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Sermon for November 3, 2024
All Saints Sunday
John 11:32-44; Revelation 21:1-6
Rev. Karl-John N. Stone
If you’ve ever been a patient in the hospital, or sat by someone’s bedside there, you know how constrained you can be—bound to your bed by IV hookups, blood pressure and heart rate monitors, or oxygen tubes. Often, they don’t want you getting out of the bed on your own, and sometimes you simply couldn’t get out if you wanted to. On top of that, it’s not exactly restful, with all the beeps and buzzes, and someone walking in your room to poke you or turn you over, or tell you something every couple of hours. Despite being uncomfortable, though, the hospital is still a place for healing. Probably all of us at some point in life will benefit from the healing that is made possible in the hospital.
We also know that healing does not always happen in the hospital, and it can become a place of great sadness and loss when someone you love dies there. Sometimes the death comes suddenly and unexpectedly, other times it’s the end of a long process. But regardless of whether or not you know intellectually that it was time for your loved one to die, death still stings. It is really hard, and there’s no shortcut to avoid the sting of death. At some point, we will all feel the stages of grief that comes from it—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The stages don’t always happen in order, but they still happen. And the reason we feel grief in the first place is because of love. Love is worth it. But the cost of loving someone is grieving for them when they’re gone. You feel the void in your life.
Jesus felt the void created by grief, himself. We hear it described so movingly in John’s gospel, when Jesus’ friend Lazarus died. John 11:35 is the shortest verse in the whole Bible: “Jesus wept”. Short, but so meaningful. Jesus wept when Lazarus died. The grief Jesus is feeling was motivated by the love he had for his friend. And because Jesus did weep at the death of Lazarus, we see how God’s own heart gets broken by feeling the sting of death.
The reaction that Mary—Lazarus’ sister—has when he dies is a common and understandable one for people of faith: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” In that short sentence, we see Mary’s grief pouring through, as well as her faith that Jesus could have done something to prevent it. But even in her faith, she reveals a tinge of anger and bargaining: if you could have done something, Jesus, then why didn’t you?!?
That question can only be answered by looking to the gospel as a whole. We do see, elsewhere during Jesus’ ministry that he performed miracles, and healings, and even in a very few cases brought a dead person back to life (but we have to remember, even then, that the resuscitated person would still die as all humans do). The power of Christ, and the Spirit of his resurrection let loose in the world, is about more than prolonging the span of life—it’s about opening the way to a life in God that has death behind it. It’s not resuscitation but transformation, in this world, and in the next. It’s not about life as we know it repeated over and over, but a completely new life that is taken up within God’s very own life, a life that is composed completely out of God’s love—God’s unconditional, unending, eternal love.
Because of that love, we find the answer to Mary’s statement. Jesus’ presence was already with Lazarus when he died. Jesus’ presence was already with Mary in her grief. And his presence is already with all of us in the good and the bad of life, in the grief and the fear, in the healing and the happiness, in the darkness and the pain, in the light and the joy. Christ dwells with us, to wipe away every tear from our eyes. He is making all things new until death will be no more. Mourning, and crying, and pain will be no more.
The presence of Jesus was already with Lazarus as he died. And what Jesus did for Lazarus after he died was, first, to weep because of love, and then to cry with a loud voice into the depths of the cave where Lazarus had been laid, and to speak God’s Word to him: “Lazarus, come out!” Even in his death, Lazarus responds in faith to God’s Word, with a gesture of hope. John’s gospel tell us about it: “The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth.” With Lazarus standing there in faith, on the cusp of new life, receiving a gift of pure grace which he did nothing to earn, Jesus gives instructions to the crowd standing there: “Unbind him, and let him go.”
And that’s how he finally gets freed—he is unwrapped by the community who had gathered to support Mary and Martha in their grief. Then, what’s the first thing Lazarus does after being unbound from the grave? He serves others. He turns his focus out from himself and back to others. It’s described in the next chapter, John 12, where Lazarus and his sisters host a dinner for Jesus and the disciples.
Maybe you are going through a time of grief. Maybe it’s because of the death of a loved one. Or maybe the grief you feel comes from a member of death’s extended family—things like disease, despair, sin, injustice, brokenness, bitterness, cynicism, or division. I’ve heard many people lately expressed their grief resulting from anxiety, exhaustion, disappointment, or disgust at the current state of politics in the United States. Regardless of who gets elected this week, chances are good that some of your friends, family, or neighbors, or perhaps you yourself, will be upset, even fearful. And regardless of the outcomes, chances are that many people in our country will still feel a sense of brokenness, a sense of grief. For many, there will remain a sense that the challenges we face are not easy to fix, maybe not so much from disagreement (because there’s always things people disagree about), but perhaps more from the difficulty of seeking a shared sense of purpose.
Jesus’ promise to dwell among us does not mean that we will avoid grief, or be set free from all our problems, or that everything will always be great. But this is why God sent his Son to be born into the world, into the midst of all the brokenness and problems, so that we would have a Redeemer whose Word brings us to new life on the other side. Transformation! So, in whichever grave or dark cave you may find yourself keeping company with Lazarus, you can join him in listening for the voice of Jesus to call to you: “Come out! So you can be unbound and set free!”
The first step on the way out of the dark cave of grief is faith—trusting that even if you don’t know how to find new life, somehow Jesus does. The gospel then shows us what we’re called to do next. First: When Lazarus came out of the cave, bound with strips of cloth, he couldn’t unbind himself. That’s why Jesus said to the crowd standing there “Unbind him and let him go.” Being set free for new life can only happen by turning toward other people. You can’t unbind yourself. We need to turn towards each other in order to turn towards God. We need to recognize the presence of God in one another, especially in people who may have different opinions or who see the world differently than you do.
Next: Remember the first thing Lazarus did after his neighbors unbound him? He looked for a way to serve—in his case, he hosted a meal and offered hospitality. When Jesus unbinds us and sets us free, he calls us to look for ways to serve our neighbors—and this calling is always going to be true for us as Christians, just as it was true for all the saints who have come before us in every time and place. You might serve by feeding people, or attending to their physical and mental health, or their emotional well-being. You might pray; or show kindness and generosity of spirit; or seek compassion and understanding.
Whichever way Christ is working in our lives to unbind us and set us free, his healing and transformation always begins in love and ends in love. Amen.