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November 2, 2003
John Auer, Pastor
Scripture:
Mark 12:28-31, Ruth 1:14b-18
All Saints Sunday
"Re-member Them: Keep Telling That Old, Old
Story"
Is that a hallowing, harrowing experience, naming our saints, or
what? In a letter I meant to get into the newsletter (It’s now on the
web site.), I confessed, No hymn stirs my passions quite like "For
All the Saints!" It begins with that breath-taking upbeat. I am
never quite sure when to come in. Which feels just like learning to live
a life worthy of the saints! Just where do we come in? Where do we fit
the big picture? They go before us in wisdom and grace. Their lives in
faith touch and shape ours. They allow holiness/wholeness so to live in
them, so to work through them, as to make this a better world for all.
They give us hope. They sustain us. They keep us going.
I remember the first All Saints Sunday of my life. We were already in
seminary. I was a student pastor with this little, loud, loveable and
laudacious congregation on the north side of Chicago, just the first
congregation to teach me everything I know about being the church! Just
before worship was to begin, an elder and saint of the congregation,
Dave Breese, who showed up nearly every day just to see what the church
building might need, literally dropped dead in his home. The pastor in
charge rushed to be with the family. I was left with the service and
sermon.
The congregation saw me through. We already had scheduled for that
day, a filmstrip about the prophets and martyrs of the early church! A
published letter from Fr. Daniel Berrigan, then an
"underground" war-resister! And a walk through the
neighborhood carrying placards with the names of our saints, to the
accompaniment of a bass drum! I hasten to say, our celebration was
unique to that time and place. But we can all be congregations who so
know, so love, and so invite our saints to surround us in brave and
living witness and service, cheering us on in our ways! Please help me
as we go on.
Julie and I simply ran out of time to see the local production by
Brown Eyes Too Spanish Theater of a play called "Dia de los Muertos"
or "The Day of the Dead." The review in the paper begins,
"Americans have an interesting tendency to forget history very
quickly – a trait people of other nationalities disdain. In most
culture, the elderly are respected and revered for their wisdom, and the
dead are gone but never forgotten." It continues in a way speaks to
our celebration today: "The story focuses on the ancient idea that
everyone dies three deaths. The first death occurs with the physical
body, the second occurs when the soul leaves the body, and the third
death occurs when the remaining loved ones have finally forgotten them.
The point of the Dia de los Muertos celebration is that the final death
never occurs. . . ." Is that not the hope of All Saints Sunday as
well?
I hope we will see all of November as a month of Thanksgiving for the
harvesting of the s/ages, not only the saints, but the elders of life
and of faith, the veterans of war and of peace, who go before us even
now, making a way through this world for us, as we "re-member
them." I even propose we consider making our Fellowship Hall a Hall
of Saints and Elders! Next Sunday we acknowledge our elders and
veterans. Two weeks from today Margaret Westhafer will remind us of the
many memorial contributions in the names of saints to our building.
There is a Senior Forum November 18 and Thanksgiving Eve Worship at St.
Thomas. In all ways, let us re-member and give thanks!
Sometimes we have to begin by forgiving our saints for dying on us.
For leaving us here without them in the flesh. For saints are folks we
are never quite done with yet! They leave us wanting more. Carter
Heyward says forgiving is not forgetting but re-membering, piecing back
together, in new and different ways, as much and as far back as we can
bear of all that has been broken and lost to us. Re-membering is not
just a personal cognitive act but a communal creative one. Jesus’
desire for us in the Eucharist, the act of thanksgiving in communion
with all the saints, is that we eat and drink of his body, his blood,
his life, his love, his justice, his joy, as a way of "re-membering"
him, of piecing him back together again, making him present in us and to
us, with us and through us, for others and for the whole world!
Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker hospitality movement,
wants saints to remain real and vital, fully available, freely
accessible to us. She would say of herself, "Don’t call me a
saint, I don’t want to be dismissed that easily!" There are
nearly 200 Catholic Worker houses in the world today. (I know someone
who wants to start one in Reno!) ( www.catholicworker.org.) They refuse to claim tax-exempt status, so as not to be
beholden to government. Many are tax-resisters. Their monthly paper
still sells for a penny. No work, no offering of the saints is too
small, too insignificant to be re-membered, says Dorothy Day, --
"Paperwork, cleaning the house, cooking the meals, dealing with
innumerable visitors who come all through the day, answering the phone,
keeping patience and acting intelligently, which is to find some meaning
in all those encounters – these things, too, are the works of peace
and often seem like a very little way."
I commend to us all a book by Robert Ellsberg entitled All Saints:
Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time. Blurbs
on the book tell us what all the saints are about: "A vigorous
cloud of witnesses – mystics, martyrs, social activists, artists,
writers, composers – who do what all saints do: mediate the many
surprising ways in which grace makes discipleship possible!"
"Human goodness as it has been tested by life!" (Our sister
Erin Breen wrote in the paper this week of a living saint in her life.
She helped me see how saints connect the heroic with the humble in us.)
The book blurbs go on: "We do not have to search far for heroes and
saints. They are in our midst. Some have been canonized, many have not
been; many will never be." (Who’s in the process of being
canonized now? Mother Teresa has reached the stage of beatification!
That is, a serious living out of Jesus’ Beatitudes in the Sermon on
the Mount!) "What brings them all together is love of God and love
of neighbor, high ideals and a willingness to sacrifice self for
others!" Hark! Echoes of the very gospel story for this morning!
Ellsberg begins his "Introduction" in a way we can much
appreciate here: "I have spent a good deal of time on Sunday
mornings contemplating the stained-glass windows of my parish church. .
. . They are a reminder that those who gather to worship God in the name
of Jesus are never alone! There is a wider ‘communion of saints’
that unites believers across all boundaries of time and space, even
across such a boundary as divides this world from the next!" We
might add to contemplation of our magnificent windows the children’s
faces in the "Hallelujah Arch" above the chancel window!
As I think about this "wider communion . . . across all
boundaries" in this much-divided world, I begin to grasp that,
while limits and boundaries hold a good and needed place in our
interpersonal relationships, we live in a world without borders! Believe
it? Hey, we’ve seen it! Remember those photographs from the moon? We’ve
seen the earth as God does, as God creates it to be, without borders!
Then as I read in the paper this week that even the bold and brave group
called "Doctors Without Borders" may have to withdraw their
witness and service from Iraq because the occupying forces cannot, or
will not, protect them, I thought to look up on the World Wide Web
everything under "Without Borders."
I found, first, a site called "Action Without Borders,"
listing opportunities to volunteer "to help build a new
world," everywhere! I went on to find sites for, Doctors Without
Borders! Engineers Without Borders! Teachers Without Borders!
Grantmakers Without Borders! Builders Without Borders! Reporters Without
Borders! Are we beginning to get the picture? Artists Without Borders!
Lawyers Without Borders! Geeks Without Borders! Nursing Students Without
Borders! And my own personal favorite, Botanical Therapeutics for Real
Medicine Without Borders! And suddenly I am thinking, these are the
saints! These are the saint-groups of our time. Risking such foolishness
of communion in and for such a divided world. Then, thank God, at last,
I found Church Without Borders!
It’s based in San Diego. I don’t know how the terrible fires may
have changed their plans this week. Church Without Borders was supposed
to be part of a huge organizing event called "The Border
Pilgrimage," departing last Sunday for a "Border
Convocation" in El Paso on All Hallows Eve, Friday. It was to
include the "Border Angels" of San Diego and "Healing Our
Borders" of Tucson, who create "water stations" in the
desert to try to keep migrants from Mexico alive. What they call there,
simply, starkly, "The Wall," a 66-mile barricade that starts
in the Tijuana-San Diego Bay of the Pacific, now is covered with white
crosses, some with names, others reading "No Identificado,"
for the estimated 2300 persons who have died in border-crossings the
past eight years! This very day, All Saints Sunday, this Day of the
Dead, in El Paso, "Catholics on each side of the Mexico-U.S. border
will push tables against a common fence to form one altar. Bishops from
both nations – separated by wall and wire – will concelebrate a
Mass." (National Catholic Reporter, Sept. 19)
Finally, it really hit me! Who are the saints, if not those who live
without borders?! And no, we are not talking mega-bookstores here! It’s
not that the saints are without limits, without failings, without
boundaries, of course. But saints may be without borders! Saints may be
those who will not let, literally, "things of this world,"
come between them and love of God, love of neighbor! And who more
powerfully, more enduringly, lives a life out of love without borders
than Ruth in this story from Hebrew scripture? Ruth who refuses to
accept any arbitrary and artificial distinctions and divisions between
and among us?
Ruth who insists that long-lasting life and love is possible between
and among any two persons, any two peoples, irrespective of gender, age,
color, class, condition, nation, language, or even creed? "Where
you go, I will go! Where you lodge, I will lodge! Your people will be my
people. Your God will be my God." Have we not seen the recent film
"My Big Fat Greek Wedding?" Where a generic WASP from
Wisconsin becomes Greek? Out of love? Who says love is dead? It’s
stronger than ever, thank God, and it’s changing our churches to prove
it! Love is changing the church. Love is the only thing that can change
the church! It’s all about new ways of telling "that old, old
story, of Jesus and his love." Is it not?
Those who are joining the church today (Thank God!) know, even as a
wedding gives way to a marriage, it is an easy thing to get into the
church, a harder thing to stay in it. And with the United Methodist
Church, at least, an even harder thing to get out of it! We face some
stressful times ahead, just by virtue of who all we are as a people of
faith. We are so complex as persons of faith, we are so diverse as
peoples of faith. Not only in our congregation, our conference and our
connection, but throughout the one church of Jesus Christ and all of the
great faith traditions! We desperately need all our saints, who surround
us now, cheering us on, because their lives are complete, because they
see clearly now, face-to-face, no longer dimly, as through a mirror, to
help us let light and let love of God and neighbor a little more fully,
a little more freely, into our lives and our life together each day. We
need to hope our United Methodist Church’s vision can move from
"Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors," as we say now, to
"Open Arms, Open Orders, Open Borders" as well.
We need a strong, living sense of the tradition in which and in whom
our saints stand and hand on to us. That is what makes Jesus’ answer
here so surprising. We expect something brand-new and revolutionary from
him. He draws upon the very creed, the "Shema" of Israel!
Which is given in Deuteronomy 6 as, what? As preparation for crossing
borders! For passing into the promised land. We need our creeds. We need
to bump up against them, even with all their rough places. We need to
say our creeds loudly and boldly, albeit at times with what my mother
calls "a stiff upper lip."
And we need to keep our creeds in some way before our children, our
saints in-formation. How are our children to know of the saints and the
elders? Deuteronomy tells us to engrave the words on our hearts! To
repeat them over and over again to our children! At home and at travel.
When we lie down and when we rise up. To brand them on our hands. To
keep them always before our eyes. To chisel them into our doorposts and
into our city gates. Think that won’t inspire a lawsuit or two? Never
forgetting to tell what God has done for us. Does not Mao say somewhere,
we are to fill our reactionary structures with revolutionary content?
Think he means our creeds?
Of course, when we were Unitarians, we used to joke that we could not
sing hymns because we had to read ahead to see if we agreed with the
next line! Creeds feel like that sometimes. (Are any of the three or
more "amigos" here? I am asking you now to help us sing with
guitars the Nicene Creed at Christmas!) Creeds are part of the tradition
we bear, part of the burden, the witness, the service we bear to be
responsible for the whole of our church. The saints are those who now
see, thank God, it takes all of us to be the church! It takes all of us
to be the world. It takes all of us to be the earth, the creation
herself.
Hear, O Church! The Lord our God is one! Let us love all of God,
heart and soul, mind and strength, without borders! Let us love all of
God’s children, all of our neighbors, even as all of the parts of
ourselves, without borders! And let the Church Without Borders say,
Amen!
John Auer, Pastor
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