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Thursday, November 17, 2011
Full-Circle Faith
Matthew 5:1-12; Revelation 7:9-17
On All Saints' Sunday this year (November 6) our church honored the memory of just two members who had passed on in the past year. Don't get me wrong: By saying just, I don't wish more people had died! It's just that some years we've had close to a dozen roses on the Communion table, each one representing a person who's now "away from the body and at home with the Lord" (2 Corinthians 5:8). This year, just two.
Along with the very visible roses, we honor our saints audibly with a ritual borrowed from the Latin American churches. The pastor leads a brief call-and-response prayer, then states the names of our departed members. After each name, the congregation calls out, "Presente!" It's like a roll-call of the faithful. Each soul is present, we're saying, in two senses: Present with the Lord (see above); and also present in spirit with the church community, which misses their physical presence more than mere words can say.
After the official list has been read, the worshipers get to call out names of others who have died beyond our church's walls. Friends, family members, public figures, who have died recently or even long ago. All of them offered up with gratitude, all received with love in the acclamation, "Presente!"
We call it All Saints' Sunday, and on that day we give special honor to Christians who have left this life and joined what the prayer book calls "the glorious company of the saints in light." Lovely imagery, that; and an apt earthly metaphor for an enormous heavenly truth.
But sainthood isn't just for the dead. Nor is it reserved for certain good souls who outshine the rest of us here and now with their exceptionally holy way of life. Biblical sainthood is the birthright of every man or woman or child who believes in Jesus Christ and belongs to his church. Paul the Apostle addressed most of his letters to churches as "the saints" in such and such a city, including even the Corinthians, whose factionalism was a ticking spiritual time-bomb.
I don't know about you, but that encourages me no end. And it sets me up to appreciate all over again the strange and wonderful surprise blessings Jesus pronounces in the Gospel story we listened to on All Saints' Sunday.
Instead of promising some good new thing coming soon from God, Jesus' blessings assure us that even in the worst of circumstances we are never all alone, unknown, unloved, or forgotten right here and right now by God.
God bless you, he says... God bless you when you're poor, when your heart is broken, when you're powerless, when you so desperately want goodness to win out once and for all that you can virtually taste it!
In the dirt, the pouring rain... in the hurt, the burning pain... in the loneliness, the wishing they'd just leave you alone... in all life's worries and woes...
Sainthood works itself out in real time, in real life. Works itself in, if we'll let it, into our hearts and minds and wills. And then, one day by God's grace our lives might begin to glow a little, with a kind of heavenly light.
Who knows? This all might just be true.
Listen to the GODcast!
posted by Jack Buckley at
4:24 PM
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