The Sunday after All Saints' Day--2018

The Sunday after All Saints’ Day November 4, 2018 Last month, when I came back from traveling to Mississippi for my grandmother’s funeral, I returned to Savannah with a treasure. While I was home, I found a number of old savings bonds that I had received as a teenager from my great-aunt, who we called Retsie. Retsie, whose given name was Margaret (where I got the Margaret in Melanie Margaret Dickson Lemburg and also Mary Margaret Lemburg) was my father’s mother’s sister. She was a retired school teacher who never married, and she was a close to me as a third grandmother. (When my middle brother Jonathan was born, I stayed with Retsie, who lived right across the street from us.) I spent many hours of my childhood with Retsie. She never did drive, so we would walk to the Krystal down from her house and visit the Woolworth’s. Retsie lived frugally, and she had a very structured routine into which she would fold me when I came to visit. But she would also take trips around the world with her girl friends, and she would bring me back souvenirs from distant lands. With her I learned about order and also about a different kind of feminine independence. In my teenage years, Retsie began giving me savings bonds for special occasions. I learned to set them aside, and then I forgot about them for 20 years. Just recently I heard that the Government is going to discontinue savings bonds, and I remember I had these. So I retrieved them, and I took them down to the bank to see if they were still valid. Well, it was quite an ordeal to get these bonds cashed, and as I stood there while the teller worked, I thought about Retsie, about how much I missed her, even though she’s been dead 16 years. I thought about all I had learned from her, and I realized I knew exactly how I was going to use the money from those bonds she gave me so long ago. I was going to use it to help fund my trip to the Holy Land early next year. Today we celebrate the Sunday after All Saints’ Day, one of the 7 major feasts in the church year when it is especially appropriate to have baptisms. Our readings for today name the ever-present reality of death, and the acknowledgement that when those who we love die then we are left to mourn. (I once planned a funeral with a son who was burying a parent who chose today’s gospel reading for the funeral because it was important for him that Jesus, too, mourned when those he loved had died). Grief is not unchristian, our prayer book reminds us. Rather it is a part of the way that we love in this life, and it is an acknowledgement that when we lose those we love we are forever changed. This past week, I read a meditation by the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr that was talking about divine love. And in that meditation Rohr writes, “all human loves are an increasingly demanding school preparing us for an infinite divine love.” He continues, “Today we recognize this school as the only real training ground for “All the Saints,” and it can never be limited to those who have fully graduated. As the entire New Testament does, we must apply the word “saints” to all of us who are in kindergarten, primary school, middle school, high school, college, and doing graduate studies. Love is one shared reality, and our common name for that one shared reality is “God.”i The New Testament talks about “saints” 20 times, and it’s not talking about stained-glass people living perfect lives of faithfulness that we could only dream about. Saints, in the New Testament, refer to “God-lovers.” One of our old, beloved hymns puts it, “they loved their Lord so dear, so dear, and his love made them strong.” Saints are those God-lovers, both in our own lives and in the life of the body of Christ who walk with us a ways in the school for divine love, who teach us about God through the way that they love God and the way that they love us. So, in the light of our human loves being a school for the divine love for each and every one of us, our baptismal vows give us the frame-work within which to learn, over and over again through the course of our entire lives. As we renew our baptismal vows today and maybe even spend some time with them in reflection over the coming week, we can ask ourselves the following questions. “How are we loving God and others in our lives?” “How can we love God and others even more?” “When do we fail to love God and others?”ii Now, after the sermon ends, I invite you to come forward and light a candle for the saint or the saints that you remember in your life today. Remember them for how they helped you learn to love God and to love others through their love for you; and as you light your candle from the Paschal candle, may you hold fast to the hope that death is not the end but a change, that we are all knit together in the communion of the saints, even now, and that we will all feast together again at God’s table, where we will dwell forever in the light of the undying, unending, unyielding love of God. i.Richard Rohr’s meditation for November 1, 2018: https://cac.org/self-giving-2018-11-01/ ii. These questions came from the article Learning to Love God and Love Others Well on All Saints Day by Emily Watkins on November 1, 2018 at http://www.growchristians.org/2018/11/01/learning-to-love-god-and-love-others-well-on-all-saints-day/