Merciful God,
Jesus Christ, Lord of the living and dead;
with each generation your body of believers grows and grows.
Thank you for all who have gone before us,
for what they achieved and what they learned.
Give us strength to do your will, to be your body now. –
– The New Zealand Prayer Book
Beloved Friends,
Sunday we will join together to commemorate and combine the Feast Days of All Saints and All Souls. Together they offer a wonderful way to honor those who have died; both those who have garnered the moniker of “saint” in our tradition as well as what we might call more “ordinary saints” the lives of those we have loved and no longer have here with us. Both feast days, celebrated back to back on November 1& 2 are often combined, as we will do, to help us remember all who will forever be a part of us as the Body of Christ in profound ways.
Also, All Saints/Souls Day is one of our denomination’s “officially designated” days for baptism and whenever there is not a baptism scheduled, the faithful gathered are encouraged to remember our baptism by renewing our baptismal vows, so that will be our practice this Sunday.
As we begin this season of remembrance I find myself thinking about the proximity between two seemingly opposite spectrums of our faith journey- baptism and death. For those of us baptized as infants nothing could seem further away in our lives at that moment than the distance of death, and yet our faith life calls us to a new awareness.
Through Christ we are called to the nearly impossible task of rejecting the notion that death is the end; instead we proclaim that dying to self we are born to newness of life. It is a paradox of such magnitude that at times I am left to rely on the faith of others. It is not possible to avoid the grief incurred with the death of someone we have loved; embracing our grief is integral to learning to live, and denying that task is to our own determent. What I continue to learn through community is that there is in fact an added depth to our grief when we can weave our loss into the fabric of our lives, trusting it will find a tender place of purpose and meaning day by day. I yearn for us to be a community that embraces that mystery with courage and love. We are at our best when we can stand next to each other with no need to fade or fix each other’s pain, but rather show up with unmitigated love. Perhaps that is what it means to be an everyday saint.
So come “home” Sunday to the community that needs and wants you. Come home to remember those who have died and to look into each other’s faces as we offer peace. Come home to renew our baptismal vows; to come to the table Christ makes ready for us to be fed and made whole. Come home to be seen, and heard and fed, and then sent back out into the world with love, strength and courage to be the saints we are called to be day by day.
And may you never forget that you are loved,
Lisa