Rector’s Sermon
November 1, 2009
All Saints' Day

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When Jesus heard that his good friend Lazarus had died, he treated us to the shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus wept.” The slightly more current translation has it, “Jesus began to weep.” However we translate it, it speaks to us of grieving, of Jesus grieving in particular upon the death of a friend. Lazarus died. It broke Jesus’ heart. And you and I have been there and done that.

            Today is All Saints’ Sunday, and it may seem strange for us to lift up this story of Lazarus, this story that begins certainly in sorrow. But clearly it’s not the end of the story because the end of the story is the miracle of Christ’s calling forth Lazarus from the tomb, an extraordinarily dramatic expression of those familiar words associated with this miracle, “I am the Resurrection and the Life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.” For Christians not only are death and taxes certainties, so is God’s promise that nothing can be lost if we belong to God, that nothing shall separate us from the love of God.

            Something of the same dynamic was at play for Bev and me when we attended the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus’s performance of Brahms’s Requiem. Two of Bev’s very closest and oldest friends had died and the texts that Brahms had chosen and the music he composed to accompany those texts encompassed the full range of pathos as well as hope in recalling two lives cut relatively short but with a sublime comfort so accessible to us.
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted…For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withers and the flower thereof fadeth away…How lovely is thy dwelling place, O Lord God of hosts!...Blessed are they that dwell in thy house: they will always be praising thee...Then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, “Death is swallowed up in victory. O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory?”…Blessed are the dead, which die in the Lord, from henceforth. Yea, says the spirit, that they may rest from their labors.

And so we recall those lives of loved ones and like Jesus, we weep, but we do so as Christians, as those who have been assured that there is no such thing as a throw-away life, that there’s no such thing as a meaningless life. St. Paul describes us as being the “Communion of Saints,” which is to say that we proclaim in both the lives of extraordinary people and in the lives of those who are long forgotten, that all are lives with a purpose of service to God and of service to one’s neighbor. I have long felt that those who are immortalized in stained glass are nothing more or less than the rest of us who allow the light of Christ to shine through us, who allow the light of Christ to be revealed through us.

So dust off your recording of Solti and the CSO’s performance of Brahms’s Requiem, or anyone else’s for that matter, and weep with me your tears of joy. Amen.