All Saints, Year B, November 4, 2012
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was
The Feast
of All Saints. This is one of the major
feasts of our church, a feast of memory, remembering the lives and work of
those who have gone before us. We
remember the triumph of light over darkness, right over wrong, good over evil. That is what saints do, and that is what we
are supposed to do for this feast; remember them. This is part of our birthright as Anglicans,
the Communion of Saints, that cloud of witnesses, named and anonymous, that
have served God and humanity in our past, and we are to remember them and their
stories. But that is not the whole
story. All Saints does not stand
alone. This week we also celebrated All
Hallows’ Eve, Halloween on the 31st, and on the 2nd, All
Souls, or officially, the Feast of All Faithful departed. These three days come together in a complex
of feasts that should probably have a name, but doesn’t.
All
Hallows’ Eve... Not that I don’t love
all the witches and superheros and kitty cats and mermaids running around the
neighborhood, and the cheap candy and spider webs hung from trees, but
Halloween has lost its traditional power.
What is being taunted on All Hallows’ Eve? Death.
Death itself. It is a carnival,
in its most ancient sense, which means it is an occasion for humans to bring
our wit and sense of humor to bear on serious, terrifying, and solemn subjects.
All Hallows’ Eve is a lot like Mardi Gras, but instead of mocking the fast
leading up to remembering Christ’s death as in Mardi Gras, in All Hallows’ Eve
we are mocking our own death. Wearing a fanciful, outrageous or even obscene costume
and eating too much candy or drinking too much whatever, I am saying, “Death –
I mock you. You have no power over me
because I can chose to not take you seriously.
And I so choose. (Tonight).” That is where it comes from, Halloween. It is not where we are today.
For All
Faithful Departed, All Souls, we remember our own common of saints, those that
we as individuals and communities have lost to death’s inevitable embrace. Remembering our dead in hope; that is part of
the light perpetual shining on those who have passed into the sweet by and
by. All Faithful Departed is celebrated
in the full knowledge of our collective mortality, mitigated by a hope for a
common eternity, or at least by the hope that even in death, I think Bob Marley
says it best, even in death, “…every little thing’s gonna be alright.” Even in death, it is going to be fine, there
is nothing to fear.
This
autumnal triduum, anchored by All Saints, is among the most powerful complexes
of Holy Days that we have. The dark and
chaotic mockery of Halloween, the commemoration of powerful servants throughout
history for All Saints and the solemn remembrance of our own dead on All Faithful
Departed… there is powerful medicine in there.
But this feast complex is, barely observed religiously by anything
besides reading the names of the dead and singing “For All the Saints.” Why?
Earlier
this week, someone described to me a cartoon they saw. It may have been in the Guard. It had two
panels, the first a man in a suit just standing there, the second, the same man
in a suit, this time standing in rather deep water in what was obviously New
York City, and each panel had the same caption: “This is no time to talk about
climate change.” On the eve of a
complicated election, in the wake of a devastating and unprecedented storm, or
in the words of our resident expert on such matters, John Orbell, an “
‘anomalous’ and extreme weather event,” it is what, disappointing, dismaying,
disgusting that neither major party candidate has even uttered the words climate change. It is beyond negligent. This fact is an abomination of Biblical
proportions. We are experiencing the
overwhelming and willful disregard of our and our planet’s future by our
so-called leaders. And not the distant
future. My sister’s sculpture studio
under the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges was under 6 feet of water on Wednesday
(they still don’t have power). And she
was blocks from the river, the studio is in a good neighborhood, but not that
good. First Bangkok was under water this
year, now New York. Millennial droughts
occurred across the central US this summer, they are still ongoing. And in the artic, we experienced the smallest
summer ice pack ever. This is it
happening; climate change. Wet places
getting wetter, dry places getting drier, storms getting bigger. And no one is talking about it, not without
being couched by politicized and partisan deniers of what are accepted and now,
in the wake of Sandy, widely experienced facts about the reality of climate
change. How can they get away without ever talking about climate change in this
whole campaign (or poverty or homelessness or barley even the wars we are
involved in)? How do we let them get
away with it? Why does this happen?
Why?
Well,
why?__________
What I
think, is that they, you know, They think, that we can’t handle the
truth. Remember that line from Rob
Reiner’s film A Few Good Men? “We can’t handle the truth,” that truth being
that the world is a brutal place that needs brutal people to protect us by
brutal means. That is in fact not true,
but They
operate under that premise, andby extrapolation, so do we. If we, the people, knew how bad it was, is,
knew how precarious our atmosphere has become, knew how much the ocean has
warmed and knew, truly knew what we were facing, sure, we’d be angry, we’d
certainly not reelect some, and would certainly not elect others, we’d change
consumption habits, change a lot about how we live and then get on with
it. That’s what New Orleans is
doing. It is what we did during World
War I, the Depression, and World War II.
We can handle the truth. We have,
and we can again.
And the
same thing goes for death. Ours is a death denying culture. Over the generations, they, and by that I
certainly include we, the clergy we, as part of the problem, we have come up with
all kinds of death denying jargon, theologies, distractions, taking us away
from the heart of the matter. And the
heart of the matter is that, yes, we will all die. You heard it here. It is true.
Death is in all of our futures.
The thing
is that that, death, is not the end
of the story. Here is where the liberals
among us start to get uncomfortable. And
hey, I get confused too. But the words
of Sam Portaro, an Episcopal priest and writer, bring us to the heart of the
matter is that, “We Christians dare to hope beyond the constraints of
mortality.” That is what this whole All
Hallow/All Saints/All Souls feast complex is about. Christian hope is all bound up with the
departed in the face of death: saints, souls and otherwise, a vast collection
of those gone before us living life everlasting, beyond time, beyond mortality,
now and forever. And every little thing’s
gonna be alright.
There is
no evidence for this, of course, evidence for eternal life, not immortality,
that is heresy if not sacrilegious, but eternal life. The testimonials on the hereafter are spotty
and are generally unreliable. But
Christianity is THE hopeful religion. It
is the religion of eternal life. Our
culture lives as if there is no tomorrow.
It, we spend our natural resources, our real wealth, our people as if
there is no future to expect. That is
the ethic of clear-cutting, strip-mining, tar sands, and fission reactors. If
there is no hope for tomorrow, there need be no worries for today. That is the guiding theology of late stage
free-market capitalism of the West; no hope, so… (Lots of words flow through my
mind that are not appropriate for Sunday mornings, so I’ll settle with a
locally grown slogan) just do it. That is not a Christian way to live.
Hope is
the guiding force in the life of the Christian.
Not hope for some forseen or wished for future, not some grasping image
of how things might be, or how you want things to be, not some vision of a
world unstained by death, a world that miraculously turns the corner on global
warming, but an eschatological hope, a hope unconcerned with the mechanics of
it all but with the blessed assurance we can do it. By do it I don’t mean that you are going to
live. None of us are, not that much longer, but by “do it”, I mean
that you can go through all that you have to go through. You can handle the truth of what it means to
be alive, alive, formed in the imago dei,
the image of God. We, Christians, live
in the hope of the Resurrection; of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, yes of
course, and of the perpetual nature
of life, eternity, time outside of time, and the very real, cold fact of death,
and its inevitablility. Christian hope
is the balance of inevitable death and equally inevitable eternity. Christian hope is bound up with the indelible
mark of life, the unstoppable will to live, and the intense fragility of the
living. We can handle the truth. About our own future and about the future of
our planet. And the complex of All
Hallow’s Eve, All Saints and All Faithful Departed, we can handle that, too,
and in handling those observances, we might even be able to handle the rest of it
even better. So until next year, give to
the departed eternal rest: may light perpetual shine upon them, because every
little thing’s gonna be alright. AMEN
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