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The grace and peace of God our Father, the love of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
My predecessor as rector here at Grace, and the current Bishop of Indianapolis, Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows, begins most of her sermons and addresses with “Good Morning, Saints.”
I have not been able to pull that off. I think partly growing up Irish Catholic, I have a hesitation because I'm like, “Well, not yet. I'm not dead.”
But her point is well taken. “Good Morning, Saints” is meant to remind us of our own vocation to be saints and the reality of our lives: that saints are always around us.
It's this time of year, November first. Every year we celebrate the feast of All Saints, and tomorrow, All Souls. And the church calendar leads us to think about the last things as we move towards this end of the liturgical year. And those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere live in a time when the leaves are falling and the snow has not yet begun to fly, although I imagine it will be soon.
And as the prominent musical artist Noah Kahan says, we live in the season of the sticks, or stick season. The pretty foliage is about to go, or it's gone, and we're in this brown time.
And often this is a time when we think about those who have gone before us and our life with the saints.
And this year, as I've been contemplating this, three themes have been coming to mind: one of loving memory, harsh reality, and eternal hope.
Loving memory is, I think, always before us.
I am one of those people that doesn't mind cemeteries. As a kid, I used to be an altar server and would often serve funerals. As a college student, one of my jobs was to be a cemetery caretaker, where I mowed the lawn and even helped to dig the graves. As a priest, I've presided at countless funerals. I've lost count of the number of funerals.
I don't find cemeteries to be a difficult place to be, and in fact, on one of my running routes, I run right through Saint Mary's Cemetery in DeWitt, and I have made friends with people there.
That may sound odd to you, but this is not a new practice for me. When I was a Jesuit novice and going through the Spiritual Exercises, there was the Jesuit cemetery in Wernersville, and I went down there one day and I found a Jesuit who had the same birthday as me, and I told him, “You need to get me through this experience.” And I made it. So I think he was on my side.
And when I run through Saint Mary's Cemetery, I stop and I visit some of my friends, those I've known tangentially, some I've known a bit better. I usually stop to see Karl von den Steinen, who was the psychologist before me at the Child and Adolescent Inpatient Unit. And I tell Karl, “You better help me out, you know. You did this pretty well.”
And so this is a reality. As our Jewish brothers and sisters say, you know, when someone dies, “May their memory be a blessing to us.”
And that's the image that we're given today in that book of Revelation. People, uncounted numbers, stand before the throne of God, intercessors, praying in white robes.
That is an image to help remind us that those who have gone before us, those who stand before the throne of God, are countless.
We have in the church, certainly, those we recognize as saints in a variety of ways. And yet we also have those who we've known and who've touched our lives, that we know to be saints, who have touched our hearts.
We have many of them looking at us from behind their pictures, reminding us of their presence. Here, we were just in our garden, surrounded by many of our beloved who have gone before us, and we've laid to rest there.
And certainly you all have members of family, friends, teachers, pastors, those who have gone before you, who have shown you the way, that we hold in loving memory.
And yet we also have to recognize that this brings about a harsh reality.
I remember when it became most clear for me. I was at the graveside of a beloved friend, and we had just finished the graveside service. And I looked up, and my eyes looked across the street from the cemetery, where there was an elementary school, and kids were outside playing on the playground at recess. And I couldn't help but wonder, “How could this be? Part of me wanted to shout, ‘Don't you know what we've lost? How can the world go on? How can life ever be the same?’”
And I imagine many of you have had that same harsh reality in your own lives when you've lost a loved one close to you. It's hard to imagine life without them. And to ignore that would be to deny something important to the human condition.
But we also must recognize that this harsh reality is not just about the losses we experience in death. It's also about the losses that we experience in our lives.
Our Gospel reading today points to that: the Beatitudes, which we've read before during this year, which talk about, “Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are they who mourn, who are meek, who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the peacemakers, those who are pure in heart, and blessed are those who are persecuted.”
There's a recognition that our life is about blessing, even—and maybe most especially—in those most difficult moments of life.
And that really living a life of faith requires us to strip ourselves bare at times of those illusions and delusions we hold on to, that keep us from really loving and living life to the full.
And we have to recognize that as Christians, we live somewhere in between, recognizing that this life is not all that there is. And yet we cannot absent ourselves from living truly in this world and attempting to make a change, and living that the reality of God is here among us.
And that leads us to that eternal hope.
I think one of the most central aspects in why this is a major feast in the church is that the communion of saints, while we might think about it from time to time, is always before us.
In fact, in the creed that we say every Sunday, towards the end of that prayer, we will pray that we believe in the communion of saints. This is an essential part of our Christian heritage, and perhaps there is no better symbol of that than our altar table that stands before us.
We certainly, as a parish community, remember all those whom we sent to their eternal rest from here as we gather around this, our family table.
But I also believe that it's no mistake that Jesus' last gift of memorial to us was around a meal, around a table, where so often we can remember in our own lives ways in which we've gathered around the table, perhaps a Thanksgiving dinner or a holiday, or times at our grandmother's house, or different ways in which we've broken bread with each other and known greater intimacy and communion.
And this symbol continues for us, because it reminds us that while we gather here in this place, gathered around this table, are not only those of us who are physically present, but all those who have gone before us: the saints who fit on the official calendar, and those who walked with Jesus, and all those who have walked afterwards.
We gather together as a family because, as we hear in our second reading from John's letter, that we are God's children now, but what we will be has not yet come to light.
We don't have complete understanding, but we have hope. And we recognize that living into this hope is part of our heritage, part of us being a part of this family of faith.
All Saints reminds us of these many realities in how we live in this world and we continue on. We've lost those who have gone before us, but they are not truly gone. Their memory is a blessing for us, but also a reminder that we are connected and we live our lives in that reality.
I just end by sharing a blessing that my friend Father John Rohde, who himself has gone to the Lord, would share often. I think pretty much every time he celebrated Eucharist.
It's a blessing by Henry-Frédéric Amiel:
“Life is short, and we do not have much time to gladden the hearts of those who make the journey with us. So be swift to love and make haste to be kind. And the blessing of God who made us, who loves us, and who travels with us, be with you now and forever.”
