postID: 6991; title: All Saints’ Sunday
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All Saints’ Sunday
Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord: Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
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All Saints' Sunday
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reading found matching title 'Revelation 21:1-4, 22—22:5' with ID: 311680
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Scripture citation(s): Wisdom 5:1-5, 14-16; Revelation 21:1-4, 22—22:5
A Sermon by
Fr. Spurlock
on
Wisdom 5:1-5, 14-16; Revelation 21:1-4, 22—22:5
✛
A Sermon for the Sunday after All Saints' Day
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I have been blessed in my 42 years to have known most of my great grandparents and all of my grand parents, most of whom are still alive. But, I received some news about my grandmother’s health this week that has troubled me. Last night I called my dad, this is his mom, and we were talking about how we felt about this development.
Now, I am a priest: I do not labor under any illusion that death does not come for us all. It’s just a fact; we will all die someday. But when my father asked me, in so many words, how I felt about the possibility that my grandmother might die, I suddenly realized I had mixed feelings. I, who am usually so certain, found myself confused.
I found myself, as an English priest once described it, “twixt hope and fear.” Hope in the promises of eternal life and fear in the face of the chaos that even the thought of death brings into our lives.
In the face of death our hearts can become awash in chaos; we don’t know quite what to feel, we never know what to say. When we watch as the health of someone we love begins to fail a panic can rise up in us. We wonder what our hope for our loved one is based upon. Do we wish to recall them from the brink, or do we release them into a world beyond where there is no more pain, no more suffering?
Are we capable of reconciling our own fear of loss with our feeble and groping insights into what awaits them and, in time, us? Do they really go onto a place that is not just a cessation of pain, but a fullness of life that makes the best of this world seem foolish and anemic? I can only imagine how much more frightening and chaotic these feelings must be in the case of sudden and tragic death.
But whether death is a tragic loss or whether, because of the suffering involved, it seems a respite, it still hurts. When Jesus confronted the death of his friend Lazarus, he didn’t launch into bromides about what a release it was. Jesus wept. He wept because death is a tragedy. It’s a tragic loss to sin; it’s a grotesque reminder of the brokenness of creation; and it places those of us left behind twixt hope and fear, and that in-between place is chaos.
This is why our reading from Revelation tonight has been such a comfort to me this week as I have thought about, and prayed for my own loved one. In it we hear the promise of a new heaven and a new earth, and the subjection of the sea, which in the Jewish mind embodied chaos. These visions of a new heaven and earth are the climax to what is a harrowing book filled with visions of great monsters and catastrophic judgments. But every time the monsters close in or catastrophe strikes, John’s attention and ours are drawn back to Jesus Christ seated at the right hand of God.
Sometimes Jesus acts and sometimes he speaks, but no matter which, our Lord subdues chaos (the sea shall be no more). He brings peace, and his promise is one of comfort and victory. But the book of Revelation is shot through with struggle. John never suggests that the birthing of this new heaven and earth will be painless. Elsewhere, he likens it to a woman birthing a child, “she has sorrow for her hour has come and she is in anguish, but that passes away and is replaced with joy that a new life has been born.”
The apostle Paul speaks of this birthing anguish too. He says that all creation is in travail. It groans as if it is in labor, trying to give birth to something. And Paul says it is not just creation that is groaning, but so are we. Mankind groans alongside creation awaiting a delivery. . . or deliverance. Now if you are hopeless and cynical it’s easy to see this groaning and this travail and say, “Agh, the end is coming. The world is dying.” Not so, says Paul, not so, says John, not so says the Christian. What we see is not a death, but a resurrection. Not an end but the new beginning promised to us in Jesus Christ.
And this is where the Christian has to cock just as cold an eye toward the situation as the cynic. Ours is not a faith that looks through rose lenses and says “OH, everything is fine.” The Christian, sees truth for what it is. We see the death and we weep. But where the cynic weeps and walks away thinking he’s seen all there is to see and declares, “There’s a stench about this!” We, along with our Lord can peer deep into the tomb and we expect something new to come out of it. Yes, Lazarus, come out! Where the cynic and the believer differ is that the believer can see that truth extends even into those regions that we cannot observe with our eyes.
Just like the cynic we see the destructiveness of our wars, we see the consequences of our poor stewardship, we see the hurt, the hunger, the pain that we cause, but we see something the faithless do not see, we see the power of God working through people’s lives sowing seeds of repentance. We see God working through the cross and death and the tomb to bring forth a glorified life of which Jesus is just the first fruit and to which we might dare hope to rise to ourselves. We do not see that the end is at hand, but we see our beginning; and can that be described any better than when Paul cries, “I consider the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to the glory about to be revealed to us.”
About to be. . . . But how long, O Lord? But perhaps that is not the right question. Not, “how long” but rather simply “How, O Lord?” You and I live in the groaning and travailing age. I trust in the promises of salvation won for us on the cross of Christ. I know that the cross is the way the truth and the life. But I also know it’s not God’s final word. Resurrection is God’s final word, but not even Jesus’ resurrection. The final or I should say, the first word is our own resurrection. The hope of the Christian life, the glory that awaits us at the end of this groaning labor is the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come.
Paul reminds us of this hope writing that we await the “adoption and the redemption of our bodies.” And John envisions that heavenly city descending down to us here on earth in which God himself will be our temple and Jesus Christ the only light by which we need see. I’m not looking to say goodbye to this world, but rather hello to the world that is to come, the world that even now, God is preparing to give us.
And in God’s good time we will all find ourselves on the threshold between this world and the world to come. When that day comes, I pray we each can meet it as Saint Paul did, not with a defeated, weary kind of desperation, but with “eager longing.” We can be out front scanning the horizon eagerly awaiting this new beginning. The Christian lives in the world, but we also live in Christ and so we don’t await death, we await life. In our present travail we might see this new life dimly, but I trust that one day it will appear forever bright and glorious, after God has wiped away every tear from our eyes.
