EVERYMAN. It is All Saints Sunday, a time to remember the departed, the passed away, the

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1 EVERYMAN Isaiah 25:6-9; Rev. 21:1-6; John 11:32-44 It is All Saints Sunday, a time to remember the departed, the passed away, the dead. Few of us in this sanctuary have not at some point mourned the loss of someone we love. Mourning is hard. Losing someone you love is hard. It tears at you. Then the feelings subside, and it s almost as if the departed, the passed away, the dead isn t departed or passed away or dead. But then the pain comes back, and it is hard all over again. I try not to sidestep this fact, the reality of loss when I write funeral sermons. I put in a good word for the resurrection, but I spend most of my time on the person and how awful it is to lose her or him, to be without one you love. I stay with what I think is the truest part of the story of Jesus and Lazarus, which is not the resuscitation of a dead man that is all it is, you know, a resuscitation. Lazarus will still have to die, if not today, then tomorrow. In any case, the story is told to make a point, to set a stage, to forecast the resurrection of Jesus and the message that death will not have dominion. Unbind him and let him go, says Jesus. Well and good. But the part of the story that catches me, the part of the story that could bring me to tears if I were in the right mood, is when we read, Jesus began to weep. Lazarus was Jesus friend, somebody he loved. As was Lazarus sister, Mary, whom Jesus saw weeping, along with her friends. And he was deeply moved. He begins to weep. Jesus begins to weep.

2 Philip Roth s most recent novel is called Everyman. It takes its title from a fifteenth century allegorical play whose theme is the summoning of the living to death. The principal character in this novel is unnamed. He is everyman, coming to terms with mortality, the fact that we all die, that this life ends. In the first third of the novel this everyman goes to his beloved father s funeral and burial, which takes place at a crumbling cemetery on the border of Elizabeth and Newark. There were two upright shovels with their blades in the large pile of earth to one side of the grave. He had thought they had been left there by the gravediggers, who would use them later to fill the grave. He had imagined that, as at his mother s funeral, each mourner would step up to the hole to throw a clump of dirt onto the coffin s lid, after which they would all depart for their cars. But his father had requested of the rabbi the traditional Jewish rites, and those, he now discovered, called for burial by the mourners and not by employees of the cemetery or anyone else. The rabbi had told Howie [Everyman s brother] beforehand, but Howie, for whatever reason, hadn t told him, and so he was surprised now when his brother, handsomely dressed in a dark suit, a white shirt, a dark tie, and shining black shoes, walked over to pull one of the shovels out of the pile, and then set out to fill the blade until it was brimming with dirt. Then he walked ceremoniously to the head of the grave, stood there a moment to think his thoughts, and, angling the shovel downward a little, let the dirt run slowly out. Upon landing on the wood cover of the coffin, it made the sound that is absorbed into one s being like no other.

3 Howie returned to plunge the blade of the shovel into the crumbling pyramid of dirt that stood about four feet high. They were going to have to shovel that dirt back into the hole until his father s grave was level with the adjacent cemetery grounds. It took close to an hour to move the dirt. The elderly among the relatives and friends, unable to wield a shovel, helped by throwing fistfuls of dirt onto the coffin, and he himself could do no more than that, and so it fell to Howie and Howie s four sons and his own two the six of them all strapping men in their late twenties and early thirties to do the heavy labor. In teams of two they stood beside the pile and, spadeful by spadeful, moved the dirt from the pile back into the hole. Every few minutes another team took over, and it seemed to him, at one point, as though this task would never end, as though they would be there burying his father forever. The best he could do to be as immersed in the burial s brutal directness as his brother, his sons, and his nephews was to stand at the edge of the grave and watch as the dirt encased the coffin. He watched till it reached the lid, which was decorated only with a carving of the Star of David, and then he watched as it began to cover the lid. His father was going to lie not only in the coffin but under the weight of that dirt, and all at once he saw his father s mouth as if there were no coffin, as if the dirt they were throwing into the grave was being deposited straight down on him, filling his mouth, blinding his eyes, clogging his nostrils, and closing off his ears. He wanted to tell them to stop, to command them to go no further he did not want them to cover his father s face and block the passages through which he sucked in life. I ve been looking at that face since I was born stop burying my father s face! But they had found their rhythm, these strong boys, and they couldn t stop and they wouldn t stop, not even if he hurled himself into the grave and demanded that the burial come to a

4 halt. Nothing could stop them now. They would just keep going, burying him, too, if that was necessary to get the job done. Howie was off to the side, his brow covered with sweat, watching the six cousins athletically complete the job, with the goal in sight shoveling at a terrific pace, not like mourners assuming the burden of an archaic ritual but like old-fashioned workmen feeding a furnace with fuel. Many of the elderly were weeping now and holding on to each other. (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, pp ) That was hard to hear, wasn t it? When first I read it, I was chilled to the bone, remembering taking my dear father s ashes to the graveyard in Belvidere to be buried on a cold autumn day; and remembering loved ones in your family over whose funery rites I have presided, people who were often dear to me as well as to you and whose names I now recall in the course of the funeral service when we are encouraged to remember in our hearts those we have loved who are gone. That passage I read to you from Philip Roth depicts all too well that shroud that is cast over all peoples to take a phrase from Isaiah. Our faith makes grand promises. It tells us the God of hosts will swallow up death forever, that God will wipe away the tears from all faces. It tells us that death will be no more, that mourning and crying and pain will be no more. You ve heard all this before or at least you ve heard it this morning. What do you think? Will death have the last say or will the God who is the Source and Sustenance of all things somehow make all things new? Our faith tells us that death will not have the last word, that the last word belongs to God, as does the first; that God is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.

5 I believe that, but in saying this, I must also say that I can t really make sense of what this means beyond the ultimate confidence that our hope is in God. I do not know nor does anyone else know what awaits us when we die. The Bible is not terribly helpful on this score how could it be? other than to tell us that we are loved by our Creator with a love that is everlasting. But what this means in relation to our deaths is a mystery that only God can solve. Think about yourself before you were born. You can t. You weren t there. Many of your loved ones were there, but you weren t. When you came on the scene all things were new as far as you were concerned, though not for those around you who were already in the world. It is as difficult to imagine the next world as it is for us to imagine this one before we were born into it. If this conclusion seems less positive than you would like it to be, I apologize. But I, like you, am only a mortal. All that can be said is that we are dependent on God for our lives and in our deaths. Our faith, which was born at Easter, tells us to be confident that the One who makes all things can make all things new. In this is our hope. What more do we need to know? Amen. All Saints Sunday, November 5, 2006 Emanuel Lutheran Church