A Sermon for All Saints Day, Year B
Almighty
God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the
mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord…
Just this past week, I started receiving
a daily inspirational email from a
colleague and friend who is the Hospital Chaplain back in Mercerville where I
used to serve. I’m not a great fan of
most of the religious material that gets sent around the Internet, but my
friend Ted, being a Quaker, knows the value of few words and has deep spiritual
insight. Here is what he wrote on
Friday:
In honor of the ancient observance of
Halloween, and the Christian holy days of All Saints and All Souls, I share
with you the thought that we are all connected – and that our relationships have the possibility
of transcending space and time. Many say
that these days signify “thin places” in our reality, and that the ties that
connect us to our ancestors are unusually strong.[1]
We are all connected – and ... our relationships have the possibility of transcending space and time. Wow! I thought -- Ted nailed it. In his few words about connection, he's named much of what we celebrate on this All Saints' Day. Today, we mark the reality of our connection with “all the Saints who from their labors rest” -- “the saints of God are just folk like me.” We mark the reality that we are all connected as we renew our Baptisms – the sacrament that connects us to Christ and to one another in Christ; the sacrament that makes us members of God’s one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, and participants in the Communion of Saints that transcends space and time. We mark our connection with saints who have gone before as we pray for our beloved departed in the Eucharistic Prayer. And, as we do every Sunday, we claim our deep connection with one another and with the whole Body of Christ throughout the world as we share in the Eucharist, that feast of rich food and well aged wines for all peoples of which Isaiah speaks.
That we are all connected, all knit together in one Communion and fellowship, is a wonderful, glorious truth we celebrate this All Saints’ Day.
Actually, we’ve
been living into our connection in Christ the last 6 weeks in the Growing Together Conversations we've had
on Sunday mornings as part of our Stewardship program. I’ve been moved by what I’ve heard about what
that connection means to you as we’ve shared some of the results of those
conversations together and as I’ve read over the notes that are posted on the
back walls of the Church. You’ve spoken
of how much the support and fellowship of this congregation mean to you; how rich you find the diversity of culture
and experience in this parish family and the welcoming spirit that has drawn
you in; how you value the opportunities to work together and to serve God in
our common life -- on the Altar Guild, teaching Sunday School, serving on
Vestry, taking care of our facilities; how important it is to you that we
connect to people in need in our community and the world through FISH, Grace’s
Kitchen, ERD and other outreach ministries; how our life of worship and
opportunities for spiritual growth for all ages connects you to our God. And, of course, we’ve become more aware of
our connection with one another simply through the act of sharing our stories,
our values and our wishes for the life of this congregation. We are all connected and we’ve been Growing Together.
Our connections in Christ are not, of course, limited to this congregation. I’ve told you some about my experiences of how connected we are with the wider Body through my participation in the General Convention of the Episcopal Church. You might recall the story I told on my return this summer that brought home to me how we are connected in ways that transcend space and time: how, in a hotel bar in Anaheim, California, I met the grandson of the rector of one of our ancestor congregations who gave this window over our Altar in memory of his beloved wife many years ago.
More recently, I’ve become yet more aware of how deeply connected we are with our sisters and brothers in the Diocese of New Jersey as I’ve worked with gifted and committed people from all over the state on the Bishop's Task Force on Restructure. As we've sought ways to support the rich ministries of our Diocese in a time of financial challenge, I’ve become acutely aware of how the 164 congregations are connected with and dependent on each other. As one my colleagues has written, “There is only Church in the Diocese of New Jersey. There are [many] local manifestations of that one Church, but there is only one Church.” [2]
It is because I am part of that one Church and connected with everyone in it that I will be going to the meeting of Watchung Convocation this Tuesday night, and to the Jazz Vespers in Ocean Grove next Sunday afternoon. It is because you are part of that one Church and connected with everyone in it that I invite you to come with me. I want you to experience some of what I and others here have come to know about how we in this Diocese are connected with one another in Christ.
Those connections that we have with one another in this parish, in our Diocese in, the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Communion, the one, holy catholic and apostolic Church and the whole Communion of Saints in Heaven are not just a feel good thing. Connection means that what we do has an impact on all those with whom we are connected -- sometimes in ways that we can see, often in ways that we don’t.
Beginning this morning and over the next two weeks, we will each have the opportunity to do something that will have an impact not only St. Francis, but our Diocese, the Church and the whole world. As you leave Church this morning, you will be given an envelope with a letter from the Stewardship Committee and your pledge card for 2010. The financial commitment we each make through our pledges is an act of connection, a way to grow together with each other here at St. Francis and with our fellow Episcopalians in our Diocese, throughout the country and the world. The money we give supports the ministry of this congregation as we seek to grow in the ways that were named in last week's Growing Together Conversation. Through our parish's pledge to our Diocese, we support the ministry of our Bishop and his staff; the work of Trinity Cathedral; the formation and deployment of deacons and priests; mission congregations in urban areas; youth ministry; the mission of the whole Episcopal Church, the Anglican Communion and much more. Our pledges are a practical and essential sacrament of the reality we celebrate this All Saints Day: that we are all connected in Christ.
I've just named some of the ways that our pledges connect us to the ministry of our sisters and brothers nearby and far away that we can see. But I believe that our connections with others go beyond what can be named, and seen, and that they exist with more depth and power than we usually imagine.
Garrison Keillor, the host of the public radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, gets at this deeper level of connection in a story, at once serious and whimsical, about a man in mid-life crisis whose younger female co-worker appears to find him more witty. attractive and interesting than his wife of 20 some years and his adolescent children. He's about to go a business trip with her, and, he admits, he has, adultery on his mind. He knows that if he does this, he will be sinning against his family. But as he waits on his suburban lawn for his would-be lover to pick him up, what stops him is a vision of the wider effects his action will have – wider, he realizes, because we all are connected.
“As I sat on the lawn looking down the street,” the man writes to a friend, “I saw that we all depend on each other. I saw that although I thought my sins could be kept secret, that they would be no more secret than an earthquake. All these house and these families – my infidelity will somehow shake them. It will pollute the drinking water. It will make noxious gasses come out of the ventilators in the elementary school. When we scream in senseless anger, blocks away, a little girl we do not know spills gravy all over a white tablecloth. If I go to Chicago with this woman who is not my wife, somehow the school patrol will forget to guard an intersection and someone’s child may be injured. A six grade teacher will say, ‘What the hell’ – and eliminate South America from geography. Our minister will decide, ‘What the hell – I’m not going to give that sermon on the poor.’ Somehow, my adultery will cause the man in the grocery store to say, ‘The hell with the Health Department: this sausage was good yesterday; it can’t be any worse today.’ I leave the story there except to say that we depend on each other more than we ever know.” [3]
We are all connected. We depend on each other more than we ever know – this truth is of vast importance to our life in Christ, in the Church, in the Communion of Saints. What each of us does and what we do together impacts countless others in ways both visible and invisible. That is an awesome responsibility, because it means our actions affect not only ourselves and those nearest us, but people we will never see or meet. But it is a wondrous and glorious truth, as well – because it means that our prayers, our acts of love and service, our work and worship together, and the offering of ourselves, our souls and bodies in Christ’ service and, yes, our pledges can have an impact for good far beyond what we will ever see or know.
We are all connected. We depend on each other more than we ever know. Thanks be to God!
The Rev. Jack Zamboni
St. Francis’ Church
November 1st, 2009