I rarely publish the text of my sermons, as I was taught that a "sermon" is actually the live delivery in real time of the Word, regardless of what may be written on the page. But this All Saints Sunday I was moved by the privilege of preaching and presiding at St. Anne's Lutheran Church. Below is my manuscript.
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Earlier this year I heard that my friend Les in Detroit was dying. This was someone who had played a key role in empowering me to accomplish my great transatlantic move to England. We had weekly phone calls to set goals and report progress, and keep alive the promise of possibility that had inspired me to choose this massive life shift in the first place. Les was confronting, often annoying on these calls. Many times, I didn’t feel like talking to him. But always, at the end of it, I was grateful that someone with no personal stake in it at all was willing to push me to do what it took to realize my dream. Hearing that this friend of mine was on the verge of succumbing to cancer felt unreal. I wished that I could have been there at the memorial, to bear witness to this extraordinary life and grieve with my friends who had gathered.
I’m sure we could all tell stories of people whose paths have crossed ours, who have made a similar impression upon us. People whose very lives seemed to be a testimony to the Spirit’s power. People who have touched us with their presence, and left us changed. When we hear that such a person has died, our first reaction is, “It can’t be. He was always so full of life. Or she showed what it meant to truly live.” It is such people who make us want to believe that there is a life beyond our own, a real communion of saints.
What a gift God has given us, in placing us on this earth alongside others who remind us just how full of grace and love our creator really is. In order to be a saint, the only requirement is that one be holy. And to be holy simply means that you’ve been touched by God. I challenge you to find one person in this room that hasn’t been touched by God. One person who wouldn’t qualify for sainthood.
The first way God touched us was by creating us in the first place. The singer of Psalm 139 says to God, “You knit me together in my mother’s womb.” What a gentle, intimate way to begin our journey of sainthood. God’s hands made us exactly who we needed to be, with every variation and nuance of our being--even those things which we consider less than perfect. Still, not enough to disqualify us as saints--that is, those who have been touched by God.
God touches us again in our baptism, through the water and the Holy Spirit--and makes us saints with a name all our own--called the Children of God.
As we travel the road of sainthood, we are touched many times along the way. At sometimes we can feel it more than at others--like when we are struggling or in pain, and receive an indescribable sense of peace, as though we are truly feeling the hand of God. Maybe it was during an illness, or some other crisis. For saints are never promised easy lives. We are only assured that we will never be alone in our suffering.
Other times, it might be people through whom we feel the touch of God. Fellow saints who seem to radiate the Spirit in an unusually bright way--people like my friend Les, who faced many hardships in his life, but rose to accomplish amazing things nevertheless, and inspired others to do the same. Think about those in your life who have this pull of the Spirit. Remember what it felt like to be around someone who seemed to mediate the very presence of God. It is not that they are somehow, by themselves, “great people,” but they are able, by God’s grace, to reflect the divine--to somehow mirror back to us the way our creator must see us. To touch us with the hand of God.
God touches us again in a way that is perhaps the most unforgettable of all: when Jesus comes to live among us--truly human and tangible, reaching out in words and deeds, and simply being present, as God among people. When his dear friend Lazarus died, and Jesus saw how grieved his family was at the loss of their brother, Jesus too felt the pain of losing one so dear. After crying tears of his own, he reaches out and pulls his friend back from beyond death, even, just to show how powerful is God’s love, and how just being touched by it can release us from the grip of death, and bring us into something new, recreating us in the process.
That something new is what we talk about today, when we anticipate how our God plans to bring us all back together at the end of time. The images of the great feast, of eternal fellowship and the end of suffering and grief fill our readings this morning, reminding us of just what it means to be saints--in the company of other saints, and in the presence of a God whose touch has reached beyond every earthly and supernatural boundary we can imagine. This is the God who gathers, who celebrates with creation, and who makes all things new.
When we think of loved ones who have gone before us in death, we often find ourselves visiting their graves, stopping to remember who they were and what they meant to us. We leave flowers in their honor; we may even find that we can talk to them there--that they are somehow close. Maybe we think about that final feast, where we’ll all be reunited, where we won’t have to wait to be with our fellow saints, in the presence of God who loves us.
I invite you to be so impatient for that day, that you refuse to wait any longer. This day, and every day we share the Lord’s Supper, is not only a preview of that ultimate reunion, but a present time, real celebration with ALL the saints, living, dead, and yet unborn. It is another way that our Lord touches us--offering us the real food of his body and blood, and his hand upon our heads in blessing. It’s dinnertime for the saints, where we gather around the table, are fed, strengthened and sent out again…
Whether we choose it or not, we are saints, by the very fact that our lives have the handprints of God all over them. What God has touched, cannot help but be transformed, made holy. John W. Crawford’s poem says it well:
Once it was that only
green hawthorne or arbor vitae grew nearby
shading good souls gone to their reward.
Sometimes, especially in July heat,
sharp pink and red Zinnia heads
rose over those same souls lined with quiet satin,
with strong voices floating in the wind,
laughing loud at such dead things beneath.
Now, in human jest, hard stems rise by hard stones
announcing with guarded hope some new birth of life,
some Lazarus scene bursting forth
breaking the hard red soil apart.
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