The Sunday after All Saints' Day-Year B

Sunday after All Saints’ Day Year B November 7, 2021 This time of year, a lot of people like to hang out in graveyards. I’ve seen lots of folks decorating their yards with skeletons, bones, and tombstones this year, and this time of year always sees an increase of interest in cemetery or haunted walking tours. Just this past week, some of us spent some time hanging out here in the Memorial Garden, our church’s very own graveyard, as we held our All Saints’ service in the Memorial Garden for the second year. We wrote the names of the Saints and our faithful departed on luminary bags that we lit up with candles and placed on different graves and on the pathways in our church’s graveyard. After the brief service, many of us lingered, talking with our fellow worshippers among the graves as we waited for darkness to fall to better see the lighted luminaries. I found it to be such a profound moment of peace in the midst of a very full week. Not so long ago, Scott Tanner oversaw a project to clean up the Memorial Garden. In addition to placing new sod and cleaning the markers, Scott ran plumblines through the garden and then straightened the grave markers to be in better alignment. One day, as Scott was out there working in the heat, I went out to check on him toward the end of the day. (He’s said it’s ok that I share all this with you.) Even though the work was grueling, and he was clearly tired, he was strangely luminous. He told me he was actually enjoying the work, and he talked about how, while he was working, he would talk to his friends and loved ones who were buried nearby where he was working, how he could almost just hear how they were responding to him—some were offering him words of encouragement while others were heckling him or still trying to boss him around even from beyond the grave. (I’m sure those of you who have been around here a while can guess who was doing what!) I couldn’t help remembering Scott’s peace and his joy when he told me that he was working among friends and loved ones as we sat among friends, both living and dead, and waited for the darkness to fall this past Monday. The Celtic people-both pagans and Christians-had a name for this. They called it a “thin place,” and they had an abiding awareness of these thin places in their lives and in their world. Harvard theologian Rev. Peter Gomes writes this about thin places: “There is in Celtic mythology the notion of ‘thin places’ in the universe where the visible and the invisible world come into their closest proximity. To seek such places is the vocation of the wise and the good — and for those that find them, the clearest communication between the temporal and eternal. Mountains and rivers are particularly favored as thin places marking invariably as they do, the horizontal and perpendicular frontiers. But perhaps the ultimate of these thin places in the human condition are the experiences people are likely to have as they encounter suffering, joy, and mystery.”i Thin places are places and moments when we recognize that the veil between our current life and our eternal life is thin, sheer, even, at times, non-existent. Thin places, both physically and spiritually, transport us to a place of homecoming and belonging. In the liturgical year, the days surrounding All Saints’ Day are one of these thin places. We see Jesus standing in one of these thin places in our gospel reading for today, as he raises his friend Lazarus from the dead and invites him to come out of his grave. And we see another thin place in the vision of the celebratory banquet in Isaiah, a joyful vision of a time when the scattered will one day be regathered and restored. Today is such a thin place in the life of this church. As we turn in our pledge cards and ask God to bless these gifts that we offer back to God from the gifts God has given us, we stand in the thin place between the past and the future here at St. Thomas. On one side are all those saints who have come before us, who have shined the light of Christ’s love for us in this place. And on the other side are those who have yet to come, to whom we are called to shine the light of Christ’s love—our companions and children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the faith—generations yet to be born. We mark our place here in this thin place by making our pledge commitment and by renewing our baptismal vows—reminding and encouraging ourselves and each other of what it means to be bearers of Christ’s light in this place and in this season. Years ago, in the early days of my priesthood, I performed the funeral of a woman named Virginia Stephens. Virginia, who was a wife, a mother, a grandmother, and a great-grandmother, had been a life-long Episcopalian, and she wasn’t so different from most of those folks buried out in our graveyard. She had been secretary of the parish for a season long before I got there, was a member of the altar guild and a choir member among many other things. One of the gifts Virginia gave to her family and to me as a baby priest, is that she planned her entire funeral. (Perhaps she didn’t trust me or her family to not mess it up!?) As we processed out of the service, her grandchildren bearing her body out of the church for the last time, we sang the hymn Virginia had chosen for her exit. It was hymn 400 which we sang last Sunday and is the same hymn tune as the hymn we’re singing today. It’s a hymn, whose words are attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, and which talks about how all of creation is invited to join in praise of God the Creator. There’s an optional verse that Virginia had us sing, and singing that verse in that moment opened up a thin place for me; even now I can’t hear it without wanting to weep with a strange mix of sorrow and joy. “And even you, most gentle death/ waiting to hush our final breath/O, praise him. Alleluia!/ You lead back home the child of God/for Christ before that way has trod/O praise him! O praise him! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!” i. https://couragerenewal.org/wpccr/thin-places/