We are Made Saints

Sermon preached Sunday, November 6, 2022, All Saints Sunday, at Lutheran Church of Our Saviour in Chesterfield, VA.

If I’m being honest, I don’t always love the beatitudes, especially Luke’s beatitudes, for All Saints Sunday. With the blessings and woes, it seems to steer us into a direction I don’t want to go, pitting us against them, saint against sinner, blessing against woe, now against then.

I don’t believe this is Jesus’ purpose here. In Luke, Jesus is always talking about reversing the current order of things, toppling power structures and flipping things on their head. Just look at the Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise after she becomes pregnant with Jesus: God casting the mighty down from their thrones and lifting up the lowly.

I think these beatitudes are almost another example of that.

Whenever I read passages like this, these harsh words from Jesus, these woes sound like threats—ominous ones. “Watch out!” they say, “This could happen to you!” But I wonder if they are more a naming of reality…two realities, really.

One reality that states that when one lives as a disciple of Jesus, their life will change. When they share what they have, they might individually have less, but the collective will have more. When they advocate for justice, they might lose the goodwill of people who profit off other’s oppression. When they can no longer ignore the suffering of others, their hearts will be open to feeling that communal pain.

And there’s a second reality, a reality that states that nothing is permanent but God. Everything else can fade away, can be lost in a second, cannot be counted on, cannot be taken with us…everything but God who loves us and has claimed us.

And so the challenge begins in verse 27, to everyone who is listening, not just those who might have the blessings or woes directed at them. To Everyone.

And man, the bar is set so high! It may be that we’ve heard these so many times that we don’t feel their full impact anymore, but these are hard things! Praying for people who pursecute us. Giving away additional clothing to people who have stolen from us. Offering up ourselves in a nonviolent way when someone strikes us. Love your enemies!

Dang. This is not easy.

It’s All Saints Sunday, the day we remember those who have gone before us, who have passed along the faith to us, those who have lived holy lives…right?

The tendency, when we think of the Company of Saints, is to think of them as paragons. As perfect. As disciples who were so faithful they never faltered. That’s not reality, is it? No person is perfect, and I can think of lots of people who fell quite far from perfect who are counted among that host.

And yet, we trust and believe and know that they are with God because God keeps God’s promises.

In 2014, a few months before I was ordained, my grandfather died. He was my mom’s dad, also a Lutheran pastor and a great carpenter.

What he wasn’t, however, was always easy to get along with.

He had strong ideas about what was right and what wasn’t right, which meant that there were a lot of topics our family had silently decreed were forbidden to bring up with him.

We didn’t talk about education, because inevitably that would lead to a discussion about how terrible the education system had gotten.

We didn’t talk about politics, because no one wanted to hear how the politicians he didn’t like were ruining the country.

And we didn’t talk about religion, if we could help it. My grandpa was not comfortable with women in leadership roles in the church, which meant that my mother’s work as a rostered leader was difficult for him to swallow and when I was planning to go to seminary, he told me that “Jesus called twelve disciples and not one of them was a woman,” leading to a blowup that ceased communication between him and my immediate family for months.

This was my grandpa. I loved him, but our relationship was marked and broken by all the things we couldn’t talk about and the things he sometimes decided to say.

My grandma died a couple years before he did. Less than a year, actually, after that blow-up that causes such a break in our family. She had always been the one to smooth things over when conflict arose in the family. She was the one who made sure we knew how much we were loved. And when she died, my grandpa came to a realization.

He had been reading her journals. She had been keeping a journal since my mom was in her twenties. In reading her words and her thoughts, he realized that been pushing everyone he loved away. He realized that if he wanted to have a relationship with his children and grandchildren, he needed to make a change, because my grandma wasn’t there to make things better anymore.

He did make a change. He made an effort to tell my mom that he was proud of her, something he had never told her before. When I graduated from seminary, he gave me this cross (point to cross) which my grandma had given him years earlier. Some of the things we could never bring up around him were now able to be spoken.

It wasn’t that he changed his mind overnight about his long-held beliefs, but he now knew that relationships were more important than being right and showing everyone else how wrong they were.

By the time he died, my family was thankful that we’d had at least a few years of being in relationship with him. It didn’t erase all the difficult years, the hurt and pain that we went through, but it was important for us at least to know that he wanted to know us and support us.

It was troubling, then, to attend his funeral. The sermon preached at his funeral ignored all of the difficulty. It painted my grandpa as a man he wasn’t—or at least as a man he wasn’t always to us. It lauded his ministry and his dedication to the church, which were true, but it was a funeral sermon for a pastor without fault, and not the man who I remembered both denigrating my call as pastor and acting out the story of the three little pigs to make my siblings and I laugh when I was young. He did both.

To add to this, the pastor giving the sermon and leading the funeral never once referred to my grandpa by his name. He never talked about Emmett Schmitt, the father, the husband, the son, the grandfather. He only talked about Pastor Schmitt, the paragon of religious virtue.

As I’ve said, this is the problem sometimes when we talk about saints. When we call someone a saint, we only want to look at their positive qualities. We only want to pay attention to the “holy” things they did, and ignore the rest.

But a person’s actions aren’t what defines them as “saint.” “Saint” doesn’t necessarily define someone by the life they lived, but by their status as a child of God.

Pastor Schmitt is not a saint because he was ordained, or preached the Gospel, or fed people with the body and blood of Christ. Emmett Schmitt is a saint because God claimed him in the waters of baptism and worked in him throughout his life. Being a saint and a sinner aren’t mutually exclusive: they go hand in hand. Grandpa had his share of sins, but still, we call him “saint.” And we still count him among that communion that praises God without ceasing, along with so many others I have loved and who have died.

All Saints is often emotional or even said, especially for anyone who has lost someone recently or for whom the grief is still fresh.

But All Saints is also a day of celebration: a day to give thanks for these people we’ve loved. A day to acknowledge the reality of their lives and their status as child of God. A day to remind ourselves of all the ways we are still connected to them.

If you ever need a reminder, you don’t need to look any further than our communion liturgy. Each week, during the Great Thanksgiving, I say some version of this:

“And so, with all the choirs of angels,

with the church on earth and the hosts of heaven,

we praise your name and join their unending hymn:”

And then we sing “Holy, Holy, Holy,” and in that moment we are joined with that communion of saints who are already with God and who offer praise without ceasing.

Saints in heaven. Saints here in this room. Saints because God has made it so.

Amen.

Unbinding

Sermon preached Sunday, November 7, 2021, All Saints Sunday, at Grace Lutheran Church in Westminster, MD. 

All Saints is one of my favorite festivals of the church year. It is a day when we speak the realities of death and the promise of the resurrection. It is a day when we might feel most strongly the connection with the whole communion of saints that stretches back throughout human history.

It is a day that is both personal and universal, as we speak the names of our beloved friends, mentors, parents, children, siblings in the same breath as we remember every person who has ever died in the faith.

As our second All Saints in this COVIDtide, we come to this festival tired. There has been so much to grieve.

I wonder if maybe we’re not all feeling a bit like Mary and Martha today. It’s been a long season, approaching two years, of ups and downs, hopes and disappointments.

Mary and Martha saw their brother, Lazarus, get sick. It doesn’t say how long he was ill, but that almost doesn’t matter. They watched him deteriorate, caring for him. Hoping he would get better, seeing positive signs one moment, only to face grim reality the next. If they are unmarried (and we have no reason to assume they aren’t), losing their brother would not only mean losing someone they loved, but losing the one person in the world who could care for them. Without husbands, parents, or brothers, they would be moved to the margins of society, left to subsist of the charity of others.

When they realized Lazarus was dying they sent word to Jesus, hoping beyond hope that Jesus would arrive and heal their brother before he died. Jesus did arrive, of course, but not in time. By the time he got into town, Lazarus had been in the tomb four days. Imagine what it must have been like for these two sisters. They had been hopeful, but now they are grieving. They are probably feeling a whole host of emotions: anger, frustration, sadness, exhaustion, fear of what comes next.

They unleash these emotions on Jesus. They are pleased to see him, but disappointed in his timing: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” It’s important to note: Jesus doesn’t brush aside their feelings; he mourns with them. When he calls Lazarus out of the tomb, he anticipates the crowd’s reactions. He anticipates that the people will still be wrestling with their emotions and feelings and won’t necessarily know the best way to move forward. He helps them out and gives them direction: “Unbind him and let him go.”

There are lots of great moments in this chapter, but this is my favorite: “Unbind him and let him go.”

The reading stops after the next verse, but that leaves a lot of important stuff out—it leaves out the reactions of people when they heard what had happened. If we read just a bit further, this is what the Gospel of John tells us:

“⁴⁵Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him. ⁴⁶But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what he had done. ⁴⁷So the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the council, and said, “What are we to do? This man is performing many signs. ⁴⁸If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.” ^…53So from that day on they planned to put him to death.” (John 11:45-53)

In the Gospel of John, it is this sign by Jesus, it is the raising of Lazarus that directly precipitates the plotting of his death. Why did they react this way? It might simply be because Jesus was gaining a reputation, but it might also be because of those last words. Perhaps it was the unbinding of Lazarus that would draw the most attention.

Lazarus was bound in his burial clothes. He was wrapped in cloth, surrounded by all the things that marked death. When he is unbound, he is able to rejoin the community. If he was resurrected, but not unbound, he would still be “othered”—he would still be kept on the outside. Unbinding means that his family and neighbors help him moved on from the things that marked him as dead and assist him in embracing new life.

It’s not just Lazarus. It’s not just the dead who are bound, it’s the living, all around us. They are struggling to come back to life; waiting for someone to help them do it. There are people bound by economic struggles, by the unfair expectations of others, by grief, by mental illness, by the social -isms that effect so many of us: sexism, racisms, ableism. We are bound. Our fellow siblings in Christ are bound. I truly think that everyone, everywhere, is bound by something, at one time or another.

Jesus call us to unbind them, to unbind each other, to unbind ourselves. This might mean comforting one another and speaking words of hope when all feels lost. It might mean reminding each other that we are whole, beautiful, and loved creations of God, even when we fail to meet the demands set by others. It might mean helping people seek out appropriate medical and mental health when stigma or fear makes it seem impossible. It might mean speaking up for all whose voices are marginalized to make every space one where all are welcome.

…and, as was the case with Lazarus, it might mean some complications in the community. When we start pursuing this path, when we truly work on unbinding ourselves and each other, we’re bound to rub some people the wrong way.

But we can’t cower in fear. We can’t put our own safety first, like the Pharisees did. Jesus calls us to action. “Unbind him and let him go!”

Jesus does the hard part. God is the one who brings us back to life, who calls out to us in our death and resurrects us. But as Christians we are called to be more than spectators. We are called to walk with and accompany our fellow human siblings and we do that by unbinding.

It is the unbinding that moves us forward.

Collectively, as a Church—not just this congregation, but throughout every corner of Christianity, I wonder if we are not still carrying around the body February 2020, unable to admit that what was is gone. Unwilling to put the past in the tomb, admit it’s dead, and let God get to the work of resurrection.

We know that on the back-end of this pandemic, we can’t go back to what was before. If we are honest with ourselves, we know that chapter is closed. It is laying in the tomb.

But God is bringing about new life. It’s already happening in fits and spurts if we’re looking out for it. The new life is there—if we’re willing to unbind it.

Unbind it from the extra baggage and expectations that no longer fit.

Unbind it from “the way we’ve always done it.”

Unbind it from our own doubt about stepping out in faith.

In baptism, we die and rise to new life. It’s harder to see sometimes when we just sprinkle water on a person’s head, but when baptism is whole immersion, it is much more clear. A person is lowered into the water—they meet death there. If they didn’t come out, they would die, they would drown. Coming out of the water is a rush of new life; fresh, incredible oxygen fills their lungs and they are able to breathe. We die with Christ, we die in Christ…and then are raised with Christ to new life.

This is God’s action in baptism, but it is the unbinding that gives us our opportunity to enter into the action. We are a community. We care for one another. When someone, like Lazarus, is coming out of their tomb, we are there to help them take the next steps. Even this work we are only able to do because of what God has done for us, first.

God is inviting us into this holy work, to unbind the Church and to unbind each other.

This is what the communion of saints does for each other.

Amen.

Blessed Saints

Sermon preached Sunday, November 1, 2020, All Saints Sunday, at St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Littlestown, PA.

The day after I graduated from seminary, I flew to Turkey with forty other people and two of my professors. Our goal was to visit the ruins of the cities with early groups of Christians: Ephesus, Pergamum, Laodicea, among others. Along the way we visited other wonderful sites of our Christian heritage. We saw cave churches in Cappadocia, tiny little chapels built into rock, each with a unique assortment of paintings on the walls, telling Bible stories, depicting angels, naming saints.

We went to the Hagia Sophia, or Holy Wisdom, in Istanbul. First a basilica built for the Eastern Roman Emperor, it was converted into a mosque in the 1500s by the Ottomans. Its original mosaics were covered to conform with Muslim piety, but in 1935 it was converted to a museum. Currently, it’s an interesting mixture of Islamic symbols and uncovered Christian mosaics. The mosaics are, as you might guess, of Jesus, Mary, and other saints.

Just outside of the city center in Istanbul is the Chora Church. It was one of the most remarkable sites I saw while I was there, so remarkable, that I actually bought a book. The book contains close up pictures and explanations of all the mosaics in this church and the book is necessary because almost every inch of ceiling and wall in this space was covered in images.

There is a room that tells the whole life cycle of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Another that tells the life of Christ. The genealogies of Christ and Mary. The apostles. And then, on one wall, there is the Parekklesion, the part of the church dedicated to what will happen, instead of what has happened. It depicts the risen Christ, the archangel Michael, the Day of Judgment, and what you have in front of you, the picture that I’ve been using in all our social media posts about All Saints.

This is called the Anastasis, or the “Harrowing of Hell.” If you remember, in our creed every week, we say that Christ “descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again.” This mosaic imagines what that meant, what that might have looked like.

You can see Christ in the center, grabbing two people, Adam and Eve, and pulling them out of their tombs. It’s hard to see, but down at the bottom is a figure bound near a broken gate: Satan, defeated. Behind Adam is a group of the righteous, including John the Baptist, King Solomon and King David. Behind Eve stands her son, Abel and other figures representing various Church leaders.

This is one image of what resurrection might look like, of what it might mean to be a saint.

We get another image in our reading from Revelation. A multitude that no one can count, from every nation, every language, worshipping God. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?

These are saints, those who have come out of the great ordeal we call life, who have been washed clean. They hunger no more, and thirst no more. God wipes away every tear from their eye. And they worship God, day and night, in unceasing praise.

This is the image we have the opportunity to enter into every Sunday. When we are preparing for communion, I greet you and you greet me, and then I pray: It is indeed right, our duty and our joy…remember? And then, finally, I’ll sing today, “And so, with all the saints, with the choirs of angels and the hosts of heaven, we praise your name and join their unending hymn…”

And we sing together, “Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God. God of power, God of might. Blest is he who comes in your name. Sing hosanna here on Earth.” Sing hosanna here on earth because hosanna is already being sung in heaven. Sing hosanna here on earth because at this moment heaven and earth are joined together, the great company of saints, living and dead, united in worshipping God.

Every year when we observe this festival, it hits each person a little differently. Some of us have lost someone dear in the past twelve months. For others of us, it’s been much longer, but still feels raw. Some of us are grieving people we had a wonderful relationship with. Others are grieving relationships that never were, and now never have the chance to be. And still others have complicated grief for someone who caused hurt and damage.

But when we remember the saints, we remember all of that. We remember that not every person spread joy and love. We remember that we are still sinful and far from perfect. And yet, somehow, God still opens arms to us in welcome.  Still, somehow, calls us blessed. Still, somehow, calls us saints.

Saints in heaven, Saints on earth. Saints we knew, saints we never had the chance to meet. Saints we loved, saints who never showed love, saints who never experienced being loved.

Saints who brought joy and some saints whose sinful side brought pain.

Saints claimed and named by God. Called children of God. Not because of what they did, but simply by virtue of belonging to God.

And we are saints, as well as sinners. Again, not because of what we do, but because we are God’s.

You. Me. The ones we remember today.

Blessed saints.

Amen.

[Insert Your Name Here], Come Out!

Sermon preached Sunday, November 4, 2018, All Saints Sunday, at St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Littlestown, PA. Audio can be found here.

Imagine the scene, if you will.

Jesus has just come into town, four days late. At least that what Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus believe. Jesus is four days past due. “Jesus,” they say to him, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died!”

These two women have had four days to mourn. They’ve had four days to try to begin the process of reorienting their life without Lazarus. Four days of grief. Four days of that hollow, empty feeling you have when someone you love is no longer there.

And then Jesus arrives. Martha hears he’s come to town and goes out to meet him. She’s not angry with him for not getting there sooner. She isn’t berating his tardiness. She simply states the fact, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died, but even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.”

Mary has a similar reaction when she finally sees Jesus. She goes to find him and when she does, she kneels before him and also says, “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died.”

Because at this point, it is obvious to everyone in the village, including Mary and Martha, that four days is simply too long for there to be any hope of Lazarus coming back. In the ancient world when it was hard to tell sometimes if someone truly was dead-dead…everyone could agree that four days was indeed dead.

But still, Jesus goes to the tomb and commands that the stone of the cave-tomb be moved. Martha can’t believe this. She is  incredulous and protests Jesus’ actions. Doesn’t Jesus smell what everyone else can smell? Doesn’t Jesus realize that Lazarus’s body has already started to decay? They could smell it from outside the tomb! He’s been dead for four days.

And that’s just outside of the tomb! What was it like inside the tomb? Dark, surely. It was a cave, after all. There was the smell, the stench of a dead body laid to rest. It was likely quiet, too. The stone that covered the entrance likely blocked a lot of sound from the other side and, it being a tomb, there wasn’t a whole lot happening inside. Dark, full of stink, silent.

Then the stone is moved. Light begins to stream in bit by bit. And the voice of Jesus cries, “Lazarus, come out!”

…and he does! Lazarus comes out. In the darkness, in the isolation, in the decaying stench of death, the voice of Jesus reaches Lazarus and Lazarus comes out.

Four days dead. Lying in a tomb. Alone. In the dark. Life over.

And then the voice of Jesus calls Lazarus forth from the tomb—calls life forth out of death.

The trick, though is that there was death first. Lazarus was dead. Jesus didn’t prevent the death from happening. Lazarus did die. But God is able to bring life out of it.

There’s death everywhere. That’s the main reason we celebrate All Saints Sunday. We recognize, acknowledge and name the reality of death in our world, particularly the literal, physical death of our friends, family, and loved ones.

But there’s also another kind of death. The death that makes us feel as though we are in a tomb of our own. Alone, in the dark, heavy with the smell of failure or despair.

We’ve been Lazarus. You may be feeling like Lazarus today, this morning. I don’t know what your death might be. I don’t know what your tomb might look like.

Maybe death came in the form of a lost job or opportunity. Things were looking good, looking up, everything was pointing to the stars aligning and circumstances coming together and then—nothing. A pink slip. A rejection letter. A thanks-but-no-thanks from the school or organization or office you envisioned yourself at. The imagined future has died.

Or death could be a broken relationship. A friendship, a marriage, a connection that felt real and deep but for whatever reason fell apart. Hurtful words and that deep sense of loss dig the tomb we find ourselves in. It feels like nothing will be the same ever again and it’s almost impossible to imagine moving forward.

Perhaps the death we talk about the least among other people is a death of faith, or perhaps it’s better to say that our relationship with God feels dead. Sometimes that connection to God feels so strong and so powerful that it erases all doubts and concerns.

But other times… Other times it seems as if there’s nothing on the other side of our prayers, as if there’s no one who actually cares about us, or loves us…as if we’re just going through the motions, but feeling empty.

And, just maybe, it is simply the death of someone you cared about deeply and now your grief ebbs and flows in such a way that you’re not sure if you’ll ever feel quite “normal” again, whatever that means. Our mourning becomes a kind of death in and of itself—keeping us from the life we led before.

I don’t know what your death looks like, but it really doesn’t matter. In all cases, these deaths are around us and in us. They suck energy. They leave us drained, with little desire to do anything about them. They put us in a tomb, bound in cloth, lifeless. We sit in a dark, dank cave unable to do anything else. And we cry out to God, “If only you had been here, we would not have died!”

Then Jesus comes. Jesus has been there all along. Not preventing the death—death is a part of the greater cycle of creation. Instead, Jesus is prepared with the gift of new and abundant life.

Jesus doesn’t wait for us to gather our own strength. Jesus doesn’t wait for us to “buck-up” or “get over it” or even to “just have faith.” None of these admonitions or pieces of advice are helpful in the face of death. They are platitudes, at best. But Jesus doesn’t say these things.

No, instead Jesus comes to the tomb, stands at the entrance of the cave and calls us out. In the silence, darkness and isolation, we hear a voice:

“Lazarus, come out!”

Jesus calls to each of us:

“Karen, come out!”

“Larry, come out!”

“[Insert your name here], come out!”

The voice draws us out, into the light, into the fresh air, and into the community. It’s not through our own power or sheer force of will that we are brought back to life, but through Jesus coming to us.

And it the same way that our deaths take different forms and shapes, the voice of Jesus can reach us in a lot of ways.

Maybe the voice of Jesus comes through words of comfort and commiseration from a friend. Or through forgiveness proclaimed through our baptism. Or through the words “given for you” as you receive communion.

But somehow, someway, that wonderful, beautiful voice of Jesus reaches into the tomb to bring us back to life.

New life that looks like finding joy in the things you once loved; reconciling broken relationships and finding the strength to build new ones; sensing renewal and looking forward to all of the ups and downs life has to offer. Opportunities open up and fresh paths lay out before us, ready to be walked down with our village alongside us. New life, spring forth out of the darkness. We think of the ones we’ve loved and lost and our heart begins to feel the joy of memory,  even if tinged in grief.

It may not happen instantaneously and sometimes the voice might be a little subtle. It might be hard to hear.

But it’s there. God is there. God isn’t afraid to roll away the stone and smell the stench of our death. God doesn’t care if our village has given up on us after four days in the tomb. The God who loves us, who wept for Lazarus, weeps for us. The God who loves us doesn’t let death have the last word in our relationship. God has the last word at the door of death.

God says, “Child of mine, come out and live.”

Amen.