Jesus said to them:  “Unbind him, and let him go.”  

 

Lazarus needed to be unbound, because he was wrapped in grave cloths.  He was wrapped in grave cloths because he had died:  at this point, he had been dead for four days.  He died because he had been very sick, and when word came to Jesus of his illness, Jesus hadn’t rushed over to heal him, but instead finished the business he had at hand before he came.  

 

When Jesus arrived, Mary, Lazarus’ sister, came to him weeping and said to him:  “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  It is pretty much an accusation:  “It’s your fault, Jesus, we asked you to come and you didn’t.”  And Jesus is not immune to her emotion:  everyone is weeping, and Jesus weeps too.  

 

Jesus weeps--even though he knows what he is about to do, even though he knows that Lazarus will rise, Jesus enters fully into the experiences of those whom he loves and he weeps as they do.  

 

This is what it means to have an incarnate God, that is, to believe that God was truly incarnate in Christ Jesus.  It is the same thing that John recounts hearing from the throne in the Book of Revelation:  “the home of God is among mortals.  He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.”  

 

It means that GOD wept at the grave of Lazarus, knowing full well that in moments Lazarus would walk out of the grave.

 

It means that when we weep, God weeps; and when we rejoice, God rejoices.  

 

And I think that God loves to rejoice.  After all, after Jesus wept, he called Lazarus out of the tomb.  After Jesus said:  “unbind him, and let him go,”  don’t you think there was some rejoicing?  Quite a bit of rejoicing, in fact?

 

Jesus says to Martha, after she protests his request to take away the stone over Lazarus’ tomb:  “did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?”  That phrase:  “see the glory of God” generally means to us something along the lines of “see God in heaven after you die.”  That is particularly true when it is paired with a phrase like:  “if you believe.”  We often have blinders that focus our attention on the afterlife--that may be natural, after all, we may be worried about what happens after we die, but in this case, the glory of God is so much more than that.  

 

I think that, in this case, the glory of God has a lot to do with all that Christ is able to do in our lives, while we live.  I also think it has something to with believing, with saying yes to God, saying yes to Christ, with allowing Jesus to unbind us and let us go.  

 

Unbinding is what happens at baptism.  We are baptized out of death, into life, and Jesus unbinds us, that is, he sets us free.  Once we are freed through baptism, having passed through death into life just like Lazarus did, we are free to learn to see the glory of God, and to see it in some surprising places.  

 

But it is hard to live an unbound life.  It is hard to live as though we are truly free, as though Christ has given us the free gift of his love and we are not circumscribed by death.  We forget, and we find those grave cloths and bind ourselves up again, and then we forget that we were ever unbound in the first place.  

 

That is one of the reasons we have saints.  Saints are people who live unbound lives.  Saints can serve as an example to us; they can show us how to live an unbound life, as Christ would have us live.  They have heard Christ call to them, and have followed that call.  They have seen God’s glory, here on earth, and have worked to show it to other people.  

 

Some of the saints are those whose names we remember, and some are those whose names are forgotten.  Today we celebrate all of them, and as we remember them we also ask God to help us to walk in the paths they walked in.  We ask God to help us remember that we are unbound, that Christ has set us free, and that we too can learn to see the glory of God and to show it to others.

 

And remember, one of the ways we know that we are seeing the glory of God is when it leads to rejoicing.  Sometimes rejoicing happens quietly, within our hearts, for example as we see a rainbow after a storm, or a beautiful moonrise.  Other times, rejoicing happens with many other people.  

 

Just as Lazarus’ friends and family rejoiced when he came out of the tomb, so today do Zachary James Hughes’ friends and family rejoice.  Zachary will be baptized, he will be unbound, and Christ will set him free.  We celebrate his rebirth, and we will see the glory of God in his baptism.  Today, Zachary joins the party, and begins his own journey of learning to live an unbound life and learning to see the glory of God.  

 

And of course, along with rejoicing goes a party.  First, we’ll share the same party we share each Sunday as we share bread and wine in the Eucharist.  Then, we’ll have a party after church, to which all are invited, to celebrate Zachary and all the saints.  Isaiah talks about a party that God will throw:  “a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow . . . . “ Well, I can’t guarantee that the food after church today will be filled with marrow, or that there will be any wine, but today is only a precursor, a shadow, of the party to come hereafter, to which we are all invited.  

 

And now, it’s time to unbind Zachary!