All Saints’ Sunday - 2024
Sermon for All Saints Sunday, Year B
The Rev. Andrew McLarty
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Today, on All Saints' Sunday, we see in the Gospel of John the moment when Jesus, moved by grief and compassion, raises Lazarus from the dead. Here, Jesus stands as both fully human, weeping with us in sorrow, and fully divine, calling Lazarus back to life. In this act, Jesus reveals God’s power over death itself, reminding us that through Christ, death is not the end but the threshold of a fuller, eternal life.
For us, this is difficult to wrap our heads around, for we exist within Time and Space, but the dearly departed have transcended these confines. We cannot imagine where they are or how they are. But we trust in him who said, “I go to prepare a place for you.”
In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis speaks to this hope of a life beyond what we know now:
“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”
As humans, we all carry a longing for something beyond this earthly existence—a desire for wholeness and completion, for life in its fullness. This innate yearning, as Lewis points out, speaks to our divine purpose. We are not made simply to live and die; we are made to be raised, to be with Christ, to live as saints with all those who have gone before us.
Today also reminds us of the sacred journey that begins at baptism. As Wyatt Tubbs with experience in a moment, baptism is more than a symbol; it is an initiation into the Body of Christ, joining us to one another as members of God’s family. Through baptism, we are buried with Christ, but we are also raised with Him. This sacrament marks the beginning of our eternal story, through our membership in the Body of Christ we are promised life here on earth but also life everlasting.
When Jesus calls Lazarus out of the tomb, He does so with authority and love, commanding the community to "unbind him and let him go." It’s a call to release each other from the chains of death, to share in resurrection hope, to journey together as saints. In A Grief Observed, Lewis reflects on this reunion, saying,
“You have seen only the real world; I have seen it as a shadow, a glimpse through a window, as in a mirror dimly.”
On this day, the hope is that we will feel more intensely than ever the reality of the communion of saints and that all in the cloud of witnesses will become real to us as never before.
May we, as baptized members of Christ’s Body, live as those called out of darkness into light, and may we carry forward the hope of resurrection, as saints here on earth and someday, saints forever in heaven.
Amen.
