John 11:1-6, 17-44
“What’s a Saint?”
One day a man was walking through a beautiful church building with his 4-year-old son.
As they walked, the young boy looked around.
He stopped and was curious about the stained-glass windows that looked so beautiful with their bright colors.
As he looked at the windows, he asked: “Who are all the people in the windows, daddy?”
“They are saints,” said the father.
“What are saints daddy?” the kid asked.
The father was stuck.
How was he going to explain who saints were to a four-year-old boy?
As the boy was still looking up at the windows and the father was still wondering how he would explain who saints are, the young boy shouted out: “I know who saints are daddy.
They are the people that the light shines through.”
Who are the people in your life through whom the light has shined?
Who are the saints that have touched your life with the incredible love of Christ?
Maybe they are still alive.
Maybe they are members of this congregation.
Maybe they have passed on, and you lit a candle in memory of them this morning.
My dad was far from perfect, but he was a person through whom the light of Christ shone.
My father had three young children.
He worked hard all week and had very little time to himself.
So, on Sunday mornings he would take an hour or so for himself while my mother rushed my sisters and I off to Sunday school.
Later, my dad would join us all in worship.
One Sunday, when I was about 5-years-old I asked: “Why do I have to go to Sunday school?
Dad doesn’t go!”
From that day on, my dad went to Sunday school.
Those are the kinds of things saints do.
My dad passed away two years ago.
And even though he is physically gone from this earth, I still feel him with me--cheering me on as he always did--through Jesus Christ the Resurrection and the Life.
I would imagine many of you can relate.
Death is horrible and ugly.
But through Jesus Christ—it is not the end.
Here on All Saints Sunday in the year 2018 we find ourselves looking at an extra-ordinary passage of Scripture.
For, in this Scripture, we come upon a man weeping.
And this man who is weeping is none other than the Son of God Himself!!!
He is the One through Whom and for Whom this entire universe was created.
He is the Word that became flesh and lived among us.
He is One with the Father.
He is God.
And He is weeping for us because He is confronted with the utter hopelessness of our human condition.
His compassion for us is so great that to see us in this lost state is almost too much for Him to bear.
We weren’t created to die.
We weren’t created to live life outside of a relationship with God.
We weren’t created for darkness, brokenness, lost-ness…
…life without meaning…
…a future without hope…
…death, chaos, and despair.
And we see the evidence of this despair all around us.
Every day there are more and more shootings.
Every moment another young person takes their first hit of a drug that will ultimately and completely destroy their life.
Every day more and more human beings are trafficked for sex.
Every day more and more children are destroyed by an evil which is beyond comprehension.
Every day the suicide rate climbs.
Every day the world is a little bit more cold and desolate.
And so, Jesus weeps.
Love incarnate breaks down in tears outside our tombs.
And here lies our hope.
For God so loves the world that God will not give up on us.
God so loves the world that God shares our pain.
“For God so [loves] the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Mary, Martha and Lazarus were basically Jesus’s best friends.
Their house was a home away from home for Jesus.
He ate dinner there.
He relaxed.
He laughed.
He shared life.
And when Lazarus became sick, Mary and Martha sent for Jesus.
But, no matter how hard it must have been for Jesus to do this, so that they might be given the gift of faith, Jesus waits until Lazarus dies in order set out for Bethany.
Martha is the first one to meet up with Jesus when He gets there.
“Lord,” she says to Jesus, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
“Jesus [says] to her, ‘Your brother will rise again.’
Martha answer [s], ‘I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.’
Jesus [says] to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life.’”
You know, the Resurrection isn’t just a future fact.
It’s a Person, and here He is standing in front of Martha.
And He comes and He stands in front of you, and He comes and He stands in front of me.
How exciting is that?
When Jesus told Martha: “I am the resurrection and the life.
He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die…”
He finishes with a question: “Do you believe this?”
And this is the question that every one of us must answer for ourselves.
And how we answer this question determines how we will live our lives.
How we answer this question decides whether or not we will be “people who the light shines through.”
So, Jesus asks Martha if she believes.
And as she stands in the midst of such tragedy, chaos, pain, and darkness Martha confidently replies: “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, God’s Son, the one who is coming into the world.”
And with that, Martha stops crying and starts running excitedly to tell her sister that Jesus has arrived.
In Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book Mowgli, the man cub, asks the animals what the most feared thing in the jungle is.
He’s told that when two animals meet on a narrow path that one of the animals must step aside and let the other animal pass.
The animal that steps aside for no one would then be the most feared.
Mowgli wants to know what kind of animal that is?
One tells him it’s an elephant.
Another tells him it’s a lion.
Finally the wise old owl exclaims: “The most feared thing in the jungle is death. It steps aside for no one.”
Well, my friends, Welcome to the Jungle!!!
No one is exempt from death.
But wait a minute…
Those who believe in Christ will never die!!!
When the people saw Jesus crying they said, “See how he loved him.”
When I was thinking about this sermon earlier in the week, I thought to myself, “How cool it would have been to be Lazarus or Mary or Martha.
To be one of the ones who were called Jesus’ friends.”
But you know, in a real sense, I am one of Jesus’ friends.
And so are you.
In John Chapter 15 Jesus says: “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends.”
At Lazarus’ tomb Jesus’ called in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”
In the same way, Jesus calls in a loud voice outside the tomb of my life—“Ken come out!”
And Jesus calls in a loud voice outside the tomb of your life, and your neighbor’s life and the lives of those who live in the homes surrounding this church building: “Come out.”
But notice in our passage that before Jesus called Lazarus out, he told Martha: “Take away the stone.”
And when called Lazarus comes stumbling out of the tomb still wrapped in his burial cloths, and Jesus commands His disciples to remove them and let him go.
Isn’t this amazing: that even as Christ calls us to come out He also calls His disciples to participate in the work of rolling away the stone, of bringing new life, of unbinding people and letting them go free?
The late Fred Craddock told a story about visiting his father who was dying of throat cancer in a hospital in Nashville.
When he got there his dad was taking a nap, and so he started looking at the flowers, the cards from Sunday school classes, church circles, the Youth Group, the Choir—just about every group you can think of in a church had remembered his daddy.
Fred said that the remarkable thing was that his dad didn’t go to church.
His mom was active in the church, but his dad saw no need for it.
Fred said that when his dad woke up he smiled and reached out his hand, because he could no longer speak.
After a while his dad took out a pencil and wrote the following on the back of a Kleenex Box: “I was wrong about the church.”
Most of us were given our first glimpse of Jesus through His saints.
And His saints are the ones who make up Jesus’ Church.
And today we remember them, but more than that, we thank God for them.
And they are still with us.
They are cheering us on.
They are the “great cloud of witnesses” that Hebrews makes reference too in our call to worship for this morning.
“Saints are the people that the light shines through.”
Is that YOU?
Is that ME?
