St. Andrew's Day (midweek message)

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

November 26, 2014

St. Andrew’s Day

(Sent while Fr. Tony is on vacation)

The beginning of the new Church year is November 30, the feast day of St. Andrew the Apostle.   We read in the Gospel of John:

The next day John [the Baptist] was there again with two of his disciples.  When he saw Jesus passing by, he said, “Look,  the Lamb of God!”   When the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus.  Turning around, Jesus saw them following and asked, “What do you want?”   They said, “Rabbi” (which means “Teacher”), “where are you staying?”   “Come,” he replied, “and you will see.”  So they went and saw where he was staying, and they spent that day with him. It was about four in the afternoon.   Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, was one of the two who heard what John had said and who had followed Jesus.  The first thing Andrew did was to find his brother Simon and tell him, “We have found the Messiah” (that is, the Christ).  And he brought him to Jesus.  Jesus looked at him and said, “You are Simon son of John. You will be called Cephas” (which, when translated, is Peter).  (John 1:35-40)

In the Eastern tradition, Andrew is often called “the first-called (protokletos)” because of this story in the Gospel of John, where Andrew and the unnamed John (the Beloved) are described as disciples of John the Baptist who first became followers of Jesus.  Andrew is the one who introduces his brother Simon Peter to Jesus.   Andrew and Peter were both fishermen from Capernaum, who were called by Jesus to become “fishers of people.”  

The name Andrew is actually a Greek name, meaning “manly.”   A measure of the degree of intra-cultural mingling in the mixed populations of Galilee of the period is found in the popularity of such Greek names for Jewish boys there.   This, even in the presence of wildly popular but such stridently nationalistic Jewish names such as Simon, Judas (Judah), and Jesus (Joshua).  

 

Later in John’s Gospel, when a group of Greeks-speaking Jews wish to speak with Jesus, it is Philip and Andrew that they approach, both disciples with Greek names (John 12:20-22; “Philip” means “horse lover”). 

Earlier in John, when Jesus realizes the crowds are hungry just before he feeds the Five Thousand, it is Andrew who introduces him to a boy nearby by saying, "Here is a lad with five barley loaves and two fish." (Jn 6:8f)

Andrew appears in all the various lists of the Twelve given in the New Testament, but these three passages in John are the only places where we see Andrew as an individual.  In each, he is portrayed as introducing people to Jesus.  As a result, he is seen as the archetype of the Christian missionary or evangelist.  The Fellowship of Saint Andrew among Episcopalians today is devoted to encouraging personal evangelism, bringing of one's friends and colleagues to a knowledge of Christ.

Since Andrew’s day marks the beginning of the Church Year, the First Sunday of Advent is defined as the Sunday on or nearest the Feast of St. Andrew.  This day is effectively the fourth Sunday before Christmas Day.  

In early Church tradition, Andrew preached in Asia Minor and along the Black Sea, and was martyred by crucifixion in Greece.  Tellingly, later tradition describes him not nailed to a Latin cross, like Jesus, but rather, tied to an X shaped cross (a “saltire”), where he valiantly preaches for two days before expiring. 

When the Emperor Constantine in the 4^th century set up his new capital Constantinople at Byzantium, the bishopric of the new city needed the cachet and authority of an appeal to apostolic tradition like those of the other major metropolitan sees or patriarchates.  Rome and Antioch both claimed that their churches had been founded by Peter and Paul; Alexandria, Mark, Peter’s assistant and scribe; Jerusalem, all the Twelve as well as James the brother of the Lord. The Patriarch of Constantinople reached back to the traditions of Andrew preaching along the Black Sea and the Bosporus to claim such status for his see.  The great Byzantine preacher John Chrysostom said that thus Andrew, the first-called of the apostles, the “Peter even before there was a Peter” founded what he claimed was the preeminent Patriarchate in the Church. 

Since missionaries went far and wide from Constantinople, soon Andrew was claimed as patron saint of Ukraine, Romania, Russia.   In the early Middle Ages, a missionary named Rule brought some of Andrew’s relics to Scotland, to a town known as Fife, but which he rechristened as St. Andrew's, where there is now the oldest and most famous course for Scotland’s national sport, golf.   Andrew thus became the patron saint of Scotland in addition to the Greek Byzantine heritage countries where he himself had been a missionary.   

The white X shaped saltire “St. Andrew’s Cross” on a blue field is the design of the Scottish national flag.  The St. Andrew's cross appears in the Union Jack of Great Britain behind the red X shaped cross of St. Patrick of Ireland and the regular +-shaped red cross of St. George, patron saint of England.

Andrew is a sign for all of us to be bold in introducing people to Christ.  Gentle inviting hospitality seems to have been his way, and seems to be the best way for us as well.   

The collect for St. Andrew’s day is:

Most Merciful God, you make yourself known in the lives and examples of your saints.  Bestow on us, we pray you, the courage and loving friendly concern of your first apostle, Andrew, that we, like him, may stand as constant witnesses of your love, grace and truth, and bring our friends and colleagues to the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ your son our Lord, in whose name we pray.  Amen. 

 Grace and Peace,  Fr. Tony+

Difference, Not Disagreement (Mid-week Message)

 

The Great Barrier Reef from Space

Difference, not Disagreement

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Nov. 19, 2014

Elena and I are heading off on our adventure in the Great Barrier Reef.  See you in Advent!

Last week at the Diocesan convention, I was privileged to witness a serious discussion of a serious matter, where both sides held their opinions deeply, and differed widely from each other.  The issue was whether the Diocese should publicly condemn the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian lands, what Israel calls the West Bank and Gaza, and consider divestment of stocks in companies that profit from the occupation.  What made me proud was that we had a real discussion of issues.  People on both sides were informed, respectful, and shared common Gospel values of how to judge the matter.  They differed on how specifically to approach the injustice of the situation and the horrible plight of occupants of the occupied territories.  Though we differed, however, we were not disagreeable.  Everyone respected the floor rules; no one stooped to ad hominem attacks; and all recognized the points of common value and belief they shared with the opposite position.    Here were Episcopalians doing what Anglicans from the time of Elizabeth have aspired to do:  create a middle path, a common ground, a sect- and brand-free faith rooted in shared, or common prayer. 

The Archbishop of Canterbury this week gave an important speech to the General Synod of the Church of England in which he gave an overview of the status of the Anglican Communion.  One point that he raised underscores this point of the value of sharing common life with those with whom we differ:  

 “The future of the Communion requires sacrifice.  The biggest sacrifice is that we cannot only work with those we like, and hang out with those whose views are also ours.  Groups of like-minded individuals meeting to support and encourage each other may be necessary, indeed often are very necessary, but they are never sufficient.  Sufficiency is in loving those with whom we disagree.  What may be necessary in the way of party politics, is not sufficient in what might be called the polity of the Church.” 

As we prepare for Christ the King Sunday and the start of Advent, it might be a good idea to look at how well we are showing love to those from whom we differ, especially when the beliefs are deeply held. 

Grace and peace,  Fr. Tony+

I Was Afraid (Proper 28A)

“I Was Afraid”

 November 16, 2014

Proper 28 A

Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

8:00 a.m. spoken Mass

Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18; Psalm 90:1-8, 12; 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11; Matthew 25:14-30

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

When I was growing up, my dear mother and father often quoted from today’s Gospel to me.  “To whom much is given, much is expected.”  I came to hate that phrase.  Whenever I boasted of some accomplishment, desperate for parental and sibling approval, my mom quoted it to set a higher standard.  Whenever I failed in the slightest degree, perhaps a B on test, or a slight scuffle in the breezeway or on the playground that sent me to the principal’s office, my dad quoted to bring me up short and make me realize the gravity of what I might excuse as age appropriate behavior.   They wanted to make me feel how grievous for me were failings that might pass in any other, less gifted child.  At least that’s how it felt to me.  In fairness, I should note that my parents were trying to gently break down some of the arrogance and prissiness they saw developing in their third child.  They applied the principle to themselves and my other siblings as well. 

Today’s Parable of the Entrusted Money is called the parable of the talents in Matthew and of the pounds in Luke.  Despite some differences, the underlying parable seems to almost certainly go back to the historical Jesus.

When he told it, like many of his parables, it was a non-too-subtle indictment of the unfair political and economic systems of the time.  That it is a story of the careless rich is seen in the astronomical sums involved:  five, two, and one talents of silver, respectively approximately worth in today’s money two million, 650,000, and 350,000 dollars.  Thus Jesus is being highly ironic when he has the master say to the servant who has doubled his million “you have done so well with a trifling sum, I intend to start giving you real money!”   The servants here are retainers of a great holder of lands and property—wealth gained through extortionate lending to poor peasants who end up losing their surety, the land.  He expects the servants to use such means to further grow his money.  When the third man simply buries his “paltry” $250,000, afraid of losing the principal, the land owner’s response is guaranteed:  anger, abuse at the “lazy” and “unprofitable” servant for not having the sense of at least putting the money into low yield, risk free ventures akin today savings accounts.  At least then some interest would have been gained!  On the lips of Jesus, this was the parable of the extortionists.  The third man, while perhaps not a hero, represents the values of Jesus’ audience.   He alone represents solid peasant virtues, and the common sense to bury money rather than risk losing it or engage in immoral business practices.  By refusing to go along with the extortionate system, he is a sort of whistle-blower.  And the story tells what happens to whistle-blowers:  they get burned.   

On Jesus’ lips, the story is not only a critique of the system of land grabbing and exploitation.  It also might be a dig at his religious competitors’ cautious efforts at keeping God’s commands by building of a fence around the law and trying to maintain the ultimate in purity.  Again and again Jesus in other parables criticizes this approach to faith taken by the Pharisees and Scribes: a fruitless fig tree, a barren olive tree, a gate closed to others by those who refuse themselves to enter it.  Such a fearful approach to faith prevents us taking the risks necessary to do really great things in God’s name, says Jesus.   

The Church, especially when it began to wait longer and longer for Jesus to  return, turned the parable into a moral exhortation of those waiting for his return.   “Lazy and unprofitable servant” lost its irony:  now it meant overly cautious Christians whose fear at going all out in following the Gospel limited their success in ministry and “producing fruit.” It was in this setting that the Gospel writers appended to Jesus’ parable the phrase that bothered me so much in my childhood, the moralistic commonplace of the ancient world about those who have received much being expected to turn a bigger profit. 

No matter how you read the parable—a crooked master punishing an uppity employee for siding with the exploited peasants or a righteous master Jesus returning to earth with judgment rather than healing in his wings—they both agree that the third servant, the one who buried the money, did so out of fear.  And therein lies the point.  

Fear of scarcity means not feeling God’s abundance.  It means we stop or reduce our sharing.  Fear of rejection prevents some from ever truly loving, and making themselves vulnerable to the beloved and running the risk of having their heart broken.  Fear of death means some people never fully live. 

The opposite of love is not merely hate, it is fear of vulnerability.  The opposite of generosity is not just stinginess, it is fear of loss.  The opposite of wisdom and knowledge is not just foolishness and ignorance, but it is fear of the truth.  

FDR said it well:  the only thing we truly have to fear is fear itself. 

Many of us, in receiving spiritual direction or doing what is called a moral inventory have had a similar experience: we find that at the heart of most of our negative emotions and unproductive or harmful acts lies some kind of fear:  fear of loss of self-esteem, of money, of pleasure, of family, or of social standing.  

Fear separates us from ourselves and others.  It divides us from God.  It makes us sterile, unfruitful branches, lazy, unprofitable servants by any standard.

Andrew King’s poem about the parable says it this way:  

                 “I WAS AFRAID. . .”
                   by Andrew King

It could be me, standing there with the spade,
the crate of money beside me on the ground,
thoughts as bleak as the late-day twilight’s fade,
house lamps all lit but the darkness around
growing within, where fists clench my soul
and I know by the claws the cold-boned fear
that scrapes from my heart’s slender soil a hole
of its own, and leaves there, hidden but near,
shadows of despair. It’s fear of defeat
brings the shovel here, the fear of failure
that digs traps for faith on so many streets,
causes the loss of so much that is treasure.
Faith that fears loss and fails to try, can’t see
that such fear, not loss, is the enemy. And
this too I know: sometimes that has been me.
But maybe the story does not have to end
there – the one with dirt still on his fingers
standing alone in the darkness, the only
thing left to him regret, raw, lingering . . .
What if there’s One who pities the lonely,
the lost, the defeated; who, loving the failed,
the fallen ones, the ones who are broken,
allowed himself to know darkness; was nailed
to the cross; and who rose again, token
of a new day? In the shine of his light
we see all our sad failures overcome;
treasure – a buried soul – redeemed . . . and life,
once again, and not death, will have won
https://earth2earth.wordpress.com/2014/11/09/poem-for-the-sunday-lectionary-pentecost-23/

 

I invite us this week to look at the things of which we are afraid: name them, reflect on how fear colors our various emotions and actions. 

And let us pray for boldness, and confidence, and trust.  Jesus will give us such gifts.  He has promised us he will. 

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

Prayer and Yearning (Mid-week Message)

Prayer and Yearning 

A parishioner a couple of Sundays ago, while leaving church, leaned over and said to me, "Your whole sermon for me was in one memorable phrase.  You threw it out as an aside near the end, but it was the main point:  yearning is prayer."  

I thought that I'd complement that thought with a wonderful poem that another parishioner shared with me: 

 

An Embarrassment
by Wendell Berry

"Do you want to ask
the blessing?"

"No. If you do,
go ahead."

He went ahead:
his prayer dressed up

in Sunday clothes
rose a few feet

and dropped with a soft
thump.

If a lonely soul
did ever cry out

in company its true
outcry to God,

it would be as though
at a sedate party

a man suddenly
removed his clothes

and took his wife
passionately into his arms.

"An Embarrassment" by Wendell Berry from Leavings. © Counterpoint, 2010.

Grace and peace,

Fr. Tony

People Get Ready (Proper 27A)

The Wise and Foolish Virgins, He Qi

 

“People Get Ready”

 November 9, 2014

Proper 27 A

Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

8:00 a.m. spoken Mass

Wisdom of Solomon 6:17-20 Psalm 70 1 Thess 4:13-18 Matt 25:1-13

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

The ten virgins or bridesmaids, otherwise called the Parable of the Closed Door, is a story rich in images, echoes, and memory triggers: 

 “At that time the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom.  Five of them were foolish and five were wise.”  

“No  one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. [Mt 5:15-16]

You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has lost its taste [lit. "become foolish"], how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot. [Mt 5:13]

Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise person who built their house on rock. … And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish person who built their house on sand. [Mt 7:24-27]

But then there is this: “But if you think that you are wise in this age, you should become fools so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.”

“The foolish ones took their lamps but did not take any oil with them. The wise, however, took oil in jars along with their lamps. The bridegroom was a long time in coming, and they all became drowsy and fell asleep.”

In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus came back from agonized prayer to find his closest disciples all sleeping: “So, could you not stay awake with me one hour?”

At midnight the cry rang out: “Here’s the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!”  Then all the virgins woke up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish ones said to the wise, “Give us some of your oil; our lamps are going out.”

A smoldering wick he will not snuff out — 

“No,” they replied, “there may not be enough for both us and you.”

Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you —

“Instead, go to those who sell oil and buy some for yourselves.”

Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor.”

But while they were on their way to buy the oil, the bridegroom arrived.

In the city of God, they will not need the light of a lamp, for the Lord God will give them light.

The virgins who were ready went in with him to the wedding banquet.

But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first. –

And the door was shut.

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door to kingdom of heaven peoples’ faces.

Later the others also came. “Sir! Sir!” they said. “Open the door for us!”

But he replied, “I tell you the truth, I don’t know you.”

If a man shuts his ears to the cry of the poor, he too will cry out and not be answered.

(Most of these images were developed by Episcopal Priest David Henson: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davidhenson/2014/11/the-breaking-of-the-bridesmaids-how-scripture-undermines-a-parable/#ixzz3IOZPjGCC)

When I was growing up in a Mormon family, this parable was a major part of how I was taught to live as a Christian.  The wise virgins were good, the foolish, bad.  The oil couldn’t be shared because it was a symbol for spiritual preparation, what we called “having a testimony.”  I wanted to be wise.  I knew I needed to stay a virgin, at least till I was married.  I needed to work hard to convince myself of the truth of the faith: pray, serve in church callings, follow the commandments.   That way, I’d have the Holy Ghost in my heart, would know the Gospel was true, and  no matter what trials and temptations came my way, I’d have the strength to endure to the end, be a wise virgin, and in the end party with Jesus. 

I think that summarizes how most of us grew up with this parable, at least in some sense.  I think it probably captures how St. Matthew in his Gospel understood it:  it is an allegory on spiritual preparation, with a major emphasis on good works.  And, as far as it goes, that is a good message:  while you’re able, do as much as you can to do good deeds and service, pray, resist temptation, and pray.  That way, you’ll be stronger when bad times come. 

But I wonder if this somewhat conventional morality and works-based spirituality is all there is to the matter of preparation.  You can’t really praise those wise virgins for being so stingy with their oil.  And you have to wonder about the bridegroom: why can’t he cut these poor girls some slack and let them in: he, after all, was the one who was late, not them. 

The Wise and Foolish Virgins, Sadao Watanabe

Most scholars think that this parable as it is told does not go back to the historical Jesus.  It doesn’t have the surprise ending, the edgy point of comparison, the simplicity that we have come to recognize in the parables that clearly come from our Lord in his life.   It is hard to tell what parable of Jesus lies behind this story in Matthew.

Whatever its form, in the life of Jesus, such a story would not have been about what we call the second coming of Jesus.  It would have been about how people reacted to Jesus’ announcing of the Kingdom of God.  It is about decision, not preparation.  That closed door at the end of the story on Jesus’ lips is a symbol saying “Don’t wait until it’s too late.” 

As far as preparation goes, I personally think that those wise ones need to share their oil and their light.  Acts of mercy and kindness are ways that the spirit reveals God. 

The foolish ones need to stay put even with lamps sputtering out, rather than leave in search of oil.  Dry times will come in our spiritual lives, be sure of that.  But be equally sure that leaving and wandering in the night on the off chance of finding a store that is open that might, just might, sell you new batteries, is not a good strategy for dealing with dryness and depleted spiritual life.  Hanging in there and redoubling efforts might be a smarter choice. 

I also think that if we are talking about spiritual preparation, the groom in this story needs to be a little more generous and hospitable for an event that he is late for.   The key is the phrase “I don’t recognize you; I don’t even know who you are. “  

In my same Mormon youth, I was told a story about what it means to be known by God.  It came from the diary of a Mormon pioneer to the South of Utah, the so-called “Dixie Mission,” name Joseph Millet.  In his diary, he tells of an experience of helping a neighbor that happened in 1871: 

“…one of my children came in and said that Brother Newton Hall’s folks were out of bread.  Had none that day.  I put … our flour in sack to send up to [them].  Just then, [he] came in.  Says I, “…[H]ow are you out for flour?”  “Brother Millet, we have none.”  “Well, … there is some in that sack.  I have divided and was going to send it to you.  Your children told mine that you were out.”  Brother Hall began to cry.  Said he had tried others.  Could not get any. Went to the cedars and prayed … and the Lord told him to go to Joseph Millett.  “Well, … you needn’t bring this back if the Lord sent you for it.  You don’t owe me for it.”  You can’t tell me how it made me feel to know that the Lord knew there was such a person as Joseph Millett.”  (as recounted in Eugene England. "Great Books or True Religion," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 9:4 [Winter 1974] 36-49).   

I was once told that something I had done was a direct answer to someone’s prayer.   I suspect that all of you have had similar experiences.   God knows us and loves us all.  We realize this great truth more and more as we act as God’s hands in the word, loving, and serving, and sacrificing ourselves for others.   It’s all about faith, trust, hanging in there, loving others, and never giving up.  

Curtis Mayfield’s song, “People get ready” says it all: 

People get ready, there's a train comin'
You don't need no baggage, you just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin'
You don't need no ticket you just thank the Lord

… There ain't no room for the hopeless sinner

who would hurt anyone just to save his own
Have pity on those whose chances grow thinner
For there is no hiding place from the King on his throne.

I pray that all of us can come to know in our hearts that God knows us and loves us.  Such knowledge is the best preparation of all. 

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

Fire and Flesh (Midweek Message)

Fire and Flesh

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

November 5, 2014

Great 4^th century Desert Father Abba Lot, one day approached Abba Joseph of Panephysis and said to him, “Abba, as far as I can, I say my Little Prayer Office. I fast a little. I pray. I meditate. I live in peace and as far as I can. I purify my thoughts. What else am I to do?” At this, the old man Joseph stood up, stretched his hands towards heaven and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire, and he said to him, “If you will, you can become all flame.”

His point is that all the set disciplines we follow to focus our attention and spiritual energy, all the ordered practices we pursue, all the deeds we accomplish—these can only go so far.  In the words of the frustrated Lot, they remain “little.”  Joseph says that in wholly throwing oneself into God, you become infected with God.  God is light and fire, and so embracing God means bursting into flame.   It is all about not going through the motions only, but giving one’s heart, one’s all. 

George Herbert, in a poem about the priesthood, also used the image of fire for God and contrasted this with our efforts, which he calls “made of clay” and "brittle" rather than “little”:

But thou art fire, sacred and hallow’d fire;

And I but earth and clay: should I presume

To wear thy habit, the severe attire

My slender compositions might consume.

I am both foul and brittle; much unfit                        

To deal in holy Writ.

I start most of my homilies with the prayer “give us hearts of flesh.”   This is not because of some kind of sick crypto-Calvinist belief that our fallen and depraved state requires us to ask God for even basic human feelings.   Far from it:  “hearts of flesh” are exactly the heart God intends in us in creation.  In this prayer, I am praying for all of us, but especially for me.  It is a confession of my need to connect with my feelings in a healthy way, rather than run away from them or stifle them.  Sometimes this can  appear to be as hard for me as breathing under water, given my psychological need to feel in control of my life, and to not show weakness.   Asking God for a heart of flesh is my way of trying to surrender to God, and to start the process of bursting into flame. 

Grace and Peace, 

Fr. Tony+ 

 

Blessed and Beloved (All Saints Day Year A)

 

“Blessed and Beloved”

 November 2012

Solemnity of All Saints (Year A; transferred from Nov. 1)

& Commemoration of All Souls

Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

8:00 a.m. spoken Mass, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Revelation 7:9-17; Psalm 34:1-10, 22; 1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

The Church’s calendar has two Triduum—or three day—liturgies, one in the spring and one in the fall.   The one in the Spring is the greatest feast of the Church, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and then Easter itself.  The fall Triduum—the celebration of All Hallows’ Eve, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day—is much smaller, but seeks to take the promise of the Easter Feast and make it personal to us all, in our shared humanity and shared mortality.   

All Hallows’ Eve is celebrated by the larger community as Halloween.  Its basic message is that though there are many things in the world and in our hearts and imaginations that are truly frightening, we need not fear because God is with us.    All Saints’ celebrates the blessed departed whose lives and witness to the faith were such that we look to them as examples, believe that they are in the presence of God, and hope they are praying for us.   All Souls’ or the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed remembers the larger group of the beloved dead for whom we hope and pray.  As our Prayer Book puts it, “Remember all who died in the peace of Christ, and those whose faith is known to you alone; bring them into the place of eternal joy and light” (p. 375). 

We pray for the dead because it is a natural desire of the human heart, and since ultimately death is such a mystery to us.  Some early Protestants rejected prayers for the dead because they were critical of a corrupt Church’s selling of prayers and sacraments and believed that the dead instantly go to glory or damnation, and that there is little prayer can do to change that.  But the fact is, there are plenty of examples of prayers offered for the dead in the traditional Greek canon of the Christian Bible, as well as Jewish prayers for the dead.   So we pray for the dead, and hope. 

Since it is impossible to know what is inside the human heart, in practice many on All Souls’ remember and pray for all the dead, confident that God wants to save all his creatures, and hopeful that, in the end, God’s love will overcome all our human crankiness and resistance.   Perhaps, just perhaps, all the departed will one day be faithful departed since the faithfulness at issue is God’s, not ours. 

Blessed and beloved: All Saints and All Souls.  But also all of us here:  Blessed and Beloved.  

  

We have had a lot of funerals here at Trinity in the last few weeks.  Death of those we know and love is hard, even when they spell the end of suffering and pain.  Part is the pain of missing the beloved departed.  Part is the pain of being reminded that each and every one of us will die.  Life is terminal; no one gets out alive.  The grim reaper is a specter for most of us because in moments of honest clarity we realize this: despite all our hopes, our doctrines, and our stories of resurrection and rebirth, the only thing we really commonly and publicly know about death is its finality:  when you’re dead, you’re dead, never to come back in any day-to-day sense of the word.  

Conscious beings that we are, we fear oblivion .  And death, as mysterious as it looks, certainly has the semblance of oblivion.  And so we think of it as sleep, even deep sleep, with some kind of dreaming or awakening.  As Shakespeare in Hamlet says,

To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. …

But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered Country, from whose bourn
No Traveler returns, Puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of.

Some people say that the problem of evil—the darkness, atrocity, and horror in life, summed up in sickness and death, the fact that life is terminal—is the reason they cannot believe in the existence of God.   I think, however, that the very fact that evil horrifies us is a sign that there’s something or someone more out there than just what we see before us.   The very fact we cannot conceive of oblivion, not really, is a hint that our consciousness goes beyond our brain functions.  Though dread of horror and fear of death may make us doubt at times the proposition “there is a God,” such feelings actually trigger in us yearning and desire, the basis of giving our heart to, of “beloving” God.

In Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil tells the story of two prisoners in solitary confinement whose cells are next to each other.  A stone wall separates them and they never have seen the other.  But over years, they discover each other’s existence and learn to communicate using taps and scratches.   The very wall that separates them is their sole means of communicating. “It is the same with us and God,” she says. “Every separation is a link.”

Nietszche, that iconic example of godless honesty and will to power and create sense in the meaningless, says that if you stare into the Abyss long enough, the Abyss stares back.  Poet Christian Wiman takes this image further and turns it inside out.  For him, the “Bright Abyss” is God, whom we desperately desire because he is absent, and yet is constantly behind and within that desire.

Horror, sickness, and death are not good, and not what God intends finally for any of us.   That is why they all find themselves redeemed in God’s economy.   The Beatitudes of Jesus we read today all find blessedness in some kind of horror: hunger, poverty, broken hearts.  The Absent God is present in his apparent distance.   And it is in the small hints of grace that we find faith in the underlying goodness and love, and hope in the final saving act:  an affirmed heart after prayer, a glimpse of glory in the Holy Meal shared by brothers and sisters, the luminous beauty of service and the love we share, the example of the saints and the martyrs.  There is another beatitude in scripture:  blessed are those who die in God. 

One of the glories of our faith is that we worship a God who became a human being in all respects, suffered the worst that life can give, even unjust torment and death, and then came back again.  Death did not have the final word.  Randomness and Meaninglessness lost the wager.  That God invites us to follow, to embrace the way of service and love, and even of embracing the suffering of our lives, and redeeming it.  “Take up your cross, and follow me,” he says.  He invites us all to be his witnesses, his martyrs, his saints.  As the prayer book again puts it, may we, in walking the way of the cross, find it none other than the way of life and life. 

 

As part of our prayers this week, I invite us to think about a dearly departed person, whether one of the great saints of the Church, or a dear friend or family member.  Pray for them, and ask to be prayed for by them.  Think of what they prayed for when they were here.  Wonder what they might be praying for now.  If they weren’t churchy, and it is hard to imagine them praying, ask what their hopes and fears were, and what their hearts yearned for, especially when they were at their best.  For yearning is prayer.  And then find a way to start working for that.

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.