Feast of All Saints Sermon

Those people, long ago, who drafted the liturgical calendar that views each year through the prism of faith – through the lens of theology – they imagined (perhaps naively!) a community that keeps coming back to church, often several times a week (!), to pray the liturgy assigned for that day. Mind you, I’ve never actually been in a church that’s capable of pulling this off. Probably only seminary, where you’ve got a captive community of students who are all quite geeky when it comes to church attendance and liturgies! But that’s all to say, that the rhythm of the church’s prayers is actually quite rich because – what they do – is tap into a profound awareness of the human condition. They understand and explore the complex experience we’re sharing as a people, living this life we all live. And this week, had we often been at church (and had our little COVID scare not shut us down), we would have experienced a three-day sequence of prayers: All Hallows Eve, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day – October 31 through November 2. And what makes this trio of days so valuable for us, is how it takes quite seriously our human need to remember and connect with those who have gone before – to assure us that we are not alone, severed, or isolated. But we remain, and claim, our part in a larger humanity. For so God made us to be one. All Hallows Eve (or “Halloween”) is just a day of preparation for the big feast day that follows. (Just like Christmas Eve prepares us for Christmas Day.) All Saints Day focuses on the notable people of faith, whose lives bears witness to the reality that we humans actually do have the potential to live out the gospel with conviction and resolve in such a way that the world is made a better place – that God’s heart for justice and compassion and healing can be realized in the flesh, to the glory of God and to the flourishing of our neighbors, because actual people chose to align themselves as partners in God’s mercy. And so we began this service with our litany of saints, just a sampling of people throughout history who have actually done what we might all aspire to do. And you might have noticed, that our litany was addressed to them. “Call us to walk beside you,” we repeated to each saint. Because, in the mystery of our faith, we believe them to be alive in Christ, as we are alive in Christ – that we remain alive one with one another. So our appeal to them for support is, in some ways, no different than the appeal we make to one another when we need their support. And I call this “mystery” because – it is! I don’t claim to have this all figured out. It’s more like theological head knowledge, for me, that’s slowly leaking into my experience, or (you might say) my “experiments with faith” (which I’ll get to shortly). Tuesday was “All Souls Day,” officially known in our calendar as the Feast of All Faithful Departed. That’s the day we remember “our own,” our own beloved who have died – our family members and friends – who are so much more than stories; they can be part of our very souls, whose presence in our lives helped shape us into who we know ourselves to be, and whose loss can be without measure. We had planned the dedication service for our remodeled church to take place on All Souls Day because a significant element of our renovation was the creation of a Memorial Garden where the cremated remains of our beloved could be interred right here on our property, so that when we come to church we can interact with the larger church, the living and the dead who, together, comprise the full body of Christ. They remain a part of us, now physically manifest in the living plants growing above and from their ashes. But if we are going enter into that mystery, of knowing them still one with us, it really is a matter of faith. Sometimes we might feel it intuitively or fleetingly. But (at least for me) I have to choose to lean into that potential of faith which is otherwise quite foreign to me. But I have been experimenting with it. You often heard me speak of my hot tub spirituality – how sitting in the hot tub helps me to pray and mull things over contemplatively. And part of what I like about it is, over the years, my view remains the same. I keep looking at, and considering, these three tall fir trees in my yard that have become a kind of Holy Trinity. I’ve got a Father Tree and a Son Tree and a Holy Spirit Tree, living with me in my garden. And over this past year it’s the “Son Tree” I’ve been watching especially. Up towards the top, within the pattern of branches and the space between them, I can detect a face looking at me. It kind of resembles the face of the mermaid in the Starbucks logo. Half the face is kind of blank. But the other half has a clearly defined eye. And that face has become Jesus looking at me. And I look back at him. And, at some point, that face also became my birth mother, who died several ago, looking at me. It’s simultaneously Jesus and my mom. And the first time I saw this (or perceived or felt this), it was just kind of this welcome jolt to say, “Hey, Mom.” And I keep looking at it, experiencing it as an icon, as a symbol – but more than a symbol – as a portal into a divine mystery. And the way I’m experiencing it is that the half of the face I can’t see – that’s Jesus himself. Because the truth of the matter is, I’ve never seen Jesus face-to-face. I don’t know what he looks like. I’ve never related to the incarnate Christ in my incarnate state. But the half of the face I can see – that’s my mother. Because I do know what she looks like. By God’s sovereign will, she is the one in whose I body I was formed. She was the first to hold me, to gaze at me lovingly. She was God’s partner in my creation. And if Christ is in her, then it was through her particular incarnation that Christ made himself tangibly known to me. But to be clear, she was no saint (in any classic of the word). In fact, she divorced my father to marry another man and left us when I was three years old. And, I assure you, though she loved me constantly, reconciling that rupture has been a significant part of my life and evolving faith. But in beholding her now – with Christ, in the fir tree – what I behold is my mother fully restored as the image bearer of God – a more complete mom than I ever knew in her life. As a wise friend once advised me, “Eric, your mom has now surpassed you in the way of perfection.” And you know what’s most moving for me as I experiment with this kind of faith? It’s the way her gaze remains fully fixed on me (as a tree is perfectly suited to do). Month after month, there is no wavering, no judgment, no awkwardness, no emotional agenda of any kind. It’s just a steady, peace-filled attentiveness, where she and Jesus and I can behold one another freely because we are fully redeemed together through Christ. And, who knows, this may just be the fanciful, over-wrought imagination of your priest. And that’s fine. But what gives me freedom to lean into this kind of prayer, is the awareness that this orientation is rooted in what the church has classically termed, “The Communion of the Saints,” this real communion between the living and the dead, in Christ. And it is this nugget of hope that resides at the heart of All Saints Day and All Souls Day – this extraordinary gospel-promise that, in God, nothing is lost; nothing remains dead, because the resurrected Christ is gathering all things unto himself; that the God who is One: Father, Son and Spirit, extends that oneness to all God loves and redeems, which I believe to be a very broad embrace indeed. And this faith – this hope – becomes increasingly valuable to us the further we sojourn in this life, when the weight of bereavement gets heavier and heavier, with each additional loved one we lose. There comes a point for some when the people who have been most significant to us are all now on the other side of the grave. Then, do we need our communion with the saints to be far more than just head knowledge. And the beauty of this communion is that it keeps growing in both directions. Through death, we perceive an increasingly large gathering of saints with God in heaven – such as we’ll remember when we pray their names later in the service. But through baptism, we experience the body of Christ growing amongst the living. Today, 2-year-old Maddox and twenty-something-year-old Chase, are being baptized. And one of the significant ways we make sense of that sacrament is the belief that they too are dying with Christ (drowned, as it were) in the baptismal waters, then emerging from the watery tomb as participants in Christ’s resurrection from the tomb. What we see happening before us is a preview and a promise of what will happen again at their eventual death. Behind the font you can see the new Resurrection Doors that we’ve just installed as a memorial for Mike Broun. The imagery comes from the book of Revelation and its depiction of the new heaven and the new earth, with the river of life flowing from Christ’s throne, watering the tree of life along its banks. So now, at the end of every funeral, we can process out of this nave, bearing the ashes of our loved ones, and walk with them past the baptismal font – and all it promises – then through these doors, sentinels of hope, to make our way to the Memorial Garden where we can lay our loved ones to rest, and where we can rest with them at the bench, as we consider, as we pray, as we lean into our Christian hope, that death is not the final word. Christ is gathering All Saints together – the living and the dead. And we will be one beloved people. Forever and ever. Amen.