Sainthood

Each first Sunday in November we remember those people who have passed from this life to the next and more specifically we remember those who passed away since last year’s All Saints Sunday. It is a day that we typically remember those in our lives that have died, and we typically think of those who have died that have had a big impact on our faith.

When I am asked about who I think about as someone who was a saint that has now passed on to be with God I talk about my mom. You see when we typically talk about saints we not only talk about people who have passed away, but also those people who have had a big impact on our faith in our lives. The reason they impacted our faith life is because they had a big faith life of their own. My mom was one of those people. She was the rock of our family and the one who made sure that we went to church each week.

It was my mom, Susan, who helped me when I had questions about my faith and she was the one who said that she always knew that I was going to be a pastor. She was the one who supported and uplifted me throughout everything that happened in my life and encouraged me to take all those trials to God so that I too would have a relationship with him like she did. It was also my mom that after I graduated from seminary, who would ask me 1,000 questions about the Bible and faith and what I had learned. My mom embraced struggling with the topics of the Bible and the topics of our society and really wrested with them in a good way.

She is the one that I still talk to about my own questions about life and faith hoping that she might share some insight from above. My mom wasn’t perfect by any means, but for all of who she was in this life I give thanks and consider her a saint in my life.

What is a saint and who is considered a saint? If we take a look at history we will see that for most of the world the word saint takes on a Roman Catholic meaning, whether a person is a Christian or not. In this case a saint is someone of incredible faith who has been vetted and compared to other saints to see if their faith and life of ministry are enough to give them the status of a saint. When you think of the word saint you might immediately think of those people like Mother Teresa or the gospel writers. IN fact each week you hear me say the name of the gospel preceded by the word saint. So saint can be a title for someone who has great faith and is someone that we look up to as an example of what we might do to live out our faith in this world.

So a saint is basically someone who is holy and if we take a look at the Old Testament we can see that the way things are made holy are by being in contact something that was already holy. We see a lot of that in the story of Moses when he sees the burning bush and is told to take off his sandals because he is standing on holy ground in . We see this also with Moses when he gos up the mountain to receive the 10 commandments and when he comes down he was glowing white. So Moses was made holy by being in the presence of God. This is just one example of the different ways things were made holy in the Old Testament.

So when I look at the text today and I think about the life of Lazarus from what we know I don’t specifically see anything that would lead me to think of him as a saint in the traditional or popular sense of the word. What we do know about Lazarus is that he was a friend of Jesus and brother to Mary and Martha. He obviously must have been someone special because we don’t necessarily see a whole lot of people as a friend of Jesus. He was also someone special because almost the entire 11th chapter of John’s gospel is dedicated to the events that lead up to and include Lazarus’ death and resurrection.

But what did Lazarus do that made him a saint? If we take a look at today’s text there is really nothing that Lazarus did that made him a saint. Honestly, there is not much that he could do because our text only gives us that story of Lazarus being dead. There’s not much you can do when you are dead. So again, if Lazarus is dead then there is nothing that Lazarus could have done that would have made him a saint.

At this point then, if Lazarus could do nothing to make him a saint or to make him holy then what is it that made him a saint? If we think about the Old Testament idea of what it meant to be holy, which is typically what we think of as a characteristic of a saint, then we can say that Lazarus was holy or a saint because he was in contact with and around Jesus who is holy. It is Jesus who made those around him holy and turned them into saints.

Not only was Lazarus dead so he couldn’t do anything to make him a saint, there was also nothing that Lazarus could do to earn this sacred gift of being raised from the dead. There aren’t a lot of stories of rising from the dead and Lazarus has that claim. But what did Lazarus do to earn that? Was it because he was a friend of Jesus? Was it because he was a follower of Jesus? What was it that caused Jesus to raise Lazarus from the dead? I can guarantee you it wasn’t anything that Lazarus did . Jesus was the one who raised him from the dead.

So if we take the Old Testament idea of what it means to be holy and combine it with our New Testament idea of what it means to be a saint then we can learn that a saint is someone who is made holy by God through Jesus. It is that Old Testament idea of being holy is being in contact with something holy. Since God sent Jesus to be with us and live among us then God made us holy through his Son.

We continue to receive that holiness from the gift of the Holy Spirit given to us. If then, we are all holy and all have the presence of God living within us from that gift of the Holy Spirit, then we are all saints in the eyes of God. I truly believe it is important to remember those who have gone before us and laid the foundation of our own faith like my mom, but we must also remember that we are all saints in this life and not just in the one to come.

In fact we are all saints from the tiniest of us to the oldest of us. We are all saints because Christ died and rose from the dead and made the whole world holy through his sacrifice. So on this All Saints day I encourage you to go out from this place and live into your sainthood. Knowing that like Lazarus did that day that death has no power over you, but we do have the power to share God’s love and grace. Live out your saintliness knowing that you have been made holy and righteous through our Savior Jesus Christ.

Amen.