All Saints: We Have Already Died

Sermon 11-4-18 – All Saints

Grace to you and peace from God our Creator and from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

I want this gospel text to be read at my funeral. I also want Isaiah 43 read, along with some of my favorite hymns, and the service should include Communion. I keep my beneficiaries for both my Thrivent life insurance policy and my health insurance up to date… by the way, Family of God is listed as one of my recipients of my small life insurance policy. Is Family of God part of your legacy planning? I don’t mean to sound morbid, but in my line of work as a pastor, I have encountered death and dying A LOT more than the average person, and so I have spent some time thinking about it. Have YOU? …Have you thought about your wishes, your legacy, how you want to spend your remaining time, your quality of life, how you would like your family and friends to mourn and give thanks for your life, and how you would like to be laid to rest?

It’s ok to think about and talk about this stuff, but it’s also hard, because we don’t normally do it. But today, on All Saints Sunday, gives us the perfect opportunity to do so. Someday, every single person in this room will become one of the saints – remembered one year during an All Saints Sunday some day in the future, as we are doing today. Since we are born, we will also someday die. It’s the truth that haunts all of us, if you’ll forgive that way to describe it. A truth that both drives our most creative accomplishments, and also the biggest secret we live to deny. 

This is a very strange time in history, according to a book I recently read on death history (and much of the following information is from this book). We no longer see death as part of our daily reality. A veil has been drawn over how we spend our last days and moments, and what happens to us after our death, by the medical and the funeral industry. Most of our loved ones – or even us, when our times comes, spend their last moments in a hospital room, surrounded by medical equipment, and our bodies are whisked away and not seen again until the family visitation, wake, memorial service, or funeral. In the last century, we have been separated from the ritual and sacred task than has been a tradition for centuries: mourning for our dead by caring for them ourselves, in our homes, with family.

Until recently, “death care” has been the unsung work of women… and in most cultures and countries, it still is. In first century Palestine as well, when you died, your female female relatives washed your body, dressed you, wrapped you in burial cloths, and anointed you with aromatic spices. You would be then laid temporarily in a tomb, for the course of about a year, until the natural process of decomposition was complete. Then your family collected your bones to be laid to rest in a special “bone box,” called an ossuary.

Historically speaking, women were “death’s natural companion,” providing the (sometimes literal) labor at the beginning and at the ending of our lives – laboring to bring us forth from the womb, and laboring to lay us to rest in our tombs and beyond. Women throughout history have seen death and dying up close and have been the most helpless when left behind.

If you are Mary and Martha - two unmarried women living in their brother Lazarus’ household as his dependents – you would of course send word Jesus at the first sign of your brother’s serious illness. Without Lazarus, they would be a the mercy of other male relatives, or homeless. Surely JESUS would make his dear friend Lazarus well, since he had already healed many, many strangers!

But Jesus delayed, and by the time he arrived, Lazarus had already been four days buried. It had been four days since Martha and Mary had sat by his bedside, changing his sheets and mopping his forehead as he took his last breath. It had been four days since Martha and Mary had prepared his body for burial, washing and wrapping his entire body long strips of burial cloth, and covering him with special ointments of myrrh and aloe. It has been four days since they watched other members of their family and friend carry him to and lay him in a tomb, until they would tenderly collect his bones and finally place of rest.

Both Mary and Martha confront Jesus with the bold accusation – “If YOU had BEEN HERE… our brother would not have died.” These women had BEEN THERE for Lazarus, and it seemed that Jesus had NOT. They had been present with him, and stayed by their brother’s side, until the end. Where had Jesus been?

It is a question that we too might ask. In the midst of our own grieving for those who died since last All Saints Sunday… or in other ways that we are suffering, we wonder too – “Where were you Jesus? If you had been here, our brother would not have died…. the cancer would not returned …. the marriage would not have ended… or the accident would not have happened… or any number of things.” But they did happen. Divorce, cancer, accidents, evil, suffering, violence, and death still happen in this world. So where is Jesus in all of this?

In the face of death, when Jesus seems to FINALLY show up on the scene for his friend Lazarus, he engages the angry questions of the sisters head-on. Their accusations and questions did not faze him… though their grief did. The unfettered grief deeply affected him, and Jesus wept.  

But amid the tears, Jesus was not deterred from his mission of defeating death at its own game. He asked where Lazarus has been laid to rest and goes directly to were death lives. The heavy sealed stone of the tomb does not make Jesus turn away, and neither did the smell of decay and decomposition of the body of Lazarus had undergone. 

Even if Jesus HAD shown up on the scene earlier, he MIGHT have healed Lazarus… but Lazarus would have died eventually. The same with Martha and Mary. The same with all of those present with Jesus and the sisters to mourn Lazarus. The same with us… perhaps what Mary and Martha SHOULD have said was “Jesus, if you had been here, Lazarus would not have died RIGHT NOW.” But he would have died eventually. And actually, Lazarus had to die AGAIN… at some point. Someday Lazarus’s body would be washed, wrapped, anointed, and laid to rest a second time. The atoms that made up his body would finish their process of breaking down and returning to the universe God has created.

The rest of us though, we only have to die once. And truth be told, we have already done it. That’s right, I’m already dead, and those of us present here have already died. The moment we were baptized, and the pastor sprinkled your head with water, you died with Christ and were buried in his tomb with him.  In your baptisms, the old, sinful person in you died, and a new person, a saint of God, was resurrected. You have died to your old self, you have died to the ways of the world that seek to hold you back from following God, and you have died to even death itself.

The emergence of Lazarus from the tomb would foreshadow Jesus’ victory over death in his resurrection. Jesus can call us out of our tombs because Jesus knows what it’s like to be INSIDE OF one.

Those who sealed Jesus’ tomb after his crucifixion may have remembered Lazarus, and perhaps thought to themselves, “Maybe the one raised that Lazarus guy could have kept HIMSELF from dying. But I guess not.” Point, set, match. Death wins.

Three days later, another Mary came to his tomb to mourn. But she found there a surprise waiting for her: a tomb without a stone and a grave without a body. Death, so used to swallowing up people, had instead found itself swallowed up by Jesus, just as Isaiah said– he will destroy the shroud over all the peoples, and the sheet over all the nations, and he will even swallow up death forever. The “way things were” has been turned upside down. Because of this, we can ask at every funeral, along with Saint Paul, “Death, where is your victory? Death, where is your sting?”

And because we have already died in Christ, and have been raised with him, let us commend the members of the Family of God to the mercy of God, our maker and redeemer, in the word that are spoken at every funeral service:

Into your hands, O merciful Savior, we commend your servants. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech you, sheep of your own fold, lambs of your own flock, sinners of your own redeeming. Receive us into the arms of your mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light. Amen.