All Saints Day Homily

Good morning!  Welcome, dearly beloved of God, to the Day of All Saints.

I love the institution of All Saints’ Day.  I love the hymns, especially For all the saints who from their labors rest, with its glorious music by Ralph Vaughan Williams.  I will confess that as I child I didn’t understand some of the words, including “through gates of pearl streams, in the countless host”: I thought that streams was a noun modified by pearl, and so my mind would wonder off trying to imagine what a “pearl stream” would look like.

I have come to love this day all the more as I have grown older, and the list of those dear to me who have died has grown longer: my grandparents, my father five years ago, my grandson Brendan last year, and for each of us here in the last few months, Olin Storvick, Bob Homan, David Boggs, and Hank Tkachuk, beloved of this college.  We honor them and affirm our communion with all God’s children who have died.

Yet today as I reflect on the Revelation scripture written to a Christian community under deadly persecution, I am struck by the realization that this reading is as much about the living as the dead.  When the narrator sees the “multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,” he asks an elder who they are.  You’ll remember the answer:

These are they who have come out of the great ordeal.  (7:9 & 14)

I have learned something about this verse from New Testament scholar Walter Taylor, who writes that there is a small but important mistranslation here:

"These are they who have come out of the great ordeal," should be translated as "these are they who are coming [out of that ordeal, he writes].  The participle that means coming is present tense and refers to an ongoing action.[1]

If so, then the writer means that multi-national, multi-lingual, multi-ethnic living people of God are, right now, both suffering and held in God’s embrace. 

You and I live in a time and place where the very idea of such communion in shared suffering and love is at risk.  I never thought that All Saints’ Day would become counter-cultural, but so be it.  Let me go back a ways to explain.  When I was a first-year college student in 1970, home to see my parents, I found in their bedroom a newly published book by Philip Slater.  It was called The Pursuit of Loneliness, and as one of Slater’s obituaries put it on his death in 2013, the book “warned that a national cult of individualism and careerism threatened to turn America into a country of hypercompetitive loners ruled by tyrants.”[2]

In the 48 years since Slater’s book appeared, there has been a long line of studies following the same trend, Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart and Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone among the best known.  Their critique, and mine today, is not about the virtue of freedom championed for the American republic from its revolutionary founding forward.   It is about the psychologically, civically, spiritually destructive idea that achievement in life is a matter of needing no one else, a matter of defeating all competitors, of keeping separate from those “unlike” ourselves, of being triumphantly alone.  It is about the notion that the people and place around us don’t matter as we pursue our “goals.” It is at once alluring and ruinous. 

Such a distorted vision of independence is what you’ll find if you venture with Dante’s pilgrim into the Inferno: Hell is a very private place where the damned get very the isolation they have sought.  At is very bottom, the pilgrim finds Satan himself, forever locked in a lake of ice made ever colder by the beating of his once angelic wings.  The scriptures of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity call us away from such isolation into community.

Earlier this term, in her compelling series of “Text Tuesdays,” Professor Elna Solvang taught us about the radical act of the Israelite Ruth in refusing to leave her wretched Moabite mother-in-law after the deaths of her husband and sons: “Do not press me to leave you,” Ruth tells Naomi. . . .  “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16-17).  Throughout the Christian gospels, we hear stories of faithfulness that reveal the stranger and even the outcast as our neighbors: the good Samaritan, the centurion’s slave, the despised (rich) tax collector, the impoverished widow.  Christ makes common cause with them all, even when, as in the feeding of the 5000, he has withdrawn “privately” to rest (see Luke 9:10ff.).

The Judeo-Christian tradition teaches us that our health, our salvation, lies in being the people of God: plural.  This spiritual truth turns out to be a psychological, even neurological one as well.  In his brilliant talk earlier this month, Carus Lecturer Mark Sullivan, a psychiatrist and philosopher, made the argument that our very brain chemistry has evolved in affirmation of the fact that human beings are profoundly social animals.  The chemical networks in our heads bring us comfort and relief from fear in the company of others.  This is why, as Sullivan noted, addiction recovery efforts always seek to bring suffers of these diseases to choose human company instead of drink or drugs.   

Cutting ourselves off from others, dividing ourselves for the sake of some imagined competition or perverse idea of purity, is quite literally an environmental disaster: a waste of the community for which we were created by God.  So as I close, we honor the saints, living and dead, with whom we have communion [images appear as the saints are named]:

§  Here is 1932 Concordia graduate Viola Eid, who graduated at the top of her class and accepted a scholarship to Harvard: She was blind from childhood.  How easy it would have been to hide away, but she sought this community.

§  Here are African American students demonstrating in the 1976 strike called to protest their felt exclusion from full community at Concordia: How tempting it would have been to vent their fears in private or simply to leave, but they make their pain public and cried out, as one of their signs said, “We are students too!”  One of their leaders now chairs our governing Board of Regents.

§  Moving out from this place, here are the saints fleeing violence in Honduras; mothers, fathers, children of God suffering not only the threat of death at home but the derision of those who suggest that they are alien to us: however complex immigration policy may be, their journey is a profile in courage.  Imagine them to be your own family, coming out of the great ordeal.

§  Here are the grieving children of God in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, their friends and neighbors murdered while worshiping ay the Tree of Life congregation, just a few minutes’ walk from where my own grandmother grew up.  We know now that they were targeted not only as Jews but also as a congregation committed to the care and resettlement of refugees.

We are all day by day, year by year, “coming out of the great ordeal,” at once suffering and embraced by the limitless love of God.  As the New Testament scripture engraved on the statue just outside this [north] window tells us, in that love we are no longer strangers and aliens but fellow saints in the household of God.   

The communion of saints isn’t an artifact; it isn’t even only the company of the beloved dead.  The communion of the saints will become fully real only if we practice it.  If so, we will influence the affairs of the world.  If so, though the earth should change, though the mountains tremble, we will not fear (Psalm 46).

Let it be so.  Amen.