This Week's Sermons

Sermons for the Month
God's Powers Work Best in a Graveyard
DATE: November 1, 1998
SERVICE: All Saints Sunday
TEXT: 2 Timothy 1:1-14, 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12
"To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN

Graveyard goosebumps. Children's author, R.L. Stine, has made a tidy fortune churning out his Goosebump series of horror stories for preadolescents. For Boomers, the horror-monger of choice was and still is Stephen King, last Tuesday one of the TV stations aired his movie, "Needful Things." Of course, you may prefer the even darker imagery of an Edgar Allan Poe, and revel in the gruesome joy with which Montresor slaps the mortar on bricks, burying Fortunato upright in the basement wall of a wine cellar.

Last night was the annual goosebump night for kids. Parents. Do you know where your kids were and what they were doing? If you were like most parents who want their kids to experience the traditional excitement of patrolling through their neighborhoods "trick-or-treating" for Halloween goodies, you went with them to protect and watch for the real Halloween spooks - those who put razors in apples and poison in candy. The one place I bet you did not take your kids last night or visit yourself is one of the area graveyards.

In the past, however, if you wanted to visit a graveyard, you wouldn't have to go to one of today's "memorial parks" or high-rise mausoleums like Rosehill.. Instead, you'd go to church! The graveyards of the past were planted around the church, creating on a Sunday morning a community of the "quick and the dead" - quick inside, dead outside. In the east, you see this phenomenon all over. Locally, Trinity Lutheran, Norton, is the only Lutheran church I know that has a graveyard within its property boundaries.

Once upon a time, in the not so distant past, it was important for believers to be buried within the borders of sanctified ground from which rose both the church building - the center of the living saints' worship life - and the community cemetery - the final resting place for all past generations of saints who had lived and died as believers. A hundred years ago we would have passed the graves of Joan Downing, Evan and Ethel Lewis and Harold Lange, those we remember this morning, on our way to worship.
All that has changed. It's been at least three or four generations now that most of us have found nothing very comforting, or sanctified, in a graveyard. Graveyards are no longer seen as holy ground. They aren't even perceived as wholesome ground. We have been imprinted by too many cheap, creepy, mist-in-the-graveyard horror movies of bodies rise up from their graves to see cemeteries as anything but haunted and horrible. By moving our burial grounds away from our worship centers, we have fractured the fellowship of the faithful. They have become out of sight and so often out of mind to all but perhaps the immediate family. We forget that the majority of the church is underground.
Why do we so quickly whisk the dead away to fenced-in (or is it fenced-off) "green ghettos"? Is it a way to safely ignore the reality of death? Is it our plot to keep those creepy dead folks out of our line of sight or, most especially, out from underfoot? The old church graveyard, on the other hand, was a consistently "in your face" place. In death, as in life, these church graveyards offered a real "down and dirty" answer to the question of one's ultimate loyalty, one's final response to the question, "To whom do you belong?" The common ground of the burial grounds overruled allegiances to families, tribes, clubs or cliques.

To whom do you belong?

You belong to God.

You don't belong to your parents. You don't belong to your community. You don't belong to yourself. You belong to God.

The day after October 31 - today - Halloween horror is transformed into the sanctity of the saints on a day which is called in some traditions, All Saints' Day. Today is sort of Christian Hall of Fame day when we remember the early Christians who were persecuted and killed, not because of supposed criminal conduct, but for their daring to be associated with "the name itself" (nomen ipsum, Pliny puts it in a letter to Trajan). Bearing the name "Christian" was enough to earn one a death sentence. The issue was not wrongdoing. It was name-bearing.

The Christians of Thessalonica were some of our earlies Hall of Famers. Today's epistle recalls how early church communities were forced to face the persistent possibility that they might suddenly find themselves part of Rome's permanent Christian "witness relocation" program. In periodic fits of pluralistic ethno-religious cleansing, various emperors ordered (or simply "allowed") cruel and violent purges of philosophically annoying religious sects, especially one particularly peculiar sect called the "Christians."
One didn't even need to be a very "good" Christian to raise Rome's ire. Despite this, the Thessalonian Christians faced the danger and uncertainty of bearing the name of Christ with grace, courage and good spirit. Paul is delighted to be able to "boast" about the witness of these saints. Although they faced "persecutions" and "afflictions," the Thessalonians had become mirrors of Christ's own glory by growing in faith, increasing in love and enduring with steadfastness, all for which Paul expresses his thankfulness. It never ceased to amaze him that although burying martyred believers in Christian graveyards like the Roman catacombs was a real growth industry in the first century, there were always new saints ready to risk everything for the sake of their faith?
Steve Wilson of Meadow Grove Baptist Church in Brandon, Mississippi, shocked my sensibilities when he insisted in an article that "God's power works best in a graveyard." He invites us to look at the Lazarus story:
"It is never hopeless with God. God's power works best in a graveyard. What is happening in your life? Are you ready to give up? Do you think it is too late for even God to help? Are your plans dead? Are your dreams dead? Is your hope dead? God's power works best in a graveyard."
Or look at the Luther story: At one point in his flight from both civil and ecclesiastical authorities, Luther was forced to take refuge among the bats and owls of a cold, dark and dank Wartburg castle. Lonely and depressed, he wrote, "I had rather burn on live coals than rot here." Smoke was rising from the charcoal burners outside his room. But as he watched, a wind came up and blew the smoke away. In that moment his doubt dissipated and his faith was restored and he knew he had to go back to lead his church into a new era. (Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther by Roland H. Bainton, [Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1950], 194).
Or look at the C.S. Lewis story. Lewis, an Oxford don and Christian apologist of the middle decades of this century, married late in life and then lost his wife, Joy, to cancer. In his graveyard of grief, he wrote:
"Meanwhile, where is God? When you are happy ... and turn to him with gratitude and praise, you will be welcomed with open arms. But go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and who do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double-bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become" (A Grief Observed [New York: The Seabury Press, 1961], 9).
Wilson writes as if to Lewis, "I wonder if in your pain, you have lost sight of Jesus. Can you not see that he is at work all around you? Do you not know you are in his presence? Listen, you can hear him calling your name! He wants to resurrect your hope. He wants to give you life. When life looks the worst, God is at his best. God's power works best in a graveyard".
At age 32, Karen Michele Howard's life was fading. In full renal failure since her kidneys gave out during pregnancy 15 months ago, she knew the only thing keeping her alive was dialysis three times a week that cleaned her blood but left her hurting and exhausted.
As the family sought a donor, her great-aunt, Learlee Ross of Lodi, told her not to worry, she would be getting a kidney transplant sooner than anybody thought. The next weekend, Mrs. Ross had a fatal stroke at age 77. It turned out that her kidneys were a match, and saved Karen's life. The week before, Mrs. Ross had spent extra time with her husband, Harry, in his Medina nursing home. She climbed three stories to visit a granddaughter's apartment, where she had never felt strong enough to climb before. And, on the night before her stroke, Learlee Ross and her sister Irma Johnson, 81, talked on the phone, laughing and joking, until late at night. Mrs. Johnson was known to always be in bed by 7 p.m.
Family members believe there was a miracle. Karen Howard said it seemed that Mrs. Ross sensed that something was about to happen. ``It's like God said . . . well, she could have gone just like that, but she wasn't taken just like that. She was held on, for me.''
For Karen Howard and her three young sons, Michael, 7, Aaron, 6, and Ryan Joseph, now 15 months, her gift of life means a new kind of family life with a mother who is up and around and strong. Already, less than two weeks after the Oct. 14 transplant, Karen feels like a new woman. Her doctors say it is likely she will not have to undergo dialysis again.
``I just think now that there is always hope, always,'' she said. ``Just when I was ready to throw in the towel, just when I was getting really down and out about it. I think everybody should keep the faith,'' she said. ``Keep praying. This is an act of God, I don't care what anybody says.''
Where is your graveyard? I remember when Evan Lewis died. Both he and and his wife Ethel were in the hospital at the same time. Ethel was not expected to live but it was she who survived and Evan who died. However, when he died Ethel just gave up. Her grief was too great; her will to live evaporated. Within a month she was gone as well. Sadly, she could not find God.
Where in your life are you most bereft of hope? Where do you feel most helpless? Where are you most at your wits' end? All Saints reminds us that it is there, precisely there, that God can work best. Where life is worst, God is best. God does his best work in a graveyard.
In Lamentations 3:18, Jeremiah complained, "Gone is my glory, and all that I had hoped for from the LORD." But a couple verses later (3:20-24), he affirms that, although his "soul ... is bowed down," he has not forgotten, nor has he lost all hope: "The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. 'The LORD is my portion,' says my soul, 'therefore I will hope in him.'"
Hymnwriter Thomas Chisholm based the words to our last hymn "Great Is Thy Faithfulness" on this text. But at one point Chisholm makes an error in his representation of the passage. Remember the chorus?
Great is thy faithfulness!
Great is thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning, new mercies I see ...

Oops! Did the hymnwriter get it wrong? The Bible clearly states that Jeremiah did not see. He didn't see a thing! Jeremiah had no visible evidence of God's mercies at all. Morning by morning brought horror, pain and dread, but not "new mercies." Jeremiah could not say, "I trust you because I understand it all - because I've got it all figured out." He could only say, "I trust you because you are God and you cannot lie" (Close to His Majesty [Portland, Oreg.: Multnomah, 1987], 94-95).
No, the hymnwriter didn't get it wrong. God was working in Jeremiah's graveyard, enabling him to "see" what no one else could see. Like C.S. Lewis, he could only say, "We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least" (59). God was working in the Thessalonians' graveyard, giving them the courage to bear the name of Jesus. God was working in the graveyard of the early Church as they bore witness to the faith. God was working in Luther's graveyard, in Karen Howard's graveyard, in Joan Downing, Evan and Ethel Lewis, Harold Lange's graveyard and God is working in our graveyards today.

God's power works best in a graveyard!

AMEN