St. George's Episcopal Church
Roseburg, Oregon
All Saint's Sunday
6 November 2005
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Revelation 7:9-17
Psalm 34:1-10, 22
1 John 3:1-3
Matthew 5:1-12
The Collect of the Day
From the Revised Common Lectionary as Adapted for Use by the Episcopal Church
and Authorized by the 74 th General Convention of the ECUSA
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (Matthew 5:1-12)
From Lost Faith Come Saints
The Rev. Dr. Bill Stroop, Rector
“O Rosa Parks and Thurgood Marshall, pray for us. O Oscar Romero and Raoul Wallenberg; O Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Medgar Evers, O William Wilberforce, pray for us. O all you whose names we do not know who lived your lives or gave your lives in the struggle for freedom and justice, pray for us that we will be worthy of your sacrifices.
“O four chaplains who chose to die so others might live, and the four little Birmingham girls who did not get to choose, pray for us.
“O Thomas Merton and Dame Julian, O Father Damien and Mother Theresa, O Thomas Beckett and Li Tim-Oi, pray for us. Blessed Augustine of Hippo, pray for us. Blessed Paul, pray for us and help us to pray.
“O Chaucer, O George Herbert and James Joyce, O William Shakespeare, O Gene Roddenberry, O Eugene O’Neill, O Mike Royko, and T.S. Eliot, pray for us and accept our thanks.
“O Hildegard, O Bach, O Vivaldi, O William Byrd and Scott Joplin, O Stravinsky and Gershwin, O Leonard Bernstein, pray for us and accept our thanks.
“O Michelangelo and Picasso, and Rembrandt and DaVinci, O Corot and Turner, O Matisse and Monet, O artists whose hearts were broken and whose names forgotten but whose work lives forever, pray for us and accept our thanks.
“O Louis Pasteur, O William Harvey, O Florence Nightingale, O Albert Schwietzer, O Jonas Salk, O all you who died of diseases that would not have killed you if you had lived today, pray for us. O you who have died of preventable diseases simply because you were poor, pray for us and forgive us.
“O Mom and Dad, pray for us. O Doug who died way too soon, forgive us for not telling you often that we loved you.
We give you thanks, O God, for setting us among the community of the saints, and for allowing the grace they showed in their lives to continue in ours - for in your kingdom, nothing is ever completely lost.”[1]
In God’s kingdom, nothing is ever lost . Catchy phrase. Sounds Biblical, doesn’t it? But how can nothing ever be lost – especially when it comes to the dead? Once we are gone, we’re gone. How can we live on and not become lost? One ancient Indian legend says that one who passes away is never forgotten as long as there is one person who remembers them. I think there is an element of truth there. But I think “living on” is more than mere recollection. It refers to a continued relationship with someone even when that person is no longer with us.
The 1985 movie Enemy Mine illustrates this vividly. At the height of the war between the Dracon and Terran Empires, two military pilots crash in the heat of battle. One, named Willis Davidge, is Terran, and the other, named Jeriba Shigan, is Drac. Each is a repulsive alien to the other. Each is a professional warrior, filled with hatred for his blood enemy. Marooned on a hostile world, they chose to cooperate in order to survive rather than complete their mission of mutual annihilation. In time, they became comrades, friends, and soul mates.
As it turns out, the enemy soldier ‘Jerry’ is carrying his child; it is a situation a little like the sea horse, where the male does the work of carrying the fetus until birth instead of the female. Jerry, weakened to the point of death by childbirth, asks Willis to stand in for him on Jerry’s home planet at a ceremony equivalent to Christian Baptism. What Jerry asks is huge, but Willis agrees, and then learns what he needs to do to ensure that Jerry’s child will be embraced as a Dracon child. And that meant that Willis had to recite from memory the name of every ancestor back to the beginning of the planet. It would be equivalent to extending the genealogical lineage of Jesus provided by Matthew at the beginning of his Gospel all the way back to Adam. But it is by the lineage that the relationship of the child of Willis is acknowledged and celebrated. And in so doing Willis and all of his ancestors are remembered as contributors to a living framework of memory.
The preacher Fred Buechner says that this kind of memory is “more than looking back to a time that is no longer; it is a looking out into another kind of time altogether where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but will grow and change with the life that is within it still.”[2]
So with this kind of memory, all of the people we loved and the people who loved us, the people who taught us for good, or for ill, continue to shape us. And they don’t have to be our blood kin. As they live in our memories, we come to understand them in new ways, just as we come to understand ourselves in new ways too.
These are the saints of our lives. They are not ghosts or echoes of people we once knew. They are alive. Today, as we celebrate all Saints Day, we remember all of the saints, known and unknown to the church, who had things to say to us in the past, and who continue to speak to us now. We bless them for who they were and continue to be. We bless them to God.
Did you ever wonder who Jesus might regard as a saintly person? I would imagine he would count his mother, Mary, and his father Joseph. How about other people? The apostles? Pilate? Judas? The centurion?
Our Gospel reading begins today with Jesus climbing to the top of a mountain. Although it might seem that he was trying to escape the crowds, the text makes it clear that he moved to the mountain top in order to be heard by his disciples – which were not just the twelve, but many people (see Matt 5:1 and 7:28). From the top of the mountain, Jesus speaks the beatitudes with authority (Matt 7:29). The beatitudes give us some insight into who Jesus might honor as saintly spiritual heroes.[3]
In Matthew’s version of the beatitudes, Jesus blesses those who suffer and those who give of themselves. Jesus did not pick out for special recognition the women and men of outstanding moral, spiritual, or humanly character. Instead, Jesus picked the poor. These are the people who have absolutely nothing to give, but everything to gain. Jesus also singled out those who mourn and suffer, not the ones who have the ability to rejoice in the midst of pain. Jesus did not commend the righteous ones, but rather those who hope that they will achieve righteousness someday, and who aware of how far they have to go along that particular path. Jesus did not applaud those who were victorious over evil in the world, but rather those who can see evil in themselves everyday when they look in the mirror, and who are merciful when they see that same evil in others. Jesus does not give kudos to those who have found peace, but rather blesses those who just because they haven’t found peace, struggle to bring it about whenever and wherever they can. They struggle for peace with themselves, peace with their neighbors, and peace with God.
It is important to remember that these sayings of Jesus are not a call to people to become victims. They are really the opposite: They show Jesus extending his blessing to victims. I think that between the lines is the clear expectation that victims will take action to undo their victim hood and claim a life appropriate to Jesus’ blessing. Those who can love their enemy, turn the other cheek, and give up their coat are no longer victims – they are Kingdom people.[4] They are the people I imagine Jesus regarding as saintly.
One individual from modern times who universally comes to mind as a very saintly person is Mother Theresa.[5] Led by a series of visions she experienced in 1946, she ministered tirelessly to the poor and desperately ill until her death in 1997. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 19 October 2003. She is a graphic and very real example of someone who showed us what we can become.
But such saintly behavior can also seem unreachable. It is hard to even try to live up to an ideal which no one could possibly attain. Despite her outward appearance of God-inspired faith, though, Mother Theresa was also someone who suffered tremendous spiritual pain.
Brent Morrison writes that as early as 1958 she wrote “My smile is a great cloak that hides a multitude of pains.” Because of her perpetual good cheer, she felt others believed “[her] faith, [her] hope and [her] love were overflowing and that [her] intimacy with God and [her] union with his will filled [her] heart.” It was not so. She once wrote, “The damned of hell suffer eternal punishment because they experiment with the loss of God. In my own soul, I feel the terrible pain of this loss. “In my soul, I can’t tell you how dark it is, how painful, how terrible – I feel like refusing God.” “I feel that God does not want me, that God is not God and that he does not really exist.” “Where I try to raise my thoughts to heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul. “Love,” she wrote, “means nothing.”
Her words don’t seem terribly saintly, do they? Aren’t saints supposed to be all about faith? Maybe Theresa’s words show us the human quality of a true saint. Despite feelings of being lost and wandering in the arid spiritual desert, she was somehow able to see around her personal doubts and continue to walk the journey, putting one foot in front of the other.
Saints, like Mother Theresa, are not stone, or painted images, or mythic characters that did impossible things. They are human, like you and me. And like all of us, they are loved by God. And perhaps that is what we need to remember most this day. That God loves us even when we are not sure God even exists. God never abandons us. God knows we are human, and knows that those very real human doubts are in part what will draw us closer to God. So do not despair. Even when faith itself is lost, God is always there. God is always with us, beckoning us out of a maelstrom of doubt into the light of God’s grace.
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After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, singing, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.” Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” I said to him, “Sir, you are the one that knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for 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.”
1 I will bless the LORD at all times;
his praise shall continually be in my mouth.
2 My soul makes its boast in the LORD;
let the humble hear and be glad.
3 O magnify the LORD with me,
and let us exalt his name together.
4 I sought the LORD, and he answered me,
and delivered me from all my fears.
5 Look to him, and be radiant;
so your faces shall never be ashamed.
6 This poor soul cried, and was heard by the LORD,
and was saved from every trouble.
7 The angel of the LORD encamps
around those who fear him, and delivers them.
8 O taste and see that the LORD is good;
happy are those who take refuge in him.
9 O fear the LORD, you his holy ones,
for those who fear him have no want.
10 The young lions suffer want and hunger,
but those who seek the LORD lack no good thing.
22 The LORD redeems the life of his servants;
none of those who take refuge in him
will be condemned.
See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord: Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
[1] Litany adapted from Barbara Crafton. “A Partial Litany of the Saints.” The Almost Daily eMo from GeraniumFarm.org. Email accessed 1 November 2005.
[2] Frederick Buechner. “How Do They Live On.” Listening to Your Life. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992. 292.
[3] Frederick Buechner. “Beatitudes.” Listening to Your Life. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992. 256.
[4] Fred B. Craddock, John H. Haynes, Carl R. Holladay, and Gene M. Tucker. Preaching Through the Christian Year: Year A, A Comprehensive Commentary on the Lectionary. Harrisburgh, PA: Trinity Press International, 1992) 525.
[5] Information about Mother Theresa is adapted from Brent Morrison. “Mother Theresa’s Doubts: Newly Released Writings Reveal Secrets” December 2, 2002, downloaded from http://www.brentmorrison.com/021202Mother_Theresas_Faith.htm on 31 October, 2003.
The Mission of St. George’s Episcopal Church is to lead people to love Jesus, and, through worship and scripture, to become empowered as a servant body – to each other, to our community, and to the world. For information about St. George’s Episcopal Church and its life and mission, please contact us at 1024 Southeast Cass Avenue , Roseburg, OR 97470 or by phone at (541) 673-4048 or (541) 680-3465. Contact Bill by email at wgstroop@earthlink.net and visit our church at http://www.roseburgchurch.net |
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Copyright © 2005, William G. Stroop - All Rights Reserved.
3 November 2005
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