Sermon preached on All Saints' Sunday, November 4, 2018 at St. Thomas' Church, Bath, NY. We baptized five children.Listen to the sermon here.
I was baptized when I
was just shy of my fifth birthday, in 1966, in the little Methodist Church that
used to be in Wallace, up the road from Avoca.
Of course, I don’t remember it, and no one ever talked about while I was
growing up, and my family didn’t go to church.
Then something happened
to me when I was eleven years old. My
grandmother died, someone I absolutely adored.
She died young at the age of 49 at the end of a terrible two years of
battling cancer.
I was a confused and
angry young man. I was told that she was
now in heaven with God, which was a better place for her to be. But I had no frame of reference to process
those statements, and they only made me more confused and more angry. Whoever God was, he seemed completely
selfish, and how could it be possible that there was any better place for my
grandmother except by my side.
And she was no longer
by my side. She was gone.
For many years I
carried this hurt and anger in me. When
I was sixteen, my great Aunt Ann asked me to come to church with her—here to
St. Thomas’.
I did not have an
immediate revelation that made everything all better again. But over time I began to discover a different
possibility in relation to that great loss in my life.
That discovery was the
possibility that the living and the dead are still in relationship with one
another. That death is not the last word
on life. That even though in this life I
might always mourn the death of my grandmother—and I still do—I can also
celebrate the mystery that we are still together.
That mystery is what we
mean by “the communion of saints.”
We have to call it a
mystery because it is not intellectually provable. But we are not dismissive or afraid of
mystery. In the realm of mystery lies
the faith and hope and love through which we see the world and try to live in
it. In the realm of mystery lies our
capacity to choose not to live in fear or resentment or anger, all of which are
agents of the power of death.
We choose life, and it
is this choice, this life, a life driven by faith, hope and love, into which we
are baptizing these children this morning.
We say some radical
things this morning in this realm of mystery and life. We say that the bond which God establishes in
Baptism is indissoluble, that these children are sealed by the Holy Spirit in
Baptism and marked as Christ’s own for ever.
We do this not knowing
what life is going to be like for these children. Of course we hope and pray for the best, but
we know they will know tragedy. We know
they will know trial. We know they will
fall short of everything God wants them to be.
We know these
things. But we believe, as Paul says in
Romans, that nothing can separate us from the love of God. There is no asterisk at the end of the
sentence that they are Christ’s own for ever.
There is no asterisk that leads us to some fine print that says, “unless
they screw up.”
You see, the saints are
not people who always do what is right.
The saints are the people whom God loves, because God chooses to love
them, in spite of anything.
The hard part is that
we are called to love just like God does.
We are called to love our neighbors as ourselves, to expect to find God
in them, and to always treat them with dignity because the God of love is also
the God of peace and justice.
The good news we
proclaim today in our celebration of the communion of saints and in these
baptisms is that faith is stronger than fear, hope is stronger than despair,
and love is stronger than death.
And life always has the last word.
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