335 Past Present Future

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Past Present Future” originally shared on October 30, 2024. It was the 335^th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Oscar Wilde wrote in one of his plays, “Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future”. Today, we’re going to find out why both may be true and how both the past and the future shape the present.

   We had a hard rain this week. The Dodgers are having an amazing World Series. We are close to national, statewide, and local elections.

   None of them compares with what will be celebrated this weekend in churches around the world.

   This coming Sunday, November 3^rd, is All Saints Sunday. All Saints Sunday is celebrated on the first Sunday after November 1^st, which is All Saints Day.

   You know those round glowing things above the heads of certain people in Christian art? That’s right, “halo’s”.

   They are there to show that the person under them is a saint, or holy, or as was said in the Middle Ages, a hallow, or a person who is hallowed, as in “hallowed be thy name”.

   All Saints Day was once called All Hallows Day in Western Christianity. The night before was called All Hallows Eve. It was shortened over time to Halloween. We talked more about that last week.

   The forces of evil, the forces that defy God, were allowed to come out on October 31^st to try to scare people. Christians dressed up to mock them.

   Those forces were then required to return to whatever hell they came from at midnight, because that was the beginning of All Saints Day.

   The gospel reading that will be shared in the vast majority of churches in the world this coming Sunday will be John 11:32-44. It tells an incredible story with many of the worst elements of the current celebration of Halloween, but it ends in life! And that’s its message.

   The siblings Lazarus, Mary, and Martha were among Jesus, closest friends. The family lived in the village of Bethany, just over the Mount of Olives and about two miles east of Jerusalem. It appears to have been Jesus’ favorite place on earth. These were his close friends who were not among his close disciples. We have no record of him teaching publicly there. He just went there to relax and hang out with people who loved him and whom he loved.

   One day, Lazarus was very sick and the sisters sent a message to Jesus to let him know.

   Jesus seemed to take the news casually, then he stays put for a couple of days, then he decides to go to see Lazarus even though he had just been there and some of the people there were trying to kill him. Then Jesus tells the disciples that Lazarus was actually dead but Jesus is going to see him anyway. Then “doubting” Thomas is brave.

   Then Martha, with Mary, leaves the mourners to see Jesus in order to tell him that she believes Jesus could have prevented Lazarus’ death if Jesus had been around. Then Jesus states the promise of resurrection for all believe, even though they die.

   Then Martha states her belief that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.

   Then things get even weirder.

   Martha goes and tells Mary that Jesus is near and is calling for her.

   Mary finds Jesus, and our text for Sunday begins with these stinging words in John 11:32,

³² 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.”    

   Now, I’m not normally much of a crier. Maybe more so now that I’m older and the estrogen is kicking in. But the floodgates open up if I see other people crying. That’s it.

   I remember sitting in the front row at my mother’s funeral. She had died of complications of breast cancer at age 53. I was trying to keep it together. That’s kind of the Norwegian way. Stoic. And I did it until I looked to my left and saw one of my best friends since childhood sitting with his wife, looking at me. And he looked stricken, and his face was pale and wet. That was it for me.

   That’s why I’ve usually looked over the heads of people at the funerals I have led. I need to stay focused on the needs of others, not my own.

   I don’t know if Jesus cried often. He lamented over Jerusalem. He was fully God, and he was fully human. Look what happens here, in verses 33-35,

³³When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. ³⁴He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” ³⁵Jesus began to weep.

   There is it. John 11:35, “Jesus began to weep.” In some translations it’s simply, “Jesus wept.”, the shortest verse in the Bible.

   Do you ever picture Jesus crying? I don’t. He seems to be above that kind of thing. He’s God. Doesn’t he see death all the time every day?

   Why would Jesus weep over anything? He knows how it will turn out. Is death so unfamiliar to him? So unexpected?

   Queen Elizabeth II once said, in a statement of condolence to the families of the British who were casualties on 9-11, “Grief is the price we pay for love.”

   Grief is the price we pay for love.

   Was that it? Was it the expression of the living relationship with the one true living God for which we were all created and which now Jesus appears to have lost with Lazarus?

   The next verse tells us, in verse 36,

 ³⁶So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” 

   Others, though, were not so empathetic. Some questioned how Jesus healed the man born blind but didn’t heal his friend, Lazarus.

   Jesus was again in grief and went to the cave-tomb. A stone was lying against it. Sound familiar?

   Some protested when Jesus said, “Take away the stone”, pointing out that after four days there would be a stench. The King James Version of the Bible translates this passage, “Lord, by this time he stinketh”! Much of Christian art of this event shows people holding their noses.

   Jesus brushes all that off and says, in verse 40b-41a,

^40b “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” ⁴¹So they took away the stone.

   Jesus prays with thanksgiving, and then this happens, in verses 43-44,

⁴³When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” ⁴⁴The 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.”

   Wow! What must it have been like to be there at that moment? I wonder what the people who were there took away from this?

   Well, we find out in the verse after the reading for this Sunday, in verse 45,

⁴⁵Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him.

   That’s easy to understand. But what can we take away from this, particularly when we celebrate All Saints Day (November 1^st) and then All Saints Sunday (November 3^rd)

   First, that there’s a reason that the verses at the center of this event are so often heard at Christian funerals, John 11:25-26,

²⁵Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, ²⁶and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” 

   It is the very foundation for our hope in the new life in this world and the new heaven and the new earth in the life to come in Jesus Christ. It’s our credentials for sainthood. It’s faith, alone.

   Second, the answer to the question, “Who killed Jesus?” is the same answer to the question, “How did I get to be a saint?”

   The award-winning and Oscar-nominated film “The Fabelmans” is based on the life of director Steven Spielberg and contains a scene from when he was in high school being attacked for being a Jew, “because the Jews killed Jesus”. The actor responds, in part, by saying that he wasn’t around 2,000 years ago.

   Jesus and all of his disciples and virtually all of his followers at this point were Jews.

   It is true that some Jews are shown in the Bible calling for Jesus crucifixion, but not one of them is alive today. And I’ve always wondered why there isn’t more anti-Italian prejudice directed at the descendants of the Romans who actually conducted the trial and did the crucifixion. “Jews” didn’t kill Jesus any more than “Italians” did.  

   Others say that the answer to the question “Who killed Jesus?” is “You did.” and “I did. Jesus died to be the only acceptable sacrifice for our sin, to restore the relationship with God that our sin had broken. He would not need to have been killed if it wasn’t for the fact that humanity had messed things up.

   But the fact is, and it is the record of scriptures, that, ultimately, nobody took Jesus’ life. He gave it. On the cross.

   In John 10:17-18, where Jesus speaks about being the good shepherd and how the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, Jesus says,

17For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. 18No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.

   We see God’s power over life and death in Jesus Christ in the raising of Lazarus from the dead. We see in the gift of God in Jesus Christ that Jesus gives his life on the cross as fully God and fully human being, and then he takes it up again in the Resurrection. That, and that alone, is what makes us saints.

   Third, is that we have good news to share: that Jesus is the Resurrection and the life. Our lives are transformed, they are made new, we are born again, we are a new Creation through a living relationship with the one true living God that we call “faith”. Lazarus was raised from the dead by Jesus, but he is given new life, eternal life, in Jesus, and that is much more important. It’s why we can call each other saints without blushing.

   Lazarus would die again, eventually. But Lazarus’ eternal life is assured in Jesus. “Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, ²⁶and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” The question is “Do you believe this?”

   A colleague, a predecessor at a congregation I served, told me about the night he had a Church Council meeting, and he knew it would be a late evening. He called his wife and told her not to make a dinner for him. He would just stop by MacDonald’s on the way home, which he did. But, as he got out of his car to order inside, someone jumped out at him, pointed a gun at him and told him to give him all his money or he’d kill him.

   He told me, “I wish I could say that I was brave, but the truth is that I was just tired, and I said, ‘You can’t kill me. I’ve already died in Jesus Christ.’”

   All the color drained from the other person’s face, and he turned and ran away!

   That brings us to the Fourth lesson, that we have already died. We died in our baptism. Death is a past-tense experience for us. Does that mean we are the “Living Dead?”

   In a sense, it does.

   Paul writes, in Romans 6:3-5,

3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. 5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.

   And, Fifth, that God suffers with us in our suffering.

   Jesus wept. He was greatly distressed. He was “disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” That in itself is a sign to us pointing to the nature of God.

   I remember very clearly when my father was dying. My brothers and sister and I were at the hospital. Our dad was in and out of consciousness. His organs were shutting down. We took turns sitting with our dad while the others sat in the hallway. I’ve been in that space countless times as the pastor. I’ve struggled with the right things to say in that moment.

   I remember when the pastor from our hometown church, our dad’s pastor, came to visit. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. The look on his face said everything. We so appreciated his visit, his empathy and his concern. He just had to be there to express all of that.

   People say weird things when people have died. Even Christians. Things like, “I guess God needed another angel”, or “Everything happens for a reason.” or “Don’t cry, they’re with the Lord now.” or “God won’t give you any more than you can handle.” None of these reach us at the point of our pain. But I don’t criticize people for saying these things. People just don’t know what to say in their grief, in the face of death, and they’re afraid of saying the wrong thing.

   The best we can do is to be present in the hallways of people’s hearts. To sit with them. To share their grief even in the midst of our hope. The world isn’t the way the world was created to be, but God has redeemed it, and us.

   This is what God does. God loves us at the point of our pain. God weeps at the point of our loss and reminds us of His eternal promises in our suffering: love everlasting.

   Martin Luther, the 16^th century Church reformer, believed that we are all saints because we have been made righteous through faith, by God’s grace, and in baptism. Only those mentioned and described in the Bible as a part of the history of salvation could be given the honorific title of “Saint.”

   If you see people as either saints or sinners, you might take a harsh approach as in the “fire and brimstone preachers”, or even an aspirational one as in Oscar Wilde’s observation that, “Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.”

  If you take a more Lutheran approach, though, you might say that we are saints and sinners at the same time. How is that possible?

   As I mentioned above, Luther believed that we are all saints because we have been made righteous through faith, by God’s grace, and in baptism. But we still struggle with sin and sometimes we fail.

   Who can deliver us when we fail? We see Him in this week’s Gospel reading.

   We see it in Jesus’ power over death itself.

   We who have been saved have no need to fear death. It’s just a transition to another way of living. But we feel that pain in the pain of others even as we rejoice in the promise of eternal life given to us by Jesus Christ on the cross.

   The question is, do you believe it? Do you believe that the key to life and death is Jesus Christ? That life, eternal life, is not something we achieve, but something we receive as the gift of God in Jesus Christ? That you are a saint by God’s grace alone, through faith alone, revealed in the Bible alone?

   That Jesus gave his life and then took it back again? That Jesus has set everyone who believes and is baptized free from the effects of sin, death and the power of the devil?

   The story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead is our story. Our story of life from death.

   Lazarus lived in the present. But, in the words of Keith Morrison, “or, did he?

   He lived in the present, and then he didn’t live at all, and then he did. So, was his life lived in the past, in the present, or in the future?

   The cartoonist Bil (yes, that’s the correct spelling. 😊) Keane once said, “Yesterday's the past, tomorrow's the future, but today is a gift. That's why it's called the present.”  

   All time is the present for God, and we who have been saved now live in God, in the unity of time.

   Our lives are a gift of God. Our salvation is a gift of God’s grace.

   We’ll see the bones of our old selves on Halloween, but that’s not the end of our story. We see our story on All Saints Day.

   Jesus has made us saints! We who believe and baptized are all saints even as we struggle with sin and sometimes fail! But in Christ, we are made a new creation!

   Jesus has unbound us, and let us go! Share the good news.