All Saints Sunday

Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.

So, who was it?  Who, in your life, did you have to let go?  Wife, husband, child…there’s no end to it.  If there’s any one thing that is so frustrating about this life, it’s that it sometimes seems like we can live our lives always being touched by death – if not directly, then by the fear of death; the fear of loss that can often be just as eviscerating as the actual loss itself.  But living under that fear, in the end, only makes us angry: angry at the God who could make this unbelievably unfair world.

That’s the question that I’ve been asked the most in the years since I’ve been ordained: why did this happen?  Why are we the ones who are suffering?

I hear it slightly different than usually asked.  I hear it as Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.  In the feeling of utter helplessness that comes with waiting and watching and walking along with those who suffer, God dies.  God dies, not because of God’s own actions, but because in the experience of something so much more powerful than us – the power of death – the power of God, the power of life made manifest in Christ becomes eclipsed, covered up in great darkness.  Thick, suffocating, darkness.

In that darkness, there are some glimmers of light: the friends who come with a hug and a shared tear; the anonymous ‘thinking of you’ card that comes when you think you have no more energy; the quick phone call when you’re feeling desperately alone.  Those glimmers of light remind you that you are not alone; that others have walked that road before you and walk along beside you; they remind you that you do not wait alone.

And you do wait.  You wait as did the people of Israel, who longed for rescue, longed for God to come down and bring with him a new creation that would mean they would not have to watch their nation; their people, suffer, and die.  And God made them a promise: 

          And he will destroy on this mountain

          the shroud that is cast over all peoples,

          the sheet that is spread over all nations;

               he will swallow up death forever.

          Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces,

          and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth,

          for the LORD has spoken.

And they wait for that promise to be fulfilled.  A promised fulfilled by a commandment at a tomb:  unbind him, and let him go.

Jesus has wept at the grave of his friend, been berated by Mary, and in the face of the condemnation of the law, Lazarus has been raised from the dead.  Old Hebrew tradition held that the soul stayed in the body for three days after death; someone who had been dead for four days was ‘truly’ dead.  Prohibitions against touching the dead abounded, and now the crowd has a dead man in their midst.

A dead man, for whom moments ago they were crying.  Maybe not just crying; wailing, because the loss of the male head of a family would usually mean destitution and poverty for the female members of the family left behind. 

Jesus comes, the dead man is alive again; and the horrified crowd looks on, making Jesus’ instructions a necessity: unbind him, and let him go.

It’s small wonder that it is the raising of Lazarus that leads the Pharisees to understand that Jesus is too real to let live; if the crowd makes him king, the Romans will destroy their people.  From one life, comes death, and the crowd must then learn: unbind him, and let him go.  Unbind Jesus from their expectations, from their hopes, and let him be the Saviour that they need.  Death will still reign unless the Son of God can defeat death.

They also must unbind Lazarus from their fear, and let him be the man whom Jesus raised.  Fear, it turns out, may be as binding as the shrouds in which the dead are wrapped.  “See how much he loved him,” the crowd marvelled as Jesus wept; and Jesus did.  While the crowd and his sisters feared for Lazarus, feared for a future without Lazarus because they loved him, but they love imperfectly.  Jesus loves perfectly, and in the words of his friend John some years later, perfect love casts out fear.  Perhaps easy, for the Son of God; but an altogether different proposition for those who live and love in this world.

When my eldest son was born, I was a very proud daddy.  In fact, I was so proud I was probably floating two feet off the ground.  He was very little, but he showed promise early.  That pride was tempered with no small bit of anxiety; we were due within a week of his birth to move to Saskatoon for me to start my Seminary degree. 

A friend of ours who was a pastor came to visit us in the hospital, and after she’d ooo’d and aww’d a bit over the baby, she looked at me and said, “it’s amazing, isn’t it?” and I allowed that it was.  I was expecting the ‘soft paws’ approach to pastoral care.  But my friend looked at me, and continued as she said “it’s amazing that we can invite something so beautiful into our lives, but also realize that we’re inviting them to death.”

That sounds like a real downer.  But my friend is a very good pastor, and what she said stuck with me because to invite someone (anyone) into our lives is to invite them to death; and to invite grief.  Yet, I still hold my friend’s challenge to me as important because of the way I grew into my calling as a husband and father: I grew into fear.  Where I had never known fear of death – despite losing both sets of my grandparents before I turned 18, I felt largely untouched by fear.

That changed.

I began to have nightmares as I had never before.  I started to panic at the thought of my wife in hospital or my children – especially that first wee baby – getting sick.  It affected my health; it affected my capability to fulfill my calling.  Eventually, I had to realize that my fear was due to my love for that little family; but that my love had its roots in control: I want to control their health – even the to the extent of being God in God’s place, to dictate when, and where, and how.  But then I hear the words of the Saviour: unbind them, and let them go.

I had invited great love into my life; but I also invited them to be part of a creation in which death is a reality.  In the midst of my own darkness of fear, I had to let the light of Jesus Christ shine through – because God is NOT dead; God unbinds us and our love from the fear of death and decay.  God lives with God’s people as they care for each other: I learned that I did not care for my family alone.

In that understanding, you can raise your own voice with the people of Israel:  Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us.  This is the LORD for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.  There is nothing I can do to save my family.  But, we can be together with all God’s people, and together we can wait, worship, and praise.

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, we are tied together by Christ, and we are tied to Christ through the gift of our baptism.  When death comes for each of us, Jesus unties us from this earthly life and releases us to eternal life with him.  Like Lazarus, we are raised.  We are eternally bound and tied together in Christ, tied to the past, tied to the future.

Today is All Saints’ Sunday, remembering all those who have been gathered to everlasting life in Christ.  Today, as we gather as a community around the table of the Lord, you have the opportunity to come and light and candle for the ones you love.  A light to show that you know the darkness won’t win; a light to know that their everlasting life is real; a light to know that in the midst of your own great pain, you can unbind the ones you love, and let them go.

Let them go to Christ, who loves them, who weeps with you.  Let them go as they let you go; not to loneliness, but to the community that gathered and gathers still around you: God with you, and you, God’s people – for the home of God is with us.

And let the people of God say amen.