I love rocks.  In fact, my house is full of baskets and bowls full of rocks from all sorts of places, and wherever I go I manage to squirrel away a rock or two in my suitcase to bring home.

I have here a plain ordinary rock.  I picked it up off the beach at the lake house.  This time of year, the lake water recedes a bit from the shore, and it’s possible to get a better look at the rocks that usually are under two or three feet of water, so when I walk on the beach I pick up stones and look at them and put them down again – unless I keep them.

This one is really not a particularly fancy rock, but instead it’s a simple object that a person might spend little attention on.  It appears to be a plain old rock, like other rocks.

And yet, if I put my attention on this rock for a long enough time, I might just notice that it is shot through with tiny garnets, little jewels embedded in its matrix, and when I notice this it becomes a little more unique, a little more special. What has seemed ordinary has taken on a bit of what is rare, extraordinary, and precious.

You might ask me, “Pastor, what does this have to do with All Saints’ Sunday?”  I think it has a lot to do with this day.

In the Lutheran tradition, the feast of All Saints today reminds us of those who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith. We might think of some of them as special, like Katie and Martin Luther, and the four evangelists, and Mary the mother of our Lord, and the apostles, and Mary Magdalene.  If we were to think of them as stones,  we might imagine that they were diamonds or sapphires, sparkling in the light of Christ, great examples for us.  Others that we might think of are more ordinary saints,  ordinary like plain stones from the beach. But what seems ordinary to us is actually extraordinary, rare and precious if you have the eyes to see, like this rock that almost anyone, even a naturalist, might think of as – well – just a rock.

So why did I see what others might not see?  It is because I love the rocks of Maine, and I have been picking them up and putting them down again ever since I was a little girl.

What helps us see that the apparently ordinary thing is in fact extraordinary, is love.  When you walk in a big city you may see a great many people on the sidewalk, and you might just think, that’s a lot of people.   Sometimes, they might even seem like walking objects to you, and you to them, and sometimes they might even think of you as an obstacle and push past you, if they are in a hurry.

But when the loved ones of each of these people look at them, that is not what they see.  They see the beautiful look in the eye, the shape of the smile, and their hearts are warmed, because they love. That is how we see our own relatives and friends that are ordinary saints; they are extraordinary to us, because we love them.

God loves us.  To God, we are all diamonds in the rough, and precious.  So God sent Jesus to show us that love.   He looks on us, who are little bits of clay that God has filled with the breath of life,  with love greater than we can imagine, and to Him, we are extraordinary, not because of anything we have done, but simply because He loves us.

Now, whether we are thinking of the great saints of old, or our own local saints, like Shirley Morrison, who died this year, or whether we are thinking of countless other apparently ordinary saints, we have this in common with all of them.   We all die.

Most of the time we don’t give this mortality of ours much thought.  But now and then, we have a brush with this knowledge, some sort of twinge or some sort of news that brings it a little to our attention.  And in those moments when we realize that our days are limited, something that is usually thought of as ordinary, like the quietness of the early morning,  or the color of the sky,  or the look in the eyes of a friend,  may take on a preciousness that otherwise we did not pay much attention to.  We become aware, at these times,  that we love.

Jesus loved Lazarus of Bethany.  Lazarus was a beloved friend of our Lord, along with his sisters, and Lazarus died, as we all will as well.  His life left him, and they wrapped his body and placed him in the tomb.   And his sisters grieved the loss of him –  his smile, the way he laughed, the light in his eyes, the person he was.  They wept.  He was precious and beloved to them, and then he was gone.

But he was not gone from our Lord.

God intended for us that we experience life, life, abundant life.  But Scripture tells us that when sin entered the world, death also came.   Christ came to do battle with sin and death for us, and our Gospel says to us, He is victorious.   Christ is victorious.  And it is important in these days of mass shootings and other violence to remember:  God’s love has conquered death forever.  We get to see the end of the story, even as we struggle in the middle of it.  There will come a day when the tears are dried from every eye.

This is the other thing we have in common with all the saints of all times and places – we believe in resurrection. We believe that in Christ, all will be made alive.  And That is because God’s love is stronger than death.  It is because we are so precious in the eyes of the God who loves us that God simply will not allow death to have the final say.

Maybe you have sensed, after a loved one dies, that they are still with you.  I sometimes have.  Love never ends, and the love that you share with them causes them to remain a part of you.  You notice that there is an unbreakable bond between the saints. There is an unbreakable bond between the saints.  Death cannot break this bond.  We are called into this bond by Christ himself in our baptisms, as we become part of his body with him as the head, and even as Christ was raised, we shall be also.  And so we celebrate the saints of all times and conditions and places that have died, with confidence despite our grief,  because Christ’s love binds us together.

But we who celebrate the saints who have gone before us are also called to pay attention to the precious saints who still walk here among us.  If we celebrate the saints of all times and places that have died, we ought to see and celebrate those saints still among us who still struggle in this place.  For in whatever place, whether they are in our own homes, or in some poor shack in Sudan, or in a nursing home, or in some conflict area like Jerusalem or Gaza, or in prison, or gathered in a group of desperate people approaching our southern border, our Lord looks on them and sees them as precious and beloved. We are bound to these brothers and sisters in love.  They are not objects to be hated or feared, used, or pushed aside.

When Jesus raised Lazarus, He raised him to this earthly life.  It was a return to living here, not in the great beyond.  Not yet.  And at that time, he gave three commands.  The first was, “Roll away the stone.”  And so they did.  We, the church,  also are to go to the places where people are living in the valley of the shadow of death, and we must remove the barriers that keep others from life, life, abundant life.

The second command was to Lazarus himself: “Come forth.”  Jesus is always calling us out of death into new life.  When we hear this call, we must choose to respond, rise,  and reach out to grasp the new life that is offered, just as a person who has had surgery must get up and go to rehab and do exercises.

And finally, there was a command to those who were bystanders.  “Unbind him, and let him go.”  It is the church’s job, our job,  to participate in the unbinding of those who are bound, that they might simply and fully live – to undo whatever is holding back our brothers and sisters from this full life.  These can take various forms – to name a few, some are bound by fear or hatred directed against themselves or others, and some are bound by unjust laws.

Jesus commands us to do these things because He sees us as precious and beloved, and we are to see ourselves and one another as precious and worthy of the effort, as though we were not just ordinary stones picked up off the beach, but precious stones filled with jewels.

As it is in heaven, so may it be among us.  May God give us the eyes to see each soul as He sees, not as plain and ordinary and therefore not worth the time, but as precious, extraordinary jewels to be cherished and cared for, polished by his love until we shine.  And may he give us hearts to see as He sees and to love as He loves. May he trouble us with dissatisfaction with the brokenness around us, until we have come to love with the active and effective sort of compassion with which Christ loves each of us.  Amen.