The Word in our Lives: All Saints' Sunday 2018

In most profiles that churches put out when they are looking for a new pastor or priest, there is often a statement that says the church would like a preacher who connects the Scriptures to their daily lives---a preacher who makes sense of the Gospel and declares how it is relevant to our world today.
Well, buckle up: here goes…..
We are faced with many issues today---some of these issues have been going on since the beginning of time, I am sure---but most of these issues feel as if they have escalated in recent months and years. I am talking about:
Climate change
gun violence
immigration and border security
homelessness and poverty
healthcare for all people
should we raise or lower our taxes (in other words, why do I have to pay for other folks?)
racism, white supremacy, and nationalism
 
Beloved, the Good News of Jesus Christ has something to say about all of these things, and today’s readings speak God’s Truth if we have ears to listen:
 
“The earth is the LORD’s and all that is in it, the world and all who dwell therein.”
 
This one verse from today’s Psalm, speaks to all of these issues in one way or another.  Let’s start with Creation.  This verse reminds us that everything is God’s and everything was made by God. Our part in Creation, going back to Genesis, chapter 2, is to care for all of creation. To be good stewards of that which God has made---including humanity which is made in the image of God.  When God puts human in charge of the Garden of Eden---of the Creation---God asks human to do two things: to serve Creation and to guard Creation. Obed and shamar: these are the two Hebrew verbs. To serve and to guard.
 
Four weeks ago, the UN put out a statement reporting that the status of carbon dioxide pollution here on earth is a life or death situation. Time is running out; if we are not willing to live differently in order to limit and decrease the carbon dioxide pollution in our atmosphere within these next 12 years, we will cause damage that cannot be walked back---damage that will lead to unprecedented changes to our world.  People, we are talking about the status of this fragile earth, our island home, becoming more inhospitable and drastically different in the lifetimes of the children who sit in this room right now---in the lifetime of Gus and Roman whom we baptized two weeks ago.
 
As we celebrate All Saints Sunday---when we recognize that we are all in one communion---bound together: past, present and future---we hear this wonderful reading from the 21st chapter of the Book of Revelation. Now, this book of the Bible has been used as a weapon in our lifetime.  Some have taken it and spun a tale about a great rapture, a clear distinction of who is in and who is out.  This Great Rapture that has captured many folks’ imagination and has sold thousands of books for the writers of the Left Behind Series---this Great Rapture is made up. It was concocted in the 19th century; and while elements of Scripture and the Book of Revelation were woven into the fantasy---it is not Biblical. It is not the Good News.
 
But there is plenty of Good News in the Book of Revelation (in fact, we will be studying it in the New Year, so stay posted).  The Book of Revelation is an apocalypse—an end time prophetic epiphany---but not about the end of the earth. This book describes an end of an age, the end of one age—the age of the Empire---and the start of a new age---the age of God’s reign on earth—the new Jerusalem. Where God and humanity are one another’s, where chaos has ended, and death, pain and sorrow do not have the ultimate power.  For God makes all things new---all things.
 
Beloved---do you hear this Good News today: God loves and includes all---all people, all created things, all of humanity, all kinds. God does not divvy up the worthiness of humanity into races, genders, sexual orientations, colors, economic status, or even nations. God does not look down upon created earth and see borders. God does not favor one nation over another, one race over another, one gender over another, one social status over another. Those are sinful, human divisions. God works for all things; God makes all things new.
 
Today’s Gospel has Jesus standing at the mouth of the tomb, with the stench of death and decay hanging in the air, and Jesus calls the dead back into life. Because the Good News is Resurrection---that death does not have the ultimate power, that love wins, that darkness does not overcome the light and that life is stronger than death.
 
This is the central message of our faith: Resurrection.
 
But, beloved, do we believe in Resurrection? Do we let it be our primary call?
Or, Beloved, do we allow death to have more power than resurrection?
 
What if we considered all these burning issues of the day through the lens of Resurrection?
 
Climate change
gun violence
immigration and border security
homelessness and poverty
healthcare for all people
the purpose and need for taxes
racism, white supremacy, and nationalism
 
What if, as we ask and consider how we should vote or choose or what we should believe about these issues, what if we used resurrection as our litmus test?  Think about it; we believe in the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Another way to name the Trinity is Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer.  That is who God is: the One who Creates, the One who Redeems and the One who Sustains life.  If we are to name ourselves as Christian, then this means our allegiance is to God first, not nation. This means that Jesus is our Lord, not our wallet or our status quo. If we are Christian, this means we have vowed to live the life of Trinity: creating, redeeming, and sustaining life.  This is our litmus test---this is how we know how to choose, how to vote, how to live and how to give.
 
But, here’s the kicker. We are not called to create, redeem, and sustain life only for ourselves or only for our family or only for our nation or only for our race or only for those who profess the same creed or speak the same language or who celebrate the same holidays……..God makes all things new.  All things. As Christians, we are called to live our lives in ways that create, redeem, and sustain life for all things---for all of Creation----for all belong to God, so we are each other’s business.
 
So let’s get back to how the Good News speaks to these burning issues of the day; you know, apply the Bible to our everyday lives:
 
The thousands of our siblings who are seeking a better life so they walk thousands of miles in hope of tasting that abundance which God provides for all---we already know what God-the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of life-- desires for these ones. On which side of the tomb will we stand?
 
 Or in Pittsburgh where our Jewish siblings are gunned down while attending worship or in the high school hallways of Parkland, Florida or in weekend celebrations at Pulse nightclub in Orlando or the concert in Las Vegas or the elementary classrooms in Newtown, Connecticut…..are we prepared to unbind our nation from the death shroud of gun violence?
 
Can we share our abundance in the form of taxes in order to provide healthcare for all folks, making certain all people have shelter, food and drink, providing a living wage for all those who work, practicing resurrection through our systems and structures?  Building a society that is enabled and empowered to care for one another---especially our most vulnerable (in Scripture they are named as the widowed and orphaned). Raising folks from death to life?
 
And if we are unwilling to have taxes that provide for this, if we don’t think it is the government’s role to do this, then we must come up with another way, for Gospel makes it clear that it is our work to do. Not somebody else’s.
 
  As Christians, as Jesus followers, as People of the Way of Love---this is our business. And it is the business we call all people to take up with us. This is resurrection. This is how we, like Jesus, stand at the mouth of the tomb, with the stench of death and decay all around us, and raise people from death to life. This is how we unbind them and let them go----free them and us from the death shroud that strangles us from the abundant life God desires for all things to know and have.
 
This beautiful vision described in the book of Revelation is not about a heaven that we can go to when we die.  This apocalyptic dream is not about the end of the world; it is about the end of an age. This is an apocalypse of Hope---and oh, how we need to hear it today; how we need to believe it today; how we need to lean into this vision and participate in what God is already doing today---creating, redeeming, and sustaining life.  Because, Beloved, we are the agents of resurrection whose participation in God’s vision creates the apocalyptic turn---moving us from one age to the next.
 
As Republican President Abraham Lincoln preached at his first inauguration in 1861, standing at the cusp of the Civil War:
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may
have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”