Resurrection Shines Through Us All - John 11:32-44

If you are the child of a preacher, or God help you, the child of two preachers, you likely had restrictions placed on your Halloween activities this week. Some preachers won’t let their kids trick-or-treating, unless it’s a trunk-or-treat event in the theological safety of a church parking lot. There are preachers who won’t allow their children to dress as witches or Satan or, well, several of the fun options. I’m sure there are several rules, depending on who you ask. Some of you might recall the year when Halloween fell on a Sunday and we naively thought it would be fun to let kids come to church in their costumes and trick-or-treat in the office. That was worrisome to a particular group of non-Episcopalians, who protested in our parking lot with bullhorns. I was so proud of all of you for inviting them in to worship with us and stay for coffee hour. Though they didn’t take us up on that, the whole event demonstrated how divisive or offensive the holiday can be for Christians.

Our double-preacher household is not worried about things like costumes or trick-or-treating. Much to my teenagers’ frustration, however, I draw the line when it comes to putting up fake tombstones or any burial references in the front yard. Spiders and cobwebs and jump scares are fine, but anything related to actual death doesn’t feel right. I don’t worry about my neighbors’ yards with that stuff, it’s just a clergy peculiarity I think. As someone who does actual funerals in actual cemeteries, such decorations feel too real to me. I promised my kids again that I would work on that.

Tombstone decorations are just one aspect of a much wider tradition. These few days from Halloween, or All Hallows Eve to All Saints’ Day, are filled with evocative traditions, both secular and sacred. Cultures around the world use this time of year to honor the dead, and so does our Church. All Saints’ Day is a celebration of the communion of saints, past, present, and yet to come, and of our own place within that communion. Our hearts and minds naturally turn to those we’ve lost and to the larger mysteries of life of death.

Perhaps you are grieving the loss of a loved one today. Or, you might simply be contemplating your place in the mysterious communion of saints. Our prayers and music on All Saints’ are wide enough to span both grief and joy, whatever you bring to this occasion. This service is for anyone seeking connection to loved ones, or anyone who has questions about life, or death, or heaven itself. We fumble our way through such questions, since we quickly come up against mysteries too vast to understand.

I see that same imperfect search woven throughout the story of the raising of Lazarus. Martha and Mary are upset that Jesus hasn’t arrived sooner to save their brother’s life. Lazarus is already gone, and they are grieving the finality of his absence. In the verses leading up to the passage we just heard, Jesus tells Martha that her brother will rise again. Martha agrees that he will rise again on the last day, a common Jewish teaching at the time. That’s the way we usually talk about resurrection, too, as a future event that we don’t yet understand. Here what Jesus says next to Martha. “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” Resurrection is now, in Jesus, in the present tense. And to make this teaching tangible, he calls Lazarus out from the grave.

The English theologian F. D. Maurice once said that this exchange between Jesus and Martha depressed him. “How sad it is,” he observed, “that after two thousand years, the church has gotten most Christians only to the point to which the Pharisees got Martha: a belief in resurrection in the future, in resurrection a week from some Tuesday years from now. Only a handful have ever gotten past that point and made the leap to resurrection now – to resurrection as the fundamental mystery of creation made manifest in Jesus’ own flesh. And yet that mystery is all over the pages of the New Testament.” (Robert Capon) Another preacher suggested that if you hold a light beneath the page with the Lazarus story written on it, you’d see the resurrection of Jesus shining through.

The raising of Lazarus is not about saving Lazarus’ life. Lazarus would die a second time. Bringing Lazarus back from the dead is meant to show us something more fundamental about who Jesus is. Jesus is the resurrection and the life, now. Making life from death is what he does. His death and resurrection are underlying realities, not of a specific moment in history but of all moments. Like a grand sacrament, Jesus is the fundamental sign of God’s grace that runs throughout creation, the sign of God’s mercy over judgment, of God’s forgiveness over sin, of God’s life over death itself.

Just as God created out of nothing, God redeems out of the nothingness of death. Lazarus didn’t earn resurrection and neither do we. We cannot earn anything eternal by our own merits. Heaven is already ours through the grace of Jesus Christ. His resurrection and life are what bind us to one another, a communion of saints, from Lazarus to loved ones we have lost, to each of us.

Today, we give thanks for the communion of saints, that sacred and non-exclusive club of which we are all members. We honor those who have gone before us, the saints who  now rest from their labors. We find ourselves in good company with Mary and Martha, trying to understand the bigger picture. Like them, we long to hear that there is a mystery that holds us all together. And with them, on this day, we are assured that it’s true. Christ’s resurrection shines through us all.