John 11:1-6, 17-44
“People the Light Shines Through”
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: “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 me 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 six 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 2022, we examine an extraordinary passage of Scripture.
For, in this Scripture, we come upon a man weeping.
And this man 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, lostness…
…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 destroy their life.
Every day the suicide rate climbs.
And every day, at least here in the West, fewer people attend Church, learning about and practicing the love of God.
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 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 brought the gift of faith, Jesus waited until Lazarus died to set out for Bethany.
Martha is the first to meet up with Jesus when He arrives.
“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 answered, ‘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 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.
The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing 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.
Let’s take a moment and think about how we answer this question.
(pause)
And if we believe, let’s consider whether we are putting our faith into loving action.
Because our answer to this question should genuinely change our life.
It certainly won’t make us perfect, but it should cause us to be some of the “people whom the light shines through.”
(pause)
So, Jesus asks Martha if she believes.
And as she stands amid 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.
(pause)
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, “How cool it would have been to be Lazarus, Mary, or Martha.
To be one of the ones who were called Jesus’ friends.”
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 if you do what I command.”
And Jesus’ command in this context is for us to Love one another as He has loved us.
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, 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, Jesus commands His disciples to remove them and let him go.
Isn’t this amazing: that even as Christ calls us to move from death to life, He also calls those around us to participate in the work of rolling away the stone, of helping to bring new life, of unbinding people, and letting them go free?
These are “The people the light shines through.”
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, 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 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 one or more of 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” Hebrews references in our call to worship for this morning.
(pause)
“Saints are the people that the light shines through.”
Is this you?
Is this me?
