All Saint's Sunday
Isaiah 25:6-9; Revelation 21:1-6
Rev. Laura J. Collins
November 2, 2003
I want to speak to you today about death.
About death and life. Life that comes out of death, life that comes after death.
I want to speak to you today about hope and mystery.
About loss and resurrection.
I want to speak to you today about saints:
saints among us and saints long gone and saints just lost.
About community and communion and God's commonwealth.
I want to speak to you today of promise.
Let me begin with a confession.
When I was a young pastor, fresh out of seminary and full of ideas, before I'd ever done a funeral, or for that matter, before I'd even had somebody very close to me die, I didn't care much about life after death.
I knew, of course, the Christian proclamation. I knew the promises of eternal life, the declaration of Christ's own resurrection.
But it didn't seem to matter all that much to me.
I cared about life now. Life here. Life before death. About how we live and how we treat each other and how we seek to find and follow God.
What I knew was that none of us could say for certain what happens when a person dies. And I firmly believed then, as I do now, that God is merciful. So, with trust in a merciful God, I reasoned, and with such human uncertainty, why bother with those eternal questions?
And then I did my first funeral.
And then, I began to pray with families experiencing death.
And then, I began to sit with people who were dying.
And I realized, it matters.
Not just to them -- the ones on their death bed or the ones left behind -- but to me.
Are God's promises real? Can they be trusted? What is the point of eternal life?
And what does any of it have to do with life here and now?
Scripture is full of promises like those we heard this morning.
A place of no more misery. A time of no more crying.
A future of peace. A promise of wholeness.
Our Bible begins in a mythological paradise long gone
and ends with this vision in Revelation of a paradise regained.
Paradise lost and paradise regained are the bookends on our story of faith.
And here we are, living in the meantime.
In the place of war and famine and poverty and injustice.
A place where good people suffer and disease lays waste to innocent children.
A place where teenagers are shot at school or starve to death before they ever see a book.
A place where trust gets broken and power gets abused.
And also a place of beauty and wonder and love.
A place of compassion and passion; of miracles and grace;
of natural splendor and surprising joy.
Today is All Saint's Sunday, a time when we remember those who have died.
Especially today we remember members of our congregation who have died since last year.
And each of us has our own saints to remember;
God's children whom we have loved who no longer walk this earth.
We speak of the communion of saints as we gather for communion with Christ at the Table. How do we have communion with those who have died? For that matter, how do we have communion with Christ? In fact, isn't it often difficult to be in communion with those who are living and breathing and right here with us?
For me, this is where all these questions come together. Are the promises true? And do they make any difference?
The communion of saints is all those faithful people who have died and who now live with God. Their bodies are gone, buried in the earth or cremated back into the dust from which we all began, but we claim that some essential part of them survives. That the God-part, the spirit-part, continues to be living soul, unquenchable.
Not just that the spirit they shared on earth is revived in our memories or in the work they left behind. No, we claim the spirits of the saints are, in fact, still present in the universe.
In Communion at Christ's table we make a similarly astounding claim. The assertion we make when we share the bread and cup is not only that Jesus lived and breathed once, but that because he lives still, we actually imbibe his spirit here, when we come in faith.
In this church, we do not claim to eat Christ's flesh or drink his blood, but neither do we say that what we do is merely symbolic, a remembrance, a ritual of thanksgiving. No, we boldly claim that when we eat this bread and share this cup, Christ is actually present to us, in us, with us, among us; that his spirit can be one with our spirit; that his divinity can transform our humanity.
Now, either there's something to all this or we're just blowing smoke. Because if it's all just in memory -- of Jesus, of our friends who have died -- then let us say so clearly. Jesus was a good teacher and we come to learn his lessons. The people who died in faith were good people and we come to honor their memory. But now it's up to us. Up to us to keep the spirit alive. Up to us to finish the work.
Now, here's my problem. If that's the case, then I don't believe these Biblical promises for a minute. No more war, no more crying, no more pain, only peace. We can do our best, as many humans have throughout the history of the world, and we'll still end up with something like we see today: moments of beauty, lots of loss.
But what if it's true? What if the saints who went before us are not gone? What if they are still present and the spirit they embodied here for a time, is now free to be with us as we have need? What if Christ actually comes to us in communion and offers himself to us to take, and eat, and make part of our own body and soul? What if there is a paradise to be regained?
If it is true, then I have hope. I have hope not only that someday, when I have died, I can experience the kind of peace that we read about in Isaiah and Revelation, but that this vision of paradise, this image of shalom, has a reality now beyond my own wishful thinking.
And if that is true, then how can I not reach for it, strive for it, ache for it, long for it? How can I not look at the world as it is and see the world as it could be? How can I not yearn to end the suffering and usher in the peace? How can I dip into the beautiful grace at this table and not long to carry it with me into my life?
Of course, it is all a mystery. It is still true that none of us really knows what happens when we die. None of us really knows how Jesus could have been a Palestinian Jew 2000 years ago and still speak to Americans and Asians and Africans today.
Faith is still a leap.
But I have sat on the side of the bed and watched the life go out. And let me say this. What left was not just breath. What stopped was not simply brain-waves. What left was a person. A spirit-breathed person. A body remained, stiff and soon cold. But the person that I knew was no longer in that body. A nd yet, neither were they gone.
And so when we gather here to worship, week after week, what I know is that we do not worship alone. It's not just the ones still walking who fill this room. But all the saints. The community gathered is bigger than we see. It is the people who laid the cornerstone in 1922 and the ones who sang in the choir in 1944 and the ones who sat on the session in 1966 and the ones who quietly prayed all along the way.
God's community of saints surrounds us.
God's commonwealth of grace lives among us.
God's communion of peace is nearer than we think.
So today we speak of death.
And life. And life that comes after death.
Of mystery and hope.
Today we remember the saints.
And God's promise of a tearless day.
And we leap with faith,
to be part of that communion even now, even here.
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