The Sunday after All Saints' Day year A

The Sunday after All Saints’ Day Year A November 5, 2017 A letter to Hedges King upon the occasion of his baptism. Matthew 5:1-12 Dear Hedges, Today is a special day for three reasons. First, it is the day of your baptism, when your parents and godparents will accept for you that you are God’s beloved child, where you will be baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and become a part of his body in this world and the next. Second, it is a day when we will renew our own baptismal promises and when we will remember these truths for ourselves once again. And third it is the Sunday after All Saints’ Day when we remember all the Saints who have come before us who continue to surround us and uphold us as fellow members of the body of Christ, who support us on our life-long journeys of following Jesus. Someone once wrote about the Saints that “the Saints were men and women who understood the challenge of living the gospel in the context of their own place and time. They are remembered because they lived it with imagination and devotion. They used what they had been given to live their lives into the freedom of the kingdom.”i “Living the challenge of the gospel with imagination and devotion” is truly the call of the Christian life that you begin this day, Hedges. And you begin it here with us because it will not be easy. And you will need us. And we will need you. So how do we live the challenge of the gospel with imagination and devotion? We hold fast to certain truths. That death is not the end, but a change, and it is not to be feared. That Jesus’s death and resurrection has proven, once and for all, that God’s love is stronger than anything we can and will encounter in this life, even death. That God’s kingdom is real and present, transformative and active. That how we live our lives matters because we are the body of Christ in this world. That we need each other to remember and to be the body of Christ, the church in the world in every moment of every day. That God’s blessing are often found in places where we would never think to see or to look: in poverty, mourning, meekness, in a hunger and thirst for righteousness, in mercy, in peacemaking, and in persecution. That we, together, as the body of Christ, the church, can create and imagine a kingdom, here and now, where exercising mercy transforms violence, where the children of God are known by the way we make peace, and we can imagine and create a place where every member of the body of Christ can respond to others from a place of belonging and from the assurance of their belovedness. But this work, this life, is not easy. Which is why we do it together. Following the way of Jesus can be difficult and demanding and lonely, and we need each other desperately. We need each other to understand things which don’t make sense to us at the time and to see things that we can’t see on our own. We need each other to offer comfort when we mourn, to offer solace when we are heartbroken, to offer kindness when we are weary beyond measure, to offer mercy when we have gone astray. We will do this for you and your family, Hedges, and you will do it for us. That is a part of the promises that we all make this day. Because that’s how we do all this, Hedges, this living the challenge of Jesus’s good news with imagination and devotion. We do it together, and we do it by helping each other remember, over and over again that you are God’s beloved, marked as Christ’s own forever. We will help you remember when you are afraid. We will help you remember when you are angry. We will help you remember when you are joyful. We will help you remember when you feel you have lost your way. And you will do this for us. Because that is what it means to be the body of Christ in this world. I am so glad that you have joined us. God loves you, and I love you too. Your sister in Christ, Melanie+ i. Br. Robert L'Esperance in “Brother, Give us a Word” for November 1, 2017 from the Society of St. John the Evangelist www.ssje.org