Sermon for All Saints Sunday B 2012
Sermon for All Saints Sunday B
November 4, 2012
Michael Coffey
When Mary came where Jesus was
and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, "Lord, if you had been
here, my brother would not have died." When Jesus saw her weeping, and the
Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and
deeply moved. He said, "Where have you laid him?" They said to him,
"Lord, come and see." Jesus began to weep. 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?"
Then Jesus, again greatly
disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it.
Jesus said, "Take away the stone." Martha, the sister of the dead
man, said to him, "Lord, already there is a stench because he has been
dead four days." Jesus said to her, "Did I not tell you that if you
believed, you would see the glory of God?" So they took away the stone.
And Jesus looked upward and said, "Father, I thank you for having heard
me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the
crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me." When he
had said this, he cried with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!" The
dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face
wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, "Unbind him, and let him
go." -
John 11:32-44
On All Saints Sunday, as we recall
the good things
of
those who have gone before us,
it
is quite a legacy they have given us.
It might make us wonder:
What
kind of legacy are we giving to those after us?
That’s
a daunting question,
maybe
even intimidating.
Maybe
it feels like we haven’t done enough with our own lives
to
matter much to the future.
Maybe
it feels like the gallons of mistakes and failures and sins
overwhelm
the scant cup of good deeds we’ve done.
Maybe
it feels like it’s too late now
to
leave much of a legacy of love.
If you look at the story of Lazarus
you
can see that he had quite an impact on Jesus.
In what is famously known as the
shortest verse in the Bible,
we
hear just this: Jesus began to weep.
It’s
actually just two words in Greek,
sometimes translated as: Jesus wept.
It says that Jesus wept because he
loved Lazarus so much.
And
the love expressed in this verse is the love of friendship.
I
wonder how it was that Lazarus so touched Jesus’ life.
Was
it staying up too late looking up at the stars
by
a fire and talking about God
and life and hopes and dreams?
Was
it Lazarus helping Jesus finish his chores
when
he was a teenager so they could go have fun?
Was
it Lazarus’ quiet, listening ear to Jesus
when he talked about how hard it was
to lead
and
how few people seemed to understand him?
Whatever it was, Lazarus touched
Jesus’ life so deeply
that
at his death Jesus is not just weeping,
he’s rather fiercely crying and
disturbed.
We don’t know the details, but it
seems clear
Lazarus
left a legacy of love.
When we gather on All Saints Day, or Sunday,
we
gather to remember and give thanks for
the legacy of love left to us by
those who now rest in God.
We
know the impact on us of their legacy is great,
whether they were close friends,
relatives,
or distant figures we never knew
personally,
but
their lives sing to us across space and time.
They
changed us with their legacy of love.
That’s what we’re looking to leave,
right?
We
want, when we’re in our better minds and moments,
to leave a legacy of love.
We
want something of ourselves to be planted in someone else
something good,
something that blesses and heals and
brings grace,
something that lets our own pain and
failure and sin
become
moments of wisdom for others to benefit from.
But we all know how complicated and
messed up that legacy is.
There’s
nothing clear or easy about it,
there’s
no recipe for living human life that makes
the bread come out perfectly risen
and browned.
We
have regrets about things we do,
and we have anxiety about things left
to do.
Yet,
we have this unquenchable thirst in our souls
to leave a legacy of love inspite of
it all.
The complexity and yearning of our
legacy of love
is
expressed beautifully in a song
by
my favorite Austin musician, Guy Forsyth.
It’s called Red Dirt and it is on his new album The Freedom to Fail.
It’s
a kind of a bluesy, Gospel song on planting seeds
and making them grow in other people’s
lives.
In
the notes on the CD booklet,
he says he wrote it with his friend
Mark Addison,
and I quote, “Shortly after I found
out I was pregnant.”
Listen to how he reflects on the
yearning and complexity
of
leaving a legacy of love:
Plant a little
seed in the red dirt baby, how you gonna make it grow?
Too much
water and you’re gonna drown it
Too much
wind and it blows away
Too much
sun and now you've browned it
Down too
deep and it's under clay
Plant a
little seed in the heart of a child how you gonna make it grow
Too much
talk and she won't learn to listen
Too much
silence and she won't speak
Too much
favor and you spoil her
Not enough
and you make her weak
Plant a
little seed in the mind of a man How you gonna make it grow
Too much
pride and he won't pay attention
Too much
money and the soul grows thin
Too much
faith you can't see reason
To right
to see the shape we’re in
Too
stubborn, you won't learn nothing
Too much
guilt you can't decide
Too little
love makes it easy
Paints
everything in black and white
Plant a
little seed in the red dirt baby how you gonna make it grow
What a
world where we're all connected
What a
world with love supreme
What a
world with no one neglected
What a
world where everyone dreams
What a
world where we're all connected
What a
world with love supreme
What a
world with no one neglected
What a world in one little seed
It might seem so complicated and
difficult
think
see our lives as leaving a legacy of love
that
we just don’t bother to spend time working on it,
planning it, giving energy to it.
But the yearning in us won’t let us
let go.
It
is too much of what it means to be human
for us to pretend it doesn’t matter.
So we begin where we always begin,
but
especially on All Saints Sunday:
Our lives are made holy, saintly,
by God through sheer mercy and grace.
We
don’t have to live in such a way as to prove it.
We only return again and again to the
one
whose
legacy impacts us all so deeply
that
he has changed us into something we were not:
Jesus,
who is God’s legacy of love in us.
We
are connected to this legacy
through baptism, the gift of grace
where we died to our old selves of
sin and selfishness,
and
were raised up to a new life of love as our legacy.
As we remember the saints before us
we
know that their stories are muddled and mixed
and full of contradiction and
complexity, just like our own.
But through the gift of grace
we
can see their lives through the legacy of love they leave us
not merely through their own human
frailty and faults.
God’s
grace is like a great sieve, that filters out
whatever we need to let go of or
forgive or forget,
and let’s all the goodness and love
come through.
Our legacy is not a perfect one or
something we can fix.
It
is to live in such a way that the grace of God is seen in us,
to let our brokenness and our doubts
and fears
be part of our story,
and
to love as best we are able even with all of that.
There’s a kind of writing called hagiography.
It
is the way early Christians in particular wrote about the saints.
Sometimes this term is used
pejoratively
to describe an account of someone’s
life as being
idealized,
or romanticized, or only telling the good stuff.
But
really, it’s about telling the legacy of a life
from the perspective of grace and
mercy.
It’s about letting the faults be what
they are,
but
making note of the amazing ways
God
in Christ created a legacy in that person,
that caused love to sprout up and
grow
from the small seeds they planted.
Hagiography
is really about giving glory to God
rather than to the person alone,
because it is God who hallows our
lives,
makes us holy,
blesses our legacies to be more than
they could be on our own.
Today we baptized Norah.
Allison
and Kinnon:
Sorry to put all of this pressure on
you,
but your legacy is at hand.
The
love you can give, which is God’s love in you,
to this beautiful child of yours,
this is your legacy to the world.
And
just imagine all the ways
she
will leave a legacy of love because of how you loved her,
because of how the community of faith
loved her,
because of how God in Christ loved
her completely.
What a beautiful thing to see today
another
saint added to the roster,
the
list of those baptized in Christ,
those
who found in their very lives
they
mystery of God’s love lived in the flesh
that transforms ordinary live into
holinesss.
It is our work together
to
live by such faith in God’s grace in Christ
that we might befriend many,
love
family and stranger,
and
leave a legacy of love to the world
that
doesn’t give us any particular credit or worth,
but glorifies God who made us to
love.
We are all together part of this
mystical body of Christ,
the
communion of saints,
the
community of humble love embodied in space and time.
What a
world where we're all connected
What a
world with love supreme
What a
world with no one neglected
What a
world where everyone dreams
What a
world where we're all connected
What a
world with love supreme
What a
world with no one neglected
What a world in one little seed
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