Pastor Beverly Piro + November 3, 2024
All Saints Sunday
Pastor Bev Piro’s sermon for All Saints Sunday looks at Jesus' raising of Lazarus, not merely as a miracle but as a profound testament to God’s word of life that overcomes death. God's word calls us out of places of despair and into community, where we can be freed from isolation and bound together by love. In remembering both the saints who have gone before and those who live among us, we celebrate God’s unending grace that unbinds us daily.
Sermon Transcript
From automatically generated captions, and lightly edited for readability by AI chatbots
This story about the raising of Lazarus is not so much about what happened to Lazarus as it is about what happened to death that had a hold of him. Let's delve into the story, beginning with the women.
Mary and Martha are good friends of Jesus. In an earlier encounter, we learned that Mary and Martha related to Jesus in very different ways that caused tension between them—Martha, the dutiful one, making things ready; Mary, the one who sat at Jesus's feet. Here, near the tomb of their brother, Mary speaks from her heart of faith and appeals to Jesus's compassion: "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." They wept together, and Mary took Jesus to the tomb as he had asked.
Martha, in her usual way, speaks from a faith that's grounded in practicality. When Jesus asked for the stone to be removed from the tomb, she reminded him that it was too late—Lazarus was already held by the stench of death. At this moment, Jesus turned their sorrow into a witness to the power of God's word—not the miracle of resurrection, I would argue, but the power of the word of God to bring life in any circumstance.
So, let's think about that for a moment. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth and all that is, with the power of God's word. It was God's word at the burning bush that established His relationship with Abraham and revealed God's identity: "I am who I am." It was God's word that spared the life of Isaac. It was God's word that became flesh in the form of an infant, fully human, here weeping at the loss of a dear friend, and yet fully God. And it is by God's word, through Jesus, that Lazarus broke the bonds of death and came again to life.
So we see here that God's word is more powerful than death. It smothers the stench of death. The strips of cloth that bind the dead are broken. God's word is a word of life. To be sure, death is always with us, but not at God's hand. Death comes because we still live outside the Garden of Eden. Humankind continually stands in conflict with God, knowing better, wanting better, self-serving rather than letting God be the Creator. And so, we suffer at the hands of those who would harm us, of disease that would rob us of our health, of hatred, of loneliness, of broken spirits, and broken promises.
But we never suffer at the hand of God. God's hand is the one that is continually extended to us—to lift us up out of despair, to hold us in our pain, and to comfort us in grief. As we are gathered into God's hands and wrapped in God's arms, God whispers into our ears God's word of hope.
For many years, I subscribed to the Sunday New York Times—you know, the big, fat paper one. Many times, but not always, I would sort of dwell in the obituary section. They were fascinating. At great cost and at great length, people would try to pack the essence of someone's life into this tiny columnar print. Some were elderly people who had lived long lives with many accomplishments; some were young, the promises of their future accomplishments cut short.
In one of the congregations I served, I started a book group for women who didn't fit the traditional circle model, yet were eager to be in community where questions of faith could be openly raised, challenged, and explored. The participants ranged in age from new mothers to great-grandmothers—some cradle Lutherans, some newly returning to church after an age of skepticism or extreme doubt. Well, it wasn't long before the topic of heaven and hell came up. In some ways, it was the ultimate test topic—how open was this group of women? They wondered: Is this really a safe place to lay out my faith questions? Will I risk being silenced, corrected, or scorned if I question convention?
So someone bravely asked the question, "Do you think there really is a place that is heaven?" The responses were as varied as the women gathered around that table. And believe me when I tell you that no one was silenced, corrected, or scorned.
"Is there really a place that is heaven?" was the question we asked in return. If heaven is the place where we meet God, must we wait until we die? If we live our lives in anticipation of meeting God, don't we risk not seeing God present with us now? If we spend our lives waiting to meet God on the other side, we will fail to hear God's word of life—the creative, redeeming, renewing word of life that speaks to the many deaths we experience, the deaths that we die over and over again.
We die repeatedly because of our failure to follow the command of Jesus: to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. We die whenever sin overcomes us and separates us from God. We die when we choose evil over good. These are the deaths that are never recorded in the pages of the newspaper or on legacy.com.
If we follow Luther's teaching, we die every day to sin and are born again into life in Christ because of the power of our baptism and the mark of Christ that we bear. It is that cross that means that death cannot hold us, that evil cannot overcome us, that the stench of death, which swirls around us—even that sign of repugnant death—is subject to God's word of life.
"Come out," God says to us. "Come out and get out of the bindings of death and live again." And again, God calls us to life. Who will unwrap our bindings? Jesus instructed others to unbind Lazarus and release him from death. But who will unbind us and free us from things that send us alone to a tomb of desperation and despair? Left on our own, we would stumble with feet bound up, and we would starve without hands to feed us. So we are called by God to live in a community that cares for and nurtures the risen dead.
The COVID pandemic robbed us of many things, but most profoundly, we were robbed of life in community—isolated, distanced, fearful. The communities that support us, that hold us accountable, that proclaim God's word to us have been slow to come back. But we desperately need to be in community. A community can look like many things—like coffee fellowship on Sunday morning, like quilter and prayer shawl groups, around dinner tables in each other's homes, in book groups, in praying with someone you don't know when invited to do so during worship. It is in those places and at those times that the bindings of death are unwrapped and the death shroud is torn away.
Today we remember and name people from this community who have died in the last year. While they were alive, they took care of us, and we took care of them, speaking to one another God's word of life. We call them saints because they have put aside their daily labor and now are at rest. But this is a day to remember the saints who yet live among us. At the same time saints and sinners, we live in that dynamic tension between death and life. We give thanks for our brothers and sisters who show us the face of Christ and speak God's redeeming word to us.
This is a community of saints, not because of how good we are or what we do or say or anything else. We are a community of sinners gathered together because of the goodness of God's creative and redeeming word that continues to call us over and over again out of the death of sin and into the light of life.
Thanks be to God for all the saints—those who now live with God, may they be blessed, and those who yet live among us, may they be a blessing even as they are blessed.
Amen.
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