The Procession, John August Swanson, serigraph, 2007, used by permission
Everything is going to work out in the End.
Everyone is going to come together at the End.
Lazarus greets his stunned and overjoyed sisters, but the skeptical and cynical onlookers will eventually be brought back into the circle, too.
Jesus is raised from the dead, and he soon greets not only his friends, but his adversaries too, even those who condemned and killed him. He will bring them all back by the End.
The Communion of Saints will gather on God’s mountain. We will all be together. If you like, you can let the theologians—the doctors of the church, as they’ve been called—work out things like “paraeschatological opportunity for baptism,” the idea that before all is said and done, every human soul will be invited to stream through the gates of pearl, as today’s opening hymn sings it. If you’re worried about the finer points of that, you are welcome to join the conversation! But for now, know this:
Everything is going to work out in the End.
We are just not yet at the End.
In a little while, we will say our table prayers, our shouts of thanksgiving at God’s Table, here, where we taste just a tiny bit of the mountain feast that God is preparing when we are all together at the End, the feast where God does not eat the food on the mountain, because God will be swallowing up death itself.
One word that takes pride of place in our table prayers today is the word, “Remember.” “Remember, remember, remember,” we chant to God. We want God to remember everything and everyone, by the End. We want God to remember all of us here at Grace, each one of us a minister. We want God to remember all people, and all who seek God’s truth. We want God to remember our beloved friends and family who are sick, or in need of support, or peace. We want God to remember all who have died, especially those closest to our hearts. And we want God to bring all of these people into the mighty company of the saints: Mary, and the “matriarchs, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, martyrs, and all the saints…” We want God to bring everyone to the mountain, at the End.
And God will do just that.
Everything is going to work out in the end.
But there’s another line in the “Remember” prayers we are about to say. It may bring you up short, so I hope you can hear its deeper echoes, its splendid message of inclusion and grace. This is one of our “Remember” prayers: “Remember, Lord, your one holy catholic and apostolic Church, redeemed by the blood of your Christ. Reveal its unity, guard its faith, and preserve it in peace.”
Whoa.
This prayer may be offensive to you, especially if we do not allow for the possibility that this prayer is not just about God’s Church in the here and now, but it is also about the End—the end of time, the end of history. If it is only a prayer about the Now, then it could sound exclusivist, clique-y, discriminatory, and wrong. But it is also a prayer about the End, when God gathers everyone as one people for the mountaintop feast.
To open all of this up, I want to introduce you to a two-year-old girl named Ruth, who is the daughter of a friend of mine named Claire, who is a priest and was one of my seminary classmates. Claire and I are two of four classmates (the others are named Sam and Chip) who did hospital chaplaincy together in the summer of 2018, and the four of us have kept up a lively text string for three years running. A few days ago, Claire texted us this story, about her two-year-old daughter:
Claire texted to us, “Ruth pretends to ‘go to work’ like I do, but she clearly doesn't know what that means because I'll ask her, ‘Where do you work?’ and she looks at me like I'm crazy.”
This is an adorable vignette about a young girl who likely will go far. She has a sharp, insightful working mom for a role model, and even at age two, Ruth is already mimicking her mother’s behaviors. Now, does young Ruth know what “work” is? Of course not. But she apprehends the incidental details: “work” is what’s going on when Mommy puts on certain clothes and leaves the house. Ruth wants some of that; she wants to participate in that; she begins mimicking her mother in her earliest attempts to figure out what it means to “go to work.” One day she will go to work herself.
A day or two after Claire texted us this story, I texted my three chaplaincy friends about All Saints Sunday, and to be specific, the fact that I was going to say that line about the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church,” and I was low-key worried that I might be run out to Day Road and thrown into traffic by the good people here at Grace whose passion for the inclusion of all people is (I believe) our most cherished value. Grace folk despise (that is not too strong a word)—you despise—old-time church language that communicates exclusion, or superiority.
And that’s when one of the other four friends on the text string, my friend Sam, offered his perspective. When you first meet him, Sam may come across as a conventional Episcopal priest in the grand tradition. His parishioners call him Father Sam. But he harbors a few startling, subversive beliefs, like universalism, the idea that all human persons will be gathered at the mountaintop feast, not just Christians. (In fact, if history is a guide, Christians will probably form a small minority of the crowd gathered on that huge mountain.)
And here is what Sam said:
“Stephen, if you want me to grab my Dennis Nineham book and my Michael Battle books and come explain to [Grace Church] … that there will be paraeschatological opportunity for baptism, I’d be happy to put on my hippie pants.” But then Sam got a bit more serious and he said it this way: “There is only one church. It exists at the End. Gracious though God is to let us glimpse it now in [God] the Son, our dim Now will burn away like chaff and there will be a great big ol Coming Home Sunday Morning.”
And then Sam really made it clear for me. He added this comment: “Or to use another image: Our churches now are not unlike when Ruth goes to work.”
Today we will be showered by water that flows from the font of Holy Baptism, and we will take that water and make the sign of the cross over our bodies, remembering our Baptism (there’s that word “remember” again), just before we gather at this Table and beg God to remember us at the mountaintop feast, on that “great big ol Coming Home Sunday Morning.” If Sam is right, when we do all these things, we are like that clever two-year-old named Ruth: we are acting out what is coming later, and what we really don’t yet understand. We are celebrating that we already are one people, even though we barely know one percent of what this all means, and even though we won’t all fully be one until the End.
“One, holy, catholic, apostolic” — four challenging, provocative words. One: right now, humanity seems to be anything but one; but we pray to God to reveal our unity, not create it, which means we know it is already here, it’s just hard to see, and it takes all of history to be revealed.
Holy: not purity-code holiness, not snobs at the cool-kids table, but doing-what-we-are-created-to-do holiness. Our holiness is just the living out of our lives with openness to God’s grace.
Catholic: not popes and basilicas (though they get to come along), but universal catholic, inclusive catholic, all God’s creatures got a place in the choir catholic.
And finally, apostolic: we leave here today with Good News on our lips. We are apostles, full of joyful, glad tidings. And: none of these good things are all done, or even half done; so much of the world is in disunion and disarray; the raised Lazarus will face death again. “This is not the end,” writes Luther, “but it is the road.”
And so the two-year-old apostle Ruth forms us in the faith: she teaches us to start participating in the mountaintop feast even now, before we understand it and long before it happens in its fullness. There is so much we do not know. There is so much more to do. But be encouraged: hear this Good News:
Everything is going to work out in the End. Alleluia, alleluia.
***
Preached on All Saints’ Sunday (Year B), November 7, 2021, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Isaiah 25:6-9
Psalm 24
Revelation 21:1-6a
John 11:32-44