This is All Saints Sunday,
and
one of those four special times during the Church Year
especially
appropriate for baptisms.
And we have two today! – a brother and sister, Matthew and
Ava Wiliamson.
We, as members of God’s family, will welcome these two
children
and
pledge ourselves to support them in their new life in Christ.
And we will also remember the fact that each of us are
also
baptized
into Christ.
As the Apostle Paul states so clearly in his letters,
this
means that now our lives are not our own to claim for ourselves;
we live no longer for ourselves but for Christ who lives
within us.
Now here is where reality sets in.
If we look at the way we live,
most
of the time it IS very much for ourselves and our own self interest.
And then there are the Saints, those whose lives really
did show
that
they no longer lived for themselves, but for Christ.
In today’s pop culture we might tend to think about saints
as
religious superheroes.
Certainly in what we know about saints,
they
seem larger than life,
able
to do incredible good deeds, proclaim the gospel eloquently, endure
suffering, persist in faithfulness through great difficulties.
And they have done this in the face of what the rest of
the world
might
think as foolishness and a waist of effort.
That is what that first lesson describes,
the reading from the Wisdom of Solomon in the Apocrypha:
The souls of the righteous are in
the hand of God,…
In the eyes of the foolish they
seemed to have died,
and their departure was thought
to be a disaster,
and their going from us to be
their destruction; but they are at peace.
For though in the sight of others
they were punished,
their hope is full of
immortality.…
They were tried and refined like gold,
and the effect of their lives on all around them is
described like
“sparks
running through dry stubble.”
What an image!
The Saints have been like sparks here and there
setting
the whole world ablaze with the testimony of their lives.
Yet any saint who has earned that title would tell you
that
this has not been the result of any superhero special talent.
For what does the text say?
The
souls of the righteous are in the hand of God,…
Those
who trust in him will understand truth,
and
the faithful will abide with him in love,
because
grace and mercy are upon his holy ones,
and
he watches over his elect.
Grace and mercy – it is God’s providence, care and
attentiveness
that
are the source of the glory of the saints.
They are in God’s hands,
and
in their trust in God, they will understand truth, understand reality,
they
are at one with the mind of God.
Again I say, it is all God’s work.
They
have been made a new creation.
The saints, like St. Paul, would be the first to say,
May
I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which
the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Galatians
6:14
Or these words from Philippians
3:7-9
Yet
whatever gains I had, [Paul declared]
these
I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.
More
than that, I regard everything as loss
because
of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
For
his sake I have suffered the loss of all things,
and
I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ
and
be found in him,
not
having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law,
but
one that comes through the faith of Christ.
The saints are those just like you and me, with one
distinction:
they
were open and malleable for God’s grace and mercy
to
make them into a new creation.
So what’s our excuse?
Maybe we can get some good news from the gospel reading
for today,
a
rather strange reading to have for All Saints, one might think,
the raising of Lazarus.
Is this all about a hope in a
personal resurrection to assure our own immortality?
No, not really.
There is something else going on in this story.
Jesus had been away, across the Jordan, out of the
country,
when
Lazarus got sick, and Martha and Mary had sent word to him.
But he delayed in returning until Lazarus was already dead
for four days.
Martha and Mary both stated that if Jesus had only been
there in time,
their
brother would not have died.
They believed that Jesus could heal, but they couldn’t see
beyond that.
They did not understand why he would delay nor what was
possible,
for
they were lost in their grief.
The Greek in this passage reveals more about what Jesus
was feeling
than
our English translations do.
Jesus was greatly disturbed, yes, disturbed,
not
with his own grief about the death of his friend,
- of course not, because he had
a plan and knew what he was doing in delaying -
Jesus was greatly disturbed at how limited they were in
their thinking,
Martha
and Mary, and those with them,
and
about how much grief they were suffering as a result.
The Greek indicates he was both angry with the situation
and
in tears himself in compassion for them in their grief.
The great indictment to this lack of faith and closed
perception
is
revealed in his words to Martha
when
she expressed reluctance to open the tomb.
"Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the
glory of God?"
"Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the
glory of God?"
So notice this: the only one having faith in this
situation was Lazarus,
and
he was dead.
It was, of course, the word spoken by Jesus,
who
is described in the Gospel of John as the Word of God
who
was in the beginning with God and who was God,
the
Word through whom all things came into being,
who
became incarnate among us,
this
Word of God, Jesus, standing there who said, “Lazarus, come out!”
that
gave new life to a four day old corpse.
Imagine
how much easier is it
for
God to work with those
who
are merely spiritually dead or asleep or half conscious!
Wake up! Let God work with you!
Cooperate with grace!
The
world needs us. That ought to be
obvious.
So
much potential for sainthood is sitting here.
If
God were to get his hooks into you,
you
too might run like sparks through the stubble.
1 comment:
What a great invitation to trust God!
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