Revelation
21:1-6; John 11:32-44
All Saints Day:
November 4, 2012
All Saints Day: today, we honor those Saints who
have passed from this world to the next.
The saints on whose shoulders we stand.
The ones who passed on the faith as they understood it to us, and to
those they knew. These saints are people
who we remember for their influence on our lives, on this community, on the
world and on our own formation as Christians.
Every person alive and who has ever
lived is a reflection of God. But what
makes it fun, is that none of us is the reflection of the whole of God. We each have a piece – a unique way of
manifesting the divine and showing with our lives what the kingdom of God can
be like. Yes, we are all imperfect, and
we can obscure the divine with our lives as well as reveal it. On All Saints Day we honor the ways our
imperfect faith ancestors revealed the divine.
We are all both saints and sinners. Luckily, we have therapy to deal with how people
shape us in less-than-desirable ways.
Today, we unabashedly celebrate the ways people who have gone before
were saints. Today we think of what they
did reveal of God with their lives, and how that impacted us.
There has always been an interesting
conversation of sorts in the clergy world about funerals. For many pastors, the funeral is a time to
tell stories about the life of the person who died. It’s a celebration of their life and who they
were to the people they loved. However,
there is a school of thought that is very critical of this. Funerals, they say, are not supposed to be
about the person who died – they are supposed to be about God and the
resurrection. Stories about the person
are sentimental, and when we do this we worship the person, not God.
I have found this conversation
confusing. Very confusing. A funeral – and we should do this more than
just at funerals – is a chance to give witness to who God is and how we see that
God in this particular person’s life. And
it’s a picture of God we only get in
this person’s life. When I sit down to
write a funeral, the question I ask is “what part of the kingdom of God did they
reveal?” I’m not just telling stories;
I’m describing the witness this person made to who God is.
I will never forget my grandmother’s
funeral. I was extremely close to Nanny
– as we called her. Her death was a big
blow for me, as it was for my whole family, of course. Now, I try hard not to be critical of other
pastors. This is a hard job, and there
are many ways to do it, and each person has their own gifts, and I am certainly
not perfect and cannot stand above anyone else.
But the fact was, I just didn’t connect with her pastor. He didn’t say things in a way that I
understood. He didn’t have the same
picture of God and the world that I did.
To put it simply, I wasn’t thrilled that he was going to do the
funeral. And I have to say, I wasn’t
alone in this in my family.
The night he came over to talk to us, we
shared a lot about Nanny – much of it centered on her sense of humor. On the “outside,” my grandma was always well dressed,
always put together, proper, in the old fashioned sense of that word. But what we all knew was that she was atually
a little bit crazy and irreverent – something we all loved. We wanted him to understand this because it
was such an important part of her, and at least I was worried the funeral would
be all sober and talk about her like she was a proper old lady. One of the things we told him was how much
she loved the movie Vacation, with Chevy Chase.
In this movie, Chase offers a prayer for “Aunt Edna” when she dies on
their vacation journey. As you can
imagine, this is not a reverent prayer.
At my grandmother’s funeral, to this
pastor’s eternal credit, he prayed that prayer.
The whole thing. Each of us
sitting there were reminded of how much of God we experienced in my
grandmother’s ability to love the absurd, laugh heartily, and know that life
was not just about being prim and proper.
None of the people represented up here –
or in your hearts when you think of the saints of your life – are perfect. That’s a given. But each of the people represented up here
gives a particular witness to who God is in this world and how God moves in our
midst. Something really did die when
they did, in the sense that no one can give that same picture – that same
window. Telling stories about the person
at a funeral, and looking for the ways their lives show us who God is is the
same thing as preaching about God and the resurrection. It’s the same thing.
And so today, on All Saints Day, we bring
things that remind us of the ways each of these people gave us a hint of the
divine. And by doing that, the
particular piece they revealed of God doesn’t
die with them, it remains in our hearts, our thoughts, and our own lives. With each person in this world, our picture
of God becomes fuller, more complex, has greater dimension, and defies our
tendency to define God narrowly.
But, on All Saints Day, we also honor
those saints by reminding ourselves that we are saints as well – the living
saints. And part of our job, as the
living saints, is to participate in the resurrection by keeping alive the
faithfulness of those who have passed on.
It is my God-given duty to not just remember the things I loved about my
grandmother that gave me a glimpse of the divine I wouldn’t otherwise have,
it’s my duty to share that with others, integrate it into my own faithfulness
and life, to not let it die just because she is no longer with us.
Saints continue the story – keep it
unbroken – of God’s work in this world.
We take what we have learned from those who have gone before us, and we
try to emulate it. We do this with the
saints we knew personally, and we try to do this with the saints we all know:
the Martin Luther Kings, the Mother Teresas, the St. Francis of Assisis. Our lives become more saintly as we find ways
to keep what they showed us of God alive today.
This is participating in the ongoing resurrection of God.
But, because we each have a unique piece
to offer the world, we must remember that we are not saints only when we
emulate those who have gone before us.
In each moment, with each new person, each new creation, God is doing
something new. Simply emulating,
repeating, mimicking “good people” would make God stale, inactive, ineffective,
and incomplete.
We need the saints of the past. We stand on their shoulders. But, the book of revelation reminds us of
something: we also need to make things new. The author of revelation is given a glimpse of
God and he writes it down. And he says
that in this vision he sees a “new heaven and a new earth.” Setting aside all the difficultly with
Revelation – all the stuff we don’t know what to do with (beasts, horseman, and
the like) – I have come to embrace this as the core of this wild book. In God
there is a new heaven and a new earth.
Too often, it seems like heaven is a
place we are trying to get to. It’s a
fixed destination: Heck, we even make it
a gated community J. We are trying to do what we need to on earth
to make it to heaven…where God is, where Jesus is, where our loved ones
are.
Think about how little this has to do
with what the author of revelation is talking about. This author writes of a new heaven and a new
earth. Both. The first heaven and first earth have passed
away. Heaven, passing away???!! Wait a minute. What’s wrong with heaven? We can talk about what’s wrong with earth,
and we can long for the days when much of what we see passes away and we get
something new. But a new heaven?
Heaven is not exactly, or at least not only,
a destination. Eternal life means even
heaven is being made new over and over because we are always new creations: God is being made new over and over. And so, as God dwells among us (in new people
in all their quirky uniqueness!!!!), the earth is being made new over and
over.
Being the saints of the present means
never forgetting those on whose shoulders we stand, and it means never
believing they were the end of the story and that there is nothing new to be
done. Think about this just in the
context of our church here: First Presbyterian.
We have saints in our history – some of them represented up here this morning. We have the faithful people who have gone
before us that built an incredible community, set a vision that we still
embrace today, found ways to worship God that we admire and emulate each
Sunday. Many of us love this community in
part because it embraces tradition – myself
included. And I think that is a
testament to those who have gone before – in other words, we have a tradition
worthy of embracing and carrying on. And
we have our saints to thank for that.
But, tradition is only part of the
equation in maintaining faithfulness in a church community. We can’t do without it, but we can’t make it
the only thing. Too often churches get
caught up in believing that if something was good in the past, it must be good
for the present and so can never be changed.
Changing a practice, a belief, a way of doing things is somehow seen to
be a criticism of what has gone before.
But this way of thinking is not honoring tradition, it is making an idol
of tradition – what some people call traditionalism. A colleague of mine shared a quote with me
this week: Tradition is the living faith
of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead
faith of the living.
The raising of Lazarus from the dead is
about more than just one man getting to defy death. It’s about the difference between the living
dead and the dead living. In the very
last verse of this story lies the complex reality of life and death. When Jesus calls Lazarus out from the tomb, Lazarus
is not yet alive. Even as he emerges, he
is called the “dead man.” “The dead man came
out of the tomb,” it says. The dead man emerges because he is still
wrapped in the cloths that bind him… that keep him dead and entombed.
New life will only come when people
follow Jesus’ command to “unbind him and let him go.” We have to call the saints of the past from
their tombs, but we also have to let them go…we can’t enshrine them or they
will never have new life through us. If
we just mimic people, we are dead people walking. We must unleash the spirit of God and live
anew in each moment – connected to, but not entombed by our past.
Tradition is the living faith of the
dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith
of the living. We stand on the shoulders
of the faithful, but we are constantly called to create a new heaven and a new
earth. We are constantly called to
reveal a new picture of who God is and how God works in the world. To only
honor the saints of the past is to dishonor the new creation God has set forth
in each of us.
On All Saints Day we remember those who
have passed from this life to the next, and we remember that we are the saints
today, building on the faithfulness of those who have gone before, yet always
making all things new. And finally, on
All Saints Day, we remember that our lives are a prayer for the saints of the
future: May all who come behind us find
us faithful. We will sing this with the choir
at the end of our worship today as a way of saying All Saints Day is celebrated
every year, by every generation, and
we want more than anything to live such that those who come after us have as
much to build on as possible.
When our descendants bring up their item
that reminds them of us, we want it to fill the space with the spirit and grace
of God, just as these items do here this morning. We want our faithfulness to impact who they are,
but we don’t want them to repeat our
lives – even the good parts; we want them to reveal the reality of the divine
in new, exciting and fresh ways that incorporate who they are as God’s
creations.
A new heaven and a new earth. It’s an ongoing story. We are not the beginning of the story, and we
are not the end. Those who are represented
up here were not the beginning and were not the end, and the same is true for those
who come after us. In fact, as the
author of revelation points out, God is the alpha and omega – the beginning and
the end. And God is always making a new
heaven and a new earth – through us, with us, and among us. Our lives become a part of that ongoing story
– building on what has gone before, and providing more foundation for what will
come after. My hope is that all who come
behind us find us faithful. Amen.
