All Saints’, Dorval
November 3, 2024
My grandparents’ wedding, April 18, 1947
Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.
Both Mary and Martha utter different versions of this same assertion during the story of the raising of their brother Lazarus from the dead. It’s not clear whether they’re asking a question, rebuking Jesus, or simply stating a fact. But what is clear is how much they love their brother.
This story is so familiar to many of us that I think we sometimes forget how unusual the family depicted in it is. In a society in which marriage and childbearing were normative, and the standard household configuration consisted of a paterfamilias ruling over his wife, children, and slaves, here instead we have a household of three adult siblings with no spouses or children in evidence, and in which, if you had to identify who was in charge, I think most of us would pick Martha.
On the one hand, I suspect that the inevitable messiness of human life and personalities meant that the image of the paterfamilias may have been more of an ideal than a universal reality. But on the other, I think it is valid to see the household at Bethany as being an initial example of the radical reconfiguration of the family that Christianity would usher in.
Jesus never married. He told his followers that they were his brothers, sisters, and mother. His greatest interpreter, St. Paul, believed that marriage was pointless in the face of the imminent return of Christ, and emphasized our adoption as God’s children rather than any ties of blood or matrimony. Many early Christian house churches were headed by women who were unmarried, or at least whose husbands, if they existed, have disappeared from the written record.
In early Christianity, women; those who were or had been enslaved; and other marginalized people found a way to belong that transcended the restrictive and repressive formal structure of the traditional Roman family.
So, entirely apart from the obvious connection with the theme of resurrection, this story is appropriate for All Saints’ Sunday because it points us toward an understanding of family that goes far beyond the stereotype of the heterosexual married couple with 2.5 kids, a dog, and a mortgage.
Through our baptism, and in the communion of saints, we are all family – a boisterous, chaotic, often fractious family, but family all the same. Those who sit beside us in the pews each Sunday are just as much part of this family as are those who share our blood – and so are those saints who lived decades, centuries, or millennia ago. Time and space are no barrier to these bonds of relationship. And while it helps to know the names and stories of those saints who have gone before us, that likewise is no real barrier; we are in the same close communion with those whose names and stories are known only on the other side, and we pray for them as we do for those who are most dear to us.
Many times, when I sit with a family as they prepare for a loved one’s funeral, they tell me, “Her family was everything to her.” And in that context, it’s completely understandable – they have lost someone central to their lives, and they are focused on the ways she loved them and how that love is now transmuted into grief with their loss.
And yet. As Christians, it cannot be only our blood family, nuclear or extended, that is everything to us. Of course we love our family, and care for them as best we can. But that family is only a tiny part of our true family, the one into which we are adopted by God and which transcends our mortal location and lifespan.
Sadly, we have not come very far from Roman times in terms of the expectations we impose on people about what a family “should” look like. Just this week, a colleague of mine in the Church of England was window-shopping on her day off and was severely tempted by a beautiful but very expensive carpet. She almost bought it, but was eventually put off not by the price, but by the fact that the proprietor kept insisting that she bring her husband to make sure he would approve the purchase.
Friends, my colleague has never been married. She is an only child and lives on a different continent from her only surviving parent. The only other being who shares her household is her cat.
Families come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. They did when Mary, Martha and Lazarus lived together, and they do now. But the family of God has always been the same: one great cloud of witnesses, bound together by baptism as the children of God, united from the creation of the world to its re-creation.
On the sermon slide in today’s PowerPoint deck for the worship service, are two pictures: my grandparents’ wedding photo from their marriage ceremony in 1947 in the displaced persons’ camp in Bavaria where they were both working; and a mosaic depiction of the wedding at Cana, the setting for Jesus’ first miracle.
I knew the couple in the photo. I know a great deal about their lives, I loved and was loved by them, and of course I am descended from them by blood (if you couldn’t tell that by looking at my grandmother’s face!).
The couple in the mosaic lived two millennia ago. We know nothing about them, not even their names, other than that Jesus’ mother was invited to their wedding and she brought him along. We don’t even know if they became followers of Jesus after witnessing his miracle.
And yet both these couples are part of the story of my faith, and by extension the story of all of God’s family.
The wedding photo is also on the altar at the back of the church, along with some of the saints from ages past who are most meaningful and beloved to me. Church folks are adding to the altar as they bring their own beloved saints to contribute to the display. We are creating a visual icon of the way that the family of faith is connected: how we love, venerate, and are inspired by those we knew and loved, teaches us how to love, venerate, and be inspired by all the saints.
And, of course, today we add two new saints, two new sisters, to the family, as we baptize Kardiea and Kayla. Like everyone else who has ever been baptized in the past two thousand years, they will become part of God’s family by adoption and will join the communion of saints.
This great big family is a blessing. We have innumerable examples, in our forebears in the faith, of how to love and follow Jesus; and we share that journey today with those who walk beside us and those who will come after us.
Let the family of faith be everything to us; not instead of those we consider our earthly kin, but in addition to them. Let us love each other as Mary, Martha and Lazarus did, through death and beyond it; let us extend that love far beyond those we know and love in this life; and let us let Jesus raise us from the dead, to rejoice in eternity with the communion of saints.
Amen.
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