AKMA’s Random Thoughts

For All The Saints

Today’s All Saints Day mass went well, I thought. The liturgy at Seabury is a bit odd, since we do something different almost every day, and there’s little chance to develop a rhythm of liturgical practice. On a day when we aim High (Church), the relative of habituation makes the whole exercise seem a great adventure. Still, we used up a good quantity of incense, we processed out to “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God,” and the liturgical team kept mostly in synch. I didn’t botch any of the chants, though when I’m intoning a long passage it can be hard to know whether I’m staying quite on pitch. Anyway, a wonderful mass, and prayers for Joey’s father and mine were wafted heavenward in billowing clouds of incense.

The sermon went well, although it was gauged for a slightly different congregation than actually showed up. I’d forgotten that today begins the two-week parish immersion part of the second-years’ “Plunge” course, so that a third of the seminary was away on location; and I had hoped that one or two more of the faculty would be there, but the Board of Trustees was meeting at the same time as mass. The first-years and some seniors were there, though, and I tried to modulate the tenor of the sermon better to fit the smaller, less-Seabury-ized congregation. It still could have benefited from a little more ripening and a finer connection to the congregation — but enough temporizing. This is what I preached:

Mass of All Saints
Charles Palmer Anderson Chapel of St. John the Evangelist
Seabury-Western Theological Seminary
October 31, 2003

In spite of all the learned have said
We hear the voices of the dead.

This is the beginning of a favorite poem of mine, John Hollander’s “The Widener Burying-Ground” (alluding to the name of the Harvard University library). The poem evokes a way of thinking about interpretation that disarms some of the imaginary barriers to rich, exhilarating interpretations of the texts our ancestors have left to us. We who preach are neither undertakers, who dress up still corpses as best we can, nor Frankenstinian scientists who shock a semblance of life into dead bodies. We who read poems and prophecies assimilate the words we read into our selves, and we renew their echo in a joyful, rich, responsible freedom to take up and resonate again.

Our marginalia all insist
– Beating the page as with a fist
Against a silent headstone – that
The dead whom we are shouting at,
Though silent to us now, have spoken
Through us, their stony silence broken
By our outcry (We are the dead
Resounding voices in our stead). . . .

Hollander captures the gravity of our place in the communion of saints. Our inheritance from the saints settles onto us as a constraint on our freedom. We are not free to scorn the saints, pleasant or prickly, great or small. We may not simply repudiate their wisdom. The saints have built up for us a place in the household of God, and we may not casually tear it down – even if we need to redecorate it once in a while. The saints, all the saints, testify that God’s plan is not all about us.
But with this unasked-for home the saints bless us more richly than we can imagine, entrusting us with their faith, to keep their hope alive and effective. We are the saints’ voices; we don’t invent, but we inherit the saints’ good news, which we proclaim anew in our own accents, our own dialects, from every tribe and language and people and nation. We are the saints’ bodies, bearing in our ?esh the marks of their suffering, renewing their ministry and testimony. We are the saints’ hearts, grieving and rejoicing and growing, ever growing in love for this fractured world and the lovely, stressed-out neighbors in whom we love God.
And here’s the pivotal point that this morning’s poem misses: As we indeed are the saints, as we bespeak their gospel and enact their faithful ministry and empower the church with their spirit, so the saints are not dead.
The saints are not dead, and we know that. We study at the side of African Augustine, learning how we can knit together diverse lives in a harmoniously-ordered City of God. We journey with Patrick and Francis Xavier to situations we can’t anticipate, learning to trust God’s care for us. We learn from Macrina the meaning of “resurrection,” from Sojourner Truth the meaning of endurance, from Thomas Aquinas the meaning of practically everything, if you know where to look in the Summa. And we learn not only from stained-glass saints, but from the Seabury saints who’ve warmed these pews before us, to whose inextinguishable lives we testify: Charles Harris and Jim Griffiss, alive! Lois Hart, Enmegabowh, Effie Alice Keith, Mary Gladkowski, alive! All saints, sisters and brothers, saints remembered and forgotten, saints present and absent, saints yet unborn whom we will someday parent and teach, all saints, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, singing, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever!”

Amen.

Posted by AKMA at October 31, 2003 10:04 PM | TrackBack