Sermon for All Saints Sunday

 

            Each day for the past 17 months I have posted & emailed a devotion I call “A Poem, A Psalm and A Song.” The poem I use each day comes from 1 of 2 sources—the website poems.com or 1 of several books of poetry from my personal library. The website is my 1^st choice because the poems there are fresh & force me to ponder & pray about theological connections.

            However, this past Tuesday—which was Nov. 1^st, the official All Saints Day—the online poem was one I simply couldn’t make heads nor tails of. I had no idea what the author was trying to say. So I turned to the next poem up in a book I own of poems by American poet/farmer Wendell Berry. This is the poem he wrote in 2005 on who-knows-what day of the year:

I tremble with gratitude

for my children & their children

who take pleasure in one another.

At our dinners together, the dead

enter & pass among us

in living love & memory.

And the young are taught.

            I read it & just said, “Wow!” What better poem or essay or sermon could I have found for the day on which we proclaim our eternal connection to those who have been & are saints to us!?! “At our dinner together, the dead enter & pass among us in living love & memory. And the young are taught.”

            On a very personal level, that is why it is so important that we always continue to tell the stories about our loved ones who have died. My mother & father, who have been gone for 10 & 18 years respectively, live on whenever Glenna & I or any of my 5 siblings or their children or spouses share the tales of Vivian & Ralph—as my brother Brian did this past Monday with the post of a picture from their wedding on Oct. 31, 1948.

            And those names we read earlier of those who died during the past 12 months, their memory will not die so long as we continue to share the stories of how they touched our lives & made us better people. “And the young are taught.”

            That is one of the awesome treasures that Christ has given us—an everlasting connection with God & with one another that even death cannot sever. God in Jesus Christ has made each & every one of us a saint—despite ourselves, despite our sinfulness. As Luther wrote, we are “simul Justus et peccator”—at the same time saint & sinner.

            As we gather in this place, we gather as living saints to hear God’s word & to share Christ’s body & blood at his family table that we call an altar. You & I are saints!! Just look around you. Everyone you see is a saint—many with tarnished haloes, to be sure; but saints nonetheless.

            And as we gather, as we pray & sing & come to the altar with open hands & hearts, we are joined by all the saints who have gone before us & are now part of God’s eternal throng. They are here &, as Berry writes, they “pass among us in living love & memory.”

            “And the young are taught.” We all are taught! We learn from their faithful journeys. We learn from the love they shared. We learn from their strivings, their overcomings & even their shortcomings. We learn that, even in their sinfulness, they were cherished by God & were granted salvation thru Christ’s death on the cross. We learn that, even in our failures & foibles, you & I are loved so much by God that God sent His Son to die for us.

            As we gather at our meager meal here in a few minutes, I want you to remember Berry’s poem, remember “the dead entering & passing among us in living love & memory.” Share that love & memory with all of God’s saints—the dead & the living—this day & all of your days to come. Amen.