Living Hope: Baptism and Eternity on All Saints' Day

All Saints' Day - Nov 3, 2024

Rev Sarah Colvin

You can find this week's readings here.

Today is a big day.

Today is a Feast Day of the Church.

Today is this Church’s name-day feast—All Saints Day.

Today we will baptize James and Walter Wierville.

And today also is the Sunday before the Presidential Election of the United States—I don’t need to tell you, but an election that seems poised for chaos, with a divided country and candidates with different visions of and for the country.

No pressure on the Sermon then. I guess thankfully a preacher is just called to preach the Gospel, on big days and ordinary days. If what I say aligns well with Gospel, then that’s a plus.

Let’s start with Baptisms and All Saints Day. One can be baptized any time. Sundays are preferable, with the exception of Sundays in Lent. Other than that, there are certain Sundays that are better for Baptisms, and the Sunday after All Saints Day is one of them.

When we moved back into the church after our months of exile in Gunnell hall, as we were placing the baptismal font in its place of prominence with enough space around it to give it its importance, a parishioner commented, “oh, church starts here.” And in fact, Church does start here, at the font, with waters of Baptism. We are baptized into Christ Jesus, into the Christian faith.

And Baptism then marks the beginning of the relationship between you and the triune God. No doubt as children (or tweens)—our two baptismal candidates have known God (as a Catechesis of the Good Shepherd parish, we KNOW this to be true—that all children know God). But baptism formalizes and seals the relationship. It is a sacrament marking God’s grace to truly enter into relationship with them, for them to work on the relationship, to grow into the relationship as we ALL have grown into our relationships with Christ.

Frederick Buechner wrote that, ”When you are with somebody you love, you have little if any sense of the passage of time, and you also have, in the fullest sense of the phrase, a good time.” When you are with God, you have something like the same experience. The biblical term for the experience is Eternal Life. Another is Heaven. What does it mean to be ‘with God’? To say that a person is ‘with it’ is slang for saying that a person is so caught up in what he or she is doing and so totally himself or herself it that there’s none of him or her left over to be doing anything else. In other words, to live Eternal Life in the full and final sense is to be with God as Christ is with God, and with each other as Christ is with us. It is to have a flourishing life.

It is no accident that the readings for All Saints Day are shared with choices for a burial rite as well. There is clearly a similarity between remembering one person close to us who has died during a burial rite and remembering all the Saints that have died before us. In both cases, the readings are ones of consolation, the readings are ones that acknowledge and confront grief, the readings are ones of hope—For even at the grave, we make our song: Alleluia.

How then do we handle "death, or mourning, or crying, or pain," that we hear in the book of Revelation? What means do we have to wipe every tear from our eyes? In truth, most of us are debilitated by the emotional stress caused by our problems, rather than by the problems themselves. Although the approach of first naming a problem can lift much of the burden of life's pressures, particularly as we are freed from the need to constantly mull over them… however, it is instead the vision of the Eternal that truly wipes every tear from our eyes. Honestly facing the pressures of life is the essential first step toward dealing with them, but it is viewing them in the light of eternity that gives them their true place in the scheme of things. The troubles of this age may seem beyond solution, but Christ has broken the seals and confounded the darkness with light. "The old order of things" is passing away, "now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them" and "He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death, or mourning, or crying, or pain.” We have our experience at the moment, in part, but the age is dawning when we will experience the tender and comforting hand of our God in all its fullness. Then indeed will every tear be wiped from our eyes. It is the vision of the Holy City in the age to come that aids us in drying our eyes today.

We see this in the Gospel if it is also looked upon as metaphor. In so many ways, we can see ourselves as Lazarus and see the miracle of his restoration of physical life as the beginning of our entry into eternal life that begins the moment we accept Jesus' offer of relationship with us. We are the ones who are dead, too often dead, and need to be alive. We are baptized into new life, life that is alive in Christ.

A few weeks ago, I listened online to a talk by Jim Wallis—the previous editor and writer for Sojourners magazine, and now holder of the Desmond Tutu chair at Georgetown University. His talk was about White Christian Nationalism, but also about how the world has changed and how confronting issues such as White Christian Nationalism goes beyond whatever are the results of this election --- that there is significant work to be done in our nation and the world against forces of evil that deny the goodness of all creation and the dignity of every person (you know, things that are an affront to our baptismal vows). He relayed a story of watching Desmond Tutu lead a service during Apartheid in South Africa. The soldiers entered the cathedral. He bowed his head as if to pray and instead started bopping his dance, and grinning, and then exclaimed to the congregation and the soldiers--- “You are on the winning side.” When we live into our Baptismal covenant, no matter what this election or any election holds, or whatever comes, whatever it costs-- then we too are on the winning side.

For all the Saints on All Saints Day, I think that what lay at the heart of their faith was the same thing that lies no less at your heart and mine and at the hearts of all the generations who worshiped here before us. I think it is hope that lies at our hearts and hope that finally brings us all here. Hope that in spite of all the devastating evidence to the contrary, the ground we stand on is holy ground because Christ walked here and walks here still. Hope that we are known, each one of us, by name, and that out of the burning moments of our lives he will call us by our names to the lives he would have us live and the selves he would have us become. Hope that into the secret grief and pain and bewilderment of each of us and of our world he will come at last to heal and to save.

For as Desmond Tutu said, during Apartheid, and we are not in Apartheid, “Hope is being able to see there is light despite all of the darkness.”

Lord, help us see your light when we think we are dead like Lazarus. We are not dead. We are baptized into your death so that we can truly live. ALLELUIA.

Image credits: Swanson, John August. Take Away the Stone, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=58578 [retrieved November 21, 2024]. Original source: Estate of John August Swanson, https://www.johnaugustswanson.com/.