Texts: Wisdom 3:1-9; Psalm 24; Revelation 21:1-6; John 11:32-44
Happy All Saints Day, my friends! Since the first decades of the church’s existence, the Lord’s disciples have celebrated those who have died in the faith and fear of Christ, particularly those who made their professions of faith in Christ with a self-sacrificial, heroic death. Now, for us, All Saints’ Day is our celebration of all those in Christ who have gone before us and of our participation in that “mystical body” of Christ. It is a feast for us when we can stop together and remember what it truly means to be Church.
I want to tell you a true story that provides a clear image, I think, of what it means to be Church. Fred Craddock is of the masters of preaching in America today. He tells the story of one of the first little churches that he served in the hills of eastern Tennessee. In the Christian Church, they practice adult baptism by immersion, and that little mission church served by Craddock has a very interesting tradition that they undertake on every Easter day. Just before sunset on Easter day, the church folks gather at the beach along Watts Bar Lake. The new believers join the pastor in the water to be baptized, while the members on the beach make a bonfire, cook a festive supper, and build little booths in which the newly baptized can change their wet clothes.
And once everyone meets each other in this way, they eat their feast and have a good ol’fashioned square dance. I don’t know if a group of folks can get any closer than that. They have a name for that kind of community down there in Tennessee. You may have heard of it. They call it, “Church.”
On this All Saints’ Day, we celebrate the mystery that is the Church. Together, both the saints who have gone before us and the saints alive today, we are a rag tag group of people thrown together by the mysterious working of divine providence in order to make alive the hidden reality of the kingdom of God. Rich and poor, black, white and brown, male and female, straight and gay, fully abled and disabled – God brings together human beings of every conceivable type in order to create a new humanity, a new Jerusalem, one new people created out of the vast diversity of humankind in order to re-create the world.
It’s hard for a lot of us, I know. It cuts right against many of our instincts to be in this kind of community which is often so disorderly and uncomfortable. But this is God’s plan, the divine way for us to be trained in healthy relationships. Think about it, my friends, how this works in your daily life: You can’t pick your family. You just have to learn to deal with them, and better yet, learn to appreciate them for who they are without trying to change them to be who you want them to be.
It’s the same with the Church. You can’t pick who you sit next to in Church. If you’re on Facebook, you can decide whether or not to accept the invitations of others to be your friends. But not in Church. Now, I recognize that we want to, that our natural tendency is to try to find a congregation of folks just like ourselves, people who can all be our friends.
There has been now for quite a few years a wholesale movement afoot among American Christians to go “church-shopping”, to try and find just the right place, the church where each person feels the most comfortable, where each person can get the most “fed”.
God, save us from this foolish notion! That attitude is so far off the mark of God’s vision for the church that it is difficult to know where to start the critique. You see, what we do together here in Church is meant to be practice. It’s our warm-up, our scrimmage game. We are practicing how life is meant to be within the kingdom of heaven. That what those folks do so well – the ones who gather on the shore of Watts Bar Lake down in Tennessee every Easter evening. “Brands plucked from the fire”, folks who are struggling through life and attempting to follow Jesus in his way of life.
Our brothers and sisters over at Holy Spirit and St. Luke’s have already heard me make this statement a number of times, and all of you will hear it a bunch more: there is no such thing as Christianity. It doesn’t exist. That word, “Christianity” is a fiction of the modern imagination. What DOES exist is the Church. What DOES exist are the saints, real-life saints who have been touched by the Lord Jesus is some personal way, and who have come together regularly to worship and to study and to serve their neighbors.
There is no vague idea of Christianity, as if you could simple make a mental decision and become a Christian. Nonsense. You can’t baptize yourself or confirm yourself or ordain yourself or bury yourself! All of this is done by the Church, by actual communities of real-life people, like you here, who are the Church. You, my friends, are the saints of God in this time and place. You are the ones who future generations will remember and write about.
That is, IF…If we are willing to serve each other in love, if we are willing to see the needs of those around us and respond with compassion, if we are willing to allow our lives to be shaped by the Gospel. Wouldn’t you want to be part of a church like that one in Tennessee, where folks freely give their time and talents to help one another?
A wise, anonymous writer has said this about the church: “The church is never a place, but always a people; never a fold but always a flock; never a sacred building but always a believing people. The church is you who pray, not where you pray. A structure of brick or marble can no more be a church than your clothes of satin can be you.”
Let us work together, my friends, to follow in the way of the saints, to make alive in this time and place the New Jerusalem of God, so that the will of God will be done in our lives and in our fellowship, just as it is in the heavens. Amen.
Father, thank you for having heard us. We know that you always hear us when we pray. Help us to trust you more every day, and answer these our petitions as you know best. Through Jesus Christ, the Alpha and Omega, and our Lord. Amen.
Lord, you are the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, adored by the angels and praised by the saints, receive the prayers of your people, and grant these – our requests – in accordance with your gracious will, through Christ our Lord.
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