All Saints (B)
November 3, 2024
John 11:32-44
Revelation 21:1-6a
INTRODUCTION
I love All Saints’ Day. I love the hymns, I love the texts, I love the memories. Every pastor I know says they’d rather preach a funeral than a wedding, because we get to preach the hope of resurrection – and All Saints Day is sort of a big, annual funeral, because it is all about the life and comfort we find in the resurrection promise, especially in the midst of the various losses we experience.
Just look at these texts. Each is written to and for a community experiencing a difficult time, and each of them holds in tension the extremes of human emotion: the deep sadness, grief, and fear we feel when we’ve lost, or are losing, someone or something important to us, and the hope we find in a God who keeps promises. As you listen to each one, listen for those emotions. As these texts mention death, think not only about the ultimate sort of death, but also about the mundane deaths that we experience every day – people moving away, job change or loss, losing your faculties and abilities, realizing you can’t be as active anymore as you once were, any sort of meaningful change to what you have come to understand as “normal,” whether the change is good or bad. Recall the feelings you have in those experiences of death and change, and listen in these texts to God’s words of hope and new life for you. Let’s listen.
[READ]
Grace to you and peace from the one who is and who was and who is to come. Amen.
As I read through the texts for today, I noticed a common image across all three: tears. Both Isaiah and Revelation talk about God wiping away tears from the eyes of people who are surrounded by death, grief and fear. And the Gospel text, this famous story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, is full of mourning and sadness, even expressed by Jesus himself, whom John tells us is “greatly disturbed in spirit,” “deeply moved,” and openly weeping. So much pain. So much grief. So many tears.
I’ll tell you, I really needed these emotive texts this week. Anxiety and fear, mixed with cautious hope, are everywhere in our country right now, this week, as we look toward the election in just two days. What makes you anxious, and what you hope for, may differ from the person next to you, or it may be the same, but man alive, are emotions big these days for every American who has been paying attention to this election cycle.
And so yes, I really needed to see a set of scripture texts this week that acknowledge that these big emotions are a part of being human, and always have been. Humans have always, always, felt things: we have felt fear, and anxiety; we have felt rage and discouragement, like Mary confronting Jesus; we have felt hope, even against all odds; and yes, like Jesus in this story about the raising of Lazarus, we have felt grief, grief that is sometimes so deep that we feel it in our very guts, crawling up and down our skin, and in every fiber of our being. When we can see all that play out in scripture, it feels to me like permission, from a loving God who cares enough about human emotions to become one of us and feel them himself. These texts give permission to acknowledge those feelings, to feel them, and to give ourselves space for lament.
Lament. It is a central but all-too-often overlooked piece of the biblical narrative, but one I find so helpful. Lament is the expression of deep sorrow or grief about something or someone, like the loss of a person or ideal. It is the Psalmist’s cry in Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It is the Israelites who sat down and wept by the waters of Babylon, because they could not find it in themselves to sing their song of faith while they were forced to live in a strange land. Lament is the “sighs too deep for words,” that Paul refers to in Romans. It is the deep sadness of Mary weeping inside the empty tomb on Easter morning, believing as she did that they had taken away her lord’s body. Lament.
I have lamented. Recently, I have lamented for our country, and also for the loss of some of the people for whom we lit candles this morning, and also at many other times over the course of my life. I resonate with those in the Bible who have also lamented. And so that is why I am so drawn to the tears in our passages today, and in particular, to Jesus’ tears. I find it remarkable that he cries. After all, he knows how the story ends. He knows that he will raise Lazarus. He knows that he himself will die soon, and that he will be raised. He knows that death itself will no longer have the final word, and that he, and Lazarus, and all of us will inherit eternal life with God. He knows the end of the story – but still, he weeps, gut-wrenching sobs and real tears, along with his friends.
Why does Jesus cry? Of course, we can’t make assumptions about Jesus’ psychological state or inner emotional workings. But I can observe why it is important to me that he cries, and that is that in this moment of expressed, shared emotion, Jesus makes known his capacity for empathy, and he validates the very real grief people are feeling. In his willingness to cry for the death of Lazarus, Jesus in essence says to Lazarus’ grieving sisters, “Your brother is worth grieving for. You are worth grieving for.” He doesn’t jump to paint a silver lining around it, or say, “Who are you talking to here? I can fix this for you!” Though he does eventually say, “Didn’t I say you would see the glory of God?” he doesn’t go there first. The first thing he does, is lament with them. He weeps. He lets himself feel their pain, and he cries with them.
That can be incredibly healing in times of lament! I can think of times in my life when I have been having a really rough time, and I keep trying to tell myself, “It’s not so bad, Johanna. Get over it. Things could be so much worse.” And then when I complain to someone else, and they say, “Boy, that’s really rough,” I feel relieved! “Yes! Yes, it is rough! Thank you for saying that, and making it okay for me to feel cruddy about it!” In times when this has happened, that mere acknowledgement of my pain always feels like a step toward healing.
I have found this in my interactions with other people, too. In my early life and early adulthood, when someone would express a concern to me, I would jump to saying, “Let me break this down with you and show you why this is not something to be concerned about. I think if you just understand, you’ll feel better.” Anyone ever try that on you? Turns out, that approach seldom works to diffuse conflict or heal hearts. Maybe eventually it’s needed, yes, but not at first. Because what people want most of all when they’re in pain is to be heard, to know that their feelings are valid, to feel like they are not alone. Once we have taken the time to lament together, to empathize, to sit together in the pain for a little while – only then can healing begin. Only then are we in a place where we can see and hear the good news of the resurrection.
When Jesus cries, the bystanders say, “See how he loved him!” I think it would be more accurate to say, “See how he loves us!” Because empathy is an act of love. Lamenting together is an act of love. It puts aside pretense and judgment and policy and even our own fears and baggage, and dwells for a moment in the heart and needs and longings of another. To do that, is to love.
This ability to lament together is the first step toward hope and healing, and ultimately, transformation. Right after Jesus weeps with his friends, they get their first glimpse of resurrection and new life, as Lazarus is raised. And right after that, the last of Jesus’ miracles, he walks his own agonizing path to the cross, and then, into resurrected glory.
That is the pattern of faith: from pain and sorrow and lament, to hope and healing and transformation. Over and over again we see this cycle – lament to hope to new life, lament to hope to new life. And every time, we can see that the God who came to dwell among us, also cries with us, and laments with us in our pain… and then, God wipes away our tears and his own, takes our hand, and assures us of what comes next: we see the glory of God. We see new life come about. Indeed, like the people standing there to whom Jesus said, “Unbind him and let him go,” we are invited into the work of bringing about that new life – unbinding the dead, releasing the world from the trappings of death. We are invited into the work of the resurrection. We don’t forget about the pain we felt, and neither does God, but we are assured that with Christ, that pain and death is never the last thing. Because God is always the last thing, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. God always wins.
Let us pray… Abiding God, when we are lost, rejected, suffering and afflicted, we thank you for being with us, crying empathetic tears. Make us aware of your presence, and bring us into the everlasting hope made possible by your Son Jesus Christ our Lord. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
