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The first story I shared with our youth this summer for Vacation Bible School came from the film Black Panther. Near the beginning of the movie, T’Challa, King of Wakanda, goes through the ceremony that gives him his powers, that makes him the Black Panther. When I first saw this scene, I couldn’t believe it. Here was an incredible representation of what goes on in Baptism.
In this ceremony, T’Challa is buried in the sand, just as Baptism itself is a burial through the sense of drowning. As T’Challa is buried, so he rises up, seemingly on a new plane of existence. Immediately he sees a tree filled with the Black Panthers of the past, including his father.
This is the same hope we live into. Our hope is that in being buried in this world, we will rise up in the next to be joined with a different body, the great communion of saints.
That is the hope we celebrate today as we remember all the saints, both dead and living. It is the hope we celebrate as we have a young one with us to be baptized. Our hope is that we one day will be joined with those we see now as well as those who have come before and those who will come after in experiencing the full glory of life everlasting with our Lord Jesus Christ.
That is the hope we hear in all our lessons today: the hope that one day we will be reunited with those who have come before us. It is that very hope which we witness in Christ Jesus’ own raising of Lazarus from the dead for all to see in this world.
Our hope is all the more great because unlike the Black Panthers, we do not have anything to do with this occurrence. We didn’t have to train or do anything to receive this gift of being called saints. It is the Lord who did this. Just as He lifted Lazarus from the grave, so He will do the same with us. It is the Lord, God Himself, who will wipe away all our tears in the end, as Isaiah tells us. It is God who has done the work to bring us to Himself where we will dwell with Him forever more as His saints.
We are fortunate in that we get to be made into something greater than Black Panthers; we get to be made into saints of God. That is what we are here today to recognize and to remember. It is what we are baptized into. Yet we do not have to do any work to join that great body of saints, for God in our Lord Jesus Christ already did that work for us. For that gift of Grace that Jesus Christ bought for us with His own precious life, we can truly say, “Thanks be to God!”