Sermon for Sunday, November 1, 2015 || All Saints’ Day Year B || John 11:32-44

Today’s sermon is about practicality and belief. I don’t have time for a fancy intro about when I was in fourth grade or about how something my children did reminded me of the Gospel. We’ve got too much to do in this All Saints’ Day service for that – most importantly, getting to the baptism, which is up next. Since today’s sermon is in part about practicality, I thought I’d be practical in my time-management and just skip the intro. So to reiterate, today’s sermon is about practicality and belief.

We’ll start with Martha and Lazarus, then move on to the saints, and then mention baptism near the end. The Gospel lesson picks up after Martha and Jesus have their famous conversation, in which Jesus says among other things, “I am the resurrection and the life.” He asks Martha if she believes and she answers, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”

But when they arrive at the tomb of her brother Lazarus, the oppressive reality of death threatens to overwhelm her belief. To keep from being overwhelmed, Martha’s practical side asserts itself. (In another story about Martha in Luke’s account of the Gospel, this practical side keeps her bustling around the house being the consummate hostess while her sister Mary sits at Jesus’ feet.) But in our story today, this practical side asserts itself when she mentions that Lazarus’s body must smell really bad. The translation I just read makes Martha sound something like a member of the British House of Lords: “Lord, already there is a stench.” I prefer to translate these words with an earthier, more colloquial quality – say, like a West Texas ranch hand: “He’s been in there four days; he stinks!”

Whatever way we translate Martha’s statement, the olfactory reality of death is on her mind: the practical notion that the most likely scenario is that Lazarus’s smell, and not Lazarus himself, will come out of the tomb. That’s when Jesus reminds her of her belief. “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” Now I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again, but here we have another example of Jesus turning everything around. The popular axiom says, “Seeing is believing.” But Jesus, like he so often does, flips it: “If you believed, you would see…” For Jesus, believing is seeing.

In other words, our belief in the God made known in Jesus Christ gives us a particular lens through which to view our lives, our relationships, our gifts and callings, not to mention the whole of creation. In last week’s sermon, I called this lens the “eyes of faith.” Our belief enlivens these eyes of faith and activates our special God-tinted lenses. We look back through our lives and see God’s movement stitching together the defining moments and relationships that make us the people we are. We look out and see God’s presence in those whom God calls us to serve. We look beyond and discover the fullness of new life in God with all the saints.

However, our God-tinted lenses get cloudy and scratched all the time. Often, this happens when practicality overrides belief. You look back through your life and see a series of coincidences and happenstances that led you to where you are. You look out and see the need, but perhaps not the people who are in need. You look beyond and see emptiness or maybe a vague notion of the hereafter or maybe a flicker of hope staving off the dread of death. “I don’t want to get caught up in ‘pie-in-the-sky’ thinking,” we might say, “so I’ll just be practical. Who could honestly believe all that anyway?”

The answer: I do. Not perfectly, not by a long shot. Not everyday, not even a majority of the time, to be honest. But I think seeing with God-tinted lenses is like hitting a baseball: even the very best baseball players only get a hit about a third of the time.

Here’s the tricky part. Here’s why the interaction between practicality and belief is so hard to navigate: We need our practical sides in order to live the kind of life our belief in God catalyzes. Without practicality, we would never translate our belief into action. We would never actually follow through on the callings we hear from God. We might notice God’s movement in creation, we might even generate a vague notion to respond to such movement, but we’d never make a plan. We’d never figure out how many drivers we need to deliver Thanksgiving meals or what books are most appropriate for the students at our partner school in Haiti. Without our practical sides, we’d be hard-pressed to act, and our follow through would be anemic at best.

So instead of seeing practicality and belief as opposing forces, we can see them as unlikely allies. While practicality can undermine belief, practicality can also give belief legs when used to further the missions we believe God has given us. The saints we celebrate today turned their belief into action, and I’m sure they used a heavy dose of practicality to do it. Mother Teresa, for example, believed with all her heart that God had called her to the sick and dying of Calcutta – and she was also an uncannily good fundraiser.

When we baptize _____ in a few minutes, we’ll see once again the interaction between practicality and belief. We will pour water into this basin and thank God for it. We will remember that water is sacred and life-giving. Then we will give _____ a bath. I know, I know, it won’t be a very thorough bath – just go with me on this imagery here. What could be more practical, more mundane than washing? And yet, we who wear these God-tinted lenses see something so much greater than a simple bath taking place. We see a welcome into God’s household. We see the power of sin washed away. We see the gifts of the Holy Spirit awakening. We see Christ making us his own forever.

And with the washing done, the words of the Baptismal Covenant, which we are about to say, echo again the practical, boots-on-the-ground facet of our belief. The Covenant begins with the affirmation of belief and continues with the practical ways we live out our mission, with God’s help. And so our unlikely allies, practicality and belief, animate our lives as followers of Jesus Christ. We need both, and we’d be diminished if one were absent. After all, when Lazarus comes out of the tomb, I doubt he smelled like a bed of roses. I’m sure Martha’s practical prediction about his stench was confirmed. But Lazarus came out of the tomb, just the same.