Presented by Rev. Merlin T. Batt
Interim Pastor
St. Matthew’s United Church of Christ
At Maiden, North Carolina,
On All Saints’ Sunday,
November 5, 2006 

Scripture Lessons: Revelation 21:1-6a, John 11:32-44
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There’s something about this time of year, a day like today, which makes me want to walk about and linger for a while in a country cemetery. It may sound strange to you, but it’s a fact. I guess it’s the warm sun, the cool, dry air, the leaves changing color and falling to the ground, nature preparing for its annual winter sleep, all of which beckons to me to walk among the grave stones.

This fall season brings back to me memories of a beautiful fall day in the early 1970’s in Deerfield, a small town in the Pioneer Valley of Central Massachusetts. On a day off, Adele and I had traveled the 50 or so miles to historic Deerfield from our home in the western part of the commonwealth. We spent part of the day, a day much like today, walking about the old Deerfield cemetery, where there were graves dating back to the mid-1600’s.

In the early period of Deerfield’s history there were several massacres over a period of forty years – the first when the Mohawk Indians destroyed the village in 1664, the second eleven years later during King Philip’s War, and the third in 1704 during the French and Indian War, when the town was burned, most of the townspeople killed, and a few survivors taken captive back to Canada. Needless to say, it was a town with a tragic early history!

That fall day we had brought supplies with us to do some gravestone rubbing on the grey slate markers. In those early days in New England it was common to list on the grave stone not only the name of the deceased and the person’s birth and death dates, but also personal information about the circumstances of their life and death, or about the faith that once animated them. I remember that early afternoon as a tranquil time, yet tinged with sadness as we contemplated the short, difficult lives of those buried long ago, and as we both pondered the meaning of our own mortality.

A couple of weeks ago I was working here in my study and needed to stretch and clear my mind, so I took a walk in the cemetery outside the door over there. In all my years of pastoral ministry I have never, until now, served a church which had a cemetery on its property. As I walked slowly among the graves, I took note of family names which go way back in the history of this church and which have become familiar to me after only a month or so. I saw the graves of your loved ones about whom you have told me. I even saw some of your individual names, with only your birth date inscribed on your tombstone, with space left for inscribing the date of your death.

This little afternoon walk through St. Matthew’s cemetery made me wonder what it’s like for you, members of this church, lifelong residents of this area, to pass by this church cemetery every time you come here. I imagine that, for those who have lost loved ones to death recently, especially within the last year, there is searing emotional pain every time you drive into the parking lot and see the grave of your beloved parent or spouse or child or sibling or other family member, making it a challenge, an emotional obstacle, every time you come to church.

For others whose grief has healed, the experience of seeing this cemetery when you come to church may be bitter-sweet. The bitterness of the loss is not gone, but the sweetness of remembering your loved one is called to mind by the sight of their grave. For you there may be some comfort provided by this church burial ground. For yet others whose long-ago ancestors are buried here, this cemetery may give you a secure sense of “place” – here your ancestors lived and died, here they worshiped, and here your identity is deeply rooted.

For everyone who comes to St. Matthew’s Church, member or not, native of Maiden or not, and who sees the cemetery on church property, there is a stark reminder of human mortality, an in-your-face statement that none of us gets out of this alive, and a certain promise that all of us will one day appear before our Maker. It’s the reason why some churches have clocks on their steeples and why others, like St. Matthew’s, have a cemetery next door.

Last Tuesday I was talking about this matter with several Lutheran ministers, pastors with whom I study the coming Sunday’s Scripture passages every week at Lenoir-Rhyne College. All three of them serve churches which have cemeteries on the property, and one of them said that in order to get into his church for worship, you have to walk through the church cemetery, not around it but through it. There’s no way into the church unless you encounter the sobering message a cemetery proclaims about life and death and the reality of God. Every Sunday, whether at that Lutheran church or here at St. Matthews, one becomes aware of the saints who from their labors rest.

Today is All Saints’ Sunday. Actually, All Saints’ Day was last Wednesday, November 1^st, but we’re celebrating it, as do many churches, on the Sunday following…today. Since the 4^th century, Christian churches have assigned a day on which to remember the saints and to give thanks to God for their lives. The date of the commemoration has been November 1^st for well over a thousand years! About this day and its significance, Fred Craddock, a great American preacher and a contemporary of ours, says this:

On All Saints’ Day, we remember those who have preceded us in the life of faith. We recall their noble lives as examples of courage and fidelity, and we celebrate the heavenly hope to which they aspired. In doing so, we find ourselves linked with them as sharers of a common hope and destiny.

It’s upon this “common hope and destiny” that I want to bring focus this morning. As people of faith who will one day die, what is our common hope and destiny? This question most often gets asked in a very basic kind of way when a loved one dies. We find ourselves, and often with tears, wondering where they are now. We know that, even if their body is buried beneath the ground outside this door, they are not in the ground. It’s just a fact of biology that, with every passing year after death, the body decays and soon becomes mere dust. But as Christians, we believe in life after death, so the question arises, “If in some sense they still live, where are they now, these dear loved ones of ours?”

The traditional Christian answer to this question is, “They have gone to heaven.” And this is most certainly true: all the saints, that is, all those who are baptized in Christ, when they die, go to heaven, into God’s dimension of reality. While the New Testament gives us reason to believe in going to heaven when we die, it gives us precious little information about it. We want to know the details, but, in spite of what Hollywood portrays and in spite of many centuries’ worth of pious speculation, all we’re given to know by our Biblical revelation is that we will be “with Christ” in whom we are at peace, at rest, in the loving care of God.

Do you remember this scene on Golgotha, the hill for executing criminals outside Jerusalem? During the Crucifixion of our Lord wherein Jesus was hanging on a cross between two others, both of then brigands, terrorists we might label them today, one of the men turned his head toward Jesus and said, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom. And do you recall how Jesus responded? He said, Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.

Now, the Greek word which is translated into English as Paradise means “a beautiful resting place.” Over the centuries we have imported into the meaning of this concept of heaven, elements which we do not find in the Bible. There it simply suggests a resting place on a journey, a kind of oasis, not the final destination itself, but a place of refreshment, security, intimacy, and rest. So, you see, if “going to heaven when you die” is not offered by the New Testament as the main goal, the final destination of the journey that begins with death, then we’re left to ask, “What is the goal, the final destination?

Let me put it as simply and clearly and Biblically as I can: the goal is to be bodily raised into the transformed, glorious likeness of Jesus Christ. We affirm this truth every Sunday here at St. Matthew’s when we say together the Apostles’ Creed. The goal is said in a highly concentrated way, but it’s there! We bring to a close our saying of the Creed this way:

I believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy catholic Church; the   communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins; (and here it comes) the resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting.

I want you to notice that the Apostles’ Creed doesn’t say that we believe in the immortality of the soul. It doesn’t say that we look forward to the disembodied bliss of heaven. No, the Creed says clearly that what Christians have believed in from the very beginning is “the resurrection of the body (that is, the whole person); and the life everlasting.”

This resurrection of which the Bible and our Apostles’ Creed speak hasn’t happened yet, except to Jesus on the first Easter morning. That’s why I say that our final hope and destiny as Christians is to be bodily raised into the transformed, glorious likeness of Jesus Christ, and to live in God’s new heaven and earth, about which we heard in our first Bible reading from Revelation this morning:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth…And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.

So when we speak of “going to heaven when we die” or we say that  “our loved ones have gone to heaven,” we need to be clear that this represents the first, and far less important, stage of a two-stage process. When a Christian dies, the Bible tells that we enter Paradise, stage one, the place of rest and refreshment, of conscious intimacy with the Lord. But stage two is our final destination - that for which we all wait with longing hearts - the new heaven and earth which God will bring about, in which we live forever after having been bodily raised into the glorious likeness of Jesus Christ. This, dear friends in Christ, according to the Bible is the common hope and destiny for all the saints of God (us!). In a kind of theological shorthand, we might say it this way – the hope and destiny of Christians is Life after life-after-death!

There is a wonderful hymn we’re going to sing in a moment, a hymn which, if it’s not sung on All Saints’ Sunday, something important is missing! I’m referring, of course, to the hymn “For All the Saints”. It’s based on a poem by W. Walsham How. We’re used to singing five verses of it in our E&R Hymnal. These verses represent the first four and the eighth stanza of the poem. The verses left out of the hymn, especially the sixth and seventh, speak eloquently of this two-stage process we enter upon at death: first Paradise and then “a yet more glorious day,” the day of new creation, the day of resurrection, our common hope and destiny. Listen carefully to the verses as I read them. They are found on the insert to your bulletin. And listening to them, let your heart thrill to our common Christian hope and destiny, and when I come to the end of each stanza, say the word “Alleluia” with me, please. 

            For all the saints, who from their labours rest,
            Who thee, by faith, before the world confessed,
            Thy name, O Jesu, be for ever blest. Alleluia! 

            Thou wast their rock, their fortress, and their might;
            Thou, Lord, their Captain in the well-fought fight;
            Thou, in the darkness drear, their one true Light. Alelluia!

           O may thy soldiers, faithful, true, and bold, 
            Fight as the saints who nobly fought of old,
            And win, with them, the victor’s crown of gold. Alleluia!

           O blest communion! Fellowship divine!
            We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
            Yet all are one in thee, for all are thine. Alleluia!

           And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long,
            Steals on the ear the distant triumph song,
            And hearts are brave again and arms are strong. Alleluia!

           The golden evening brightens in the west;
            Soon, soon to faithful warriors cometh rest:
            Sweet is the calm of Paradise the blest. Alleluia!

           But lo! there breaks a yet more glorious day:
            The Saints triumphant rise in bright array;
            The King of glory passes on his way. Alleluia!

           From earth’s wide bounds, from ocean’s farthest coast,
            Through gates of pearl stream in the countless host,
            Singing to Father, Son and Holy Ghost Alleluia!

Let us pray:

O Thou God of the living and the dead, you called forth your servant Lazarus from his tomb. You raised your Son Jesus from the dead with a transformed, glorious resurrection body. You promise that one day there will be a new heaven and earth where death will be no more and mourning and crying will be no more. In holy baptism, you call us to be saints, and you promise, when we die, to welcome us into Paradise, where, with all your saints, we await the coming of that yet more glorious day, when with transformed, glorious bodies we shall live with you and each other forever. Thank you. Praise you. Alleluia! Amen.