Hope (All Saints)

Yesterday, on All Souls Day, at our beautiful choral evensong, we remembered those who have died.

Today, on All Saints Sunday, we affirm our hope for life beyond death.

For it is our peculiar vocation as Christians that we are called to be people who have hope and who give hope, even in the face of death.

Our gospel reading brings us face to face with death. A young man, in the prime of his life, has died. There is a profound sense of loss. Emotions run deep. Fear, even anger in the face of death. There are questions, there is grief and there are tears.

Three times the narrator tells us that Jesus is greatly disturbed and deeply moved. Then we are told, he weeps.

On one level it’s not surprising.  Jesus loves these people. He shares their grief. He feels the loss, theirs and his own. He is deeply moved. He weeps.

But at another level, it never ceases to amaze me that the one who knows that Lazarus will live, the one who has the power to raise Lazarus from the dead, still weeps in solidarity with those who mourn.  And if, as Martha confesses, Jesus is indeed the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world, then in Jesus’ tears we get to see the God who weeps with us. We never have to suffer alone, because God is with us. God experienced our humanity in the person of Jesus, God gets our pain, and God suffers with us.  Jesus’ tears show us that more than words can ever express.

Death has a way of releasing deep emotions in us. Yet even in the midst of that grief, Jesus offers hope. The raising of Lazarus is a sign, a sign that points to our hope that death is not the end, a sign that points to the fact that even in death, God is with us, a sign that points to an even greater sign, the resurrection of Jesus which lies ahead.

For those of us who are on this side of death, death can seem quite final.  Yet I believe with St. Paul, that nothing, neither death nor life nor anything else in all of creation will be able to separate us from the love of God.  We are not a people without hope; on the contrary we are an Easter people, and the resurrection of Jesus is our sure sign of the life that awaits us beyond death.

It is our peculiar vocation to be the people who have hope and give hope, even in the face of death. It’s not that we don’t grieve. It’s not that we won’t shed tears. We experience loss, and we mourn our losses. But our hope, with time, allows us to transcend our mourning. We believe that there is life beyond death. We don’t know what that looks like, surely it is beyond our imaginations. But we have been given a beautiful vision of what is to come in our first reading this morning.

“Write down what you see” an angelic voice said to the apostle John as he prayed in the spirit on the Greek island of Patmos. What John wrote, we now call the book of Revelation, and in today’s reading we get the crowning moment of that vision. Through John, God has given us an end time vision of a new heaven and earth, of a holy city coming down out of heaven, where God will dwell with his people and be with them. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.

This is where we’re heading. Sure, we have lots of questions about how we get from here to there. But this is where we’re going.  This world is not all there is. All the things that bring us down, that make us afraid, that worry us, the conflicts and wars and everything else, these are real but not the ultimate reality. We can dream of a day when God will make all things new, when every tear will be wiped away.

Is it helpful to have these visions of the future?  Is it good for us to know how our story ends?  Does it make a difference in our lives today? 

I think that it does, in at least two ways.

I’m reminded of a popular book by Steven Covey that many people of my generation will know, called The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People.  The second of his seven habits, you might recall, is this:

“Begin with the end in mind.”

His advice was that rather than let ourselves be swept up and tossed to and fro by the chaos and events of our lives, we should have a vision of the future, we should look towards the end, and then live each day with that end in mind.

Knowing the end helps us to move forward. Having that hope orients us. It give us meaning and purpose. It sustains and helps to keep going. Yes, we experience loss, yes, we grieve, but we keep going.

Because the sign that Jesus gave us in raising Lazarus, the vision that God has given us through John, this vision isn’t meant to be just a spoiler. This vision of a new heaven and earth is intended to reach back through time and shape who we are today, so that we as individuals and as a church community might provide a glimpse of that end and offer a foretaste of where it is we are going.  It is the end that gives us our purpose and our meaning both as individuals and as the body of Christ, as we try to live our todays in harmony with the vision we have been given of tomorrow. One day, every tear will be wiped away. In the meantime, we wipe away the tears that we can.

So the first way that Revelation’s great vision of the future makes a difference in our lives today is that it orients us, it gives us meaning and purpose.

The second way that it makes a difference in our lives today is that it surrounds us. We talk about that in different ways. In our eucharistic prayer for All Saints we will affirm that we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. In the apostles’ creed we affirm that we believe in the communion of saints. What we mean by these things is that in this “more than what we can see world” that is our bigger reality, we have a mystical connection with all those who have come before us. We are surrounded by the saints in a communion that transcends time and space as we know them. And just as we draw strength from the flesh and blood relationships that surround us in this visible world, we can draw strength and hope from the invisible communion of saints that connects us and supports us. We are never alone in our faith. We live in a great communion of the living and the dead.

Yesterday, on All Souls, we remembered those who have died.

Today, on All Saints, we affirm our hope for life beyond death.

For it is our peculiar vocation as Christians that we are called to be people who have hope and who give hope, even in the face of death.

One day, every tear will be wiped away. That is our hope. In the meantime, surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, we wipe away the tears that we can.

Amen.

Homily. Yr B All Saints. November 3 2024

Readings: Revelation 21.1-6a; Ps 24.1-6; Colossians 1.9-14; John 11.32-44

Image: The Tomb of Lazarus, Bethany