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Sometime in the early 1990s, I made a deeply embarrassing mistake in church. It may have also been amusing, but I fear it might have been upsetting for some in the congregation I was serving.
I was in suburban Minneapolis, working as a part-time musician for a Lutheran church. It was All Saints Sunday, and their practice was to read out loud the names of parishioners who had died since the previous All Saints Sunday, similar to what we will be doing a bit later in this service. They had a set of large chimes, the kind you see in full orchestras, long chimes that give off dramatic, bell-like gongs. My job was to ring one of them each time a name was read. We were going along, and I rang the chime dutifully each time. “John Smith.” *gong* “Jane Doe.” *gong* And then I got distracted by something, because I was a foolish young man, and when one of the names was read, I hit a lower chime, *goonng*, which jolted everyone out of their reverie, and led someone to ask me later, “So, the guy who got the lower note… did he go to hell?”
I replied, “No. But I probably will.” I felt very bad about doing such a stupid thing.
While the topic of hell can be funny, the kind of dark humor you see in a New Yorker cartoon, hell is actually a serious topic. More serious still is the question of how people should talk about hell. Long, long gone are the days (or should be the days) when preachers could scare people into good behavior, or good annual pledges, with the threat of an afterlife full of hellfire. And good riddance! That preaching is both emotionally abusive and theologically absurd. Ancient Jerusalem had a garbage dump just outside the wall where they’d burn garbage to reduce its volume and organize the landfill. It was called “Gehenna.” You can still find it today, a grassy and rocky area not far from the Mount of Olives. Jesus would preach hope and encouragement to his followers by saying that in God’s dawning kingdom, oppressors — and perhaps even oppression itself — will be thrown onto the dustbin of history, the Dumpster fire out yonder. The misinterpretation of this teaching as a warning about an everlasting furnace beneath the world — these are the ravings of later generations of preachers, and we can discard them out of hand.
Hell for sinners and heaven for saints: that’s not how it works. And even if it were, we don’t get to decide who’s who.
Hell is better understood as a mental and emotional trap I set for myself, a little jail cell I construct, and lock myself into, when I am feeling resentful and small. Jesus is always standing at the door to that cell, inviting me to let myself out.
Or hell is even better understood as the existence here on earth for uncounted millions of people whom God calls “blessed,” but who nevertheless have to cope with massive injustice, like the parents and kids at the border who may never find each other again. Humans put humans into hellish situations. That is not something God does, and it is worth much more of our attention than the old debate about who goes to the Good Place, and who goes to the Bad Place.
And so today we pay close attention to human suffering in our prayers and actions, but we do not wonder about our beloved dead as people who have no hope. We gather as the year declines and the nights get longer, and we light candles confidently — for All Saints, and for all our saints, in all their complexity, in all their vulnerability, in all their susceptibility to error, in all their finitude, in their inability to overcome death on their own, in their utter dependence on God for their futures. We light candles for our saints in memory of all the ways they are just like us.
Our saints are just like us, except they are currently out of view. They are beautiful, creative, funny, ornery, mistake-prone, insightful, grouchy, hopeful, sad, confident, serene, anxious, gifted, needy, inspiring, infuriating, delightful, eccentric, disappointing, lovable, indispensable … They are just like us.
And so, we too are saints. Nobody in this room, or any room on earth, gets to decide our fate. God alone knows what’s next. And God looks upon us all with delight, and mercy, and also expectation, the expectation God has for all saints.
For God loves us, but God also expects a lot from us. In a little while, we will renew our Baptismal Covenant, a long list of identity statements that form a kind of political platform for us. We are to do certain things, to be certain things, to stand for certain things.
But nowhere in the covenant does it say we are to be flawless. And nowhere does it say that we are to sit in judgment of others. And nowhere does it say that we are better than those who are not taking these vows of Holy Baptism. God does not watch us come up from the bath of Holy Baptism and hand us a mallet, empowering us to ring the Good Person chime for some, the Bad Person chime for others.
No, we come up from the bath of Holy Baptism in order to be subject to others and to one another, to serve, to help, to be in the world as Christ is: as servants.
Today, then, we do two things that reflect each other. They see and speak to each other across this room. We renew our Baptismal Covenant, and we remember with prayers and candlelight all those we love but see no longer. These rituals are bound together.
Here’s how.
When we renew our Baptismal vows, we remember and rededicate ourselves to the identity we were given when we were sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever, an identity we share with the whole Communion of Saints. And then, when we light candles in memory of our departed companions on the Way, we reaffirm our connection to them in the here and now. Those who have died are not now on a happy trip at an eternal heavenly Disney World. Some of them once stood in this room, and even now, beyond death, they are still living out their Baptismal vows, acting and interceding for all in need. And those among them who are not Christian are every bit as beloved by God, and they also continue to live in relationship with everyone else, including us.
John Thiel is a Roman Catholic theologian who has been fascinated with the problematic history of how the Church talks about the Communion of Saints. For Thiel, it’s not only wrong, but it damages our spirituality to think that the saints are glowing superhuman beings who are more obedient than we are, purer of heart, closer to God. To think that way only makes ordinary people feel small, and bereft of God’s favor. It also doesn’t line up at all with how Jesus looks at saints, the people Jesus says are closest to God’s heart: the poor and the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the list of people we meet in the Beatitudes.
Yes, the Beatitudes introduce us to good people: they are merciful, even “pure in heart,” which I take to mean that they will do things like confront you with the truth, but always with kindness. “Pure in heart” could also mean that they look at the world with a loving heart, knowing that loving hearts break the most often. And that’s how they see God! They see God with a heart that breaks open in compassion. The suffering of their neighbor matters to them. But again, nowhere on the list of “blessed” or happy-with-God people — nowhere on that list are flawless people, or uncommonly successful people, or superhuman do-gooders. The saints are just like us. So we stand here today to renew our Baptismal vows, and to renew our relationships with our peers who have died. Everyone, living and dead, is embraced by God, and challenged by God, and sent by God to help bring about God’s vision for all creation.
When I die, part of me hopes a young musician will make a mistake at my memorial service and lead people to wonder, even in jest, if I went to the Bad Place. God knows I belong there if the universe is keeping a merciless score of my life story.
But God also knows it doesn’t work that way. God wants to embrace, challenge, and send every human person, forever. So even when it seems like the bad guys are winning — and by the way, no matter who wins all the political races in this coming election, millions of people will think the bad guys are winning — no matter what happens, God and the saints are here with us. And you are one of those saints. Win or lose, succeed or fail, live or die, no matter what happens to you and to those you love, God invites God’s saints, now and always, around a table of abundant grace, and a fountain of resurrecting love.
Our vows and our prayers can be our way of saying, in response to this invitation,
“Yes.”
***
Preached on All Saints Sunday, Year A, November 1, 2020, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Revelation 7:9-17
Psalm 34:1-10, 22
1 John 3:1-3
Matthew 5:1-12
Art: John August Swanson, Festival of Lights.