Years ago, when I led an Education for Ministry group, we would say a short prayer after each member shared his or her “spiritual autobiography,” the story of his or her life with God. After listening to a lifetime of both joy and struggle, we would affirm in unison: “For what was, for what is, and for what will be—Thanks be to God.” I believe that this short prayer, attributed to Dag Hammarskjold, is the essence of our All Saints’ Day prayers, as well. Instead of just blessing our individual, private lives as God’s Saints (that is, God’s children) our All Saints’ Day reflections give us an encompassing, communal vision of our past with God, our present with God, and our future with God.
First we pray: “For what was, thanks be to God.”
When I was an overly imaginative little girl, I used to engage in the comforting fantasy that my deceased grandparents were up in heaven watching me live my life, marveling at technological wonders like the TV set or my parents’ Chevrolet, and participating with me in the simple events of my day. I never knew my grandparents, so it wasn’t that I missed them, but I was seeking some kind of grounding in a loving connection with my past. This year in our parish, we have said farewell to many of our St. Thomas saints—saints whose loving spirits and faithful witnesses are still alive in all that we do here together. What a comfort it is on All Saints’ Day, to take a moment to place in our midst those whom we love and no longer see, as we call them by name and count them still here among us. What a comfort it is when the strength and love and blessedness of the past can brush softly by us, touching us for a moment in the present. “For all that was, thanks be to God.”
Next, we pray: “For all that is, thanks be to God.”
The present is the tough place to be, isn’t it? The past is so often cast in a rosy light, and dreams of the future can be exciting, but the present is full of the struggles of real life in this world. Christianity is often accused of a “pie in the sky” mentality, of excusing the injustices of the present by claiming that everything will be made right in the next life. In the Beatitudes that we read today in our Gospel, however, Jesus uses the image of God’s future reign to bless in the present the justice and mercy and righteousness and love hidden in the hearts of his poor, scraggly, persecuted and outcast bunch of followers. Before Jesus launches into what he expects of us in the Sermon on the Mount—all of the impossible demands that we love even our enemies and avoid all hypocrisy in our religious life—Jesus consoles us in the difficulties of our lives with the Beatitudes. When we read through all of them, as we did today, we cannot help but feel flickers of solace and hope, as blessings emerge in the midst of the tough present reality, as our struggles are seen through God’s eyes. As long as we don’t discard the present, tossing its reality aside as we dive for the morsels of future vision within it, we can use the biblical images of God’s Kingdom as a way to center ourselves in a reality in which the future is already present, pushing ourselves to grow into the vision that God is laying out for us, truly understanding what it means to be, as it says in our epistle today, “children of God.” “For all that is, thanks be to God.”
And finally: “For all that will be, thanks be to God.”
The problem that we often have with the book of Revelation is that we associate it with some kind of future timeline. So much misguided human effort has gone into trying to figure out what came first and what will come last according to this wildest book of our Bible, trying to decide if we are just about to witness the end of the world or if it will be in another thousand years … if an earthquake in Russia will come before or after a tidal wave in China … if the saints will see God before or after Jesus returns to earth. The images in the book of Revelation, however, cannot be put into such chronologies. They are created to break into our present like a dream, like a dream that pervades our waking consciousness with divine visions.
Close your eyes for a minute and picture the vision in today’s reading: a limitless number of the saints, the children of God, stretching as far and wide as the eye can see. They are not just Americans, or Episcopalians, or the people that we like to hang out with, but they represent every nation, every ethnicity, speaking every language, representing every time period in the history of the universe. Their sin no longer clings to them. All that they have done and left undone no longer matters, no longer drags them down or keeps them from God. They all wear God’s pure, white robes. And what are they doing? Are they playing harps on clouds or looking for their relatives or taking heavenly naps? I used to listen to a song on the “Singing Nun” album back in the ‘60’s that described the saints in heaven as Anthony and Cleopatra listening to the music of Mozart while the emperor Charlemagne gets on a bicycle and visits Napoleon, and Michelangelo draws the Cro-Magnon man. Our text tells us, though, that the saints are not doing any of these things. Instead, the multitude before the heavenly throne is totally focused on Christ. They all face the Lamb, continually singing, worshipping and blessing the God who is at their very center. It is God who holds them all together, even in heaven, as He holds us together around the Altar. It is not just that the saints are all together. It is not just that they no longer suffer. It is that they are all gathered—and comforted--in perpetual worship of God.
The 16th century artist Albrecht Durer has a painting called the “Adoration of the Trinity” that is often used as an illustration of our passage from Revelation. A papal-looking God the Father, surrounded by billows of smoke and crowned with the dove of the Spirit, is holding a large cross on which Jesus still hangs. This cross is at the very center of the painting. Around it, kings, popes, peasants, angels, men, women, and children all kneel, crowded into the margins of the painting and flowing out beyond its borders, a great multitude with heads bowed, hands folded in prayer, all directed toward the crucified Lamb. Yes, the Lamb that the saints are all worshipping is nailed to a cross! The purity and whiteness of the saints’ robes are a result of cleansing blood, not of sweet piety. The saints’ robes are also not being washed by God, but they themselves are doing the work of washing. Those who conquer are actively following their crucified Lord in the present. God can expect such costly discipleship from us because there is another plane that exists, no matter what evil assaults us, no matter what uncertainties plague our present. In God’s timeless place, there is victory: where heat and hunger, thirst and sin can no longer can claim us. It is this future that gives our mission in the present its context. “For all that will be, thanks be to God.”
Indeed, we live and move and have our being in the present moment, yet our memories of the past and our visions of the future hold us in the security of God’s embrace. Listen to T.S. Eliot, in part of the “Four Quartets,”
“But to apprehend / the point of intersection of the timeless/ With time, is an occupation for the saint--/ No occupation either, but something given/ And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love, / Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender./ For most of us, there is only the unattended/ Moment, the moment in and out of time … [the] music heard so deeply/ That it is not heard at all, but you are the music/ While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses, / Hints followed by guesses; and the rest / Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action./ The gift half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation…./ Here the past and future are conquered, and reconciled.”
Today, let us hold onto the past and the future--but not so tightly that we lose our freedom to act right now, to live fully, for we too are God’s saints, expected to take our turn in the dance, to pray, to act, and to love, no matter what. We will never be alone. Layers and layers of saints—followers of the Crucified One-- surround us, before and behind. Fear will not have the last word, even in this uncertain world, for we are surrounded by an infinitely strong net of love and communion, through which we can never fall into the abyss. “For all that was, and all that is, and all that will be: thanks be to God.”
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