This is a reblog from my friend and colleague in the Utica Presbytery, Rev. Herb Swanson. Herb is the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Lowville, NY. He previously spent 25 years working in Thailand where he was fostering greater understanding and dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism.
Here is an excerpt:
That’s worth thinking about—being a follower of Jesus but not a Christian. That’s what Paul was. Peter and the other disciples all died before there was a Christian religion. They followed Jesus while remaining devout, practicing Jews. One of the things that seems to be happening in our increasingly secular society is that small groups of followers of Jesus are reinventing the church in ways that make more sense in the 21st century than do traditional churches. Maybe something we should be aiming for is to be more Christ-like and less Christian. Worth a thought.
A middle aged man goes to see his doctor for a physical. At the end of the examination, he asks, “Well Doc, do you think I’ll live to be a hundred years old?”
“Let’s see,” the doctor said, “do you smoke?”
“No,” the man said, “absolutely not. Never.”
Doc: “OK then, do you drink?”
Man: “Not a single drop in my entire life.”
Doc: “Do you eat a lot of sugary or fatty foods?”
Man: “No way! I’ve always been very careful about what I eat.”
Doc: “Do you drive very fast?”
Man: “Never! I always drive 5 miles an hour below the speed limit, just to be sure.”
Doc: “I don’t quite know how to ask this one, but have you had a lot of girlfriends?”
Man: “Absolutely not. I’m celibate and I’ve been celibate for my entire life.”
Doc: “Then why on earth would you want to live to be a hundred?!”
Why indeed. You and I live in a culture that has mastered the art of denying death. Everything from anti-aging cream to plastic surgery is designed to keep us from facing the reality of our own mortality. Consumer advertising and commercial television keeps us distracted from thinking about death until we absolutely cannot avoid it anymore. At that point, if we so choose, they can give us drugs that will “make us as comfortable as possible,” effectively tuning us out until our bodies stop functioning. Our culture’s goal, it would seem, is to first ignore and finally numb the dying process so that we won’t ever have to come to grips with it.
Of course, the wisest among us don’t wait until that point to reflect upon their own mortality. They find their own way to accept it and even make peace with it. For these people, thinking about death doesn’t have to be something dark or morbid. In fact, it can give their lives a sense of meaning and purpose. People who know and accept the fact that they are going to die live with a conscious awareness that they have a finite amount of time on this earth and it’s up to them to make the most of it.
If you knew that you only had a week, month, or year to live, how would you choose to spend that time? What do you want your life to stand for? When other people look back at your life, what would you want them to remember about you? These are the questions that a wise person asks in the face of mortality.
When we accept that this life will not last forever, we realize that it cannot be an end in itself. Like the man in the joke, we have to ask ourselves: what’s the point of living to be a hundred years old if all you’re going to do is eat Brussels sprouts? The truly wise among us realize that life cannot last forever, therefore the truly wise among us also realize that each life must be lived for something larger than itself. Every mortal life, it seems, is a means to an end.
In spite of our culture’s death-denying attempts to distract or numb us, each of us has probably known, met, or heard about at least one person who made his or her mortal life meaningful by dedicating it to something larger than himself or herself. We tend to respect or admire such people when we meet them. Their examples might even inspire us to look more deeply at our own lives, face our mortality in new ways, and discover meaningful possibilities within us that we hadn’t noticed before. It’s a beautiful thing when that happens.
However, it’s at this point that our cultural programming kicks back in and tends to shut us off toward the next step in our development. Our culture is so individualistic that we don’t even think about the larger social bodies of which we are a part. We tend to stop with ourselves and not notice how it is that an awareness of mortality applies to larger realities.
People are mortal. We know that. We accept that fact, at least theoretically, even if we choose to ignore it for our entire lives. However, not many of us stop to think about other things that share our mortality. These things might last much longer than we do, but they too will one day fade from existence. Families are mortal. Surnames and lineages come to an end through a lack of offspring. Churches and other faith communities are mortal. There comes a point when dwindling membership and a lack of funds causes an institution to close its doors. The same thing is true of entire religions at large. There are very few people on this planet who continue to worship the gods of Mount Olympus in the same way that they were worshiped by Greeks in centuries past. Nations are mortal. The Roman Empire was once the dominant superpower in the world, unlike anything else that had come before it. Where is the great Roman Empire today? Buried under the rubble of history and preserved in ruins frequented by tourists in Bermuda shorts. Species are mortal. Dinosaurs no longer roam the earth like they did 65 million years ago. Finally, even the planets and stars are mortal. One day, our very own sun will burn up all of its hydrogen fuel and explode into a violent supernova, momentarily becoming the brightest star in some distant sky.
If coming to grips with our own individual mortality is difficult, accepting the mortality of families, churches, species, and stars feels almost impossible. Yet, the same truth applies to these larger mortal beings that first applied to mortal human beings: it is in facing mortality that we find meaning.
Let’s look at this idea in relation to this morning’s reading from Mark’s gospel. The story opens as Jesus and his disciples are leaving the great Jerusalem temple, the epicenter of Jewish worship in the first century CE. Jesus, as usual, is walking away from yet another fight with the established religious leaders of his day. In the previous chapter, chapter 12, you can read about Jesus butting heads with representatives from almost every major Jewish sect and community: Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, and temple scribes. The conflict between Jesus and the organized religion of his day had reached such a boiling point that Jesus, in his frustration, was about ready to give up on it. When this morning’s passage opens with him leaving the temple, he’s not just out for a stroll, he’s right in the middle of storming out in a huff.
It’s at this point that Jesus’ disciples, in their usual tactless and somewhat dimwitted manner, decide to stop and admire the lovely architecture of this religious icon and national monument of Judaism. They say of the temple, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” Jesus is unimpressed. He says, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”
He’s talking about mortality of the temple: this central symbol of religious and national identity for the Jewish people. They were under the impression that this sacred building would stand forever under divine protection. For them, the temple was immortal. It was an end in itself as a center of worship. The idea had never occurred to them that it might not be there one day.
As it turns out, Jesus’ prediction was spot-on. The Jerusalem temple, like any human being, was mortal. It was eventually burned to the ground by the Romans during an uprising in the year 70 CE. It was never rebuilt. The site where it once stood is now occupied by the Dome of the Rock, one of the most sacred places in Islamic religion.
The destruction of the temple was unthinkable to the average Jew, but to Jesus it was inevitable. The wisdom of Jesus did not stop with an awareness of his own individual mortality, but extended to embrace the mortal and finite nature of all things. Just as it was for individuals, so it is for temples, religions, countries, species, planets, and stars: to face mortality is to find meaning.
If our great struggle in life is limited to ensuring the continued existence of particular people, places, institutions, or things, then we have already doomed ourselves to failure. Nothing lasts forever. We need to accept that. What Jesus said about the Jerusalem temple, we could say about anything: ““Do you see these? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” All things are mortal.
The sooner we realize this truth, the sooner we can get on with the business of asking the really important questions about existence in reality. Concerning our individual selves, we can ask: “What am I living for? What will people remember about me when I’m gone? What will be my lasting contribution to the world around me or the universe as a whole? What is the meaning of my life?”
We can ask these same questions about our mortal families or this mortal country. The day will come when the United States, like the Roman Empire, will only exist as a chapter in a history book. Accepting the inevitability of this fact, we need to ask ourselves as Americans: “When that day comes, what will that chapter say?”
As Christians, we can also ask these same questions about our church, our denomination, and our religion as a whole. We need to get over this ego-centric idea that God will protect and preserve us from our own collective mortality. Just look at the way Christianity itself has changed over the last two thousand years. We shouldn’t kid ourselves into thinking that the Christianity we practice is identical in faith and form to the Christianity practiced by the Apostle Paul or St. Augustine of Hippo. We identify ourselves as Presbyterians, but if John Knox and John Calvin (the founders of Presbyterianism) were sitting in this church right now, they would be horrified by much of what they would see. Likewise, if a Christian from the year 2412 were to time travel into this sanctuary right now, that person’s faith would likely seem so foreign to us that we wouldn’t even want to call it ‘Christian’ at all. Just as Paul and Calvin have shaped us, our faith will shape the future long after we are gone and the pressing crises of our era have ceased to be relevant concerns. What will be our lasting contribution to that future?
Finally, as members of this church, I think we need to ask these questions about our mortal congregation. This little church has been in Boonville for over two hundred years. We take great pride in our history and our building. Maintaining the integrity and beauty of this place is a chief concern for many people in this room. But all of us together need to hear Jesus saying to us what he said about his own temple: “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” This place, this building, and this congregation are all mortal. They will not last forever. “All will be thrown down,” as Jesus said. If our only motivation in coming here week after week is to keep the doors open and the lights on, then we’ve already failed. We’re like the man in the joke at the beginning of this sermon: we have no reason to live for another hundred years. Wise individuals live with a conscious awareness of their inevitable death and then adjust their lives accordingly, so as to make them as rich and meaningful as possible. It is no different with wise churches.
This church will die eventually. Whether it’s in ten years or another hundred years, it will happen. We need to remember that. We need to embrace that truth for ourselves so that we, as a church, can make the most of the time we’ve been given right now. Knowing that this church will one day die and “not one stone will be left here upon another,” we need to ask ourselves, “Why are we here? What is this church living for? What will be our lasting contribution to the life of this community after our doors are closed and our lights shut off forever? What is the meaning of our life together, as a church?” Those are the real questions that we need to be asking, not just once for a special project or a mission study, but continually. We need to set these questions before our eyes like a carrot dangling in front of a horse during a race. These are the questions that need to drive us, propel us, or perhaps lure us forward into the future.
As we explore these questions within the conscious awareness of our church’s impending death (whenever that will happen), I believe we’ll start to see a slow-motion miracle in progress. Even as we are facing and embracing death, I believe that we will also start to experience a kind of resurrection. It’s been my experience and observation that the most vibrant, active, and growing churches are the ones who have found their reason for being, the meaning of their existence, outside themselves. These churches are passionate about spiritual growth and community service. Their members gather together, Sunday after Sunday, not to maintain what they have, but to seek what they desire. There is a yearning deep within such people for “something more.” They are hungry for silence, prayer, scripture, and sacrament. They long to deepen their connection with the sacred mystery of divine love. This love, in turn, leads them out, away from the church and into the streets of this community where love demands to be shared with hurting people through compassionate word and deed. This is my vision of a church that faces mortality and finds meaning. When the day comes that “not one stone will be left here upon another,” such a church will live on in a state of resurrection, even if our doors are closed, our lights shut off, and our roof caved in. Even then, even if our church dies, it will live.
As a church, as individuals, as a country, and as a species, may we be people who live with a consciousness of death. May we face mortality and find meaning. In the midst of these piles of rubble, where stones have been thrown down from the broken remnants of our sacred temples, may we walk together the path of our own, continual, slow-motion resurrection, following in the footsteps of the Living Christ, the Risen One in our midst, the faithful friend who abides with us and guides us on our way.
Jon Kabat-Zinn. Photo by Mari Smith. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.
Some weeks, when you’re writing sermons, you have to do a little extra research. Usually, this involves a trip to library to find a particular biblical commentary or an article in a scholarly journal, but this week, my “extra research” involved digging around in old boxes of lost junk and VHS tapes in order to find a John Travolta movie. The movie I was looking for is from 1996. It’s called Michael and it stars Travolta as an angel sent from heaven to help two people find true love.
All in all, John Travolta plays a rather un-angelic angel. He smokes cigarettes, curses like a sailor, and starts fights in bars. He has wings, but no halo. When someone asks him why he doesn’t fit the stereotypical angelic image, he simply responds, “I’m not that kind of angel.” However, in spite of his rough appearance, Travolta’s Michael is the real deal. He offers these occasional moments of insight and wisdom that just blow your mind.
One such moment comes when Michael confronts another character and indicates that he is aware that she has ulterior motives regarding a certain situation. Stunned and thinking that he must have the ability to read minds, she asks him, “How could you possibly know that?” His brilliant response: “I pay attention.”
Paying attention is almost always good advice, whether you’re an angel on a mission, a hunter in a tree stand, or driving a car. It also happens to be, in my opinion, essential to a healthy spiritual life. In fact, I don’t think it would be wrong at all to say that spirituality itself is mainly an exercise in paying attention.
There are those who would disagree with me on this. They might say that spirituality is about “getting God into your life”. While I can respect that metaphor, I don’t really see God as a person who walks around, into, and out of things. For me, God is that ultimate reality in which we all “live, and move, and have our being” (as the apostle Paul says in the book of Acts). That’s why I think spirituality is all about paying attention to the God who is already here: around you and within you, revealed in the stuff of everyday life.
I can see hints that Jesus himself perhaps thought of God in this way. Whenever people asked him to describe his ideas about God or God’s vision for the destiny of the world, Jesus used metaphors from everyday life: a woman baking bread, a farmer sowing seed, crops growing, birds nesting, and parents loving their kids. For Jesus, God was not an abstract philosophical concept, but an intimate and loving presence that knows us better than we know ourselves and “is closer to us than our own hearts” (Augustine). In order to reflect this intimacy, Jesus most often referred to God as “Abba”, a Hebrew word that technically means “Father” but could more accurately be translated as “Daddy”. Even today, little Israeli kids call their dads “Abba”. Jesus’ preference for this term was meant to make a point: he saw God as his Father, but not in a specifically male or authoritative sense. For Jesus, God as Father is “Abba”, “Daddy”: the intimate and affectionate presence of unconditional love and care in the universe. And it is through the regular, everyday stuff of the universe that this presence is made known to us. Therefore, according to Jesus, it’s important to pay attention to the little details and patterns of life.
If we know where to look, we can see Jesus leading by example in this regard all through the gospels. We read about the times when he stepped away from the crowds in order to pray or meditate. We can hear it in the sermon on the mount and in his many parables. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus’ capacity for paying attention fuels his insight into human nature and empowers his criticism of the pious powers that be. As usual, this passage opens with Jesus confronting educated religious leaders. Most commentaries and sermons on this passage focus on Jesus as the social critic who exposes hypocrisy among the religious elite. What I want to focus on today is the spiritual stance that allowed Jesus to become such an erudite critic of society.
The phrase that struck me as I was preparing for this sermon comes in verse 41: “[Jesus] sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury.” He sat down and watched. You’d be amazed at how much you can learn by just sitting and watching. In this world of high speed downloads from the information superhighway, most people are slowly losing their patience for the learning process. We think education is just a matter of filling a person’s brain with pieces of data as quickly and efficiently as possible, but there’s something important that comes in the way we acquire and assimilate information.
When the famous scientist Jane Goodall was a little girl (about four years old), she wanted to know where chicken eggs came from, so she made her way into a chicken coop, sat down, and watched patiently for several hours on end. Eventually, she got to see a chicken laying an egg. As an adult, she made use of that same patience in the hills of Gombe, Tanzania, where she revolutionized the study of chimpanzees in the wild. Her study method was the same as the one she used in the chicken coop as a kid: sit down and watch.
This time, it took her six months to get close enough for contact and real learning. Most of the established scientists at that time criticized Goodall’s amateurish methods. She named the chimps, rather than number them. She preferred to pay attention to her test subjects in their natural environment, rather than take them back to a laboratory and analyze them. Her fellow scientists were certain that such unorthodox methods could never yield real scientific results. However, it was Goodall’s “sit down and watch” approach that changed the way we think about chimpanzees. She was the first to observe their behavior in groups, their use of tools, their expressions of emotion, and their practice of organized warfare. In time, she even won the acceptance of the chimpanzee tribe, simply by sitting and watching. They eventually came to her and began interacting with her up-close on a voluntary basis. Much of what we now know about these animals comes from Jane Goodall just sitting and watching, against the advice of other, more established scientists.
There was even a spiritual benefit to her sitting and watching discipline. The relationship she nurtured with the natural world in Gombe shaped her relationship with the Divine. Although she is not religious in any traditional sense, Jane Goodall has a very deep awareness of the same intimate presence that Jesus talked about. She says, “I don’t have any idea of who or what God is. But I do believe in some great spiritual power. I don’t know what to call it. I feel it particularly when I’m out in nature. It’s just something that’s bigger and stronger than what I am or what anybody is. I feel it. And it’s enough for me.”
Jane Goodall’s practice of sitting and watching revolutionized her own spirituality and the study of chimpanzees. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus’ similar practice of sitting and watching placed him exactly where he needed to be in order to gain a very specific insight into human nature and the subject of generosity. He was in the right spot at the right time to notice something that everyone else had overlooked. Loyal Jews were probably going in and out of the treasury all day, leaving their offerings for the priests and temple maintenance. Well-known and wealthy sponsors were recognized for their substantial contributions. On a purely practical level, their large donations mattered more than the many small donations that were often left anonymously. Among the smallest of these small donations would have been the two copper coins left by a woman who had lost everything and was, by ancient standards, of little importance to anyone. Jesus, sitting and watching, understood the significance of her gift. When viewed in terms of actual numbers, her donation was trivial. But when viewed in terms of percentages, it was huge. Two pennies to her was a larger percentage of her income than two thousand dollars would have been to the super rich philanthropists whose contributions kept the temple running. But Jesus, sitting and watching, was the only one in a position to notice and realize the significance of this woman’s gift. Jesus paid attention. He saw what no one else would see, therefore he knew what no one else could know. After sitting and watching, he walked away with more insight about the nature of generosity than any of the hypocritical scribes and Torah scholars who worked there every day. Sitting, watching, and paying attention provided Jesus with fuel for championing the cause of poor and outcast people. Sitting, watching, and paying attention exposed the corruption and hypocrisy that lurked just below the surface of Jesus’ polite and religious society. Sitting, watching, and paying attention allowed Jesus to see the hand of God at work in his life and the world at large. His vision of what this world could and should be was shaped by the simple practice of sitting, watching, and paying attention.
One of my favorite contemporary teachers of the art of paying attention is a man named Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn. Dr. Kabat-Zinn is the person who first introduced the practice of eastern meditation to the practice of western medicine. His word for “paying attention” is mindfulness. He writes:
With our cell phones and wireless palm devices, we are now able to be so connected that we can be in touch with anyone and everyone at any time, do business anywhere. But have you noticed that, in the process, we run the risk of never being in touch with ourselves? In the overall seduction, we can easily forget that our primary connection to life is through our own interiority — the experiencing of our own body and all our senses, including the mind, which allow us to touch and be touched by the world, and to act appropriately in response to it. And for that, we need moments that are not filled with anything, in which we do not jump to get in one more phone call or send one more e-mail, or plan one more event, or add to our to-do list, even if we can. Moments of reflection, of mulling, of thinking things over, of thoughtfulness.
What Jon Kabat-Zinn is asking is this: is there any regular time in your day when you set aside moments for just sitting and watching or paying attention? Such moments can open you up to the kind of transformative insights that Jesus and Jane Goodall derived from their respective practices of mindfulness. It may feel like time wasted, but it is really essential for productivity and creativity. Even if it’s just a few minutes of quiet with your coffee before the kids get up, make use of it. Don’t try to fill that space with radio, TV, or reading. We get enough information coming into our heads all day. Let this be a time for being not doing. Although Jon Kabat-Zinn hesitates to use this term, I have no problem calling it spiritual. Through the regular practice of paying attention, we are able to nurture our conscious connection with ourselves, with the world around us, and with God.
Try it sometime. Just sit for a few minutes. Watch. Pay attention. The insights you gain from this act of mindful observing may be about the world (like they were for Jesus), they might be about God, or they might be about yourself. Given time and regular practice, you’ll begin to notice what other people pass by, just like Jesus did with the widow and her two coins. If you let them, these insights of stillness have the capacity to transform you into a wiser, more aware, more peaceful, and more compassionate person. In short, you become more Christ-like. As people of faith, especially as those who identify as Christian, we need more of this kind of inner transformation in our lives. We need to be more like Jesus.
Jon Kabat-Zinn sums up the importance of this task nicely in his own words:
It is the challenge of this era to stay sane in an increasingly insane world. How are we ever going to do it if we are continually caught up in the chatter of our own minds and the bewilderment of feeling lost or isolated or out of touch with what it all means and with who we really are when all the doing and accomplishing is sensed as being in some way empty, and we realize how short life is? Ultimately, it is only love that can give us insight into what is real and what is important. And so, a radical act of love makes sense—love for life and for the emergence of one’s truest self.
Today, I’d like to take the DeLorean back to 1998 and share with you this recently rediscovered gem from my college years. Sadly, the religiously self-involved 19 year old version of me was unable to appreciate how deep this song is. If you’re in college now, you’re too young to remember when this came out.
I grew up on the border between Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. These towns are both major international centers for medical research and educational advancement, but that’s not what they’re known for. No, the main thing that Durham and Chapel Hill are known for is college basketball. The college basketball rivalry between the Duke Blue Devils and the UNC Tarheels is one of epic proportions. Every year, these teams battle each other with bitter ferocity. No matter the outcome of the game, everyone knew to steer clear of Franklin Street in downtown Chapel Hill. The next morning, it would be completely trashed. Everyone in town had their team, whether they were interested in basketball or not. You were either a Carolina fan or a Duke fan. There was no two ways about it. If we knew a family where one child went to Duke and the other went to UNC, we called it a broken home. People in Durham and Chapel Hill go crazy over their college basketball. Even at church, you could always tell when the NCAA Final Four was happening because the place would be empty. I guess people know where their priorities lie. It’s kind of crazy when you think about it: two towns divided and their streets trashed, all because one team managed to throw a ball through a hoop more often than the other team. People divide themselves over the strangest little things.
As many of you know, this Tuesday is Election Day and we can expect a lot of divisive language around that subject as well. Like many of you, I am looking forward to being rid of all the yard signs, the sloganeering, the attack ads, the mudslinging, and the propaganda trying to convince me that one candidate is a savior while the other one is a demon. Election season makes me miss those good old days when TV commercials weren’t trying to save the country; they were just trying to get you to spend money you don’t have to buy junk you don’t need.
What bothers me about the rhetoric in these ads is the way it makes us seem so hostile and feel so divided against one another. If one were to accept everything in these ads at face value, one might think that this country was on the brink of another Civil War. But we know that’s not the case. In spite of everything, a rare and remarkable thing will happen this Tuesday: people will line up peacefully and politely to cast their votes and shape the future of this country. There will be no bombs or rifle fire. The loser of this presidential election will not face execution. The supporters of the losing party will not be rounded up, exiled from the country, or imprisoned in forced labor camps. That isn’t going to happen here on Tuesday. There are places in this world where such things do happen, even today. Voting, in some countries, is an exercise in taking your life into your hands. There are some countries where transitions in government happen only once a generation, when the incumbent president is either arrested or assassinated. Thankfully, that doesn’t happen here. We live in a place where political change happens frequently and peacefully. So, I think we should be careful before using violent and slanderous labels like ‘cult leader and ‘socialist’ when we’re describing a candidate whose views we disagree with. Jim Jones and David Koresh were cult leaders, Mitt Romney is not. Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse Tung were socialists, Barack Obama is not. Real cult leaders and socialists have slaughtered millions in the name of religion and ideology. Neither of these candidates has done such a thing. Therefore, it is morally offensive to call them these names. Whatever your views and however you vote, do it with peace and goodwill in your heart. Inoculate yourself against the toxin of incivility that poisons our public discourse. However you vote, vote with love in your heart. That’s what it means to vote as a Christian.
We human beings seem to have an innate tendency toward division and hostility. It doesn’t just come out during election years and sporting events. We divide ourselves over race, religion, gender, nationality, and beer preference. It seems that there’s something inside each and every one of us that longs to belong to some kind of community. As they say, “birds of a feather flock together,” so we often organize ourselves into small groups with others who look like us, talk like us, dress like us, think like us, vote like us, and worship like us. We do this because we feel lost in the cosmos. We perceive ourselves to be, in some sense, alone in this world. Above all, we fear the ultimate loneliness of death, which threatens to inevitably swallow us up into dark oblivion. That’s why, in our time here on earth, part of our survival instinct is a herd instinct. We want to fight the darkness, death, and loneliness. So we find some kind of object to rally around as groups: our family, race, sports team, religion, political party, or country. Each group competes with the others to win, to survive in the great contest of existence. On the one hand, we experience a great sense of purpose and solidarity from these groups, but on the other hand, they also form the basis for our hostility and hate toward one another. We think we have to beat the best in order to be the best. Subconsciously, our primal instincts are telling us that our very survival depends on the victory of our little group over its competitors. If the others win, so we think, the darkness, death, and loneliness will conquer us all.
The fact that our species has evolved to think this way is understandable, but still wrong, in my opinion. I think our fear of darkness, death, and loneliness has blinded us to a much deeper and much older truth about who we are and how it is that we’re connected to each other, to the universe, and ultimately to God. I’d like to share with you what I believe about that truth.
Today, we are celebrating the Feast of All Saints. This holiday has been celebrated by Christians for over 1,400 years as a festival to remember heroes of the faith from generations past. In some churches, this remembrance has been limited to a special class of people who have been named “saints” by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. In churches like ours, we use the term “saint” more broadly. Presbyterians have always believed that every person is a saint in his or her own way. Of course, there are always those people who we remember with special fondness and admiration, but we don’t have to wait for some church committee to decide on their spiritual status in heaven. Moreover, we include ourselves in that number. Saints don’t have to be dead people. The Communion of Saints contains all God’s people, living or dead, from every time, place, people, and language. Most importantly of all, we are not admitted to the Communion of Saints because we’ve led some kind of spiritually or morally heroic life. No, we believe that everyone is a saint by God’s grace and God’s grace alone. Not a single one of us has earned our place in the Communion of Saints. Each of us, from the greatest to the least, from the best to the worst, is a member of this worldwide family as a free gift. This community, this family that transcends time and space, is the reality that we celebrate on the Feast of All Saints. This, I believe, is the great and mysterious truth that shows us who we are and how it is that we’re connected to each other, to the universe, and to God.
In our first reading this morning, the prophet Isaiah envisions a time when “the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.” Did you get that? “A feast for all peoples”: an extravagant dinner party where everyone is invited and everyone belongs. This is the vision in the prophet’s heart that he tells us comes from God. This is God’s idea for the human race. Another prophetic soul, writing almost a thousand years after Isaiah, wrote down another, similar vision. We heard from this person in our second reading this morning: “I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” A little later on, the seer of this vision describes this mystical city in greater detail. He says, “The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.” Did you hear that? “The nations will walk by its light… Its gates will never be shut… People will bring into it the glory and honor of the nations.” Friends, this is just like Isaiah’s vision of the feast for all people. I imagine this city as a multi-ethnic, international dance party. The gifts and treasures of every tribe and culture are on display. Billions gather for an abundant feast prepared by God. In the streets you can hear Swedish and Swahili, you can see white folks and black folks, men and women, Republicans and Democrats, and yes, even Tarheel fans and Duke fans. This is the true nature of our common humanity. This is God’s goal for human history. I see it as a prophetic snapshot of the Communion of Saints.
And there’s more. There is another element found in each of this morning’s readings that factors very highly in this ultimate vision. In Isaiah’s vision, the prophet says, “And [God] will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken.” In our reading from the book of Revelation, it says, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.”” In both of these visions, as well as in our gospel reading where Jesus raises his friend Lazarus from the dead, the power of death is being undone by the power of love. This vision of a city and a feast for all peoples is not some sentimental dream that’s meant to make us feel better, it is the truth that has a power even greater than death itself. This is the truth in which we find ourselves. In the Communion of Saints, we are bound to one another by the unbreakable power of God’s free grace. Not even death can cut those ties. And, for that matter, neither can any of these stupid and pointless divisions we make among ourselves and defend with such violence and hostility. The unbreakable bond of grace exposes such foolishness for what it really is, because it’s completely unnecessary. We team up and fight for “my family/team/party/country/religion” because we falsely believe the notion that fighting for survival will protect us from the darkness and loneliness of death, but we fail to realize that the thing we fear most has already been overcome by bond that can never be broken, a bond that unites us to our enemies and competitors. By God’s free grace, we are all participants in the great Communion of Saints. That is the great, liberating truth we celebrate today, on this Feast of All Saints.
If we could just realize and remember this truth more often, our perspective on this life would be transformed. We could be unfazed and unimpressed by each new hostile attack and defensive reaction. We could learn the art of letting go of what matters less so that we can hold on to what matters more. We could be saints rather than survivors.
Sadly, this world, as it is, doesn’t make it easy for us to trust in the reality of this vision. We need to be reminded of it, which is why we celebrate this holiday once a year, at the beginning of November. We’re also reminded of this truth every time we celebrate the Eucharist, which we are doing this morning. This sacramental feast is a foretaste of Isaiah’s great feast for all people. Gathered around this Eucharistic table with us this morning, present but unseen, are people from every time and place, living and dead, who are bound together in the Communion of Saints by the unbreakable bonds of God’s free grace. If we only had eyes to see, we would see them sharing this meal with us: Jesus, Isaiah, Peter, Paul, Mary, Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Irving Beal, Ruth Jones, Bob Brucker, Dick Mahaffy, and Matt Conway: all here, present but unseen, bound to us forever by a force more powerful than death itself: the grace and the love of God.
Image is in the public domain. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.
The link below connects you to a document preserved electronically by the King Center. It is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. responding to multiple requests that he endorse candidates in the 1960 election. Dr. King refused all such requests.
He writes:
The role that is mine in the emerging social order of the south and America demands that I remain non-partisan. This devoid of partisan political attachments, I am free to be critical of both parties when necessary.
He continues:
The best antidote to degeneration of conflict of opinion into maliciousness and violence is statesmanlike, firm, expressions of the moral issues giving active support to proper resolution.
This is not the time to look back, but to look forward. I am full of hope for the future because of the goodwill and concern shown by so many people in Georgia and all over the country.
Now let us use this period for genuine negotiations so that Atlanta can take a step forward toward the society of “wisdom, justice and moderation” which the seal of the state of Georgia and the Constitution of the United States promised.
Hopping Hadrian's Wall 