Last night was Halloween, which is a “holiday” that just
about everybody celebrates in one form or another. But while you may come here
this morning still a little loopy from sampling the kids’ candy stash, I want
to introduce you to another really “holy day”—All Saints Day.
Now. Traditionally, All Saints Day has had a couple of meanings. In the old days there was All Saints Day, which celebrated those Christians who had been singled out as exceptionally “saints” of the church—your Mother Theresa types, that sort of thing—followed the next day by “All Souls Day” when the rest of the departed hoi polloi of the church was honored—your regular Christians.
But, biblically speaking, “saint” is a word that is most often used to connote a regular, faithful Christian. There was no celebrity saint distinction in the early church, so a lot of traditions have dropped All Souls while still others have dropped the whole concept of honoring the righteous dead altogether.
I think it’s a total God-thing, though, that All Saints Day happens to fall on a Sunday where we’re scheduled to talk about the resurrection of Jesus as part of our year-long journey through the Bible. Last week we talked about the crucifixion, about what Jesus’s death means for us, so this week we need to address the event that is inseparably joined to the cross and stands at the center of Christian faith—Easter and the empty tomb.
My doctoral dissertation is focusing on the resurrection of Jesus, so I’ve been doing a lot of reading in this area. A couple of weeks ago I picked up a book, Accompanying Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral by Tom Long who teaches preaching at Candler. It got me thinking a lot about the nature of death and the meaning of resurrection (I’ve also been reading books about burial practices, the concept of the soul, and other creepy stuff). Long does a great job, I think, of setting us up to celebrate All Saints Day not as a day of death, but as a reminder of Easter and resurrection.
Long argues, and I think correctly, that the Bible tends to talk about three kinds of death, and knowing the difference can help us begin to understand what’s going on in the Gospel accounts of the resurrection. Using Tom Long’s categories, we might call these “small-d” death, “capital-D” death, and, finally, the death of Christ.
Small-d death is what we might also call natural death. It’s simply the recognition that we humans are mortal—that we have a certain life span, whether it is short or long. Some might wish that we had life spans like those we read about back in Genesis (Methuselah – 969 years old—imagine how much he had to save for retirement!), but we have to remember that by chapter 6 God had already set a limit on human life – 120 years—which seems to be true even today. The world’s oldest man, Walter Bruening, was 113 on September 24.
Truth is that each of us has an expiration date, which reminds us that we are human and not divine. Our mortality is thus a mixed blessing. On the positive side, the fact that we don’t hang around forever means that our lives have a sense of urgency that can generate things like creativity and faith. If you’re a procrastinator, mortality reminds us that you can’t procrastinate eternally! There is a deadline for all of us. Small-d death keeps us from living in a state of atrophy.
Small-d death also has the somewhat positive affect of assuring us that suffering does not last forever. I’ve sat with a lot of families whose loved ones were suffering terribly in pain and for whom death was a blessed end to their suffering.. While we can never say that small-d death is desirable, sometimes it is a release from the prison of pain. Sometimes death might even be considered a friend to those for whom drawing breath is a struggle.
We’re even more familiar of the downsides of small-d death, however. It reminds us that every day we live we are one day closer to dying (aren’t you glad you came to hear all this today?). And when we die, there’s a pretty good chance we will be forgotten. I’ve done plenty of funerals where a family member will try to say something helpful like, “He’ll be remembered forever.” Well, the truth is that Park City cemetery is full of people that nobody remembers. Very few people are remembered for more than a couple of generations after their passing. Psalm 103 reminds us of this fact: “As for mortals, their days are like grass; they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it and is gone, and its place knows it no more” (v. 15-16). Knowing that we’ll likely be forgotten, we can get trapped by what Tom Long calls “the anxiety of impermanence” which can cause us to a “what’s the point?” way of thinking. When people think that their lives won’t be worth much in the long run they can wind up wasting their lives in self-destructive ways. Maybe sin itself is really a byproduct of mortality. Conversely, people may also simply try harder to stave off their mortality and drive themselves to an early grave trying to “make their mark” in the world. I once heard somebody say that lying at the root of perfectionism is an inherent belief that if I could just do everything perfectly then I just might be able to avoid death. We all want to be remembered, but will we? Small-d death is a great equalizer, but also a great antagonist.
Capital-D
death, however, is a different reality. Capital-D death is never welcome under
any circumstance and is never a gentle friend, but “an alien and destructive
force.” It is an enemy—in fact, Paul says that it is the enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26). It is God’s enemy, and it not only
steals life from individuals but also captures “principalities and powers” (to
use Paul’s terms). Capital-D death can enslave human institutions, turn people
to warfare, cause hate and genocide, lead to systems of injustice and violence,
and make a mockery of God’s good creation. Capital-D death seeks to destroy
hope for the future, mocks our very existence, and “scorns human beings who are
set down in the middle of history with aspirations for eternal worth” (Long
40). Capital-D death wreaks havoc in the world and we see it at work every time
we open a newspaper and read the accounts of madness and mayhem perpetrated by
human greed, malice, and sin. Capital-D death convinces humanity to embrace
consumption over compassion, greed over grace, and self over our neighbors. When
we begin to believe that the world is a dark and evil place, rather than God’s
good creation, Capital-D death is at work. I wonder sometimes if our
celebration of Halloween is really just an unconscious homage to Capital-D
death—the spattering blood and axe murderer caricatures being seen as innocent
fun instead of a symptom of our casual alliance with Capital-D Death.
You may want to chew that over with all your candy…
The point is that there is a difference between small-d and Capital-D death. Small-d death ends our life in time and place. Capital-D death seeks to end humanity altogether, consigning it to a future without hope. Sure, people have often thought that they could simply act better and the world would be better, too. The whole Enlightenment project was about human progress—that things will just keep getting better and better and eventually things like war and disease and even death will be conquered by reason, science, and technology. New Atheist voices like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, direct descendants of Enlightenment thinkers like Nietzsche and Kant, write screed after screed decrying faith and calling for pure reason. But how has that Enlightenment project been working out? Is war being eradicated, for example? No—and now we have nuclear weapons (which science gave us, by the way). Try as we might, humanity hasn’t been able to beat back Capital-D death, or even small-d death for that matter. If we’re thinking that we can change things on our own, well, I’ve got bad news. On our own, we’re still subjects of King Death. So we might cry out with Paul, “Wretched people that we are. Who will rescue us from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24)
Well,
the answer is why we’re here this morning. Sunday morning. An echo of Easter.
We read the story of Jesus’ crucifixion last week—all that happened on a
Friday—the day that Jesus was nailed to a Roman cross, enduring the pain and
agony of death—small-d Death in his broken body and Capital-D death in the form
of the evil and violence of empire and hate that put him there. “Death and
death apparently had won, as they always do” (Long 42). And Jesus’ friends did
the only thing they could do in the face of death and death—prepare for a
funeral.
Jesus’ body was taken down from the cross—which was unusual given the fact that the Romans most often left the corpses on them to rot for days and weeks as a warning to others—a reminder that Capital-D death was still in charge. But Jesus is allowed to be laid out in a tomb, which was a temporary state. Burial in the first century was a two-stage process. The body was laid out on a slab in the tomb, wrapped in cloths and anointed with spices to hasten the decay and cut down on the odor. One year later, the family would return to collect the bones and put them in a stone box called an ossuary. Go to Israel today and you’ll see that there were so many of them that many ossuaries are used today as flower boxes. First century people were intimately acquainted with the process and bodily byproducts of death, more so than we are in an age of sanitized funeral homes and graveyards. Jesus had been a reason for hope—now he was just a statistic. Another in a long line of those defeated by death.
But that was Friday.
Sunday morning, the women came to finish the anointing process and found the stone rolled away from the entrance, the tomb empty, and the graveclothes laid aside. The body had moved and the funeral was over. Jesus’ body was gone and he would appear in his resurrected body to his friends—not a ghost, not an illusion, not a magic trick not a collective fantasy—but a body. There were continuities; the body of the risen Jesus was in some ways like his former body, like our bodies. His followers looked at his face and recognized him, he ate food with them just as before, and he invited them to touch his flesh so they would know he was not a ghost or a dream. But there were also discontinuities; his risen body was not like his former body and not like our bodies.“ He could stand with his friends yet they did not immediately recognize him. He could walk through doors and could vanish in an instant. “This was not just the old Jesus given a shot of new life.” Rather, the Gospel writers were saying that this was a transformed body, a glorified body—but a body nonetheless. The risen Jesus was embodied, but it was not precisely the same body he had once had. This was not a mere resuscitation of a corpse—a la Lazarus--it was a resurrection. (If you want to explore some of the evidence for the bodily resurrection of Jesus, I invite you to Bible study this week)
What does the resurrection of Jesus mean for us? For death (small-d and big-d)? Well, for the early Christians, it meant nothing less than the defeat of death itself. In the human Jesus, God had done a radically new thing—he had gone through the small-d death that we all experience and had taken on directly Capital-D death and all of its sneering power. Humans have long sought a life of eternal significance—to be remembered, to have our lives count for something, to make our time valuable in a larger sense. Death has always blocked that from happening. In the resurrection of Jesus, God has removed that roadblock and the life-crushing threat of death.
Yes, we still experience small-d death, but the resurrection tells us that this is a temporary state of affairs. Ultimately, we look forward to a resurrection of our own, made possible because Capital-D death will no longer have dominion over us. Our lives have eternal significance, our work in the present matters for eternity, we have a place in the coming Kingdom of God and a role in building for it. When that Kingdom becomes a reality, as Jurgen Moltmann puts it so wonderfully: “Death will die, not-being will be no longer, hell will go to hell.”
So, we might add a third kind of death to our list—Jesus’ death. It is Jesus’ death and resurrection that trumps small-d and Capital-d death with another—the death we experience in baptism. When we are baptized, our death becomes enfolded into Jesus’ death on our behalf and in the victorious reality of resurrection. I like how Long describes this:
“Because God did not raise only the idea of Jesus or the spirit of Jesus but the body of Jesus, what makes up the embodied stuff of our lives—our relationships, the words we have spoken, the acts of love we have done—counts, counts eternally. The commitments of our lives and the places we have placed our bodies are gathered up by the power of God and transformed in the resurrection into the very life of God” (45).
On All Saints Day, we celebrate this reality—that those saints who have gone before us, whether we hold them in our conscious memory as loved ones or whether they are not yet known to us will all be known in the Kingdom and their work and life celebrated in the light of God’s new creation. We will join together with them in this new reality, unimpeded by death in any form, and become part of God’s glorious future—a new heavens and a new earth, with new bodies for new work, new worship and new life.
In the interim, we still deal with death and the pain of loss, but we do so knowing that it isn’t the last word. Through our tears of grief, we remember resurrection and can shake our fist in the face of death: “Where, O Death, is your victory. Where, O Death is your sting? But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” shouts Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:57. We celebrate today because we know that great cloud of witnesses has come before us and we build on their legacy. “Therefore, my beloved,” Paul continues, “be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (v. 58). Resurrection means that our lives matter for eternity!
I continue to use N.T. Wright’s metaphor of a medieval cathedral as a vision for how our lives are fitted for the Kingdom. You may recall my sharing with you his image of a guild of 11th century stonemasons in a yard, each chiseling out a design on a block of granite or limestone. Each has his own piece, and none has an idea of how it fits into the whole project. Only the master builder knows how it all fits together. Then, after many years, comes the great day when the master builder announces that all the work is finished. He gathers all those stonemasons together and leads them through it, pointing up at the ceiling or to a column and saying to each craftsman—“There’s your piece. Here’s yours. You did this.” No matter how small or seemingly insignificant, every stone matters. Every stone is part of a cathedral.
Someday, I imagine, God will take each of us by the hand, as he will those who have chiseled out their work for the Kingdom before us, and tour us through the new creation. He will point out—“There’s your piece. Your act of compassion built that, your prayers did that, your visit, your giving, your leadership…all of it has a place in the eternal work of God’s Kingdom.
So, today we honor all those who have gone before us and we thank God for their witness in our lives. This morning I want to invite you to offer a special prayer for a person or persons who is now part of the great cloud of witnesses, awaiting the resurrection at the last day. Thank God for their influence in your life, thank God for those whose influence you may not even realize. And, because of resurrection we can be this bold, pray for those who will come after you and build on the work you are doing today for Christ and the Kingdom. And if you can’t figure out what work that is, then maybe it’s time for you to use the sense of urgency that small-d death gives us and ask God to fill you and show you your piece of the Kingdom project.
We gather on a Sunday morning, every Sunday morning, as Easter people. Every time we gather in this place we are really spitting in the face of death. We gather here to remember our baptism and celebrate the death of Christ that defeats all death by sharing in Holy Communion. We sing songs of resurrection and not dirges. We greet one another with peace and not fear. We are Easter people…and so we pray…
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