In 2009, The Pentecost readings give way to All Saints Day.
BCP:
Ecclesiasticus 44:1-10,13-14.
Psalm 149.
Revelation 7:2-4,9-17.
Matthew 5:1-12.
Mark McIntosh, a Scottish born theologian, ask us, “Suppose you invite me to your house for a dinner party. I arrive and later, as we enjoy one another’s company, the appetizers and meal itself become a wonderfully delicious sign, a sacrament, of our fellowship, a means of being with each other in mutual delight. But what if instead I arrive at your house and grab up your food and drink, gulping it down in a corner by myself, and slip back out? In that case, the gift of your hospitality can no longer be a basis for fellowship because I have debased it. It is important to remember that by inviting me, you are implicitly allowing me this option. My communion with you must be freely and joyfully desired, a celebration of fellowship with you.”
McIntosh goes on to tell us that God is the host and the universe is his lavish party and we are created for communion with each other in thanksgiving but we are free to doubt that such communion will happen and free to decide that it would be better to grab what we can while here, preferring biological survival, to communion and fellowship.
On all Saints Day we might wonder if the dinner invitation analogy is rich enough if limited to one occasion. We have all been guests at someone’s home more than once. On later visits we may recall the earlier occasions and perhaps guests who were there then but are not present this time, thus expanding the community of communion. In some cases we recall Aunt Hazel’s steam pudding, or Grandma Duffus’s cranberry frappe long after both have died, thus further expanding the community of communion.
When someone says, he looks just like my Dad or your uncle Ben or Great Grandpa Johnson they are witnessing to at least the genetic transfer of some characteristic through several generations. While the mentioning of ancestral names does not bring them across time physically enlivens the communion by recalling previous fellowship dinners. Whenever you eat and drink this, do it in remembrance of me.
And the swiss psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, suggested that our brains not only store physical characteristics, but psychic memories, not just of things we have experienced, but of experiences of our ancestors. Thus our dreams bring up images that we could never have experienced and cultures that have never met each other have similar stories of their origin, purpose and destiny. It is as if every one of us carries forward the gift of the first banquet to which anyone was invited.
Think today of those who have died, perhaps your parents, grandparents, heaven-forbid your children, aunts, uncles, great-grandparents, great aunts, not only those you recall but those you have only heard of or even farther back, have only read about in the family genealogy. And think of friends with whom you once played or studied or argued, who are no longer alive, but attended some mutual dinner party, or at least some bar-b-cue or college beer bust with you, or fought beside you in some terrible war. Are they not in some way still a part of you and are you not in some way still in fellowship with them? I refer here, not to memory but to the fact that our association with them has helped make us who we are, though we cannot detail just how in most cases.
Nor am I just referring to those of whom you were and are fond. We are also made up of gifts from those who persecuted us, made fun of us, humiliated us, abused us, fought against us in those wars. Some have come to the dinner with great promise and made our lives miserable, and perhaps we theirs? Life in this world is a mix of good and evil in which we often differ with each other about which is which. Blood is shed by my good against your evil and the opposite. It has been that way for millennia and so those whom we recall today as having gone before us in life may all in God’s mind be those who have, as our second reading tells us, come out of the great tribulation, and have washed their robes in the blood of the lamb and now stand before the throne of grace in new garments, sheltered by the sheer presence of he who sits upon the throne. When we are in our darkest times, we seek not necessarily words of comfort and enlightenment but the sheer presence of someone who abides our darkness with us.
The writer of Ecclesiasticus was aware of something we all know and that is that most of us will never be to public history a Queen Elizabeth or President Washington. We will pass relatively unnoticed out of general public awareness.
I heard a speaker say yesterday that God knew us from the moment of our birth. Plato said that the gods knew us well before that, though when we were born we forgot them. Ecclesiasticus, in a more pastoral moment, after reminding us that some are well remembered in history, says, “And there are some who have no memorial, who have perished as though they had not lived; they have become as though they had not been born, and so have their children after them. But these were men of mercy, whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten. Their posterity will continue forever, and their glory will not be blotted out. Their bodies were buried in peace, and their name lives to all generations.
Last night I walked the streets of Rhinebeck for a few minutes. Large groups of young people and families with children passed behind and in front of the church, on their way from house to house. I wondered how many of them knew that the origin of their happy evening was in the celebration of our communion with our ancestors, familial and otherwise. The Eve of all Hallows or All Saints, eventually to be called halloween, has in the course of time, lost much of its original meaning, as is often the case with cultural change. Smaller and smaller numbers of people in our society recall with any depth the meaning of Christmas, Easter (itself originally a celebration of the nature goddess Oester) Labor Day, Memorial Day. I do not begrudge the families or the children their enjoyment together last night. In fact, it was the occasion of many fellowship meals together and will provide material for many a recollection in the future. But I was also reminded how easily present enjoyment can obscure gratitude for the past and hope for the future, and what a daunting task it is for parents and teachers and ourselves to find ways to give each new generation the language and the story by which they too can be guests at this awesome banquet, grateful for the opportunity for communion and fellowship with past and future generations, and not just seekers after biological survival.