The Dead Live

Propers: All Saints (Hallowmas), A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

One of the first things Christianity had to do was to make sense of death. Not just the death of Jesus, but the frequent and violent deaths of those who followed Him.

It all started with Stephen, whose story we read in the Acts of the Apostles. Stephen was among the first seven deacons of the Church, whose job it was to distribute congregational offerings to the widows and orphans, the poor and the needy. He spoke openly about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which was a risky proposition in those days. Jesus had been killed because of what He’d taught regarding religion, power, politics and, yes, economics. Now here came a new generation of Christians following in their Master’s footsteps, posing no less a threat to the powers and principalities of this fallen world.

It should come as little surprise, then, that Stephen’s fate mirrored Jesus’ own. He too was brought up on trial by the religious and secular authorities. He too was falsely accused of blasphemy and insurrection. And when they dragged him outside the city limits and brutally stoned him to death, he too proclaimed, even to his murderers, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” And so even in his death, Stephen witnessed to the salvation and new life poured out for the world in Jesus Christ.

He was but the first of many. The word martyr means witness, and that’s what the martyrs have always been, witnesses to the Risen Christ. True martyrdom does not seek out a violent end, but when faced with the choice between dying or denying Christ, the martyrs have shown us that there is no choice at all. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for Jesus’ sake will find it. Thus arose what we call today the Cult of Saints.

This is something Lutherans rarely talk about, to our detriment, but it is a very important biblical concept. Those who follow Jesus become one with Jesus, one in His Body the Church, one in His Spirit poured out upon us in Baptism, one in His Body and Blood shared at this altar, at the Lord’s Table. And that’s also true of death. If we live in Christ, we are one with His life. And if we die in Christ, we are one with His death. The martyrs, as clearly shown with St Stephen, join their deaths to Christ’s own Crucifixion—and thus they too pour out their lives, which are Christ’s own life, for the salvation of the world.

Early Christians, therefore, treated the blood of the martyrs as holy, because it wasn’t simply their blood anymore. It was Christ’s blood, the blood of God Incarnate, the surest sign of God’s love and forgiveness for all of humankind, all the cosmos. And so you get stories of Christians crucified or beheaded or thrown to lions in the arena, only then to have their fellow believers come by night to mop up their blood and gather their bones, reverencing these relics as they would Christ’s own body.

Death had meaning to these Christians. It had a reason, a purpose, which was to show the world how much God loves us, loves even we sinners, loves even His own murderers—loves us all the way to the Cross, all the way to hell and back. And now here’s where it gets even weirder, because the bones of these martyrs were often placed on display, washed and clothed and adorned with finery, spoken to as if they were still alive. Why? Because if we have been united with Christ in a death like His, we shall certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like His.

The dead in Christ Jesus are not dead. For indeed, He is the God of the living, not of the dead. The souls of the faithfully departed have ascended in the Risen Christ to the highest Heaven, where they rejoice in the infinite goodness and truth and beauty of Almighty God, ever praying for we who are struggling down here through our pilgrimage on earth. It’s all in the book of Revelation. And the day will come, the Scriptures promise, when that same Heaven will descend to earth, and together they shall become a new Heaven and a new earth, where God shall walk again with Man and all the dead shall be raised inviolable. It’s not just souls that get saved; it’s everything God has made, the physical as well as the spiritual, the dead as well as the living.

And so the bones of these martyrs shall live again, shall rise and talk and laugh and bless and pray again, just as Christ is Risen and shall come again on that day when darkness, deceit, and death shall die, and God will be all in all. Then will He heal every wound, and wipe away every tear, and fulfill every promise. That is our destiny; that is our final end; that is what awaits us at long last beyond the grave.

And until that day, when the harvest comes in full, we celebrate a foretaste of the feast to come whenever we kneel in faith at this altar. In the Divine Liturgy, Jesus Himself descends from on high, and becomes flesh and blood amongst us in, with, and under the bread and the wine. In this Meal, we are joined to His Passion, Crucifixion, and death. We are joined to His Resurrection and new life. And we are joined to the faithful of every age and every place who have gone before us and are at rest—joined to every generation, those long dead and those yet unborn. Here, eternity enters time. Here, we come to the end of the age, the Apocalypse, the final destiny of all humankind.

And they are all here with us: Stephen and the martyrs, Peter and the Apostles, Paul and Timothy and Silas and James and Luke and all the saints. And our forebears stand with them, our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, stretching back to the beginning, back to our first parents at the Tree of Life in the Garden. And for a moment at this railing there is no time, no death, no limitation at all placed upon the selfless grace and life-giving mercy of God. But we are all one in Christ Jesus, one in His Spirit, one in His Body and Blood, one beneath His Cross and in His glorious Resurrection. Here, the dead live. Here, the whole world rises in ecstasy to meet the Risen Christ.

Whenever I come to Communion, my father, my uncle, my aunts and grandparents, they all come down here to join me, at this rail, before this altar. We all share in the feast together. And your loved ones, they meet you here as well. Death is no barrier at all to Jesus Christ. It evaporates before Him like shadows before the sun.

After that first age of martyrs passed, a new generation of saints sought to emulate them not by dying for Christ but by living for Him. “If you die before you die,” the monks were fond of saying, “then you won’t die when you die.” Our world is still very much in need of martyrs, still in need of people who witness to God’s love by choosing the truth of Christ over the living death of falsehood offered to us in an era of perpetual selfishness and indulgence.

Today we think of life and death as merely physical things, subsisting in the beating of a heart or the electrochemical activity of a brain. But life and death go far deeper than that. There are many who seem to be living life to the fullest, who are nevertheless dead inside—whitewashed tombs full of bones—while others who have chosen to offer up their lives to service, to selflessness, to the witness of profound and simple truths, seem already beyond death, beyond the worldly cares and fears that enslave the rest of us day by day.

Do not fear the grave, dear Christians. There are joys yet to come the likes of which we cannot now imagine. Fear instead the living death of a life focused upon taking rather than giving, upon self rather than others. Look to the Cross. Look to Christ. Look to the innumerable cloud of witnesses who surround Him in this and every age. See how He has conquered death, and lo, He lives forever. See how He has conquered us, and lo, we too shall rise.

For Mary and All Martyrs. For Stephen and All Saints.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.