Thanks be to God

 All Saints' Day, Year A

 November 1, 2020

 “For what was, for what is, and for what will be—Thanks be to God.”  You may know this short prayer, attributed to Dag Hammarskjold. I believe that it sums up our prayers on All Saints’ Day. When we celebrate the saints of God, we receive an encompassing, communal vision: of our past with God, our present with God, and our future with God. And for that abiding presence, we give thanks.

First, we give thanks for what was:

When I was a little girl, I liked to pretend that my deceased grandparents were up in heaven watching me live my life. I pictured them marveling at technological wonders like the TV set or the Apollo mission. Whenever I was lonely, I imagined that they were participating with me in the simple events of my day. I never knew my grandparents, so it wasn’t that I missed them. I was just seeking some kind of grounding in a loving connection with my past. In the same way, today I wonder what it would be like for St. Ambrose of Milan to walk with us as we go about our daily life as a Christian community. Does he observe the challenges we face in our own day? Does he support us when we stumble? Does he cheer us on when our light shines brightest? In any case, we know that those we love but see no longer surround us as a cloud of witnesses. Their love never fades away. Today, we call them by name and count them still here among us. What a comfort it is when the strength, 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 give thanks for what is:

The present is often the tough place to be. The past is so often cast in a rosy light, and dreams of the future can be exciting. But the present is hard to hang onto. It is full of the distractions and struggles of real life in this world. We certainly have had no shortage of struggles in 2020, have we? Covid deaths, multiple natural disasters, national strife, racial violence and injustice, and increasing poverty and climate change … Can we even give thanks today for “what is?”

Christianity is often accused of a “pie in the sky” mentality. We are known for excusing the injustices of the present by claiming that everything will be made right in the next life. That’s not what Jesus does in the Beatitudes, however. Jesus uses the image of God’s future reign to bless in the present the justice and mercy,  righteousness and love hidden in the hearts of his ragtag, persecuted bunch of followers. The Beatitudes come right before Jesus launches into what he expects of us in the Sermon on the Mount. Before he starts in on impossible demands--like loving our enemies and avoiding hypocrisy—he blesses us. When we read through all of the Beatitudes, as we did today, we can’t help but feel flickers of solace and hope. We hear blessings emerge in the midst of tough present reality; we see our struggles through God’s eyes.

In this year of extra suffering, it helps me to know that Jesus stands with me, blessing the present for me when I can’t utter a blessing myself. It can center us to know that we are blessed and beloved by God in our mourning, as in our joy, and in our suffering, as in our flourishing. Jesus’ blessing can push us to grow into the vision that God is laying out for us. It can remind us what it means to be, as it says in our epistle today, “children (saints!) of God.” Blessing gives me the strength to say, “For all that is, thanks be to God.”

Finally, we pray for all that will be:

Close your eyes for a minute and picture the vision in today’s reading from Revelation: 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. They represent every nation, every ethnicity, speaking every language, representing every time period in the history of the universe. The 16^th-century artist Albrecht Durer has a painting called the “Adoration of the Trinity” that illustrates this scene. (Show image.) At the very center of the painting, we have the Trinity: there’s a papal-looking God the Father, and a descending dove for the Holy Spirit. And then there’s Jesus on the Cross. All around the Crucified One, we see kings, popes, peasants, angels, men, women, and children all kneeling. Some worshippers are crowded into the margins of the painting and are flowing out beyond its borders, a great multitude with heads bowed, hands folded in prayer, all directed toward the crucified Lamb. They’re not playing harps on clouds or taking heavenly naps. This multitude is totally focused on Christ. (Take off image)

In Revelation, we hear that the sin of the multitudes no longer clings to them. All that they have done and left undone no longer matters. There is nothing to drag them down or keep them from God. They all wear God’s pure, white robes. 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 actively follow their crucified Lord. 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 lives in the present their 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:”

…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./ …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.[1]

 

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. We too are God’s saints, expected to take our turn in the dance: to pray, to act, and to love, no matter what. Layers and layers of saints—followers of the Crucified One—surround us, before and behind. Hatred and 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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[1] T.S. Eliot, “Four Quartets 3: The Dry Salvages.” Found at http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/t__s__eliot/poems/15185.

The Good 'Ole Way of Love

 

The Way of Love. Presiding Bishop Curry has successfully given us Episcopalians the “Love” brand, hasn’t he? I’ve heard other Christians--and some non-Christians--complain that our Way of Love is just joining hands and singing Kumbaya. It’s too simple a path, they say--too easy, too obvious. That’s probably what the Pharisees thought, too, when they heard Jesus’ response to their trick question. They wanted to get him hung up on which one of the Torah’s 613 commandments was most important. Whichever one Jesus picked, he would surely leave out something essential. But Jesus knew better than to get caught up in their intellectual game. Instead, he gave them an answer that any Jewish child would understand. He re-framed their question by riffing on Deuteronomy 6:5-- “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” This verse is part of the Shema: "Hear O Israel." It is the basic principal of Jewish belief, prayed several times each day by devout Jews. It’s the phrase that is to be placed on their doorposts and bound on hand and forehead. In choosing the Shema, Jesus’ response to the Pharisees was a simple one, an obvious one. It is similar to a response that renowned theologian Karl Barth gave to a question about the essence of his own theology. Instead of a long, complex discourse, Barth summed up his work as, “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

Yes, the centrality of love is obvious. But we all know that it’s anything but easy. In fact, love is so often misunderstood.

         As a teen, I remember thinking that something was spiritually wrong with me. I realized that I didn’t really love God or my neighbor, either one. I was a very religious kid. I said my prayers. I went to church and Sunday School every week. I knew that God was supposed to love me. But I also knew deep-down that I didn’t love God with all my heart, soul, and mind. I might feel respect toward God, or curiosity, or occasionally loyalty or even awe. But it bothered me that I felt no warm and fuzzy, heart-giving love. I wasn’t even into loving Jesus. I didn’t like the songs in youth group that sounded like Jesus was everyone’s boyfriend. To me, love was a feeling, and it was a feeling that I didn’t have for God or for God’s Son.

          As I grew older, I had a Peanuts cartoon about love pinned to the middle of my bulletin board. On it, Lucy proclaimed, “I love [human]kind; it’s people I can’t stand.” People were disappointing and annoying … and besides, if I opened myself up to them, they might not love me back. In turning against hurtful humankind, I grew more desperate to love God. I thought that if I could just know God better, then I could love God more. If I could close myself up with God—just the two of us—then I would find some kind of union with God. Maybe then I could grasp the deep kind of love of which the mystics speak. I prayed that I might love God. I sought God with my mind. I sought God in beautiful words and in music. I didn’t have much energy left over to love my neighbor, but I didn’t care. I was seeking God.

          What I didn’t know back then was that the two Hebrew commandments that Jesus puts together in our Gospel lesson are completely intertwined. Loving God and loving neighbor cannot be separated. “A second is LIKE it,” doesn’t just mean that the two commandments have a similar structure or that they are both equally important. It means that they are interrelated. Commitment to God’s ways will always send us back out into the world, just as surely as service to the world will send us to God. In one of Dostoevsky’s stories, Father Zosima, a wise, elderly monk, is consulted by a distraught young woman. She is tormented by her lack of belief in God and in the afterlife. Her life has no meaning, no joy, no purpose, without the belief that comforted her in her childhood. Father Zosima promises to help her in her despair. He doesn’t offer her an abstract proof of God’s existence. Rather, he tells her to go home and every day, to commit herself to concrete, practical acts of love for the people with whom she comes in contact. If she does this, the wise monk explains, she will slowly and gradually begin to find that she believes in God. And the more she practices true self-giving love with those around her, she will discover that she cannot not believe in God, who is self-giving Love itself. To believe in God is to commit oneself to God; to commit oneself to God is to love God.

           “Love your neighbor as yourself” comes from Leviticus 19, the chapter that we heard in our first reading today. “I am Holy,” begins the Lord God in our reading. Holy means “set apart.” God is set apart not just in power, but also in love and mercy. In the power of my love, God says, I brought you, my people, out of the land of Egypt. I am the God who frees every captive. And because you are made in my image, you are holy like I am. You are set apart for love. As you are in relationship with me, you will set others free, as well. That is who you are. You will love one another and all of the creation that I made, as I love you. We’re to act justly with one another because God is just. We are to be in relationship with one another because God’s very self is relationship. We are to love our neighbor— because loving the other is the very essence of our God.

Again, this holiness that we are given is not some hazy, saintly aura. According to Leviticus, we enact God’s holy love when we pay fair wages to those who work for us. We love when we don’t profit off of the backs of the poor, when we forgive a grudge, when we give away part of our earnings to those who are hungry and alone. A few verses later, in Leviticus 19:34, God specifies that it is not only the “neighbor,” but the “stranger,” the “alien in our land” that we are to love as we love ourselves. The love required here is the kind of love shown by the Good Samaritan in Luke’s Gospel, the kind of love that does not leave anyone bleeding on the side of the road. To love is to show active mercy, justice, and faithfulness. God can indeed command us to love—not to bubble over with pleasant feelings—but to give ourselves over to God’s ways.       

          Of course, it is Jesus himself who most clearly shows us the place where love of God and love of neighbor meet. Jesus shows us both total commitment to God and total commitment to justice and mercy in this world. Jesus shows us love in real, tangible acts—in touching lepers, in rubbing spit into blind eyes, in being nailed to the wood of a cross. Jesus Christ reveals the paradoxical power of living a life of divine, self-giving love.

          Some people might scoff at our Episcopal love slogans, but when Bishop Curry spoke about Love at the Royal Wedding two years ago, remember how the whole world actually sat up and listened, as if they had never heard such Good News before? He got invited on Prime-Time talk shows, and jaded TV hosts got all teary-eyed to hear about the love of God.  It makes me wonder: Here at St. Ambrose, how will we love God and neighbor in such a way that our corner of the world will encounter the true power of the Way of Love? There are so many ways to live and so many choices to make, both as individuals and as a parish. What I give of myself, matters. What I share, what I eat, what I wear, whom I welcome, where I sit, when I stand, they are all opportunities to love. How will we live out our specific calling as Christians and as human beings fashioned in the image of a loving God? If a specific action comes to mind for you, keep it in prayer with you this week. No pressure, but if you feel called to give it voice, please share it in the “chat” feature.