All Saints Sunday
Isaiah 25:6-9 Psalm 24 Revelation 21:1-6 John 11:32-44 Dear fellow ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ, grace and peace to you from the one who gathers the saints in light. Amen Today we observe All Saints Sunday, the day when we formally recall those who have died. I say formally, because when someone we love dies they are often on our minds and in our hearts, they’re the ones we want to call when the grief becomes too much or when we have exciting news, they’re the ones who shaped us in some way, and now that they’re gone we find ourselves intentionally looking for them in ourselves, or we do something and it reminds us of our loved one and we say ‘oh that’s where I got that’ and give thanks to God for their influence on our life. we bring forward today the saints naming the hope and the assurance that we will see them again, and not just in our hearts but in the flesh, at the last, when the promises of God have come true, when there is a new heaven and a new earth and there is no more mourning or crying or pain and certainly no more death. But until then, we wait. In many ways All Saints day is a day where we Christians are reminded that we are in the middle of time, stuck between the already and the not yet. We already have Jesus, that part of God’s promise and plan has been realized, Jesus fulfills the promises that God makes in Isaiah and through the prophets, Jesus is God’s way of bridging the gap between God and humans, between God’s hopes for creation and reality. But the kingdom of God is not yet complete, it has come near in Jesus, the process has started but construction is still underway so we are left to wonder, what do we do in the meantime? We have hope certainly, hope in the promise of God fulfilled in Jesus, and because of that hope we work to live our lives according to the way of God that Jesus taught us, making the world around us a bit more like God’s vision but some days that doesn’t seem like enough, try as we might there are days where hope and Jesus don’t seem like enough, those days we’re like Mary in our gospel reading, her brother has been dead four days and finally Jesus shows up and the first thing she says to him is “Lord if you had been here my brother would not have died.” what she’s really saying to him is, where were you? We sent you a message, you’re too late. And Jesus, seeing Mary and the mourners weeping asks to see where Lazarus is laid, and Jesus too is overcome with emotion and weeps with them, for his friend, and here Jesus too is caught in the middle. Jesus is God, he knows who he is and what he is going to do, especially in the gospel of John, and sometimes, a lot of times this involves some suffering especially for the humans he loves that just don’t understand the scope of Jesus’ mission in the world. Jesus’ disciples don’t understand when he tells them what is going to happen to him, a crucified messiah doesn’t compute Jesus knows they will be scared and sad, he tries to give them reassurance, at the same time knowing that the only way to get to Easter Sunday and the empty tomb is through the fear and sadness. Jesus loves his friends Mary and Martha and Lazarus but, here too he knows that the way to the empty tomb goes through pain and sorrow, he has a mission and Lazarus’ death plays a role in it. So when Jesus is sent word that Lazarus is sick, he intentionally waits for two days. He knows that Lazarus is going to die and that he is going to raise Lazarus from the dead, this miracle will be foreshadowing of his own death and it will bring him closer to the cross. Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead is the last straw for the authorities, they meet together and the question is posed “‘What are we to do? This man is performing may signs. If 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.” and they have some discussion and the chief priest points out that it’s better to have one person die then all of them die and John tells us “...so from that day on they planned to put him to death.” The way to the cross and the empty tomb goes through Lazarus’ death and his sisters’ grief. Jesus knows this but when faced with the mourning of his friends, Jesus weeps with them, he’s in the middle, Jesus knows what it’s like to be in the middle of the already and not yet. Our God knows what we’re going through in those times when hope and reality collide and he weeps with us, he comes to us. Here in the middle, Jesus comes to us through the saints, and when we say saints we mean those everyday Christians baptized into Christ that walk the journey with us whether it is for a moment or a lifetime, the people present who weep when we are weeping and rejoice when we rejoice, the ones who teach us how to live through the middle, to hope. And when our paths diverge we’re sad, we weep and Jesus weeps with us but we also remember how they taught us to live through the middle and the promise of Jesus that we will one day be reunited with them on that day when Jesus gathers all the saints together in the completed kingdom of God. Amen
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AboutPastor Emily Johnson preaches weekly at Christ Lutheran. These are manuscripts of her sermons given at Christ Lutheran. Feel free to engage with them in the comments section of the blog. Archives
February 2021
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