All Saints Sunday

November 5, 2006

Sermon by Pastor Joy Bussert

The Holy Gospel according to St. John. John 11:32-44

When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

The Gospel of the Lord.

The worst thing that I could ever imagine anyone saying about anyone in my little town when I was a child growing up was: “Oh, she’s such a saint,” or “He’s such a saint.” I knew before I even met them that I wouldn’t like them.

Yet today Christians the world over, whether Protestant or Catholic, will celebrate All Saints or All Souls Sunday. They will sing, “For all the saints who from their labors rest . . . ,” or “Shall we gather at the river . . . .” And they will recall what it means to stand in the presence of what we call that great cloud of witnesses; remembering the saints, not so much for their great pious, plaster-of-Paris quality, but for their great capacity to live authentic lives to the fullest.

Think of someone close to you who has gone before you. The moments you treasure the most are not likely to be their most pious but their most outrageous, their most adorable, their most authentic moments, when they were the most alive to themselves and to the world around them.

The many people in our lives we have known and admired and recall as saints today are saints to us not so much because of all of the good and pious things that they said but because of what they did: some act of courage that lit up our paths, some extraordinary gesture of kindness that made our day more bearable, some word of encouragement that affirmed your humanity against all of the forces that wanted to contradict it; someone whose laughter, just the sheer memory of it, brightens up the darkest hour yet today. Indeed, even the great, canonized saints of Christian tradition were not named saints because they fit that mold of the pious, plaster-of-Paris figures. Instead, they were, if you read about them, down-to-earth men and women, often slightly eccentric characters, who argued with God, who wrestled with demons in the night, who got discouraged and fed up with the human race, but, in spite of it all, went right on struggling for the best in life, anyway, with just a little more tenacity than the average person.

Thomas Kepler, one of those who has studied the saints of history, once wrote: “A saint is a person who has quit worrying about him or herself because their life is centered in God. What distinguishes a saint from other people more than anything else is radiance.” Or, in the words of a child who loved cathedral windows, “A saint is a person the light shines through.”

And speaking of saints whose tenacity made or makes a difference, the old philosopher Bertold Brecht once remarked: “There are people who struggle for a day and they are good. There are others who struggle for many years and they are very good. Then there are those who struggle all their lives; these are the indispensable ones, the saints.” These are the ones who you could say lived in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, who was known to have said, “Even if you don’t think what you do is significant, it is important that you do it anyway.”

I always love the spirit of the League of Women Voters around this time of year. In September, we hosted a congressional debate at our school. True to democracy, we invited the candidates from all of the viable parties: the Green Party, the Independence Party, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party. By the time all of the candidates got there, there were eight to answer questions from nearly 200 middle-school students and their parents about everything from the environment, to education, to the Middle East. It was a wonderful and lively and informative exchange; democracy at its best.

And before we all went home for the evening, in order to encourage people to vote, the League of Women Voters moderator Jerry Sell, now nearly 80―she’s been doing this all of her life―shared some remarkable historical facts from a document entitled: “The Voting Power of One.” Here are a few of them:

In 1645, one vote gave Oliver Cromwell control of England.

In 1649, one vote caused King Charles I of England to be executed.

In 1776, one vote gave America the English language instead of German.

In 1845, one vote difference brought Texas into the Union.

One vote per precinct passed the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women suffrage in California in 1911.

In 1923, Adolph Hitler became leader of the Nazi Party by a one-vote margin.

In 1960, John F. Kennedy’s margin of victory over Richard Nixon was less than one vote per precinct.

Yet, she said, when Americans are asked why they stay home on Election Day and do not vote, they will usually say, “I’m just one person. My little old vote doesn’t make a difference.”

The saints are the ones we honor and remember on All Saints Sunday, not because of some plaster-of-Paris existence, but because they were or are still today so fully alive to the world around them, to the ideas they have, to the cause they support, to the art they create, to the music they make, to the ideals they hold. And they are alive to the people around them each and every moment of their lives. And we are blessed each and every All Saints Sunday by their remembrance.

If for no other reason than that, it is so boring to live life to the minimum. It is so boring to be nice and pious and precise all of the time. It is so boring to live life as if you were dead while you are still living. And life goes by and slips through your fingers without you ever having—carpe diem in the Latin—“seized the day.” An old saint of a church father, Iraneous, was right when he told his students, before it was too late, that “the glory of God is a human being fully alive.”

If you love theater as I do, you might recall that wonderful character of a child, Emily Webb, in Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer prize-winning classic stage play, “Our Town.”

Emily has just died. But in the closing scene of the play, the stage manager gives her the opportunity to go back to earth for just one day. Emily chooses her 12th birthday. There she is, on stage, 12 years old again, back in her old kitchen, just as it always was at her house. Her mother is frying the bacon for breakfast, but she doesn’t see her. She doesn’t seem to really notice her.

Suddenly Emily cries to the stage manager through tears, “I can’t, I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another.” She breaks down, sobbing. The lights dim on the left half of the stage. Her mother disappears. “I didn’t realize,” she says. “So all that was going on and we never noticed.” “Take me back, up the hill, to my grave. But first, wait! One more look.”

“Good-bye. Good-bye, world. Good-bye, Grover’s Corners; Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking, and Mama’s sunflowers, and food and coffee, and new-ironed dresses and hot baths, and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you!”

She looks toward the stage manager and asks abruptly, through her tears, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it, every, every moment?” “No,” the stage manger replies. And then there is a long pause. “No. The saints and the poets, maybe they do some.”

So this All Saints Day my prayer is that each one of us will remember a saint, someone close to us, or someone we have only admired from the legends of history; that each of us will recall one biography to add to the collection of portraits that line the recesses of our minds; someone whose courage lives on in our hearts, whose knowledge lights up our path, and whose tasks have now fallen to our hands.

Amen.