A Sermon for All Saints’ Sunday
Today we are experiencing a convergence of many things, both in our church life and our secular life. It happens sometimes that certain holidays and celebrations and events overlap and overlay. Today is the first Sunday of the month, so we will celebrate all upcoming birthdays and anniversaries for November. It’s also All Saints’ Sunday, the day we remember all the saints of the church, past and present, especially holding up those who have gone on to glory in the past year. And it’s baptism day, the day when we welcome the newest members to the body of Christ and witness their rebirth by the Spirit of God. It’s also daylight savings time, so congratulations on being here at the right time. And it’s the penultimate day before the presidential election for our country.
I can’t adequately address each of these things with this one sermon in this short amount of time, so I name them each now to acknowledge that our common life is full. There is a lot going on in this place and in our world. Babies are being born, couples are getting married, children are being baptized, friends are undergoing cancer treatment, loved ones have been buried, the glory of fall is around us, but the days are getting shorter and darker, our church is in transition, our country is in transition, the joy and the chaos of the holidays is around the corner. My, my, my. So, I want to begin today with the first line of our birthday prayer which we will say later in our liturgy.
I begin by saying, by praying, Lord our times are in your hand. Lord, our times are in your hand. God, every hour of every day and every day of every week, and every season and every situation is in your hand. Friends, take a moment and sit with me in this reality. Take a breath in and let it go. Let your shoulders relax and your jaw unclench and your thoughts slow down. Let these words hit your heart like you are learning them for the first time. Lord, our times are in your hand. All of our lives, both individually and communally, sit in that pocket of your palm.
On our best days, this is grounding and comforting. It helps us zoom out on the big picture and release control and count our blessings. On our worst days, it is infuriating and confusing because like Mary and Martha in our passage today, we feel that, well, if it were true, if Jesus had only been here, the bad things would not happen. Our world wouldn’t look this way, our country wouldn’t have become so divided, our person, our Lazarus, wouldn’t have died. Lord, our times are in your hand, we trust that you are working for our good, but if you had been there, all of this wouldn’t have happened.
Such contradictions, both seeming true at the same time. Like our day today, with overlapping celebrations and meanings; like our gospel passage, which holds the opposing sting of death and the reality of the resurrection, side by side. Contradictions, like a Jesus who sits at the tomb of his friend, disturbed and weakened to the point of weeping, and a Jesus who is powerful enough to make the dead walk again with three simple words. “Lazarus, come out.”
Contradictions, like the pure joy of celebrating new life in Christ and the commemoration of the community of the saints, and the deep sorrow of facing the reality of death and those names on the list who we wish were still with us today.
I spent a good portion of my life thinking that this tension I often felt in me was a flaw. That, if I truly trusted God, I would lean more into the positive parts of life and not let the hard parts get me down. That, if my heart and mind were really transformed to be like Christ, I wouldn’t toggle between laughter and tears, unbridled joy and clinical depression, as if both Tigger and Eeyore were both battling it out for the command center of my brain.
Any progress I may have made on living more in an emotional middle ground was completely blown apart in the past year. Many of you know, in the past 12 months, I welcomed my first child, my beloved daughter, and I said goodbye to my best friend, my dear father. Simultaneously watching my body bring Finley into this world and watching cancer take my dad out of it was an experience I could have done without.
Amidst it all, I found myself reciting this prayer, Lord, our times are in your hand, but with heaps more of the usual messy complexity.
God, I trust you. Thank you for this gift. And if only you had been here, this wouldn’t have happened.
Contradictions, life and death, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, all at once. It’s enough to make you feel crazy. And, and perhaps it’s not the flaw I once thought it was. Over time, with a little therapeutic reframing and a host of conversations with folks much wiser than I, my sense of what these complex feelings signify has changed. The thing that used to hit me like a shortcoming, a sign of my spiritual weakness, now hits me as a superpower. Because along the way, someone shared with me that, actually, a sign of emotional and spiritual maturity is the ability to hold seemingly contradictory realities in tension, complex truths both at once. The simple mind picks one, but the seasoned one can live amidst them both.
And it hit me that these highs and these lows, these constant ups and downs, are actually the superpower of the Christian. That, being able to acknowledge what is broken and hard and what is beautiful and good is really the unique gift of the Church, given that we follow a savior who simultaneously weeps at the death of his friend and defeats the grip of the grave. Given that, in our baptisms, we were united with him, the one who says with a shaky voice and puffy eyes, where have you laid him? And then looks upward and bellows with all his might, Lazarus, come out.
Friends, I speak to you in the name of God, not as one who speaks with complete understanding but as one who speaks with a heart cracked open, and I proclaim to you that our times, our lives, are in God’s hand. The lives of these beautiful children that are about to join us into the body of Christ, the lives of those who we remember today who are now the saints of God gone into glory, the lives of this country’s citizens, democrat and republican, fervent and undecided, are in God’s hand, and there is comfort and promise in that. And I confess to you that the sting of disappointment and loss and division and war is alive and well in this world and in our hearts. All of creation aches.
And it is these contradictions, the proclamations we believe and confessions we hold, that prove to us that we are human. It is these tensions that can craft us into mature spirits who, like Christ himself, show up, wide open, in this life. It is these realities that reside within us, the children of God, and give us the unique perspective to share with the world the story of the resurrection of Jesus, and the good news that one day he himself will come again and stand at the foot of every grave of all the saints of God and cry, “Come out.”
That he will carefully unbind our burial shroud and dress us with our baptismal garments, he will demand that death let us go and breathe new and unending life into our lungs, and he will usher us to the banquet table where we take our seats and wipe our tears and look to him, seated on the throne, as he says, “See, I am making all things new. It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.”…
Lord, our times are in your hand. On our best days, we trust you. On our worst, we just aren’t sure. Thank you for weeping for us and raising us from the grave. Amen.
The Rev. Kilpy Singer