death and how it relates to faith and a life lived in Christ. In our story today, Lazarus’ sister Mary tells Jesus, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Jesus doesn’t dismiss the pain of the loss of Lazarus. He is greatly troubled and begins to weep, which, honestly, isn’t what you’d expect from someone who is about to raise his friend from the dead.
They go to the tomb – a cave with its entrance sealed by a stone. Jesus orders the stone rolled away, but Martha objects, based on what she expects to find. “Don’t do that, Jesus,” she warns, “He’s going to smell really bad.” But Jesus thanks God for the chance to demonstrate God’s goodness, and then calls to Lazarus, who rises and walks out of the tomb, still bound and covered by burial clothes.
We might wonder, hearing this story, why death exists at all. What is God’s purpose in it? Death is, for the living, a reminder of our own limits. As much as we have and do and try, or conversely, as little as we have and do and try, in the end death waits for all of us.
The raising of Lazarus pre-figures Jesus’ own resurrection. In fact, it is the act of ministry that, according to the writer of John, leads the powers that be to make plans to kill Jesus off. Yet Jesus’ resurrection is different, too. He is not brought back to life by a human healer, but by the unquenchable power of God’s own life. As Christians rooted in the power of the resurrection story, we have a promise and a hope for abundant life in Jesus Christ, in this life and the next. The resurrection of Jesus prefigures what God will do for all of us – make us holy, and give us new life, a new heaven, a new earth.
Sometimes we think of saints as being Christian superheros – people like Mother Teresa or Francis of Assisi, who gave up their lives to serve the poor. But I like the language we heard today in Hebrews. “We are surrounded,” the author writes, “by a cloud of witnesses.” Saints are made holy by what we witness – God’s saving power in our lives and in the world.
When Jesus rose from the dead, he sparked a new community of faith. This community of saints is made up of witnesses to God’s love, people made holy by God’s loving work in their lives through Jesus. We gather here as a community of saints, at St. Mark’s, not out of a sense of being extra good, but out of gratitude. We come giving thanks for God’s healing work in our lives, and we come with a desire to pray together, to encourage each other, to learn and grow, to serve and love, and to be sent out again to our individual ministries in the wider world.
Today, there is indeed much to be grateful for. We welcome Holly and Trish as new members of this particular local church – this little section of that great cloud of witnesses, living and dead, and we invite Miranda and Michael to the communion table today to share in the community of saints founded by Jesus. These are gifts of God’s grace.
The kingdom of God, oddly, is both present with us now and yet to be revealed. In the same way, we have new life in Christ, we are a community of saints, and at the same time, the fullness of that life is yet to be revealed. Last week, I attended the lantern parade at Patterson Park. It was after dark, and there were hundreds of people carrying lanterns of different shapes and sizes, parading together, carrying their lights with them. As I looked across the park and saw the line of lanterns curving over the dark hills, I had a sudden picture of what the kingdom of God might be like – a community of saints, carrying our lanterns together, bearing God’s light into the world. May God’s new life, new heaven and new earth be manifest among us. Thanks be to God, Amen.
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