In the name of the Living God, who makes us, loves us and moves among us. Amen
Personally I shall stay well clear of my front door this evening for fear of visitors…Halloween it is…in our church calendar All Saints Day has been brought forward so that Halloween (which should be the EVE of the festival) falls on All saints Day itself. According to the Metro this is Halloween weekend: parties are all themed to ghosts, bats and spiders….we have this weird conjunction: festivities which happen largely outside ‘church’ that can be stretched and commercialised … and a high feast day in church today when we celebrate the Communion of Saints.
Both mark the great autumn Transition: traditionally great holy days of the church, marking a change of gear for those of us in the northern hemisphere as we put back the clocks and, if we can afford it, turn on our heating. Sunday is always a day of Resurrection, and this one is equivalent to Easter, which came at the spring equinox– the very beginning of summer when everything was opening up to warmth and growth. Now – this weekend – autumn movement is against the grain, darkening our evenings and more inward. The days are shortening, the leaves are falling, and earth is drawing into itself. Everything in the natural world is confronting us with reminders of loss and dying. But it’s no less about resurrection – and just as mysterious. Whereas at Easter the movement is more obviously from death on Good Friday to new life in a Garden, today gives us an inward movement, as we face up to unseen dread forces of evil and face down of our own regrets and, with them, the paralysis of our mistakes, failures and fragilities.
Today we are re-membered as the Body of Christ, fractured and wounded, AND nevertheless part of the great Communion of Saints – or, given where we are on the eve of COP, part of the great communion of ALL that is holy and surrendered – part of an interconnected creation where we are called to take our place. It’s a familiar theme in scripture that God has a happy future in store for people of faith…but in Isaiah’s vision there is no distinction between those who are faithful and all …all peoples will participate in the banquet of the kingdom… All, all, all, he repeats. He gives us a vision of a lavish feast, wines strained clear….and it is for all. And the shroud which covers us will be drawn back…
The Gospel passage which Duncan just read is part of a long and dense story (everything in John is a bit dense) – we may need to remind ourselves how it goes: the family at Bethany has been Jesus’ home from home for ages, when he heard Lazarus was ill he refused to come and waited till he was dead. But says that he will come and will raise him. Then he meets Martha, says he is the Resurrection and the Life, Martha confesses her faith, the mourners are already there ….and then we get our story which is the dramatic raising of Lazarus, a SIGN of the Glory of God…and the signpost is that we have to choose – whether to believe Jesus and catch a glimpse of glory or to reject him and join the plot to do away with him (which is the next instalment). We see a human Jesus – the word translated troubled is stronger than that – he is angry. And he weeps; an unusually emotional Jesus. Whatever his anger is about, it is clear that he is – like us – disturbed at death’s devastation and force – which he will finally overcome through his own death. This scene is dramatic and shocking: the loud voice calling forth the dead man, still wrapped in cloths – unexpectedly liberated. It’s an authority we can all claim when we need it; try it in tricky situation or when you are really angry about something. Allow that Jesus to stand at your shoulder and say ‘Lazarus come forth’. Bring good, Lord, out of the chaos and devastation which seems to threaten us.
And so the disciples, that’s us, must decide whether to heed the SIGN or join the PLOT. For all of us, the pious and not so pious, this time of year is a ‘thin place’ when worlds collide in remembrance, and happy memories hold a tension with our disguises, fears, sorrows, losses and regrets. But with or without Halloween, It remains true that unless we linger in the dark, wait for the moment, we will not really get the point. Saints are a frail bunch in themselves…. the shadows of grief and death, the chances we’ve missed that will never come again, powers of degradation in our universe which threaten to overwhelm us; the boundaries between ourselves and all we have loved but deemed lost, all we have grieved for, all the roads not taken in our lives, are met in the joyous festivities of God’s affirmation of the Communion of Saints.
THAT’S ALL OF US.. not just St Francis, St Clare and the holy apostles – but all of us. St. Paul would call us: the saints who are in St Andrews Short Street or, as the prayer book calls us: the church militant here on earth. The mega-saints, St Teresa and co, are simply the ones who’ve come to ripeness and maturity often through trials and tribulations and who now support us at our backs, gathered here with us, unseen, a great cloud of witnesses who gather around us particularly when we celebrate communion together. Part of the same great organic whole, profoundly connected to us … but no longer so thrown off course by the realities of life, using and helping us to use everything as grist in the great alchemical transformation of everything into love – God’s universe from glory to glory.
I had a colleague once, I’ll call him John, who used to take Holy Communion to an old lady in his parish. She was a long-time widow and very disabled – and with her lived and even more ancient one time butler who was her carer – and who would come to the front door to greet John and escort him to the old woman: throwing open the double doors with new found energy and announcing in a booming voice:
‘Madam, the Blessed Sacrament’
The butler would then stand aside, bow deeply, and John would gather the full solemnity of the moment and process forward in order to give her Holy Communion. Holy Communion is the communion of Saints, gathered….with all that is holy in the universe. The butler really had it right – it was a symbolic gesture which should remind us that actually we each of us, created in the image of God, carries that holy sacrament in all the stature of being somebody unique to God, everywhere we go. Knowing that deeply and reminding one another frequently….is precisely why we come to Holy Communion today. To say we are not worthy is all very true and humble, and has its place. But God is always calling us to become truly ourselves…not somebody else, but someone made in the image of God, deserving of and receiving love (we celebrate that today – and on Tuesday we remember our own beloved dead and are invited back to return to our human condition; to grieve the ones we miss and to prepare ourselves to live more deeply the strange dual walk which we humans seem to be called to, poised “at the intersection of the timeless with time”). Once faced – the Halloween demons have no final power over us.
The butler story reminds me of a Jewish proverb, “Before every person there marches an angel, proclaiming, ‘Behold, the image of God.’ We are liberated by love, so that we can more fully live and discover our place wherever deep gladness and the world’s hunger meet. That’s the way transformation works. And that’s what we are celebrating today. Our job is to keep on planting the seeds of love. We can’t know the grand plan…
It’s a unnerving idea—because it means that we’re all capable of changing the world, and responsible for finding those opportunities to protect, feed, grow, and guide love. We have been given, and we are being given, all the resources we need to be full members of the Communion of Saints. All we must do is learn to receive God’s love, so that it can overflow for the healing of the world – and our lives can be more and more surrendered to Love until that day when all distinctions between ourselves and the saints of God are wholly dissolved – and God is all in all.
One of our saintly companions is Augustine of Hippo. He was of Berber origin from Morocco, lived in 4th century while the Roman Empire was disintegrating, the whole world collapsing. I’d like to finish with this challenge to us all:
If then you are members of the Body of Christ, it is the mystery of yourselves that is there on the Lord’s table…you receive the mystery of yourselves. You respond ‘Amen’ to what you are, and in responding you accept to be what you are. You hear the words ‘the Body of Christ’, and you respond ‘amen’. Be a member of the body of Christ that your Amen may prove true.
Amen
