On this All Saints Sunday, I bring to you much needed grace and peace from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
We believe in an incarnational God. That is a God who came to experience the “carnal life” – embodied life, human life in the person of Jesus Christ who we know to be the Son of God. I start with this faith statement, because I need it for myself today and I hope it can be something to ground us all on this All Saints Sunday.
I come to you this morning in deep grief as we celebrate All Saints Sunday. It’s just two days after I learned about the death of a dear friend of mine who died on All Saints Day, this past Friday, November 1st. Her name was Betsy. Some of you may recognize her name from the prayer chain here at St. Matthew. She is now among the saints whom we commemorate on this day – alongside the beloved loved ones that many of you have recently lost to death.
I need the promise today that God came to experience the carnal, human, embodied life that we experience. I need to have God’s hand holding mine as I weep this weekend. I need to hear the words in our Gospel lesson today, “Jesus was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” I need to hear some of the most famous words of all scripture read anew to me: “Jesus began to weep.”
On a day when we commemorate all those who have gone before us, I’m stuck on my emotional responses to All Saints Sunday this year.
The gospel lesson today shows me that I’m in good company in my emotional response. We only read the last portion of the story about Lazarus today, but the whole story is 44 verses long and the story spends 42 of those 44 verses describing Lazarus’s community grieving his death.[1] Today we read 12 verses and 10 of them are describing emotional responses to Lazarus’s death.
If we look at the whole story, all 44 verses, we hear about the disciples misunderstanding a euphemism for death when Jesus says “Lazarus has fallen asleep.” The disciples say, “Oh well, if Lazarus has just fallen asleep, then he’ll be ok.” That is an emotional response called denial.[2] It’s a bit like if our modern ears misunderstood the euphemism “She passed last night.” And our reaction was, “Oh well, if she passed us then she can just turn around and come back a few exits down the freeway and come back.” You don’t really make that kind of misunderstanding though… so I think the disciples didn’t want to accept their friend had died.
Then we hear about anger and frustration from some of the crowd of people who say, “Could not he who opened the eyes of a blind man have kept this man from dying?” They’re mad that Jesus didn’t come sooner and perform one of his miracles to save this beloved community member from death.
Finally, we experience the sheer pain of Mary and Martha who are weeping at the loss of their brother. They are despondent as they say, “Jesus, if only you had been here.”
42 verses of feelings right here in our Bibles. I think this is actually really incredible in a society that doesn’t always allow us to stay with our emotions. A society where “being put together” is valued above some of the harder, bigger emotive responses we have to experiences in our human lives which we may describe as “being out of control.”
So, on Thursday afternoon, I called up a group of my seminary friends as I was sorting through my ideas for this sermon and I said to them, “is it ok if I don’t feel so confident in preaching the good news that we know we have in the resurrection, that God is victorious over death? I’m really feeling more like all the people in Lazarus’s community today who are just sad.
Because, I’m feeling the sting of death in my life right now and I’d be faking it if I stood here totally confident today and only talked to you about God’s victory.
And I believe that God’s victory over death is real – don’t hear me wrong – the empty tomb on Easter morning is all I need to have confidence in that and our text today shows us that God through the person of Jesus Christ can raise Lazarus. But that core belief is all mixed up today with the fact of the matter that death is still present in our world. We’ll acknowledge that fact today by naming all those from this community who died this past year and we’ll light candles for them on our altar in a few moments. We acknowledge that death must happen.
With the cross hanging above our altar, we even acknowledge that death is so real that Jesus himself died.
And there’s the good news that doesn’t sound like good news: even Jesus died.
We believe in an incarnational God, a God who experienced the carnal, human life through the person of Jesus Christ – who died. So, God has had that experience through the humanity of Jesus Christ.
That is incredible! We believe in a God who has such a deep desire to reach out to us, such a deep desire to care for us that God has purposefully taken on the very sting of death to show us that God knows how it can make us feel.[3] God is deeply moved at the experience of death. God shows us that he weeps because of just how hard death really is for us carnal people. We believe in an incarnational God who has shown us that he has experienced the carnal human life, in the person of Jesus Christ, up to and through experiences of death and dying.
That is incredible!
The deep feelings of sadness that I have about my friend Betsy, the weeping you may have done for your recently deceased loved ones. The fears you may have of someone near to you dying. Our text shows us today that God understands. That God knows. And that God had a choice and that choice was to become Incarnate in Jesus Christ – a man, who felt all these feelings too.
It is so comforting that I know God is with me holding my hand as I weep this weekend. God is weeping alongside me because God wept alongside Lazarus’s community and countless communities in the centuries before and after Lazarus.
So today, I will be remembering my dear friend Betsy alongside the other saints who I’ve had the blessing to know in my life. And I know that God will be holding my hand and will be helping to hold all the raw emotions I have right now as I walk up to light a candle in their memory during the Litany of Saints.
And the beauty of our Litany of Saints today and of all our liturgies – the things we do during our worship services – is that it will proclaim the good news that God has taken on death through Jesus Christ and is victorious through the resurrection. The liturgy will help us proclaim that death is not the final answer. So, I can be confident in my sermon that I can share the this one truth: God is an incarnate God, that is a God who came to experience the carnal life – embodied life, human life and so knows exactly how we feel. And I can let the Litany do the rest.
And all of you will also be invited to come forward during the Litany of the Saints to light a candle for the saints you have been blessed to know. I pray that before you come forward, you take a few moments to just tune into our incarnational God who is present with you always. Feel God’s warm arms wrap you in a supportive hug and then come forward to remember those you love who have died. God’s presence is with you and God knows how you feel. That is what I can be confident in today.
Amen.
Rev. Ryan | All Saints Sunday | Nov. 3, 2024
[1] Idea from The Rev. Dr. Karoline Lewis on Working Preacher Podcast, a podcast from Luther Seminary. Find the podcast episode at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ibA9XCwga4.
[2] Read about the stages of grief here: https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/5-stages-of-grief-coping-with-the-loss-of-a-loved-one.
[3] The theological framework of ‘a God who cares so much that God goes to the cross for us’ comes from The Crucified God by Jurgen Moltmann. In this book, Moltmann explores the incredible nature of God being incarnated (made carnal, made into man) in the person of Jesus Christ and how that shows the deep pathos, or feeling, of God’s commitment to loving all of creation.
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