Today is the festival Sunday to mark All Saints. Which begs the question what is or makes one a saint? Saints are said to have an exceptional level of holiness or reflect heaven. The Roman Catholic Church has a fourfold process that can take years or centuries to declare a saint. The Episcopal church added Harriett Tubman and Bishop Barbara Harris, the first women bishop in the Anglican Communion to the commemorations of saints and Lutherans in just added to our calendar of saints the Emmanuel Nine murdered while in Bible study at Mother Emmanuel Church. In the orthodox church, anyone who is in heaven is a saint. All religions have some definition and traits of saints. In Islam, saints carry a blessing and miracles. I like a definition I heard was authored by a young child looking up in a church filled with stained glass windows who said “A saint is someone the light shines through.” The definition implies that sunlight shines through those figures in the stained glass windows, and those figures are saints. But the childhood definition carries enough of a sermon for today: a saint is someone the light shines through. Perhaps you have some saints on your mind today?
Carl Sandburg writes in the poem, Autumn Movement: “I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.” These are the “days of the dead” we mark between October 31 through today. Halloween is now the second most popular holiday after Christmas. Graveyards are set up in front yards. Halloween, of course, is All Hallow’s Eve, the eve of All Saints Day, November 1. Some Christians mark November 2 as All Souls Day, remembering our own beloved dead. Lutherans tend to merge these two emphases into one festival day. The Days of the Dead have their roots in a pagan festival that was all about the mystery of night, the unseen, and the supernatural. We sense our blessed dead still present with us, and today affords us some time for the distance between heaven and earth to collapse for a moment at least.
In Latin cultures, the Day of the Dead is anything but morbid but filled with light colors, family, food, happiness, and fun. You can see portraits, clothing, favorite foods, and possessions of the departed loved one.
It’s at the grave of Lazarus that Jesus meets a grieving crowd. His tears reveal deep emotion, and connection to human grief. It’s the cost of love. In a well-known C.S. Lewis quote: “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.”
Certainly, God weeps with us in heart-breaking moments of devastating loss. Jesus calls Lazarus back to life. And amid the death all around us, calls us back to life as well.
God comes to dwell with us. God joins us in our grief. God holds us. God promises to wipe the tears from our eyes. God promises to destroy death forever and make all things new.
After reading the story of the raising of Lazarus in Bible study this past week, some came up with the question, “What is it that happened to Lazarus, again, Pastor?” We can only imagine a resurrection that is the resurrection of all flesh. Yet, our faith proclaims God dwelling with us in this earth’s home — a fragile stressed home threatened by decay and neglect, sadness and loss, fragmentation and hurt, yet alive with beauty beyond numbering.
We know the daily disappointments, loneliness and pain of one longing for something more from life, our failures and hurts. Amidst rancor, half-truths, and real anxieties, injustice, and despair, like Lazarus, we are bound tightly in death’s clothes: grief, disappointment, hopelessness. Jesus’ word is for us: “Unwrap him and let him loose!” (John 11:44). Jesus breaks through the pervasive stench of death. “Unwrap him and let him loose!” Jesus breaks through the endless cycles of addiction, hurt and abuse. “Unwrap him and let him loose.” Jesus who stops the codependance and enabling behaviors “Unwrap him and let him loose!”
We know from life and science that winter follows spring. We know that new life comes from death and decay. With the faithful through the ages, we proclaim the hope of the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come.
God’s light is shining through the saint who is at the bedside of the dying, sitting vigil with the one who is grieving, holding their hand, saying a prayer even while sitting in uncomfortable silence. God’s light is shining through the peacemakers who work tirelessly for an end to war, trauma, and strife calling on us all to seek an end to suffering and needless death. God’s light is shining through those acting with mercy toward those who only seem to know abuse and trauma.
I question I ask myself and church leaders is if the church is a hospital for sinners or a museum of saints. Of course, Luther taught that we are all both saints and sinners, but sometimes the church can feel a bit out of balance with the sinner hospital at capacity or the museum’s looming monuments of saints feeling a bit too overwhelming. Today is a day when we certainly want to pull out of a few more of the monuments of saints to recall them, look up to them, and have a few role models for us sinners.
In baptism, we are marked for a saintly life. “Let your light so shine before others,” we say to the newly baptized, “that they may see your good works and give glory to God” Now Lutherans don’t like the word “Good works” we prefer to focus on God’s grace, but as we recall saints today, we want to remember and give thanks to those who have shone the way of faithfulness.
Together with all the saints of every time and every place we find the rotting graves’ clothes set aside and share in a communion of the saints who feast in God’s presence along with the angels and archangels, those beloveds of this community that have gone before us, like Nancy Moriearty, Vicki Camblin, Steve Baxter, Sharon Deming, Ken Feil, Roger and Edna Odegaard, and whole host of others we remember this day and always. Thanks be to God for their faithfulness and may their light continue to shine in our hearts, in our memory, and in our lives.
