1 November -- All Saints'

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. AMEN.

Who are the saints?  Are they simply men and women who live in stained glass windows and books?  Are they the people who you name Churches after?  Are they the stuff of myths?

No.  The saints were, and are, real people.  People who lived real lives.  The hymn that we find in our hymnal is true – “And one was a doctor, and one was a priest…You can meet them in schools or in lanes or at sea…”  They were and are “just folks like us”.

I mention this because we tend to put the saints into stained glass windows and books and myths.  We tend to do all of these things and we forget that they were real people who lived real lives.  And they were real people who died.  Some died in witness to the faith, and some died because of their faith.

Some were famous, and some are only remembered by the people who knew them in this earthly life.  These are the ones whom we remember tomorrow night at our All Souls’ requiem -- the saints of god who touched our lives.  Who lived and died, and whom we knew.

I have been thinking a bit this week about the fact that the saints of God were and are real people.  People who faced the same temptations that we did.  People who were married and had children.  People who fell in love.  People who had to make choices – just like we do.

And, I thought about how they were people who really did die.  They died in so many different ways, but they died none-the-less.  And, more likely than not, when they died, there were people who had lived with them and known them and had to deal with the fact that the person whom they knew and loved was now no longer on this earth -- just like we do.

This is what we see in the story of Lazarus.  This, too, has become the stuff of Bible studies and stained glass windows and paintings by famous artists.  But, in truth, it is the story of someone who really lived, and really died, and really had people who had to deal with that death.

“Then Mary, when she came where Jesus was and saw him, fell at his feet, saying to him, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’”  Do these not sound like the words of someone who has lost someone whom they loved?  Do they not echo our own prayers for a miracle, or something other-worldly?  Do we not experience that tension between the part of us who can’t let go, and the part who knows that beyond this life is something greater?

“When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.”   And just a moment later we read the shortest verse in the entire Bible – “Jesus wept”. 

When I encounter people who are mourning the death of someone whom they love, and they are struggling with the fact that they will miss them, and yet they know that our faith calls us beyond this world to that which is to come.  I like to tell them that it is alright to cry. 

“Jesus wept”.  He knew what He was going to do, but still “Jesus wept”.  He wept because Lazarus was a friend – “So the Jews said, ‘See how he loved him!’  But some of them said, ‘Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?’”

Does this not sound like the anger and frustration we have sometimes?  As it says in one of the Prayers in the Burial liturgy, “Help us in the midst of the things that we cannot understand to believe in the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, and the resurrection to life everlasting.”

And yet, we, like Martha, and those who are with her in her grief are confronted with the words of Jesus, “Did I not tell you that if you would believe you would see the glory of God?”  And only moments later they would see that glory.

Most of us will need to wait a bit longer to see that glory.  We will continue to live with the same temptations.  We will love.  We will continue to have to make choices.  And some day, we, too will die.  And we too will hear Jesus call our name.

“The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them.  In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought to be an affliction and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace.  For though in the sight of men they were punished, their hope is full of immortality.”   “They were all of them saints of God, and I mean, God helping to be one, too.”  AMEN.