All in All '06

Texts: Isaiah 25:6-9; Revelation 21:1-6a; John 11:32-44

Last week I spoke about acceptability to God. I should say that at the time I wrote that sermon – in fact, at the time I preached it – I had no idea of the controversy that was about to erupt here in our own diocese this week. To the extent that I was talking about qualifications for the priesthood, I was provoked by the decision of the Diocese of Synod to continue to exclude women from the priesthood. However, there is nothing I would want to resile from in last week’s sermon in the light of this week’s row.

This week we are celebrating, appropriately enough, the Feast of All the Saints, and I would want to stress the word ALL. We are not making any distinctions between them. While individual saints are rightly remembered and honoured for the particular examples they have given us, today we are thanking God for the lot. And there are a lot! And our readings today tell us that there will be even more of us when the final whistle is blown.

Yes, I did say “of us”. You’ll have heard this before but it needs repeating every year. Saints are not especially brilliant, unworldly or pious exceptions to the general run of humanity. Saints, according to the Scriptures, are people who believe in Jesus Christ. In other words a saint is a Christian, any Christian is a saint.

Having got that off my chest for another year, let me get back to numbers. One of the aspects of the great question about acceptability to God has always concerned numbers. Not so much, who can be saved, but how many can be saved? Does heaven have an open-door policy – visa-free entry as it were – or is there a carefully controlled quota system? Do we have to have enough points to be allowed to enter heaven?

This is the sort of issue that underlies a lot of the small, narrow fundamentalist sects. The most obvious example is the Jehovah witnesses who believe that there is a pre-determined limit of 144,000 people who will be saved – a figure derived from Revelation 14:1. In fairness to those who hold such views, we have to admit that there are some hints in the gospels that seem to support that narrow approach. I’m thinking, for example, of Matthew 7:14, where Jesus is quoted as saying: “But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” And there’s an even more troubling passage in Luke 13:22-30, which I don’t pretend to understand.

Associated with this narrow approach seems to be an element of joylessness. My limited experience of strict fundamentalists gives me a picture of how hard it is to please God, that nothing is ever quite enough, that we are at best hanging on to eternal life by our fingertips, and one slip up could mean eternal damnation. Maybe, the joy comes later but I’m not even sure of that. I suspect that their vision of heaven might be much the same as their vision of earth, except that the population has been radically reduced to them and their kind all worried stiff that God might suddenly relax the rules and let in the riff-raff, including those terrible Anglicans!

Against such a picture we have the glorious breadth of vision given to us, last week by Jeremiah, and this week by Isaiah and St John the Divine. .Remember how Jeremiah saw that vast multitude of people being gathered together and brought back from exile? He was making the point that all the people of God were acceptable to God, including those that the Law would seem to exclude. Isaiah has a similar vision of vast numbers, but he puts a different slant on the grace of God. Or perhaps I should say he illustrates the grace of God with a different image.

His image is the great feast to which “all peoples” come. No ticket is required, no qualification or entrance exam is prescribed. All come. And the host of the feast, who is, of course, God, supplies the best of everything. I suspect that Isaiah was a bit of a gourmet himself, or at least a wine buff. We can almost hear his mouth watering: the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine – the best of meats and the finest of wines. A free smorgasbord of the very best of everything!

It’s a celebratory feast, of course. And Isaiah leaves us in no doubt what we are celebrating here. Nothing less than the defeat, the abolition, of death itself! And again, we need to note the universal breadth of his vision. He calls death the shroud that enfolds all people, the sheet that covers all nations. This is the universal reach of death that will be swallowed up for ever. There’s no hint of favouritism, narrowness or exclusion here.

And from a book written about 700 years before Christ, we can leap ahead to a book written in the first century of the Christian era, the Book of Revelation, and in today’s extract from it we find a vision with striking similarities to Isaiah’s. Again, the central point is the reunion of God and his people, and the abolition of death. But there is another even more important element this time. Isaiah’s vision was earthbound – he placed the great banquet on Mount Zion . But St John the Divine, as we call the author of the Book of Revelation, gives us an even broader perspective.

He sees the union of heaven and earth. With all due respect to those who talk of being taken up into heaven while the rest of us are left behind, this vision tells us it’s the other way around. Heaven comes down to earth. The earth is made new, or I should say, the whole of creation is made new. Verse 3 is key: Now the dwelling of God is with human beings, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.

That should sound familiar, of course, because it’s a straight steal from the early books of the Old Testament, where, again, the idea was God present with his people on earth. Against such a vision, we must surely see how narrow some of our classic Christian ideas seem. So often we have painted the picture of salvation being a sort of rescue operation, as if the whole earth was being destroyed and a lucky (or righteous!) few will be plucked to safety in heaven. Jesus as lifeguard, so to speak.

But these visions we have before us today show us something far more wonderful than that. God’s reach is universal, and so is his redemption. The whole of creation is being redeemed: There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. It is against this breadth of vision that I want to end this morning with a quick look at our gospel reading.

The story of the raising of Lazarus is much loved, and I love it myself. I have over the years preached on it a number of times, and used it for more than one funeral homily. But the more time I spend with it, the more I feel that the emphasis should be on Mary and Martha, rather than Lazarus. Lazarus is the passive one in all this. He doesn’t speak at any stage. Things happen or are done to him. He dies. He’s wrapped in burial clothes and sealed in a tomb. He’s called out of the tomb, and somebody is instructed to untie him.

Of course, we would wish for more – including an extended interview on 60 Minutes or something. But we are given no more, and the dialogue is between Jesus and the sisters. They represent us – with their natural human response to the disaster that has befallen their family. And they represent that part of us, however we might try to hide or deny it, which feels let down by God when something like this strikes our loved ones.

Both sisters say to Jesus: Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. And we are to hear that against the background that they had summoned him, and he had deliberately delayed his arrival. It’s hard to avoid the suggestion that they felt let down by Jesus; he should have hurried and arrived in time to save their brother from death.

Their vision of Jesus, and therefore of God, is too narrow. As wonderful as physical healing is, it is always only temporary, as it were. It defers death, it doesn’t defeat death. So Jesus talks of resurrection, not healing. To illustrate that he calls Lazarus out of the tomb, but that is only a small foretaste of what is to come. And notice that at no time is any special plea made for Lazarus on ground of personal merit. We are told nothing about his qualities. In the story he is simply an example of human mortality. He points ahead to Jesus’ own burial and resurrection, and to our own.

In other words, he’s just one of the multitude of our fellow saints we remember today, as we prepare to participate in our heavenly feast of the finest bread and the finest wine. Amen.