All Saints Sunday November 1, 2009 “Series B”
Grace be unto you and peace, from God our Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Let us pray: Dear Heavenly Father, we give you thanks for all your saints throughout the ages, both great and small – all who have revealed your word in faithfulness and who have enabled the proclamation of your redeeming grace in Jesus the Christ to be passed on from generation to generation. Through the power of your Holy Spirit, inspire us and encourage us to continue to witness to the message of the Gospel, so that it might continue to nurture faith for generations to come. This we ask in Christ’s holy name. Amen.
In my previous parish, the congregation maintained two cemeteries, in which many of the members over the years had been buried. Several times a year, we would receive requests from persons who were trying to trace their family tree, for information recorded on the tombstones. That would require a trip to the cemetery to hunt down the headstone, make a tracing of it, and mail it out to the family member making the request.
But I never had the experience that Dr. William H. Willimon reported in his commentary published in Pulpit Resource. Dr. Willimon wrote, and I quote, “One of the strangest requests that I ever received was from a woman who wanted me to accompany her to the cemetery. There, I was to say a prayer, and be with her as she attempted to contact her recently deceased father.
She had hired a professional “medium,” someone who offers to help people contact the dead. The medium was to offer some sort of incantation, enter into some sort of trance, that would enable us to hear the dead person speak. I never got to see the medium at work,” Dr. Willimon reported. “I told the woman that I was a Christian minister, and that we don’t do this sort of thing. So she went out to the cemetery without me. When she returned, she was very disappointed. She didn’t hear the voice of her father.
Yet as we talked, I came to understand some of this woman’s desire. She had a great relationship with her father, and often turned to him for his guidance and advice. She was at that time facing all sorts of decisions, had some problems to solve, and longed for his paternal advice. She wanted more than ever to hear his reassuring voice again, and be the recipient of his wisdom.” End quote.
Well, I would agree with Dr. Willimon that the Christian faith does not rely on the use of mediums in order to receive specific directives from those who have died. And yet, as Dr. Willimon later concluded, in a way we Christians do communicate with the dead. As Christians, we believe that we can hear the dead speak to us.
As Willimon points out in his commentary, what is it that we do every Sunday morning, but open up the Scriptures, and read the words of those who have lived centuries before us, as if they have something meaningful to say to us. “We have acted as if these ancient people with names like Isaiah, John, Lazarus, Mary, and Martha know more about God than we do. We have acted as if they have something to teach us that we could not learn any other way.”
Take our Gospel lesson as a example. We are told that Jesus comes to visit Mary and Martha, after they have just buried their brother Lazarus, a friend of Jesus. The sisters are distraught with grief. In fact, John tells us that even Jesus wept with them, a clear sign of his identity with our humanity. But Jesus didn’t leave them in their grief. He talked about the hope of the resurrection, about the hope of being in his presence in God’s kingdom forever. And then, as if to give them a sign of this promise, he called Lazarus to come out from his grave. And he did.
Of course, Lazarus, as well as Mary and Martha, would eventually be placed in a tomb, from which their bodies would not emerge to resume human life here on this earth. However, what Jesus does do in this story, is assure us that he identifies with our grief, and through his compassion and grace, through our baptism into his death and resurrection, offers us the hope of life eternal life in God’s heavenly kingdom.
Think about this for a moment. We would not have this hope, this ability to live our lives trusting that there is more to life than birth and death, and the struggle to exist that fills the days between these two extremes. And it is not just a passive hope that informs our faith, but a hope that is given flesh and blood by the real persons who have filled the pages of Scripture, testified to their encounter with the grace of God, and passed on their experience to us.
That message is ongoing, throughout the ages, as it is embodied in flesh and blood, by those who serve our crucified and risen Lord as his disciples among us. Thus, on this day, as we remember All the Saints of Christ’s Church, we remember not only those who were the giants of faith from Biblical times, the big men and women of the intervening centuries, such as such as Augustine and Luther and Calvin, or even Martin Luther King Jr.
Today we pause to remember that our own faith has been enriched by those little saints among us, whose names will never make the hallowed gallows of sainthood, but whose contributions to our own ability to trust in the grace of God, can not be denied. Thus, I would like to offer my own remembrance of the four members of our congregation that have entered the Church Triumphant this past year. And let me do so with a sense of humor, since that is one of the greatest gifts they have given to me.
The first disciple of Christ that we lost from our congregation this year was Dave Anderson. Now here was a person, that up until his illness, was so regular in his attendance at worship, that if he wasn’t sitting in the pew half way between the door and the pulpit, I would have thought he must be out of town. Of course, that was usually true. If there was anything that Dave taught us, it would be the importance of worshiping our Lord, on a regular basis. I remember him saying to me one time when I visited him during his final days, “Pastor Ron, I didn’t’ always like your sermons, but most of them hit home. It’s being there for the long run that counts.” And I thanked him for his faithfulness.
Of course, Dave and I shared a love for the black and gold. For those of you who don’t understand that analogy, we love the Steelers. One day, Dave came out of worship and said to me, Pastor Ron, I know you always wear black on Sundays. But I think you need to take a clue from your wife, who also wears black, but also gold when the Steelers are playing.
Well, unfortunately, Dave was in the hospital the day that the Steelers were going to play the Super Bowl. I visited him after worship and told him that I took his advice, and wore a black and gold stole, as well as a black and gold cincture, which was knitted for me by a member of our congregation. I then told him that a lot of members laughed when I appeared in that garb. Dave said he would have clapped.
The second disciple of Christ that we lost from our congregation this year was Richard Dunlap. In all honesty, Richard was one of the most intellectual persons I have ever met. In fact, nothing prepared me for my first visit with Barb and him, when they were thinking of becoming members of St. Johns. Richard said, Pastor, I would like you to follow me
out to my garage. When I got there, he showed me these two machines, which I had no idea what they were. They were lasers that Richard had built. Now how many persons do you know who have two lasers in their garage?
Yet in spite of all of his intelligence, Richard had an passion to see us grow in our faithfulness to stewardship. And personally, I think we, as a congregation, truly failed to hear his message. I truly miss him.
Just two weeks ago, I conducted the funeral of Marian Prebula. Like Richard, Marian also served our congregation on the worship and music committee – for years. In fact, when I first arrived at St. John’s, I quickly learned that if I was to make any changes in our worship life, especially our special services, such as Christmas Eve, I had to bring Marian on board.
For the most part, Marian was supportive of my ideas. That is, until we began to decorate for our Christmas Eve service, and I encountered her desire to set out the porcelain nativity set for Christmas Eve. I didn’t even know that we had that nativity set. But she was intent on setting out the whole set, including the camels and the wise men. Nevertheless, I, as a young pastor, dared to push forward. I suggested that she might want to leave the wise men and the camels out of the nativity scene, so that we might emphasize the season of Epiphany.
What do you mean by that, she asked. I then told her, invited her back to my study to read about the fact that the wise men did not arrive on the night of Jesus’ birth. And even though Marian came to understand the significance of Epiphany, she left my study and still put out the wise men and the camels. “It just wouldn’t be the same without the whole set displayed,” she said. As a result, I have learned to be more tolerant of the expressions of belief of those within the church. Of course, Marian is still wrong.
Finally, there is Eleanor Theiss. Now here is a person whom I have loved for years. It wasn’t long after I became pastor of St. John’s, that I went on home communion visits. When I stopped at Ginny and Floyd Bortz’s, I discovered that Gus and Eleanor Theiss were visiting. Now you have to understand that all four of these persons were rather stoic, not non-sense kind of persons, from the old school. They could look you in the eye and tell you how it is.
And yet on this day, when they all asked for communion, and me, with only three glasses, and less than three ounces of wine, they came to the rescue. They placed four rather hefty wine classes on the coffee table, along with a bottle of wine, and said, fill them up. And I learned from that experience, that even those who might have strict values, can rejoice in the grace of God, and party once and awhile.
We can all learn from the saints, both past and present. Amen.
