Foundry UMC DC: Sunday Sermons
Religion & Spirituality:Christianity
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC November 1, 2015, All Saints Sunday.
Texts: Isaiah 25:6-9, John 11:32-44
Today’s Gospel is about a funeral, something we all know something about. A beloved brother and friend has died and the family and community has gathered for the rituals of grief…in the midst of the casseroles and crying and storytelling and remembering, there hangs the question that so often lurks at funerals—where was God? Where was God when my loved one suffered with tubes coming out of her nose, when my beloved fought for breath, when the light of my life was wracked with pain, when this beautiful person was so devastated by her mental illness that she chose to exit this world rather than suffer any more, when the clot broke and moved into his brain, when my spouse’s heart, so full of love, attacked and took him from me in an instant? If God had been here, this wouldn’t have happened. Mary gives voice to this deeply human response to death: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Those gathered in grief also mutter under their breaths, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” Alongside these words, so often left unspoken except in the deep recesses of the human heart, there are also words of hope and faith. At funerals we hear words that speak of God’s light and love, of God’s presence, of hope in the life to come. Earlier in the story, Martha speaks such a word of hope saying, “I know that Lazarus will rise again…” But Mary, unlike Martha, can’t muster any words of faith or hope. She just cries.
In the midst of grief, the mixture of rage, confusion, hope, emptiness, gratitude, regret, fear, faith, loneliness, and so much more leaves us exhausted and numb as we try to adjust to a universe that has been radically altered by our loss. A beautiful prayer in the funeral liturgy of our church speaks of shrinking before the mystery of death. And a mystery it is. Suffering and death are THE human mystery, the place before which all our best efforts and all our striving reach their ultimate limit. How can we not shrink before such a mystery? //
If you read the whole story, you discover that Jesus knew that his friend Lazarus was gravely ill but purposely stayed where he was for two more days—so that by the time he arrived in Bethany Lazarus had been dead four days (11:6). But before we get aggravated by this, thinking that Jesus must be an unfeeling cad, keep in mind that this Gospel writer, John, is most concerned with telling the story of Jesus in such a way that something about the nature of God is revealed. John is a theologian, not a historian. At the time John wrote, tradition taught that the soul lingered near the body for three days, after which there was no hope of life returning. Jesus waited to arrive until the fourth day, until things were truly hopeless, when the full impact of God’s power might be displayed. And upon seeing the deep grief of his beloved friend Mary and of those who mourned with her, Jesus reveals one of the most important things we will ever know about the heart of God. Far from being unfeeling, Jesus wept; his own heart broke for the suffering of those around him. As Jesus cries, we learn that the God whom Jesus came to reveal is not far removed from our pain and our grief. Our God shares our pain, weeps with us and is deeply grieved by anything and everything that threatens human wholeness and flourishing.
But the point of Jesus’ coming into this situation isn’t only to reveal the compassion of God for our human grief and suffering—though that is certainly a word we need to hear. If that were the only message from Jesus, it would mean that God ostensibly could remain far off, sad for us, but unwilling or incapable or of doing anything to affect human life. Jesus’ purpose was to reveal even more than the great compassion of God—he came to reveal the glory of God, the power of God’s love to call forth life that is full and free even in the midst of death.
Jesus comes into a place of death, a hopeless moment, the point of despair and deep grief and he speaks words of life, words of faith in the power of God’s love, words of freedom from the things that keep human life bound by death. Jesus’ ultimate purpose here is to offer a great gift to all those who were grieving (who ARE grieving)—the gift not only of a loved one restored for a time, but more importantly, the gift of freedom from the fear of death for ALL time, the gift of knowing that God’s power is stronger than death, that God’s love is fiercer than the grave. This story, given to us on All Saints Sunday, is a proclamation of our astonishing hope: that death does not have the last word, that there is life beyond this world and the saints of our church, the saints in our lives, all the saints who have passed from this world into the next are alive—alive in and through the power of God’s love in Christ. Upon the recent death of my dad, one friend simply said, “God’s got him.” That is the promise. The great hymn states the promise this way: “O blessed communion, fellowship divine! We feebly struggle, they in glory shine...”[i]
Right now, in our church family, there are people who are grieving. There are people who are facing the end of their earthly life, there are people who are waiting and watching and walking together with their loved ones as they travel down the final stretch of their journey. We may want Jesus to show up and call it off, clean it up, make these situations different. But we know well enough this doesn’t always happen. We also know that sooner or later we will all face death—the death of those closest to us and our own death. The gift of Jesus for us all is the promise that we need not fear death. If we trust in the God revealed to us through Jesus, we truly have nothing to fear. For while we may not know WHAT is beyond the grave, we do know WHO is beyond the grave. God will never leave us nor forsake us. The Gospel today teaches us that even though Jesus wasn’t there when and how others wanted, even though Lazarus died, God was there and ready to bring about a miracle of life restored. God was there. God is here. God is near. God’s love is the very source of life and the very power of new life, resurrected life, restored life. In this world and in the next. Thanks be to God and Alleluia!
[i] “For All the Saints,” #711 in The United Methodist Hymnal
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