I preached this sermon in my capacity as chaplain/spiritual care coordinator at William Temple House, on All Saints Sunday, November 4, 2018. The church celebrates William Temple on November 6.
“Then he said to me, ‘It is
done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.”
My favorite Halloween costume this year was a little girl whose
parent or someone had built up fake shoulders over her head, with fake arms
coming from the shoulders whose hands cradled her actual head so it looked like
a headless girl carrying her own head.
 |
| Gross, but good. |
Our neighbor’s fantastic outdoor display for the Day of the Dead is
still up, too. And two of our readings
today are recommended for use in the rite of burial.
It seems that this is a Sunday where we focus on death.
And yet, All Saints has always been an uplifting celebration. At St.
Gabriel, we have a jazz service, and we process to the Saints go Marching In. It
is a day where we make friends with our mortality—and locate death, as
Christians, in the context of a story that begins and ends in Christ, and
where, even in this in-between place we call life on earth, we may nevertheless
experience eternal life in Christ now, and live without fear of death. And this is why we invite the ones who come
before us to the dance, for we remember that in Christ, they are not truly lost
to us.
As I was driving
here I came to the traffic circle at Rosemont and Stafford, and I thought of it
as a way of visualizing where we are with those saints as we move around that
circle, somewhere between the Alpha and the Omega.
Our
psalm today reminds us of our origin story—the story of coming into the world
as creatures of God, belonging to God along with everything and everyone else
created by God. The Alpha. At the other
end, in a time beyond our knowing, we hear of a final destination--the image of
a holy city in Revelation; or the promised abundant feast of Isaiah. The Omega.
In
between is the time we spend in that circle—it is our lives. Actually not just our lives, but the lives of
all in this current reign of God. We don’t choose when we begin: we move into
that circle, into whatever is going on at the time, tranquil or messy (usually
messy). Hopefully we get in without
being sideswiped. We often get lost; we may spend years at a time going around
and around aimlessly. (Here’s where I don’t want to take the metaphor too
literally.) We spend time trying to figure out how where we want to go and how
to get there. People join with us and loop around with us for a time. This is
the journey--our own storied lives as part of the grand story that encompasses
every other living soul who has been on that same journey. The people we
remember today, the saints we read about and celebrate, whose shoulders we
stand on, are all part of that circle, and they are still moving in it, around
us, into us and through us. We knit their stories into ours, and our stories develop,
as we encounter people whose stories change us. We may step into a new and
liberating narrative, and God willing, we make room in that narrative for others
who need to be liberated.
Our
Gospel continues this theme of liberation, of being unbound. Not so much from our mortality,
for we are assuredly mortal, and Lazarus did not live forever. Cynthia Jarvis
describes it as a demonstration by Jesus of the resurrection and life within
Lazarus. It is bidding us to live as though there is no separation between the
eternal and the now, because Christ is.
It is living as if death has no power over us, because Christ is. It is living as if we belong,
in life and in death, to Christ. Jarvis writes that saints “are those who
realize before they die that neither death nor life, things present nor things
to come, can separate them from the love of God in Christ Jesus. They are those
who, therefore, may dare everything for the sake of this one true thing.”
This
was the one true thing for William Temple, a saint whom the church lifts up on
November 6. He wrote, in 1941:
“God reigns. That is the fundamental truth…We
acknowledge Christ as the absolute Lord of life and savior from the sin which
brings these evils upon the world. We pledge ourselves and call our fellows to
penitence for the past and to new loyalty for the future. Especially we confess
our acquiescence in social injustice and national jealousies; and we dedicate
ourselves to the establishment of economic and international justice and
fellowship…We declare that in this allegiance to Jesus Christ we are united to
all others who acknowledge him…”
 |
| Saint du jour, and for our times |
William Temple: Archbishop of Canterbury;
social reformer; the one for whom William Temple House is named. From the upper echelons in the rigid late-Victorian
English class structure, he was born in 1881, “into the purple,” as it has been
said, for his father was a bishop, and later, Archbishop of Canterbury himself.
Temple’s interest in the poor was kindled by a
professor who encouraged his students to live in the London slums during their
summer months. It changed his life. He
later wrote, “We have to teach St. James’
doctrine that anyone who is not interested in ‘good works’ is in effect
anti-Christ.”
Temple could see that
the Church of England was losing its influence in popular life, concerned as it
was with supporting Empire and a broad public morality concerned largely with drink,
gambling, and sexual behavior. Gregarious and humble, Temple didn’t take on
airs, and young people flocked to him. In a series of lectures at Oxford in
1931, he challenged youth to follow Christ in the world
and find their purpose in lifting up those who suffered. He later articulated seven
principles consistent with Christian social action, including affordable
housing; education for all children; a secure, sustainable income for all
citizens; and a voice for every worker in the conduct of their workplace. He reformed
Church of England schools and, with a leading rabbi, established the British
Council for Christians and Jews. He embraced public outreach: in one of his frequent BBC radio addresses, he
spoke so persuasively about the moral imperative of the war against Hitler, it
was said that he changed the minds of the British virtually overnight. It was
after this address that Churchill, who needed to sustain public morale during
the war effort--but otherwise couldn’t stand Temple’s social program—asked that
he be made Archbishop of Canterbury. When he died just a few years later, all
of Britain mourned the death of “the people’s Archbishop.”
It’s hard to express
how much of an impact Temple made on how we think about the church in the
world. What strikes me is the absence of external
pressures which might have motivated his concern for social action. It wasn’t
his own self-interest, and he didn’t have first-hand experience of poverty or
want. But he loved the Gospel of John:
perhaps he was simply compelled by the idea of God enfleshed as one who
pitched his tent with the poor, the hungry and the marginalized. Temple also
stood on the shoulders of others: his correspondence with his father shows he
was encouraged to ask deep questions about the wretched lives of the poor.
Perhaps he was inspired by
Francis of Assisi’s rejection of his family wealth and title to live among the
poor. Perhaps he read about a contemporary Francis: Frances Perkins. Secretary of Labor to FDR, devout
Episcopalian, who more than any other person, was responsible for the social
reforms of the New Deal. She said “I
came to Washington to work for God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten,
plain common workingmen.” William Temple
liberated himself from whatever bound him to his past, and the works he
inspired liberated millions of Britons. He is still speaking today into the work and ethos
of William Temple House. He is certainly in my
assembly of saints.
Who
are yours? Fred Rogers said, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in
the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always
find people who are helping.” He was talking to three-year-olds, but there are
plenty of scary things in the news. We can look to the saints. The ordinary saints who have walked beside us, who
have inspired, led, or adopted us, or the saints we have merely heard of, whose
stories have been breathed into us. They
are with us: they meet us somewhere between the Alpha and the Omega, and they point
us toward the liberating love of God. And it is liberation that we need: Whether from our excess, or our poverty, from
our privilege or our oppression: the
shroud is cast over us; the sheet is spread over us. We are bound up together,
and we cannot have our share of the feast that the Lord for whom we have waited
promises until all can share in
the feast.
So let us pray.
Holy God, unbind
us, and let us go. May we wake from the death that is life without Christ, and
following the example of William Temple and all your saints, live unbounded
lives, always to your glory, and to the welfare of your people. Amen.
Lectionary readings: Isaiah 26:6-9; Psalm 24; Revelation 21:1-6a; John 11:32-44
No comments:
Post a Comment