The normalcy of a remarkable life
All Saints B  |  John 11:32-44

Today we celebrate all of the saints, an opportunity that suggests the many and the one; the whole multitude of Holy Women and Holy Men who comprise our Great Cloud of Witnesses, some who were disciples and apostles, some who were martyrs, all who were bishops, priests, deacons, or laypersons, musicians and liturgists, witnesses and prophets, healers and teachers, politicians and judges, all sorts and conditions of people. Some were tortured mystics and others were beloved and generous. Each has a story, a conviction, something that gave them a sense of purpose. All have a story for us to hear and work with to see something of the grace of God, the love of Christ, and the truth of Spirit.

What makes a saint has evolved over the centuries, as patterns and expectations have changed, churches changed with denominationalism and disputes. We share many saints with Catholic and Lutheran and Orthodox siblings in Christ, but we have many of our own.

Sometimes we shy away from the S-word to describe them, as we have a hard enough time keeping this stuff straight inside The Episcopal Church. Talking about saints with other churches invites conversations about their processes which are just as confusing as our own.

So we speak of holiness and witness. 

We honor them on days we designate as Lesser Feasts and compile them in a book, authorized by the General Convention as Lesser Feasts and Fasts. So every few years, the church, at the General Convention, will hear the case for the inclusion of  new saints, people who are already celebrated and honored in a place by a people. Honored and celebrated because their witness to the love of Christ makes them an example for people in that community of how a person of faith could be. And sometimes the church agrees.

Five new feasts authorized for trial use this summer include: Liliʻuokalani of Hawai’i, George of Lydda, The Philadelphia Eleven, Elie Naud, and Adeline Blanchard Tyler and her Companions.

The Sunday propers and Principal Feasts always override a lesser feast, meaning, the lesser feast for November 3 is not celebrated at the principal service. If we could, though? Today we’d honor Richard Hooker, the eminent Anglican theologian and definer of Anglican polity and theology. His theology and organizing of relationship of the people with the church sits alongside Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (who we honor on October 16), whose contribution of The Book of Common Prayer (which we honor June 1) and Queen Elizabeth’s famous Elizabethan Compromise comprise the three greatest achievements in the modern era of Anglicanism. 

Richard Hooker’s most famous concept, the via media, and his vision of authority resting in the combined life of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason formed the bedrock of the modern church and make it possible for our church to exist and evolve in the postmodern era.

Saints are cool.

But we should refuse to see them as anything but human. Because these are people who did things we could do.

The gospel for All Saints’ Day offers a portion of the story of Mary and Martha asking Jesus to come and save their brother, Lazarus, who also happens to be Jesus’s best friend, apparently. 

This story is beautiful and vexing, offering a foretaste of the Passion and Resurrection to come soon after. But it offers us a kind of saintly misdirect for our emotions. Here, we are torn between the human struggle of fear and grief, of love and loss that Mary and Martha experience and the divine vision of compassion and then resurrection.

The circumstances in the story exist in a kind of background we can’t access; to be rational when we, too, are overcome with emotion. Mary sends word to Jesus, who delays two days before setting off for Bethany, but when he arrives, Lazarus has been dead for four days. No amount of hurrying would have gotten him there in time. But grief doesn’t inspire rational thinking. It can’t hear that, even as it is plainly true. And Mary, so angry and frustrated and full of despair, turns that all on Jesus, and you can imagine her hitting his chest, her flailing arms lifting the hair from her face as Jesus just stands there taking it. And she says the most ridiculous thing about him trying to get there, because trying to do the impossible seems important, but that isn’t really what this is, or what God is trying to do here. It was never about saving her brother, because sometimes saving isn’t the thing, and our attempts are just flailing in grief. But God’s divine grace is revealed in resurrection.

The most important line in this gospel is its final.

After calling Lazarus to come out of the tomb, Jesus turns to the people and speaks to them:

“Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.””

This is the work: their witness. To not get Jesus to save him from death, but to witness the grace of God and unbind the one who is now living.

How frustrating! Because our hearts are so easily with Mary and Martha. But now, Jesus wants them to unbind their brother, to let him go. In life. In death. In new life.

Anyone who has gone through hell’s fiery furnace on earth, whether it be prison, addiction, loss of someone dear, knows how bound we are to other people’s expectations of us; how bound we are by other people’s funeral shrouds and conviction that we are gone, lost, dead. Even when we stand before them. 

Death and resurrection, repentance and redemption, mercy, love, this is the language of God. The language of life.

We are called to unbind the living. Free them. Let them go.

Jesus Restores Life

How full we are, with the weight of life, of preserving life. 

How convicted Jesus is in restoring life. How committed he is to restoring people to community. Children, women, gentiles. People without power or standing, people who have fallen through the cracks. He invites fishermen, tax collectors, doctors, and the formerly blind to be disciples. He invites the wealthy to sell their stuff, give the money to the poor, and follow him. He exorcizes a legion of demons, clothes the man, and sends him home. 

It may sound simplistic, but maybe what makes a saint different from others is that they can see this. Why the saintly Archbishop Desmond Tutu could see the grace of God in the young soldiers of South African Apartheid and in the laughter of the Dalai Lama. That the extraordinary work we esteem from these heroes of the faith is merely the ordinary person seeing their part is to participate in a divine project of restoration, not preservation. 

Those soldiers that pointed their guns at Desmond Tutu, ordered to kill him if he had the audacity to speak the truth. To say the word “apartheid” out loud. They were trying to save a crumbling institution. We focus on the gun, on standing up to the gun. But Tutu focused on the work of God. On resurrection. And his vision of a new South Africa, that it could look less like the Kingdom of Men and more like the Kin-dom of God—that’s what seems extraordinary. But it isn’t. It is the most normal thing a Christian who sees the Kin-dom at work in the world can do.

This is our work. How we can be saintly people in this community. Not trying as the disciples did, to protect Jesus from dying, ranking ourselves as the best disciples, or trying to ride into battle next to Jesus.

But to be witnesses of resurrection and redemption. Of seeing the grace of God as present in the people of our neighborhood, of our church, alive and thriving in our community. Unbinding them of the burial wrappings we shackle each other with in death, but to unbind them and let them go.

Join in the redeeming, in the loving, in the gracious giving of new life everywhere. For we are disciples, apostles, and saints already. We just simply remember that new life is always possible. It is freeing, joyous, and the greatest gift we can give—because it is God’s greatest gift to the world.