Merredin Uniting Church

Texts: Isaiah 25:6-9, Revelation 21:1-6 & John 11:32-44

Today is All Saint’s Day. Most often, it is treated as a celebration of the “dear departed” and the focus is on hope for resurrection. The day before All Saints Day has become a popular celebration even amongst non-Christians but has taken a distinct ghoulish flavour as Halloween, or All Hallows Eve (All Saints Eve). It’s a bit sad when the world tries to frighten itself with death instead of looking forward to that which is to come when all this has ended, or indeed, if we live by faith, that which has already come because of the Cross and the victory of the empty tomb.

This is what our texts do this morning – Isaiah with his mountain on which a great feast is set and the death shroud is removed forever; the new heaven and new earth from Revelation which points us to the resurrection of the saints and then the raising of Lazarus in John’s Gospel.

Today – on this “All Saints Day” which, incidentally includes you and I, for we are also saints, I want us to focus, not on some future resurrection but on the new life we have today.

This new life burst forth from a hill outside Jerusalem over 2000 years ago. On that hill, that mountain, a feast of rich food, of aged wine – the best of meat and the finest of wine, was set. On that mountain, Jesus took the shroud of death and bound Himself up in it. Three days later He burst forth in resurrection – He swallowed up death forever, He wiped away our tears and He removed our disgrace. He brought us joy and gladness in our salvation.

On that day, He who is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, established a new beginning which would find itself completed in the new heaven and the new earth. On that day the Holy City comes down from heaven, dressed like a bride – and a loud voice cries out, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, no more death, mourning, crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.

In our time dominated world we want to separate these events and yet they are the parts of the one event – a past time prophecy from Isaiah; an historical event at Calvary; and Revelation’s picture of the end of all things in some distant future. Three parts but one event. We struggle to grasp this because we are limited by time, but God is not.

We need a sequence, but for God everything is. He who is the great I AM, is at the same time, the one who says “I will be who I will be”. In God’s time all things have already happened for there is no time in eternity .. and yet nothing has happened, for it is still happening. For us there is the struggle of now and then, of action and reaction, sequence and consequence.

I know that this sounds crazy, but if you want to begin to understand God you have to stretch yourself outside of the constraints of space and time. You must understand that the prayer which you have yet to pray is already answered; your sins for which you come to seek forgiveness have already been forgiven.

God is great, majestic, unlimited by our imagination. When we see Him in all His glory we will stand there in our white robes with our eyes open wide and our mouths hanging open. We can’t limit God. We dare not attempt to second guess Him and we must never, ever play with Him.

In Christ, God has revealed Himself in a way that we cannot really comprehend – fully God and fully human. The Divine contained in a human body and yet omnipresent and omnipotent.

The Christ of God baffles the mind – so some would try to reduce Him to a man chosen by God but not divine. Others would say, a man, given God-like qualities. Still others that He is God but He was never flesh. The Bible though is clear. From Genesis to Revelation we see that we are dealing with something, someone, who is outside of our limited capacity to understand. So, by faith, I must believe the Bible; I must accept Christ, by faith; I must walk with Him, by faith; by faith, I must believe that my sins are wiped clean; I must know that He will come again, by faith.

It is faith that allows me to grasp this, for when we come to address God we are outside the realm of reason. We are in that place of new life given to dead flesh, of your life and mine being made utterly new. We are in that place where there is no limit to anything, because He is able to do exceedingly abundantly more than we can ever ask or imagine.

Do you sometimes feel that you have been left behind in coming to understand this? Do you sometimes look around and find yourself still there in that dead world where time marches forward from cradle to grave? Where hope is unknown and darkness abounds?

Are you still wrapped up in grave clothes?

Thirty one years ago God called me back from the dead just as much as He called Lazarus out of the tomb. I praise God for that and for those lovely people who have stood by and cheered as I have walked these past 31 years. Countless people who have shared a kind word, an encouragement, sometimes even a word of caution or warning but always we were fellow pilgrims on the same journey going to the same destination. And in this joyful throng of pilgrims, there was even sometimes no limitation of time, and it was, as if, we were already there.

This then is our place in the Kingdom … for Paul says that we are a new creation, the New Testament refers constantly to our new life in Christ. We are on this journey, we have been called from the tomb. There is a new beginning and we have already arrived.

But it is so hard for us to understand this in the to and fro and difficulties of life. John Bunyan captures this so well in the Pilgrim’s Progress.

It is only after the “place of deliverance” (The Cross) and the breaking of the “straps” (The Empty Tomb) that Pilgrim encounters “the Hill of Difficulty, The Valley of the Shadow, Vanity Fair, the Giant called Despair and Doubting Castle”. These are the struggles of faith in this life but Pilgrim presses on and ultimately finds himself in the Celestial City.

In Christ, we have been re-created for new life. And it is by faith in the risen Christ that we live this re-created life – it is a life of hope now, it is a life complete now, it is a life of victory now.

In the resurrection of Lazarus we given a glimpse outside of this time dominated world. We are introduced to the One who creates the ultimate reversal in turning death into life; and He thus substantiates His claim to give us new life in the new creation. And we see our task in this mystery.

Martha is shocked that Jesus wants the stone removed from the tomb. Lazarus has been dead 4 days – the soul has apparently already departed, the body is rotting. She is worried about the smell, she has given up on Lazarus. But then Jesus asks, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?”

The glory of God – the manifestation of the divine in the ordinary. This is glory … new life given to the rotting dead.

Jesus has come to call the dead to life, to remove the grave clothes, to set free those who have been confined to the grave without hope, and for too long. We, no-one, are so far from God that He cannot call us out into new life and make us into a new creation.

Christianity is not a religion – a philosophy which merely allows for the existence of God.

No – it is a lifestyle in which those who walk by faith put their whole trust in the One who not only made us (in His image) but who recreates us and gives us new life. From the darkest hole He retrieves us, saying to us, “Come on out”. And to those around us, He says, “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.”

The church is the communion of saints, those still living and those already departed who have been called forth from the tomb. We have been given new life. When Jesus gave us new life on that day, on that hill, in that feast there were others who were there when that happened and they helped to move the stone and they removed the grave clothes. They are the church and they fulfilled the task of the church.

And we are the church. We cannot give new life, we cannot recreate – only God can do that, but what we can do is move the grave stone. And we can remove the grave clothes. When Jesus brings someone into His Kingdom, He calls us first to move the stone – the obstruction to life. Then He calls the dead to new life.  Our task then is to remove the clothes of death – what the world wrapped them in when they were consigned to the grave: assumptions, hopelessness and failure. This is the task of the church, this is work of the saints. Remove the stone, remove the grave clothes, celebrate the feast of the resurrection.

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