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If No Sound
Overhearing the Saints©
November 1, 2009
Isaiah 25:6-9
Psalm 24 (UMH 755)
Revelation 21:1-6a
John 11:32-44
Amy DeWitte
When I was a little girl I used to eavesdrop a
lot. I would sit on the front porch with the women or the back deck with the
men and just listen. I especially like to listen in on the conversations among
my mother, grandmother, great-grandmother. Some people would call it being
nosey. I would call it intellectual curiosity
J. I learned a lot by listening in.
I heard all the gossip, and I learned pop psychology, and I learned about my
family.
They knew I was listening in on what they were
saying and I think sometimes they would say things to each other that they
wanted me to hear. They might encourage me, for example, by saying something
nice about me when I was within earshot. We do this all the time with children:
You might hear a mother say to a grandmother, “Brandon has been doing really
well at school this year!” or a father saying to a mother, “Have you seen Mollie
riding her bike without training wheels?” Kids especially learn quite a bit just
by watching and listening to adults. You don’t have to be explicitly teaching
them something in order for them to learn something from you.
Jesus was a master at this. After he had come
from a ways off when he heard that his friend Lazarus was dead, Martha took him
to the tomb, and he asked for the stone to be rolled away. But Martha
protested, “Jesus, it’s been four days. He probably already stinks of death.”
But Jesus had him roll away the stone anyway
and before he did anything he prayed aloud, “Father, I thank you for having
heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of
the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me." He thanked
God in the presence of those people, knowing that they would overhear him,
knowing that they would learn something from what he was doing and what he was
saying
Master preacher and teacher Fred Craddock calls
this “overhearing the Gospel.” It’s talking about the Gospel or teaching about
God in a way that people who don’t even know they are learning about God or the
Gospel or the Bible can hear it.
I think this may
just be the way many of us learned about God and Jesus and the Bible from the
saints who have gone before us in the faith. Think back on those people who are
now gone from this earthly life who taught you what it meant to be a Christian.
Some of them outright taught you to memorize Scripture or to know the Ten
Commandments or to tell a Bible story. But many of them also lived the
Christian journey in front of your eyes so that you could know what walking with
God looked like. Many of them spoke in a gentle, faithful, kind way where you
could overhear and learn from what they had to say. That’s the way Christians
for generations have been passing on the faith: speaking and living the faith
right in front us. The sisters of Lazarus overheard the Gospel from
Jesus; and maybe their friends overheard it from them; and their children
overheard it from them; and their nieces and nephews overheard it from them; and
their colleagues heard it from them on and on and on until we heard it from
somebody, or probably several somebodies. Many of the people who we learned the
faith from, many of the people who let us overhear the Gospel in their lives,
helped built this church. Some of them are not long gone from us, and we honor
them today. We will light candles and we will hear the echo of a chime. But
when this hour is gone, when this All Saints Celebration is over, the way we can
continue to honor the saints who have passed on the faith to us is to let the
Gospel continue to echo in our lives.
Are we living so
that somebody can see the Gospel in us? Are we speaking so that somebody can
overhear the Gospel from us? In order to honor the saints who put so much of
themselves into this congregation and into our lives, this church must go on.
Our faith must go on.
Martha
was a wonderfully pragmatic woman. You might call her a realist. “But Jesus,”
she said, “Lazarus has already been in the tomb four days. There’s already a
stench.” Maybe there are times when we feel a little helpless, a little weary
about the future of our church, even of the future of Christianity in the world
we live in today. And yet, we overhear Jesus thanking God for what God has
already done - this God who has already raised a man from the dead, this God who
has already forgiven humanity for all our sins. Even when we feel stinky and
lifeless, let’s remember the good news that we have overheard from the saints.
And let’s keep living the Good News so that others can overhear it from us. What
will you do to be overheard today?
Copyright © 2009 Amy DeWitte. All Rights Reserved. No portion of
this writing may be reproduced in any form without specific, written
permission of the author.
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