Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri

The Worship of God · November 1, 2009

All Saints Day

Litany of Praise and Invocation

From Psalm 24  

The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it,

the world and those who live in it;

          For God has founded it on the seas

          and established it on the rivers.

Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord

and stand in God’s holy place?

          Those who have clean hands and pure hearts,

          who do not lift up their souls to what is false.

Let us pray:

          We seek your face, O Lord of our lives,

          and your blessing, O God of our salvation. Amen.

New Testament Lesson

Hebrews 12:1-2

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.

Message

The Bright Cloud

Tim Carson

This week I heard the story of a young child who developed brain cancer and then, after a long time of struggle and treatment, she died at the age of six. That, in itself, is enough to consider and enough to break anyone’s heart. But what her family discovered later, in the months and years to come, was astounding. It was after her death that the real miracle took place.

By some strike of pure grace, it occurred to this young girl’s mind and heart that it was her job to communicate hope to her family – her parents and her sister – not only at the moment, but into the future. “How?” you ask. Through the miracle of note writing. Over the course of her last months, she wrote notes to her parents and sister and hid them throughout the house in every conceivable place. It was after she died that the family members began to find these notes tucked into books, closets, the pantry, in toys, and CDs, and every imaginable nook. To date, they have found two shoeboxes full of these notes, and they keep coming. They are invariably notes of encouragement that they can go on and reassurance just how much she loved them.

Who can understand the depth of compassion that would cause a child less than six-years-old to offer encouragement to her loved ones in the future, when she knew she would not be there to do it herself? Which of us, as adults can look forward and think in those ways?

One day you open a creamy-white envelop from a law firm, and the letter informs you that you were included in someone’s will. You had no idea. You just received this notice out of the blue. But by their actions, they made sure that you would know, in case you didn’t, how much you were loved and appreciated by them even after they were gone. That’s what happens to churches when their members surprise them with a bequest in their will. It’s like a love note from beyond: “I love this church so much that I still want you to minister, and love, and serve, in Christ even when I’m not there.”

One time I was serving a church in the north of England. It was part of a summer pulpit exchange, and the English pastor came to Missouri in the middle of July – sweaty, humid July. I hear from the members of that church that this English couple sat on the carport sipping their hot tea in the middle of Missouri July. When I was there, I would visit people. There was a woman who lived in a row house. Everyone lives in a row house. She lived not too far from the parsonage. I went to talk to her one time. We sat in your living room. In the middle of the conversation, we were talking about her late husband who had died not too long ago, she rose and walked over to an easy chair. She sat down and then said, “This was my husband’s chair. He spent a lot of his resting time here in the evenings. Now, whenever I’m confused, lonely, or have a hard decision to make, I just come over and sit down right here. Somehow, I don’t know how, it seems like he’s with me. I feel his presence. Does that just sound crazy?”

How many of us have had the same experience of some kind?

Frank Warren has an intriguing project of collecting anonymous postcards that people mailed to him. He opened a P.O. Box, and said, “I want you to mail your anonymous secrets to me.” He has received a half-million postcards of people’s secret about their lives. He compiles them under one cover. I bought the fourth collection that is called Post-Secret: Confessions on Life, Death, and God. On one of the cards he received one person wrote, “I feel as if my dead brother is following me.” How many of us have experienced something like that?

Somehow, beyond our comprehension, the impact and presence of people live on and surround us, whether it’s because they left us notes, or a gift, or provided such rich memories that we still feed on them. It was Jesus who insisted that we make a meal around the one sentence, “Do this in remembrance of me.” We remember and the past is not past, it’s present, it’s here. If you read the new physics and dig into relativity and time, it’s questionable whether there really is such a hard and fast boundary between past, present, and future. Then is now, and now is then. And then is the future, what will be.

You think of how the guiding values of a social movement can shape and change a whole nation, how the dreams of prophets can take root and get born and live on beyond the life of the prophet that shared them. Somehow, the prophet seems to live on in the dream, though he or she isn’t actually there in the flesh. It is like love notes found tucked into our collective memory and hopes.

My favorite language for this comes from Scripture itself, and some of the best is found in our lesson today from Hebrews. The word picture is that of a great cloud of witnesses. This word, cloud (Gk. nephos) connotes a huge throng of souls, like an army without number, or a wheat field, or a sea of souls as far as the eye can see. We are enveloped by, covered by, surrounded by this cloud of witnesses. In Greek, it is martyr, witness. So in other words, there is no such thing as going it alone. It just seems we are alone. But this is the most crowded place imaginable. In other words, everything is connected to everything else. We are always accompanied by ancestors, and the ones whose notes we keep finding in the future. We live out our days connected to an unimaginable web of relationships. That is really what All Saints Day, All Souls Day is about.

There is a kind of sacred geography presented by this text. It is a sort of sacred map. But you can’t go to Barnes and Noble to the travel section and find it anywhere. It is the way that the cloud of witnesses is positioned in relation to everything else. I have come to the conclusion that this Scripture isn’t meant to be read with rational logic as much as contemplated, meditated upon, prayed over. And here is what I mean.

The three orienting domains on this map of the sacred geography are these:

There is the cloud of witnesses that surrounds us. The second is the course of life’s race (that I call the great path) that is laid out before us. Then there is the third, the point of our attention, our focus, where we should be gazing, which is what is up ahead of us, and that is the figure of Jesus, the pioneer and the perfecter of our faith, where we gaze into the future. The three sacred locales include that which surrounds us, that which is before us, and that which is away from us – the cloud of witnesses, the great path, and the object of our attention. This mystical text… Now listen to me. This is not like driving through McDonald’s and getting fast religion. You have to set the table for this idea. Candles are lit. You linger over this dinner. There is conversation and questions. The text says you have to take these three things and hold them in your hands at the same time, simultaneously. The cloud around you, the path that unfolds before you, and the object of your attention that lies before you into the future. You take all those things.

Let me suggest an image for us that might draw these together as we contemplate, meditate, and pray over that reality. You are standing on the top of a mountain, so high that clouds surround you like thick fog. But you are standing on the path that leads down off the mountain, but it trails off into the cloudy mist. You don’t quite know where it goes. But in the distance, you can see the lights of the village where you are going. There is the cloud, the path, and that place to which you go. 

To know that you are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses is to know that you are not alone, that the love letters of the past envelop you in your present.

To follow the great path, like the great saying says, “is to discover a gateless gate into which a thousand roads converge as you walk between heaven and earth” (Zen Koan). The great path.

To find your way as you stay focused on, as you gaze upon the presence of the holy wherever you happen to be at the moment. I like the way the great mystic poet, Rumi, wrote: “God says, ‘Don’t consider whether you’re up a tree or in a hole; Consider Me, for I am the key of the way’” (Mathnawi III, 4808-4809).

***

John Shelby Spong has just written what he has called his last book in a hugely generative writing career, Eternal Life: A New Vision (HarperOne, 2009). The former Episcopal bishop has addressed a cornucopia of crucial issues throughout his writing, and this last book takes on no less than re-visioning the meaning of Eternal Life. As it goes, most of the book presents new ways of envisioning the nature of God, Christ, the future of religion, as well as reflections on his life and how his faith has changed through the years.

In his penultimate chapter, he summarizes his conclusions, and I could not help but notice some of the parallels with this sacred geography we find in Hebrews. He writes:

Jesus was the life in whom a new consciousness appeared. His consciousness called, beckoned, and empowered us to be something we could not then even dream of being. Jesus was one who was so whole, so free, and so loving that he transcended all human limits, and that transcendence helps us to understand and even to declare that we experience God in him. That is what the story of the resurrection was all about. Every human limit, including the limit of death, faded in front of Jesus. So he opens a door for me to walk into the final arena and to walk past the ultimate boundary. I can see in him what I can be – a life at one with God, at one with myself, and a part of eternity…the Christ-path becomes for me a path that is always opening to something more (208).

The cloud around us, the path before us, and the point of our gaze in the figure of Christ.

What I like about Spong’s vision is that Jesus points to the infinite cloud of connection we can find. He walks the great path that we may fearlessly follow. He becomes the end point toward which we can go precisely because he transcends himself, because his consciousness of God becomes one with God to such a degree that we find ourselves lured toward God. And if we enter into an awareness of the oneness of God and the timelessness of eternity now, then when we face our own endings, with the same sense of God’s timelessness, however form changes, we will enter in with hope and courage and trust.

***

I believe that the Lord of Life is about note writing, too, and that signs of encouragement, council, love, direction, and hope are scattered about the universe as a cloud of witnesses. I believe that every path is strewn with intimations of the eternal dimensions of life. And I believe that the haunting figure of Jesus still beckons us toward a reality that we would not have gone without him. Coming down from the mountaintop, we are given a lamp unto our feet and light unto our path, and the light that illuminates up close is the same one shining the distance. Like ancient mariners navigating at night, we trace the stars and head in the way of them, a sacred geography pointing toward the great mystery that eludes all thought and language, a cloud beyond the cloud, a path beyond the path, an echo of the voice that calls to us even when we don’t know how to call back.

And the people of God say… “Amen.”

Benediction

The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. The Lord bless you in your going in and your coming out, now and forever. Amen.