All Saints Sunday - Nov 4

In the name of Jesus. Amen.

What does it mean to be alive? What keeps us alive? What’s necessary for life? Most of us know that the essentials of human life are simple, basic things; things like oxygen, food, water, fire, shelter, clothing, We also know that without these things, human life has a difficult time flourishing. Life seems to hang on these things.

Living happens in breathing in and exhaling, eating and drinking, cooking and clothing. In these things, life finds support, life clings to these things. And yet, as we are so bluntly confronted this morning, the reality of life is that it must end someday. Life cannot cling to these things forever. They will only support life until life’s end.

So, we can easily see that life doesn’t really hang on these things. We can see that life must really hang somewhere else; life must cling not things like oxygen, food, water, and the rest.

In our story this morning, we are met with a couple of interesting characters. First, is the prophet Elijah. Elijah was on his way to learning how to be a prophet of God. But his road wasn’t easy. The prophet was learning to be a prophet while King Ahab was in charge. And there were very few good things to say about this king. Worst of all was the king’s constant worship of other gods.

So, God thought Elijah needed some training if he was going to be a man of God in this kind of time. And what did God do but send him straight into enemy territory, during a great drought, where the evil king was ruling. And God sent him to a poor widow and her dying son. And God told Elijah that the widow and her dying son were going to feed him and give him something to drink. They were going to support his life with the scare and few things they still had left.

When he arrived, the widow, hearing that Elijah wanted her to feed him, laughed in his face and told him to go away so that she could take her last little morsels of flour and oil, cook them up, eat the cakes, go, and die with her son. The widow knew that the little stuff of life was running low and they didn’t have much to cling to anymore.

But if Elijah was going to possibly make it as a prophet in the time of the evil King Ahab, Elijah had to speak God’s Word of promise in the middle of the poor widow’s despair; and not only did he have to speak it, he had to live by it as well.

And so Elijah announces, for the widow and himself, “Thus says the LORD the God of Israel. The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail til the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth.” And, as the story proclaims, “the jar of meal was not emptied, either did the jug of oil fail, according to the word to the LORD that he spoke by Elijah.”

Both Elijah and the widow learned at that very moment that real life does not cling to the things of life, but the things of life cling to the word of the Lord. That little word, “according,” means that life clings to the word of the Lord. By God’s promise, made through the mouth of Elijah, the meal in the jar did not run out, and neither did the oil.

But, of course, the things of life were not able to keep the widow’s dying son alive. And when he died, the widow yelled at Elijah. She said, “have you come to cause the death of my son?!” Elijah, finally learning to be a prophet of God, took the widows son, prayed over him, prayed to God and said, “O LORD my God, let this child’s life come into him again.” Elijah knew all too well that life clings to the word of God. And God heard Elijah and listened to him and the child lived again.

In dying, there is living. And living is made possible because life actually clings not to the stuff of life, but the very word of God. For Christians, this word of God goes by another name, and his name is Jesus Christ. The word of God is a person. Christians live by the word of God, we have life in his name.

This is what it means to be a saint. A saint is not some spiritual superstar, but a person who lives by the very word of God, Jesus Christ. A saint is one who clings to life only in the promise. We know that right now is the time for our lives to cling both to the stuff of life and the word of God. But the time is coming when we will live only by the word of the Lord.

And we celebrate the lives of those saints who have gone before us who now have life only by the word of God. These brothers and sisters who we remember today are simply clinging to the word of God. We live in communion with these saints, we share in the kind of life they have because we have been baptized by the word of God. As the apostle Paul writes, “Now we see in the mirror dimly, but then we shall see face to face.” We will someday see the very face of the word of God, but now we only glimpse and strain to see.

Now is the time for the word of God to be found stuffed deep in the things of life: things like water and bread and wine, these are ordinary things that hold and carry the very promise of God for eternal life, real life much further beyond the kind of life that clings to the stuff.

As we share in Holy Communion today, we join together with all of God’s saints who have gone before us, God’s saints who are now clinging only to the word of God. We receive the word of God, hidden and revealed in bread and wine, and it comes in the form of a promise: this is the body of Christ, given for you; this is the blood of Christ, shed for you.

Our churches architecture even proclaims our communion of the saints as we gather in this half circle shape at the alter railing, we look across the table and are joined in a full circle of God’s saints who have gone before us. The other half of the circle are our brothers and sisters in Christ, who see God face to face. Our loved ones, our friends, our enemies, our neighbors, all gathered at the table with God at the center. We sing with them, “Holy, holy, holy.” We join their prayers, we eat with them, we commune with all the saints in heaven. We live by the very word of God in our midst.

In the name of Jesus. Amen.

"...we were together"

There is a saying around here. It's an odd one for me, one that I had never heard before this place. It's the kind of saying that makes my mind wander away from a conversation, imagining the many layers of meaning in it. (I'll admit, my mind wanders easily, anyway).

The saying goes like this, "...we were together." From what I can gather, it is a saying about friendship. But it's more than that. It is about friendship and proximity. It means something along the lines of, "we were friends and we spent a lot of time with each other."

And yet, the saying seems to be even more than simply friendship and proximity. There is a particular quality about it that is hard to put into words. "...we were together," has a sense of longing, a sense of leaning into a complex history; it has a quality to it that I don't encounter when someone says, "we were friends," or, "we used to hang out." There is a past-tense quality about the saying that seamlessly transitions into a longing for the past.

I have only heard the saying spoken by some of the older members that I visit. So this leads me to think it might be more of a generational saying than regional or cultural peculiarity (it could be a combination of all of these).

In any case, I like it. Let me give you a sense of how it sounds when it is used. "I had a very good friend in seminary; his name was Nathaneil and 'we were together.'"

The saying is a turn of phrase that gives a weightiness to a friendship in the past that is now somehow different because either, 1) the two friends are separated by a distance or 2) one of the two friends has died and joined the Church Triumphant. In most of my conversations, I encounter the latter of the two connotations. A friend is longing for someone who has died. (*note* Nathaneil and I are still good friends and he is still very much alive; only, now we are separated by a few thousand miles).

For this All Saints Sunday, I have really been thinking a lot about this turn of phrase. It is such a unique  and beautiful way of talking about a relationship that is both very meaningful, but now somehow different than it was before.

It gets me thinking about the saints of God who have gone before us, who are leaning forward into the gates of eternal life. And then it gets me thinking, what if those of us who have victory in Christ, because of God's gift of forgiveness and salvation, are simply only standing a little bit straighter, a little bit more upright than those who are leaning forward into the gates of eternal life?

Perhaps the saying, "...we were together," is simply a way of longing for a future together, not longing for the past. Perhaps there is a quality about the phrase that leans not backward into a complex history and longing for a past like I thought, but leans forward into the unknown future of God. And perhaps those who have died and gone before us are simply leaning a little bit more than those of us who are still living now.

When we say, "...we were together," about a relationship we had with someone who has now died, we are not saying that the relationship is over, but that it is different; and the difference is in the angle of our bodies as we lean into the future that God has in store for us. Perhaps, "...we were together," is a way of talking about believing in the, "communion of saints," both those who have died and gone before us, and saints/sinners who are still now living in the present. Perhaps, "...we were together," simply remembers the angle of our bodies and the angle of the bodies of those who have gone before us as we all lean toward the future God has for us.

Or, I have had too much tea and it is a Friday afternoon! :oP