Grief and Hope: A sermon for All Saints, Year B

This is an edited version of the sermon preached on All Saints Sunday, November 3, 2024, at St. Raphael's Episcopal Church, Crossville, Tennessee.

So, I've been away. You may have noticed that the last month was a little disrupted. It was, in its own interesting way, a month of hope.

Some of you know that at the beginning of the month, my wife and I were away in Kansas City, for our Bonus child. I say that because that's how she listed us in the wedding party, as Bonus Parents. Our Bonus Child is now married. We are happy and delighted. They are married to a very fine young man, and I think they're going to do well together.

Weddings are always moments of hope. It is very rare - I won't say never; I've learned in my life to say never, almost never -  but people, by and large, marry in hope and in good faith. And we all know things can happen, but in that moment there is great joy and great hope and great excitement and a great looking to the future. It's interesting to see how they begin to see their future. So, it was a time of great hope. 

And then came what was in its way the hard part. We had been home only a few days and found that my wife’s sister-in-law had a cardiac event and was not going to recover. My wife said, “How can we go up there so fast?” I said, “We can be turned around in two days. We can do this.”

And so we had a trip to Maryland to be with family, to support her brother, to support her family, to attend the graveside - because we were in Maryland, to eat a lot of crab cakes; it’s required. And to appreciate that for us, for us, funerals are opportunities for hope.

Now, never ask a chaplain to undervalue grief. Everybody grieves. Everybody grieves differently. And while often we don't know how to help them grieve, there is little that is more problematic than trying to get in the way of that grief. I had a conversation with a medical resident many years ago who wanted to describe a patient's grief as problematic because she was still grieving a partner's death six months later. And I said, oh, no, no, no, no. Talk to the chaplains who know this. So I'm not talking about not grieving. I'm not talking about not knowing the pain. But there is a reason that we, and we as Episcopalians especially, say that every funeral service is an Easter service. 

Now, there's a lot in today’s lessons that gets at the grief side of things. In Wisdom: “In the eyes of the foolish, they seem to have died and their departure was thought to be a disaster and they're going from us to be their destruction.” And “from us” and “destruction,” that separation, we know that feeling. All of us in some way - sometimes some more recently and more acutely than others - all of us know that feeling. And we have this concern: “Though in the sight of others, they were punished.” And yet the author of Wisdom comes back to hope.

I look at the Gospel lesson and I look at how Jesus interacts with Mary and Martha. Let me remind you of the broader story. Jesus is not there. Jesus is some distance away. And word comes that says, “Lazarus, whom you love, is sick.” And Jesus said, “Not to worry. It won’t lead to death.”

And so Jesus seems to drag his heels and Lazarus dies while Jesus is on his way. And both Mary and Martha show up in turn and say,  “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” After all, they have seen what Jesus in God had done.

I wonder when it says “Jesus was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” How much of that was his love for Lazarus? And how much of that was, “I've been trying to show you hope all this time.” And so he says, “We’re going to show them hope.” And I say we because he says, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I know you always hear me.” So he's making a point of how he is in God and God is in him. And God is in this hope. 

And when he says, “I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here so that they may believe that you sent me:’ again, I wonder. Is that that same? “I've been talking hope all this time. And they haven't got it yet.”

And Martha doubts. “Some degradation to that body has to have happened. Lord, it's been four days.”

Jesus says, “Lazarus, come out.” And he comes. And he stands. And he lives. 

Catch the nuance, though, in the setup. Again, this is again and again something that happens. Because we have hope, and we have hope especially in the Gospel of John, in the understanding that Our God is here. Not somewhere out there. Our promise is here and not somewhere distant in our future. Yeah, resurrection is there. But one of the things that the Gospel of John repeats again and again and again is that Jesus is evidence, and what Jesus does is evidence, and all of the Jesus event is evidence, that God is here now. And the kingdom, however partially, is present now.

And so we look at Revelation, that other work from the Johannine school, from a different John, perhaps. Note that the residence of God is with his people. In all of the various books attributed to all the various Johns, God is with his people now, and in that we have hope. We have hope that the separations we know, the losses we feel are not the last word. In fact, I have gone so far over the years to suggest that the losses we know, the separations we see, are not as real as we would like to think. We are a people who say that we are in God's Spirit; that in our baptism we participate in God’s Spirit; that when two or three together are gathered, God's Spirit moves us. Just as in John, Jesus says. “Believe me, you won't see me either, but the Spirit will be with you”. The Spirit that over the years the Church came to realize was not somehow separate from God or or some distant extension of God, but somehow in a way we don't understand - and don't try to understand because sooner or later our heads explode - the Spirit that is present is God in fullness. We are the people who claim God is with us now. 

And that doesn't make the losses go away. And that doesn't make the pain disappear. And I have prayed hard for a whole number of people who I have never slugged while I listened to them tell grieving people, “You should hope in Jesus and be happy.” 

And yet, as every wedding is an opportunity for hope for a future of people together, for us a funeral is an opportunity for hope of people together; and not just together some then, out there, but now.

Or as I often said at the bedside we are in God now; and those we lose are in God now, even if we don't know exactly how. And in God ee are still united with those we love but see no longer.