In one of our All Saints’ Day hymns, “I sing a song of the saints of God,” each verse ends with this line, “And I mean to be one too.”
As followers of Jesus, we all at least give lip service to the idea of wanting to be saints, that is to be like Jesus.
Today’s lessons lay out some components of sainthood and give us some ideas to try as we practice being saints. After all, practice makes perfect. Throughout life we face all sorts of challenges that require moral courage. These challenges can make us into better people or destroy us.
In today’s reading from the Wisdom of Solomon, the souls of the righteous have been disciplined a little, “and they will receive great good, because God tested them and found them worthy of himself.”
So we want to pass these tests that we face in life. We can be sure that God loves us even when we fail, just as God still loved Adam and Eve after they spectacularly blew their first test and ate the apple in the Garden of Eden. God did not spare them from the consequences of their disobedience, but God still loved them.
God loves us even in our failures, but God takes great delight in our efforts to pass our tests and God rejoices when we succeed. As today’s passages make clear, God is always setting life before us, and hoping that we will choose life over death. We know that God is constantly helping us to choose life, if only we pay attention to God at work in our lives.
Saints consistently choose life over death. Each action we take in a day boils down to choosing death or choosing life. The way to choose life, as we heard last week, is to love God above everything else, and Jesus added that this love of God includes loving your neighbor as yourself.
Knowing that God is the boss and not us helps us to make life giving choices. Today’s Psalm reminds us that “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it.” God is in charge, not us, although God does give us the charge of many things in this life, along with the offer to help us do the best we can with what we have got to do. So we would do well to invite God into our lives, so that we can remember to turn to God and to consider what God would have us do. God’s guidance is invaluable.
Trusting in God is an important step in striving for sainthood in this life. Trusting in God helps us to understand God’s truth, as the writer of the Wisdom of Solomon points out.
The writer says that the faithful abide with God in love because grace and mercy are upon his holy ones.
God’s truth includes love, grace and mercy.
Listen to that again. God’s truth includes love, grace and mercy.
So when we are working on becoming saints, knowing that God’s truth includes love, grace and mercy means that we try to live in loving, graceful and merciful ways, especially when we are tempted not to do so.
When we choose to live gracefully and mercifully, we make God’s life giving love visible and present in this world that can seem to be so full of death.
Thank goodness God sent Jesus to show us how to live in love, grace and mercy on this earth, for when we puzzle over what to do about the tough challenges in our lives, we can turn to him for guidance, for throughout his life, Jesus always chose life over death, love over hate, grace over meanness, and mercy over ruthlessness.
Today’s gospel reading is the story of the last miracle Jesus does before his arrest and death at the hands of the authorities in Jerusalem. The plea from Mary and Martha to come to them because their brother Lazarus is sick presents Jesus with a challenge, because right before today’s story takes place, Jesus has been in Jerusalem and the authorities have tried to arrest him. He has escaped by leaving Jerusalem, so if he goes back to that area, he will certainly be in danger.
Jesus gives this dilemma of whether or not to go back two days of thought, an important point for us, because we live in a world that is in a hurry, and often we feel that we must act immediately, when in fact, waiting and praying over what should be done is the better course before we rush into a decision.
After some deliberation, Jesus decides to go to his friends. When he tells the disciples that they are going back to Bethany, just over the hill from Jerusalem, the disciples object, because they know that doing so will put them all, especially Jesus, in danger of death. But Jesus makes the life giving decision to go to Bethany even though his life will be in danger, because going to Mary and Martha in their grief will give him the opportunity to show God’s life giving glory.
So often we have opportunities to show God’s glory in the world, but we choose to remain quiet and safe instead. But when we look at the life of Jesus, we can see that Jesus did not hesitate to put himself in danger in order to witness to God’s life giving love.
When Jesus gets to Bethany, both Mary and Martha say to Jesus that if he had been there earlier, Lazarus would not have died. When they get to the tomb of Lazarus, Jesus says to Martha, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?”
What happens next, as Jesus calls Lazarus out of the grave, does reveal the glory of God.
Jesus, in raising Lazarus, chooses life over death, even though he knows that this choice of life for Lazarus will soon lead to Jesus’ own death on a cross. This miracle is a great example of the sacrificial love of Jesus that prefigures Jesus’ own death on a cross and God’s resurrection of Jesus.
At the end of today’s gospel, Jesus tells the crowd to unbind Lazarus from his death wrappings and to let him go, back from death, into life.
We followers of Jesus frequently find ourselves in the presence of death. God provides us with the power to choose life over death. Consider a situation as simple as a conversation in which a graceful and merciful response to a death dealing comment can help remove the death wrappings from the conversation and allow new life into the discussion. These conversations are little tests that offer big challenges because we’d like to strike back. But we can pass these tests and refuse to return hate for hate if we remember that we are to be God’s agents of love in this world.
Or, in a much more complicated example, when we speak up against injustices in our society, the sorts of injustices that the prophets and Jesus railed against, our life giving responses may seem to be hateful, mean and ruthless to the status quo. Jesus faced this same dilemma in his discussions with the temple authorities. His truthful, gracious and merciful replies to their questions did not reflect God’s truth to them, for they had substituted their own understanding of truth, based on their own power, rather than focusing on God’s truth. Jesus paid with his life for his life giving responses, because to those in power, the truth of his responses showed how death dealing their own power had become.
Many of the saints that we recognize as Saints (spelled with a capital S) have also died in the service of bringing life into death, and they too, have helped us all to see the glory of God’s life giving love at work in the world.
Ultimately, only God’s power can bring life out of death, as Jesus knew. But if God reigns in our lives and we live in response to God’s love for each one of us, we can pass our tests, and choose righteous actions, that small though they may seem, will contribute to God’s life giving work in the world, as we share God’s love, grace and mercy in all that we do.
The Bible closes with the book we know as the Apocalypse, The Revelation to John, the great vision of what’s ahead for us when the old order of evil comes to an end. We refer to this book as Revelation.
How fitting that God’s story of salvation should end with the vision of God destroying the death dealing power and greed that has taken over the world. That greed includes the selling of human beings along with horses and chariots, spices and other luxuries, a greed personified in the great city of Babylon, which God destroys.
By ending this reign of power and greed, God makes space once more for a paradise in which people can dwell. This paradise is a city in which the natural world continues to make God’s glory plain. And in this city, the New Jerusalem, God dwells, no longer distant in some heavenly realm, but among us.
In this place, our God of love and grace and mercy ends death once and for all. Mourning and crying and pain are no more, for the old order has passed away. At last, God’s work is complete, the beginning and the end all wrapped up in God’s love and grace and mercy here with us.
Revelation tells us, in words that are trustworthy and true, that God says, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.”
But even in this full completeness, God’s dwelling in our midst, God is still at work.
That’s why, seated on the throne in the New Jerusalem come to earth, God says, “See, I am making all things new.”
And that’s good news for us, the saints on this earth. When we strive to live as God’s righteous people, to pass the tests that come our way, and to be people of love, grace and mercy, God can continue working on us and get something good done with us.
And even though death ends our lives here on earth, we know that God still won’t be finished with us. For God is always making all things, even us, new, even beyond the grave.
On this All Saints’ Day, may we, like the saints who have gone before us, decide to delight God, to trustingly open our hearts to God and choose life here and now so that we can grow more and more into God’s life giving, gracious and merciful people.