All Saints’ Day
November 1, 2009
John 11:32-44

Living into Sainthood

Commendations to those of you who remembered to change your clocks last night. And commendations to those who were so keen to celebrate All Saints’ Day that you came an hour early. One of the great things about the Company of All Saints is that it transcends the barriers of time and space. Somewhere, in some time zone, all the saints are on time for worship today.

A "saint," as you probably know, is a holy person. It was Martin Luther who helped us to see that all those called to be God’s church, God’s holy people, are saints. Anybody can be a saint. What makes us saints is not our own holiness, but the call of the Holy One to live to God’s glory.

Look around. You can see that we’re a mess, but according to the gospel, we’re a holy mess – a mismatched collection of sinners in the process of becoming sanctified. By grace God calls us to become what Jesus is – fully and authentically human. The more truly human we become, the closer we get to God. As we become more and more like Jesus, we live into our true identity as the saints of God.

To be a saint, in other words, is to be on the road toward sanctification. We aren’t there yet, but we’re on the way. In the words of I John, "Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed" (I John 3:2).

There are many ways to read today’s story from the Gospel of John. You can read it as a prelude to the Easter story. You can read it as evidence of Jesus’ love for his special friends Lazarus, Martha, and Mary. Or, as I would like to suggest, we can read it as story about three saints named Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, who are on the same road as the rest of us saints.

We enter their story rather late. We should start, I suppose, with the day these three met Jesus. The problem is, John doesn’t give us any of those details. Luke, however, reveals a rather embarrassing episode about a fight between the two sisters Mary and Martha. You might remember that tale.

One evening Lazarus shows up with a friend in tow.

"Mary, Martha, I’d like you to meet Jesus. He’s staying for supper. I didn’t think you’d mind. Oh, and these are his friends Peter, Andrew, his brother James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, Matthew, the other James, Thaddeus, Simon, and Judas. They’re staying for supper, too."

Crash! Bam! Martha is making a terrible racket in the kitchen trying to throw a meal together for 13 recently invited guests, when she notices Mary is nowhere to be seen. She finds her sitting at the feet of Jesus, listening to his every word as though she were a disciple, too. Martha is about to haul Mary out by her ear when Jesus intervenes and suggests that Martha needn’t prepare quite so many dishes. "Mary has chosen the better dish," he tells Martha (Luke 10:42).1

I imagine it took Martha a while to get over that episode, but by the time we get to this part of John’s Gospel, it’s pretty clear that she has. When their brother Lazarus falls ill, the first thing she and Mary do is send for Jesus. He comes – eventually – but by the time he arrives, it’s too late. The funeral is over, the tomb has been sealed, and Martha, being Martha, is busy writing thank-you notes and returning casserole dishes.

When Martha hears that Jesus has arrived, she goes out to meet him and (We might as well be honest about it.) gives him a piece of her mind. "Lord," she says, "if you had been here, my brother would not have died."

Here is our first insight into true sainthood: Saints love life and are honest in the face of death. In other words, Saints grieve. They don’t pretend not to be sad when their hearts are breaking, and they don’t mince words when they’re angry at God.

Some of us imagine that real saints don’t behave that way. They keep a stiff upper lip and maintain their composure at all times. Maybe they do – for a while, in public -- but real saints know that life is a good gift, and when it ends, it’s appropriate to grieve.

Somewhere along the line, many of us got the notion that we’ll hurt God’s feelings if we tell God what’s really on our hearts. The psalmists of old would be surprised to hear that. Seventy percent of the psalms are laments.

"Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." To be that honest is a saintly act.

The second insight into saintliness can be found in Martha’s next words to Jesus. Jesus tells her that Lazarus will rise again. "Yes, Yes." Martha says. (No doubt people have been telling her much the same thing for days now. ) "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day."

Jesus says to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live. And whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?"

It’s hard to say from the story exactly what Martha believes about that statement Jesus has just made. What is abundantly clear is that she believes Jesus. She trusts him. She loves him. She puts her faith in him. "Yes, "she says, "I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world."

To be a saint is to put your trust in Jesus. Of course, that includes believing certain things about him – that he is God’s Son, that he is the Messiah -- but before the Christian life is a set of beliefs about Jesus, it is a relationship with Jesus. Martha puts her trust not in a dogma but in a person. A saint trusts Jesus to be who he says he is and to do what he promises to do.

When I stand by a graveside to commit a saint’s body to the earth, I say,

As a Jew of her time, Martha believed in the resurrection. Most people in her tradition did. What makes her a saint in the Christian sense is her trust in Jesus. Her sure and certain hope is through our Lord Jesus Christ. Saints put their trust in Jesus.

John goes on to tell us how Martha goes back to the house to call her sister Mary. When Mary sees Jesus, she says the same thing to him that Martha said. "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." (Do you see what I mean about honesty?)

Next Jesus himself breaks down. He weeps along with Martha and Mary. His grief is no less real and no less painful than theirs. "Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows" (Is. 53:4). Then, greatly disturbed, he calls for the stone in front of the tomb to be moved, and cries with a loud voice, "Lazarus, Come out!"

Lazarus obeys, and with equal force Jesus commands, "Unbind him, and let him go."

I don’t know what to say about this story as history. I wasn’t there. Neither were you. Hearing it only as history, there’s not a lot we can say. Hearing it as sacred story, it says a great deal. It says that saints live not only in the promise of a future resurrection, but also in the reality of a new life already begun. Jesus is the resurrection and the life for the future, but he is also the resurrection and the life right now.

Right now, in this moment, you and I, like Lazarus, are set free, are unbound, to live as the saints of God. Saints love life. Saints trust Jesus. And saints live the resurrection life, unbound, right now.

Let me tell you a story. It’s about a saint named Mollie. Mollie graduated last spring form Nacogdoches High School in Texas. During a pep rally on a Friday morning last fall, the cheerleaders at Mollie’s school put on a skit about how the Nacogdoches High Dragons were going to win in the game against the Central High Roughriders. The pep rally took place in the gym, of course.

If you’re not from Texas, you might not realize just how intense a high school football pep rally can be. Several kids came out dressed in the colors of the opposite team. The cheerleaders for the Dragons went behind the rivals, tied their hands behind their backs, and had them kneel on the floor. Then the cheerleaders took out toy pistols, put them to their rivals’ heads, and pretended to execute them. They dragged the "bodies" into a pile on the gym floor. Then, strangely, they threw money into the air. The thousands of students in the gym, along with their teachers and their parents, hollered and stamped and clapped their approval.

That skit bothered Mollie. That skit wasn’t just about football. It was about war and fear and dehumanization. She went home and told her mother about it. Then she and Mollie went to see the school principal. "You’re the only ones complaining," he told them. "Nobody else thinks anything was wrong with the skit."

Mollie went to work. She got some friends together and circulated a petition. She discovered that the school handbook forbade guns – even toy guns – on campus. She wrote a column in the school newspaper protesting the skit, but it didn’t get printed because the principal said it was critical of the school administration.

Then the local newspaper ran the story on the front page. The next day the national news outlets started calling, asking Mollie for interviews.

Guess what happened a few days later. The principal apologized on the front page of the local paper, saying that the administration was wrong and that Mollie and her allies were right. Mock executions, even in the name of football, are wrong. It won’t happen again, he promised.2

Now, you might ask where Mollie got the courage to do a thing like that. Well, Mollie’s a member of the Austin Heights Baptist church in Nacogdoches. That means she has passed under the waters of baptism good and proper, and has been raised to new life in Christ.

She’s a saint, you see, and saints lives unbound. Saints live the resurrection life right now. They aren’t intimidated by peer pressure or principals without principles. Saints try to live their lives as a witness to Jesus, and anybody who knows anything about Jesus knows he wouldn’t approve of turning sports rivals into enemy combatants.

God makes saints. God then calls saints to love life, to trust Jesus, and to live the resurrection, unbound, right now, and as well as in the life to come.

And one was a doctor, and one was a queen,
And one was a shepherdess on the green
They were all of them saints of God, and I mean,
God helping, to be one too.3

 

Notes:

[1] The NRSV says “part,” but “dish” is a valid translation.
 [2] Kyle Childress, “Pep-rally Protest,” Christian Century, October 6, 2009, 33
[3] Hymn by Lesbia Scott, “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God,” Presbyterian Hymnal, No. 365

 

 

 

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