All Saints Sunday;
Patrick Preheim
Matt 5:1-12
Nov. 2, 2008
Already and Not Yet
Blessed are they... There certainly are a goodly number of people through the centuries who have taken these words of Jesus to heart. Even in our communities there are those who have hungered for righteousness, who have pursued peacemaking, and who have lived the beatitudes in one way or another. During a few moments of quiet call to mind someone who has been a saint for you. Who is this person? What was their gift to you, others, the world? [few moments of quiet] Eternal Lord God, you have surrounded us with a great cloud of witnesses: Grant that we, encouraged by the good example of your servants, may persevere in running the race that is set before us. Amen. (The Book of Common Pray, collect for a Saint, p. 250) To give a bit of background to All Saints Sunday I share with you some words from Robert Ellsberg.
Since the early centuries of the church the liturgical calendar has reserved one day to honour, collectively, all the saints, both those officially recognized and those known only to God. Thus we are reminded that the true company of saints is far more numerous than the list of those who have been formally canonized. There are many anonymous saints who nevertheless form part of the great “cloud of witnesses,” surrounding us with their faith and courage and so participating in the communion between the living and the dead.
This collective feast, All Saints, is also an occasion to acknowledge the varieties of holiness. Though they share a certain family resemblance, the saints are not formed in any particular mould. Some are renowned for contemplation and others for action; some played a public role while others spent their lives in quiet obscurity. Some demonstrated the vitality of ancient traditions while others were pioneers, charting new possibilities in the spiritual life. Some received recognition and honour within their lifetimes, while others were scorned or even persecuted.
The feast of All Saints does not honour a company of “immortals,” far removed from the realm of ordinary human existence. The saints were not “super” human beings but those who realized the vocation for which all human beings were created and to which we are ultimately called. No one is called to be another St. Francis or St. Teresa. But there is a path to holiness that lies within our individual circumstances, that engages our own talents and temperaments, that contends with our own strengths and weaknesses, that responds to the needs of our own neighbours and our particular moment in history. The feast of All Saints strengthens and encourages us to create that path by walking in it. (Robert Ellsberg, All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, prophets, and witnesses for our Time, p. 475-476)
Given this background of All Saints Day I could go almost any direction with my reflections. In preparation for this service I have found myself considering the “long obedience” (a term coined by Frederick Nietche which I learned in the Adult Sunday School this fall) of the saints. Many of our saints have toiled without the appearance of progress. The saints have been faithful, not always successful by the world’s standards. Saints have defined success in terms of faithfulness. They trust God’s ability to work things out over the long haul. They are patient with themselves, with institutions, with others, even with God. Saints are aware of the presence of God, and they are aware of brokenness in themselves and the world. They would say that the reign of God is already here, and also that the reign of God is not yet fully here. Saints get the ambiguity, the greyness, of life. They know God continues to usher in the kingdom over decades and centuries. Saints get this, and we need to be reminded of it. For we too are called to live in that space which is already and not yet. To encourage us in living as if the kingdom of God is both already here and not yet come I give you two short stories.
“Harriet Tubman was born into slavery on a plantation in Maryland, sometime around 1820. As she grew up, she experienced the typical cruelties of slave life, the beatings, insults, and daily indignities. (This almost sounds like my high school experience). Like other slaves she became skilled in the art of passive resistance…[she, like other slaves] struggl[ed] to maintain an inner conviction that she was indeed worth more than a thing. But Tubman was not content merely to survive with her inner dignity intact. She was convinced that God intended her to be free…It was with this God that Harriet Tubman enjoyed a special relationship...[Tubman literally heard the voice of God, and it was a dream she attributed to God that signalled her to flee the land of bondage, otherwise known as the plantation.]
She had trained herself over the years to move quietly, to be at home in nature, and to find her way in the dark. All these skills now came into play as she made her break. Traveling by night, following the North Star, she passed through swamps and forests, sleeping by day in the shelter of caves or hidden in a leafy treetop.” She made it to the free state of Pennsylvania, but “at once she was seized by a sense of wider mission. [she wrote], “I had crossed the line. I was FREE; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land; and my home, after all, was down in Maryland…But I was free and THEY should be free. I would make a home in the North and bring them there, God helping me.” And so, having made her perilous way to freedom, Tubman chose to return to the South to assist in the escape of others still in bondage. Over the next twelve years she returned a total of nineteen times…in the process rescuing at least three hundred slaves, including her parents. These trips were fraught with danger at every step…[and] After passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 it was no longer sufficient to bring slaves to the North. Her trips extended all the way to Canada. Though armed bounty hunters roamed the countryside, Tubman never lost a single one of her charges. A fantastic price was put on her head and wanted posters were widely circulated. Among whites she was one of the most hated figures in the South. But among slaves she was known as “Moses”. (Ibid., 135-136)
Tubman rescued over 300 people, and yet I am sure the blight of racial discrimination pained her. She lived as a free woman in the North while keenly aware that slavery continued in the South. Tubman witnessed and was part of God’s designs to destroy the institution of slavery, and yet racism continued. Could Tubman have imagined that less than a hundred years after her death a man with black skin would be a viable candidate for President of the United States? Maybe and maybe not. Tubman focused on faithfulness to God and entrusted the rest into God’s care. Regardless how you feel about Obama as a potential President, the fact that he is a viable candidate should give us pause to consider. What personal or social enslavement do we feel most keenly? Do we ever despair that deliverance will come for us or the people we love? We can take courage from the Harriet Tubman story at so many levels. It is the story of God using a woman of humble status, of God liberating people through that woman, of God continuing the struggle through new saints when the older saints died.
A second story I have comes from the Middle East. It is the story of Jews and Arabs working at a non-political and yet systemic level to end the conflict. The Hand in Hand Center for Jewish-Arab Education this year opened Israel’s first bilingual Jewish-Arab high school. “It is a radical development for a country where most schools are segregated and one that its founders hope will spark a national rethink about education. [one of the founders says that] At a minimum, putting Jews and Arabs together in bilingual classrooms can foster greater understanding between both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”…. The children are taught in both Hebrew and Arabic, [they] play together..., and [they] visit one another at their homes…We teach them to be empathic to the pain of the other and that both sides have a right to be here… they learn about both cultures, and commemorate Jewish, Muslim and Christian Holidays”...Lior Aviman, principal for the high school say “There are more than a few cynics and sceptics and we must prove that this is possible. For me, this is a big challenge…to show that Jews and Arabs can really study and live together.” The resistance has been stiff at a political level. The Ministry of Education has refused to grant a school license, ostensibly because some paper work did not get in on time. This has compromised the federal funding of the school. Ain Khalaf, Arab spokesman for the school, has taken these setbacks with ease. “At the beginning, we didn’t have anything. We didn’t have offices, we didn’t have money, only questions with good intentions.”…Khalaf says he’ll continue to push to have the Hand in Hand high school in Jerusalem officially recognized. He submitted additional paperwork for the school and hopes the ministry will reconsider. If not, he says, they will try again next year. A few years ago, it took two years and a Supreme Court petition before their middle school received its license.” (“In Israel, a first attempt at high school integration” by Brenda Gazzar in The Christian Science Monitor, Tuesday, October 7, 2008; pp. 1, 12)
These people are Jews, Christians, and Muslims who are looking to fulfill the words of Jesus in the Beatitudes. They sense the rightness of their work and step forward with calm as they seek peace and justice. They are living saints who demonstrate to the rest of us how we might move forward when there is distrust, hostility, and resistance. Be we in business or education or diplomacy we are called to partner with others in the work of reconciliation and justice. We are not required to share churches, denominations, or religious tradition-- only a desire for what we call the kingdom of God. Be we in business or education, we must expect resistance. The powers and principalities on every side will try to erode the peaceable kingdom. We must understand that systemic change takes time. We may see change in our lifetime, and maybe not. We are simply called to be faithful in our time and place. Culture clashes, environmental concerns, and even family rifts take time to untangle. How long will it take for God’s kingdom to come is unknown. Consider the news you hear out of Israel and Palestine-- it is almost always bad news. Yet there are pockets of new life in the Middle East. And given the current climate if God’s grace can take root there, it can take root in Saskatoon, northern India, our families and all sorts of places. Let us trust God to sort things out over time and keep faithful to our calling.
To conclude I will read from a section of the Mennonite Confession of Faith that speaks to the idea of God’s reign as already here, and not yet fully here. From Article 24:
We believe that God, who created the universe, continues to rule over it in wisdom, patience, and justice, though sinful creation has not yet recognized God's rule...We affirm that, in Jesus' ministry, death, and resurrection, the time of fulfillment has begun. Jesus proclaimed both the nearness of God's reign and its future realization, its healing and its judgment. We believe that the church is called to live now according to the model of the future reign of God. Thus, we are given a foretaste of the kingdom that God will one day establish in full. The church is to be a spiritual, social, and economic reality, demonstrating now the justice, righteousness, love, and peace of the age to come. The church does this in obedience to its Lord and in anticipation that the kingdom of this world will become the kingdom of our Lord. (Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective, Article 24 “The Reign of God”)
May it be so. Amen.