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All Saints’
Sunday 2005
Christ Church + Washington Parish
Revelation 7: 9-17
Judith
Davis, Rector ©
+Come,
Holy Spirit of all the saints and fill us with your presence. Amen.
 Today
is All Saints Sunday, a day when we are called to remember the
saints of God and a day when we welcome others to be joined among
the saints of God in this place and time. Today we welcome Finn
Braden Hopson to be baptized into this Community of Faith, this
community where we have found hope and comfort, challenge and peace,
friends in faith, neighbors who share in our life at Christ Church.
It’s sort of like a family reunion with all those we’ve known and
loved. I’m surprised Hallmark hasn’t capitalized on this with All
Saints’ cards. On this day, at this family reunion, we might just
bump into a halo or two of the saints of God and we have the
witnesses of Scripture to point the way for us.
In the
vision of heaven in the Revelation to John, one of the elders
asks John this question, “Who are these, robed in white, and where
have they come from?” The elder says, “These are they who have come
out of the great ordeal. . .and the Lamb at the center of the throne
will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the
water of life and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
(Rev 7: 9-17 passim).
The Book
of Revelation provided hope to the persecuted church near the end of
the first century of the Common Era. In the vision of Chapter 7,
the faithful who have been marked with a seal on their foreheads (as
described a few verses before our lectionary passage, v.3) will be
protected during the coming tribulation. This vast multitude
depicted in our passage includes those who are robed in white and
who carry palm branches as symbols of victory. They join the angels
in worshipping the living God. They are the ones who have come out
of the great ordeal in which many suffered or were persecuted for
their faith. Now they have been made pure in the Blood of the Lamb
sacrificed for their salvation. They will no longer suffer or
experience hunger or thirst or pain or suffering or crying.
Yesterday, I gave “last rites” to a woman named Geri who had
suffered with Parkinson’s disease and dementia for several years. A
few hours before her death, she lay peacefully holding a baby doll
and a teddy bear rested nearby. Her daughter sat at her side and we
prayed together and gave her mother permission to die. I thought
about these words from Revelation while I was there—about how God
would wipe away every tear from her eyes and how she would not
suffer any longer. And I thought about my own loved ones as I had
sat by their deathbeds and held their hands as they slipped away
from this mortal life, usually while some of us were singing the old
hymns or Dona nobis pacem. Geri’s daughter Ann and I were
saying how natural this was, that we sat there in vigil as Geri died
and how much that used to be a part of life in our culture—at the
old farmhouse where Grandma or Grandpa or someone would be when they
died and how the family would be gathered in vigil at home and how
later the burial would take place in the family churchyard and every
week the faithful would come to church walking by the graveyard
which housed the remains of the faithful. As we thought about these
things, our experience was one of peace instead of fear and we were
assured in the Christian life that Geri would be one of those who
would stand before God’s throne, and would be robed in white and be
free.
I am
reminded as well of my young friend Ryan, who died a few weeks ago
at the age of 17, after a lifetime of suffering and difficulty with
cerebral palsy. I remember giving him last rites and praying that
God would release him from his suffering and from his body that had
limited him in this life. I saw a vision of that song, “Eagle’s
wings,” made popular in the Roman Catholic folk masses of the 70’s
when I was in graduate school. I saw Ryan riding on a great eagle,
almost like the image in one of the Harry Potter movies when
Ron, Hermione and Harry ride on the back of the great bird.
I saw Ryan being freed from his body and singing and dancing around
God’s throne forever with all those who had come out of the great
ordeal.
I am
reminded of Rosa Parks this week and many of us are old enough to
remember her refusal to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery in
1955. I am reminded of the freedom she championed, not meaning to
be famous, but trying to be a faithful person striving for justice
and civil rights. I see Rosa among those robed in white singing and
dancing around God’s throne. One of our hymns for All Saints, “I
sing a song of the saints of God, patient and brave and true,”
characterizes each of these saints, Geri and Ryan and Rosa, and
countless others who have been saints to us in our own lives.
The
Litany of Saints is a long list of people. They come from every
possible status, class, and ethnicity. They are gifts from God to
us, beacons that light the way. Their dispositions may be cranky or
caring, and they may have been Christians or lived long before
Christ was born. But their gifts in some way have nurtured us all.
They brought us to Church, took care of us and watched over us. They
waited patiently while we learned to live as pilgrims like them. And
they continue, in their place of light and joy, to praise the living
God, while connecting with us in a Communion that is too vast to
imagine.
Saints
are people who know something profound about love, that suffering is
connected with it. They learned the path of sainthood is not one of
accolades but accusations. They were charged with demanding change
because they wanted people to know more about God than others could
stand to have revealed. They challenged governments and leaders who
were exploiting others. They sat in the front of the bus when they
were told to move to the back. They worked to bring justice to those
who were ground down by unjust systems. And in their dedicated work,
they were jailed, beaten, maligned, and sometimes murdered.
Jesus
gives us the ideals of the saints in the Beatitudes in today’s
Gospel. The Beatitudes point to a life of holiness, and illustrate
the great reversal of the expectations of the world. In God’s
commonwealth of love and justice in the life to come, the first will
be last and the last will be first, Matthew says in another passage
(Mt 19:30; 20:16). The call to discipleship overshadows worldly
recognition and achievement, as Jesus portrays a new realm in which
God’s will and purpose for creation are fully realized.
St.
Augustine of Hippo said in the 4th century
that the Beatitudes were the most perfect expression of
Christian life. Each Beatitude embodies an instance of God’s love
and mercy; altogether they provide a composite picture of a saint—a
person who is blessed, and who is a blessing to others. Today, as
we come to baptize Finn and welcome him into the blessed company of
the saints, we pray that his life will be a blessing to others and
that he will be blessed as one of the saints of God, to join the
ranks of the famous and ordinary saints and all the blessed of God,
like Geri and Ryan and Rosa Parks.
Barbara
Brown Taylor says that on All Saints’ Day, we make the very bold
claim that all these people [the famous saints of old and the
ordinary saints in our own lives] are our relatives. As the hymn
says, “They were all of them saints of God and I mean, God helping,
to be one too” (Hymn 293). Taylor says that “we have the same blood
running in our veins—Christ’s blood—and the same light we see
shining in them shines in us too. One of the reasons we celebrate
baptism on this day is that we want the new saints to meet the old
ones. We want our children and all those who are new to Christ’s
body to know who their ancestors are, and to understand that being a
saint means first and foremost belonging to God” (Home by Another
Way, 1999, p. 212).
When we
baptize Finn into this communion and fellowship, we are reminded of
all the faithful saints in this place for 211 years, those we
remember and those known to God alone. We pray for those who have
died so that we can remember what it means to be baptized: to live
our lives in God's eternal presence, and like Jesus who calls us to
walk in God's eternal presence, we are to bring this eternal life to
others. Especially the others Jesus talked about: those who are
poor, those who hunger, those who weep and mourn, those who for
whatever reason feel separated from the life of eternity
This community of faith
matters a great deal in our neighborhood of Capitol Hill and is a
place where all the saints of God can gather and support each other
and hold each other up whether we can see the halos or not. Finn
and all of us do not have to try to be saints by ourselves. We have
all these saints sitting here and all those whom we cannot see—Rosa
Parks, St. Francis, Pope John Paul II, George Liu, Josephine Payne,
Ryan Jones, Geri Ruth and the whole host of those on our “Saints
list” in the Litany of all faithful departed—all of them helping us
along, calling out our name and encouraging us to live faithful
lives. They are part of us and we are part of them and all of us are
knit together, as the Collect says, as God’s elect. So, go out from
here and try on your halo on this All Saints’ Sunday and practice
being a saint of God. Open your heart to be God’s instrument of
love, justice, reconciliation and joy in the world, which is what we
pray for Finn, whom we welcome into the communion of saints on this
Day.
Let us
pray:
Lord
Christ, your saints have been the lights of the world in every
generation: Grant that we who follow in their footsteps may be made
worthy to enter with them into that heavenly country where you live
and reign for ever and ever. Amen. |
