Sermon for 11.29.09

Scriptures for this week are found here:

http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/Advent/CAdv1_RCL.html

All around us our world is giddy with anticipation of Christmas – lights are strung, gifts are bought, stores are counting whether Black Friday was really black enough. Yet in the midst of all these holiday preparations, our gospel ignores Christmas entirely and instead takes us to the apocalypse. Here is Jesus, about to die, his life behind him, standing in front of the temple and talking about the end of everything yet to come – a time when the heavens will be shaken. In between the end of his life and the end of everything, he directs the disciples’ attention to a fig tree, the most ordinary of trees, and tells them to stay alert, to watch for signs of the kingdom of God. Because, Jesus tells them, even when things are at their most frightening and dangerous, God is doing new things. What God is doing may be hidden, but God’s work is still happening; our job is to stay alert, and watch for the signs.

The predictions Jesus makes today are what we know as “apocalyptic.” Apocalyptic predictions are pretty popular these days. I can think of two movies out now – “2012” and “The Road” that seem to predict a violent and horrible end to civilization as we know it. And it seems that apocalyptic predictions cycle through every few years. I can’t remember exactly what was happening back in 1988 to make people think the world was about to end, but there’s a cartoon from that time. In the cartoon, a bookstore owner is taking one sign out of a shop window and replacing it with another. The sign he is taking away says “The Book that Proves the World Will End in September 1988!” And the sign he is replacing it with says, “The Book That Proves the World Will End Retroactive to September 1988!”

So apocalyptic predictions are still pretty popular – if you think “apocalypse” means “the end of the world.” However, in its original sense, that’s not really what apocalypse means. In the original Greek, apocalypse is a word that simply means “revelation” – something has been hidden and the veil is being lifted, God’s action is being revealed so that we gain a new understanding of what is happening to us and what it all means.

Apocalyptic writing happens in the Bible when people who feel powerless are confronted with huge and frightening changes. As Jesus is making these predictions today, he knows that he will die in a matter of days, and he knows that for the disciples his death will be a cataclysm. And, another cataclysmic time comes when Luke, our gospel writer, sits down to record what Jesus said in 33 AD. Luke writes in about the year 80, and what is fresh in his mind is the disaster that happened in Jerusalem in 70 AD, when the Romans invaded to put down a rebellion, destroyed the temple, and scattered the Jews and Christians (who still considered themselves Jews) all over kingdom come. It was a devastating end to everything these people knew about their faith and their future as God’s people.

So, Luke is writing in an apocalyptic time – a time when a powerless people are confronted with frightening changes. Instead of succumbing to simple fear, apocalyptic prophets begin working to discern God’s hand in the frightening events of the day. Apocalyptic language describes not only the end of the world as we know it, it also gives a hope-filled promise of new beginnings to come – a revelation that God is busy in this in-between time, working not only to bring something to an end that we have grown accustomed to, but also at the same time bringing something new to birth.

We are possibly living in apocalyptic times today. At least, these are times when we are afraid that the Christian faith is shrinking or changing along with society, so fast that we’re not sure it will be able to reach new generations. In a time of fear like this, Jesus calls us to look around us for signs of what God might be doing. So what is it that is ending in our world, and what is it that God could be beginning?

Author Phyllis Tickle, in her book The Great Emergence, says that every 500 years, the church puts on a gigantic rummage sale. She says that “about every 500 years the empowered structures of institutionalized Christianity become an intolerable carapace that must be shattered in order that renewal and new growth may occur.” So, if we look back in history, we see that 500 years ago, we had the Great Reformation that split Western Christianity into Roman Catholic and Protestant. About 500 years before that, the Great Schism split East from West. About 500 years before that, the Roman Empire fell, and Pope Gregory the Great established the form of monastic Christianity that became the vehicle for evangelizing most of Western Europe, and incidentally preserved civilization through the Dark Ages. And of course, about 500 years before that, a prophet named Jesus walked the earth and started a religious revolution that would change the way we measure time itself.

Every time the church holds a rummage sale, says Tickle, a new, more vital form of Christianity emerges, and the expression of Christianity which had been dominant up to then is reconstituted into a purer expression of its former self. The church ends up with two more vital, stronger expressions. And the faith is broken open and spreads dramatically into new geographic and demographic areas, “thereby increasing exponentially the range and depth of Christianity’s reach as a result of its time of unease and distress.”

So here we are, right on schedule for a new “rummage sale.” And as Jesus would say, we have only to look around us at the signs of the times to understand that huge changes are taking place. The form of Christianity that many of us grew up with is under attack. Scientific discoveries on one hand, and historical criticism of the Bible on the other, have called into question many biblical truths once taken for granted. Freudian psychology has elevated the “self” as the location of truth rather than external sources of authority, so that it seems perfectly coherent to talk about multiple sources of truth – “my” truth, “your” truth – and assume they are all valid. Communications technology and unprecedented global mobility have ensured that countries which were once solidly mono-cultural are now multicultural, meaning that many religions vie for attention and none can maintain dominance in any area. And anxiety prevails about whether Christianity can survive all these attacks.

In anxious times like these, times of unprecedented change in our faith, Phyllis Tickle asks us to look at what is happening around us as God’s work being revealed – apocalypse. She calls the time we are living through “The Great Emergence.” And she believes that times of great change in the church like this are times when Christianity can take on new life for a changed world.

We are now in the in-between time, she says, the time in between one dominant expression of Christianity and another – a time when society is taking us away from the old forms of faith uncomfortably fast – but a time when it is not yet clear where we are going. In a sense, it is a time of apocalypse.

In times of apocalypse, God is working in special ways, and God wants to lift the veil so we can see what he is doing. In a changing world, we are called to look around us for signs of God’s presence, revelations of how God is working out God’s hope for us in this world.

I see God working in new ways all over. In a time of anxiety over the fact that Christianity is no longer overwhelmingly powerful and dominant, I believe that Christianity can gain new respect precisely because it is not the dominant social expectation. People will practice Christianity not as social expectation, but as a countercultural discipline – a place where Christian faith has always thrived.

In a time of unparalleled polarization between liberals and conservatives, I see Christians taking on new roles. Instead of concentrating on all the areas in which we disagree, I see Christians working together in the areas we all can agree on (for instance, yesterday’s New York Times had a great article about young evangelicals working to help resettle refugees).

In a time when people seem to believe that many paradoxical truths can be equally valid, I see people adopting Christian faith and practice as integral truths that permeate their whole lives, through spiritual disciplines of prayer and worship, sacrifice and service, so that they no longer live as if Christianity is merely a set of doctrines to be believed – they act as if Christianity is a way of life.

Apocalyptic writings remind us that, no matter how many disasters unfold in the world, God has made Creation for a purpose, and God is working even now to bring that purpose to fulfillment. God has come once before, and God will come again, and in the in-between time, God is still with us, working through us and in us.

So in this Advent season – Christ is here, inviting us into an Advent season. It’s a place of longing, a place of hope, a place of remembering that we are called to be part of a better world, a world even now being revealed by God. Advent is a time when we are called to special disciples of prayer and worship, service and sacrifice, as we look for signs of God’s work all around us. And as we do these things, we can truly pray to God with confidence, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Sermon for 11.22.09

Scriptures for this week are found here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp29_RCL.html

SERMON NOTES FOR 11.22.09

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite times of the year. It’s a low-pressure holiday – no gifts to buy, no lights to string. But wonderful things will happen this week.

In Fountain Hills, where I live, as morning dawns all the clubs in town will be gathering for the annual Thanksgiving parade, which in my book is much better than Macy’s. Shriners will drive their little cars, veterans will proudly walk along wearing the uniforms that still fit them, the high school band will march, Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts will be wearing coordinated costumes and singing pre-rehearsed songs (well, at least the Girl Scouts will be doing this, the Boy Scouts will be ambling along darting glances at the girls). Soccer teams of 5-year-olds will scamper along together, churches will create floats on the back of pickup trucks with their choirs singing beautiful music to the crowds, the mayor will ride in the back of a convertible, and Santa Claus will bring up the rear, expressing the hope that all of our holiday shopping will take place in Fountain Hills. Neighbors will wave and talk and sit on the curb together, and children will run into the street to catch candy thrown from the floats. And then we’ll come in from the cold (because the temperature will barely be above 70 degrees) to warm up with hot chocolate.

Elsewhere, on playing fields, burly men wearing large shoulder pads will run into each other at high speed in contests of athletic skill, while the gathered crowds yell and have a great time (I can’t speak for whether the players are having a great time; I think their fun comes when they cash their paychecks).

Later, people will sit down together for hearty meals with the best tablecloths and candles and china, gathering in large extended families or small nuclear families or groups related by affection rather than genetics, to remember that one of God’s greatest blessings is the love of the people around us.

Groups who are passionate about helping others will seek out the hungry and will bring them into warm buildings to have the best feast of the year.

In hospital emergency rooms and police cruisers, and in foreign countries on military bases we won’t ever know the names of, some people will be about their work of keeping us safe.

And in all those places, people will pause before taking their first bite of turkey to remember that all these blessings come from God. And God will bless us once more with what Episcopal priest Charles Hoffacker calls “the Dream of the Table”: “A dinner where all people share, and all people feast, and all people give thanks. We dream this dream for a single afternoon each year as we gather around the Thanksgiving Day table. For it seems then that our entire nation offers a single prayer and sits down to a single meal. The dinner is shared in the homes of the wealthy, the middle class, and the poor. It takes place in soup kitchens and suburban restaurants, and happens with studied formality and with casual folksiness. It feels as though all our people eat together today. On this one afternoon, we dream, however fitfully, "The Dream of the Table." And for a moment we see what God wants for us and for all people.”

How beautiful it is that we live this Thanksgiving dream for one day a year. For one day a year, there is plenty for all to feast on. No one is hungry, no one is alone – at least, that’s the dream. For one day a year, families are brought together, old arguments are put aside, grown children return home, and we live around a common table.

But how sad it is that Thanksgiving dream is true for only one day a year. God’s dream for us remains a future hope, that we experience from time to time, for short moments of laughter and love and sharing with our families. When we pray “thy kingdom come” in the Lord’s Prayer every week, we are praying for that dream to come true on earth, not only in small snippets or rare holidays, but as the ordinary dream of life for all, where there is plenty of love, laughter and life to go around – it is the dream of God’s kingdom.

Jesus stands before Pilate today, dreaming a dream of God’s kingdom. But it is safe to say that Pilate does not share the same dream. People who read the story of Jesus’ confrontation with Pontius Pilate are often struck by how nervous Pilate is through the whole thing: Jesus responds to each question of Pilate’s, so that it seems as if Pilate is on trial, not Jesus. Jesus comes before him accused of “subverting the nation, opposing payment of taxes to Caesar, and saying that He Himself is Christ, a King." Pilate knows that the threat of this ragged prophet is nothing compared to the might and power of Rome, but he is also confronted with an angry mob . Fearing a riot if he doesn’t do what the mob demands, he does what he would prefer not to do, and puts Jesus to death for the crime of being a king. Even though Jesus has no intention of being any kind of king that Rome would recognize – even though Jesus’ way of being a king is of another order altogether – so different from any recognizable earthly leader that Jesus can only say, “My kingdom is not of this world.”

We sometimes assume that when Jesus said “My kingdom is not of this world,” that he meant only life after death. We do believe that Jesus promises eternal life to all who believe. But Jesus taught us to pray “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” – the kingdom Jesus wants to bring is right here and now. And I think if we want to understand what that kingdom might look like, there’s no better place to look than our national “Dream of the Table” – a dream of God’s kingdom of justice and love and sharing and plenty, lived out here and now, with family and friends and those who love us.

Jesus is the king who wants that Dream of the Table to come true for the whole world. And Jesus is the king who works through us, empowers us, inspires us, makes it possible for each one of us to touch the world around us and begin making God’s dream a reality.

When we talk about Jesus as a king – maybe it’s a hard concept for Americans to relate to. The royalty we know are people like John F. Kennedy Jr., killed 46 years ago today, whose brief and shining moment is now thought of as the impossible dream of “Camelot.” But we post-Watergate people know that none of our politicians fully live up to our hopes for them – no one is perfect.

Or maybe, when we think of royalty, we think of the Queen of England – easily recognizable, waving that odd back-handed wave, respectable but old-fashioned, shielded from expressing genuine emotion or genuine thoughts, interesting (when the occasional scandal erupts) but quaint and irrelevant to anything in our real lives.

And so when we think of Jesus as our king, my question is, is he more relevant to our lives than the Queen of England? Do we really believe, and live as if, Jesus is the king of our lives? Do we really believe that he stands before the kingdoms and powers of this world, powers that keep so many people in poverty and suffering, kingdoms that allow people to be oppressed and hopeless, and challenges them with the dream that the Kingdom of God can become a reality, right here on earth as it is in heaven? Do we live as though we want to put that kingdom in practice here and now?

That Kingdom of God has been a long time coming – and still we wait and hope, still we pray for those in need and those who suffer, still we ask God to work through us and transform us so that we can transform the kingdoms we see around us.

That transformation can come in small ways, in ordinary ways. It can come when two people decide to get married, and bind themselves to each other in a covenant of love – a covenant that means they will each promise to put each other’s needs in front of their own. It can come when a father sits down with his child and teaches her to read, and while he teaches her, he also shows her what love feels like, and trains her to live that love in her life. It can come when a business person looks at the way the people in her company live, and realize that they are so busy competing, gossiping, backstabbing, and angling for promotions that they have forgotten how to live happy and productive lives – and decides to live differently.

It can come when people decide to form communities of faith that reach out to others with the good news of that kingdom, teaching children, guiding young people, sharing God’s care with each other, and following Jesus . It can come when a group of people in a community of faith decide to follow Jesus in all aspects of their lives, and make it a priority to put time, money and resources into helping the needy: donating food to feed the hungry at Thanksgiving; buying Christmas gifts for children who don’t already have them; giving money to feed the poorest of the poor in Mexico; spending Saturdays building houses for people whose homes are inadequate – all things that this Nativity community is doing – and many more.

Every time one Christian takes a stand to follow Jesus in his or her life – Jesus is standing once more before Pilate – putting the kingdoms of the world on trial. And with every action to bring God’s kingdom to earth – the kingdoms of the world lose a little bit more.

In the Prague demonstrations that sparked the Czech Revolution on Nov. 18, 1989, 20 years ago this week, students began chanting to the Communist party leadership, "You have lost already! You have lost already!" Though victory was in the future, a participant commented, "We knew we could win. We knew it was unstoppable. At the point that we committed ourselves to the struggle, we began to understand that victory was ours."

Victory belongs to Jesus Christ. It's not here fully yet, but bit by bit, Jesus Christ, our king, works through us to make his dream a reality. This table that Jesus invites us to every week, this table of Eucharist, is a Thanksgiving table. Eucharist is a word that simply means “Thanksgiving.” At this Thanksgiving table, we offer ourselves, our souls and bodies, to Christ, and Christ offers himself back to us. This table of Thanksgiving is a table where everyone is invited and welcome, and there is enough for everyone, for all time.

The kingdoms of the world have lost already, in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus – and one day, God’s kingdom will come fully on earth, and the world will change, and the Dream of this Thanksgiving Table will come true. Thanks be to God. And Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Sermon for 11.8.09

Lessons for this week are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp27_RCL.html

As some of you know, I went to seminary in Berkeley, California. Berkeley is in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the East Bay. It has two seasons: the season of sun and the season of rain. During the winter, it rains and rains for weeks on end. It’s that cold kind of rain that seeps into your bones until you feel like you will never be warm and dry again.

In the Berkeley area, there’s a sizeable homeless population. One day, I was going to the store during the season of rain. I parked my car, put up my umbrella, and walked through the rain toward the store when I saw a homeless man. He was huddled on the sidewalk with a plastic garbage bag over his head. I went into the store and when I came out, he was still there, huddled under his garbage bag in a puddle on the pavement. I walked up to him and asked him, “Would you like my umbrella?” He looked at me as if I were offering him a thousand dollars and said, “I can’t take your umbrella, you’ll get wet!” I said, “Oh no, it’s not a problem, I have another one in the car.” He looked at me very seriously and said, “Thank you.” He took the umbrella as if it were now his most precious possession, and he said, “And now, sister, I will give you a blessing.” Right there in the rain, he put his hands on my forehead, a priest in ragged clothes, and blessed me with a prayer that brought tears to my eyes.

Here I thought I was blessing him. But instead of the one giving a blessing, I was being blessed. Yet this was no sacrifice – I had another umbrella in the car – I gave out of my own abundance. It is the way I have experienced all giving to others – the blessing I receive from giving is far more than the sacrifice I made to give.

This might be one lesson learned by the widow of Zarephath in our Old Testament lesson today. A 3-year famine has spread throughout Israel and surrounding countries, God sends the prophet Elijah to a foreign widow and promises she will feed him. She has enough to make one meager meal for herself and her son – and then she knows she will die. Yet instead of hoarding that last meal for herself, she responds with generosity to this Israelite stranger, giving all she has left to feed him. She finds that her generosity in giving her whole life away is rewarded by life and more life – not only does her meager store of food last until the famine is broken, but also later Elijah miraculously brings her son back from the dead. By doing so, Elijah demonstrates that God of Israel is God of life, whose generosity is the basis of all life, whose gifts to us far outweigh any gifts we could give back, whose overflowing blessing to us is worth more than anything we could hold on to.

Perhaps this is what the widow in our gospel knows too. Jesus is sitting opposite to the temple, watching all that happens there. Note that this is Jesus’ last week of life – one of the last things he does is to watch a widow giving her own life to God – before Jesus does the same, on the cross. It is Passover time, so Jews are making their annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem –bringing their annual offering to temple and putting bags of money into the coffers. He watches rich people, scribes – these are educated people who provide their services to the rich and the elite – these are the lawyers and professionals. It appears that this is a time of economic misfortune among the common people – Jesus speaks about “devouring widows’ houses” – there are bankruptcies and foreclosures (the more things change, the more they stay the same). At Passover time, the scribes bring large sums to the treasury, but Jesus sees that those gifts are no sacrifice; giving to God large amounts but small percentages of their income will not affect how they live the rest of their lives. So Jesus gives a withering critique of religious show they are making – they are not living their faith.

He watches a widow walking quietly up to the treasury and giving two pennies – the last two pennies in her purse – everything she has to live on – and he praises the generosity that caused her to give her entire life to God. He tells his disciples that generosity is measured not by the amount of the gift, but by the abundance that it came from. The problem with the scribes is not that they give large sums, but that they give from their abundance an amount they won’t miss – they give the leftovers. God apparently doesn’t want leftovers we won’t ever miss – God wants what the widow gave. God wants it all.

The Great Commandment is: love God with ALL your heart, ALL your mind, ALL your soul, ALL your strength – God wants it all – your love, your time, your prayers, your energy, your service in every part of your life. God wants not just a pittance of our lives, 10% or any other percentage – God wants our entire lives. One hundred percent.

We can unpack what that means. I don’t think that means God wants most of us to give away everything we own and starve. I think that God intends us to use our gifts for God’s purposes, which include caring for our families, providing a decent home, sending our children to college, having a decent job, etc. But God also intends for us to use our gifts generously for purposes outside our own homes, including caring for the poor and supporting God’s mission. I like to think that the widow was cared for like widow of Zarephath, that Jesus’ disciples took her in and cared for her as one of their own – because this is what Christians do – from beginning, we have cared for the poor.

Bishop Greg Rickel of Seattle tells a story: before he became a bishop, he would often do workshops on the spirituality of money. He would start by asking people to share their first memories of money. Often, he says, someone will share a variation of this story: my grandfather (or grandmother, aunt or uncle) gave me a silver dollar – sometimes once, sometimes every year, for birthday or Christmas. Invariably, sometime in the story the person will say, “I still have that silver dollar” (or dollars). Bishop Rickel continues, ‘Sometimes the same people will later share stories of hard times in their lives when they were barely surviving. And I just want to ask, and sometimes have, "Did you ever think about spending that silver dollar?" The answer is almost always a resounding "NO WAY."’ What that silver dollar has become is the sign of a relationship, which is more precious to the holder than anything they might purchase. The relationship is the treasure, not the dollar.

Stewardship means remembering that the treasure God has given us is the gift of a relationship. Stewardship means understanding that our possessions are personal and relational – they are entrusted to us by one who loves us, with God’s hope that we will care for them and leave this world better than we found it.

Jesus says, you can’t serve two masters, you can’t serve both God and money. When we begin to understand that our money and our possessions, our time and our talents, our families and homes, everything we have and everything we are, are a gift and a trust, then we begin to understand stewardship and our own place in God’s kingdom. And that’s when we begin to develop in our relationship with Jesus Christ, becoming disciples who serve him in every part of our lives – in our families, in our businesses, in our church lives, and in our financial lives too.

This Sunday is the kickoff of our stewardship campaign. Stewardship is so often a euphemism for the annual fundraising campaign – and it is absolutely true that this church asks all members to give what they can from their abundance for God’s work. If I didn’t think that this was a worthy cause, if I didn’t see God’s work being done every day here, lives being transformed, I wouldn’t be working here. I do believe God’s work is done here, and I do believe that contributing to God’s mission is part of the personal mission of every disciple who is part of this church mission.

But at its heart, stewardship is not about contributing to the church to keep it going – stewardship is about each person’s relationship with Jesus. Stewardship is about recognizing everything we have as a gift from God, and treasuring and using every part of our lives as God calls us to do.

Some people think that money and possessions aren’t things that should be talked about in church because they aren’t spiritual matters. Well, I will promise you not to talk about them any more than Jesus did. Jesus talks about money and possessions more than anything else in the Bible except the kingdom of God itself. And I think he did it because he watched people like the rich scribes and the poor widow in the gospel story, and he realized that for all of those people, money was the biggest spiritual issue in their lives, and how they acted with their money reflected their relationship with God and with their neighbor. He recognized that for the widow, what she gave was a measure of her faith.

He also recognized that for the scribes, what they gave was an indication that they were in spiritual danger of letting their possessions separate them from God. Let’s be clear: Jesus believes that having an abundance of possessions can put a person in grave spiritual danger – he says things like, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

The reason our possessions put us in grave danger is because it is too easy for us to make money our god, to put our trust in our money rather than in our God. Money promises security and comfort – yet ultimately, only God can save us. You can't take it with you!

I think it is quite possible that in America today, our relationship with money and possessions is the most important spiritual question in our lives. Money and possessions can easily become the addiction that drives our whole lives, the thing that takes up all our energy, the passion that takes our energy away from the true calling of our lives, the god that separates us from God. Jesus says, you can’t serve both God and money. Well, our society tells us to serve money, not God – our world has made up its mind which is more important; but it’s up to us to make up our own minds.

I would be astonished if anyone here has ever experienced what widow of Zarephath experienced – enough to eat one meal, knowing death will follow soon after. But we are also in difficult economic times, so I want to say this. If you don’t know where your next meal is coming from or whether you will be able to keep your home – then give to God in other ways – your time, your worship, your prayers, your love. God knows what you have and what you need, and God doesn’t want you to starve. And this church wants to be there for you in your hour of need.

But if you are not in this kind of situation, if you have what you need and more, if you are living with abundance, then the stewardship question is different, and that question is this. How are you serving God with what God has entrusted to you? It may be the most important and most spiritual question you will ever ask.

Sermon for All Saints, 2009

Lessons for this Week:

http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearB_RCL/HolyDays/AllSaints_B_RCL.html

Imagine a November morning in Minnesota, on a wheat farm, flat and wintry, and a small white house standing all alone on the prairie. The wind is blowing, but this early in winter, no snow has fallen yet. The year is 1918, and a world away, men are huddled in trenches in France, but here in Minnesota, another drama is unfolding.

A man is carefully and gingerly helping his wife up into a wagon. They are bundled up against the winter chill, and she is weak, so that he almost has to lift her into the seat. The man is taking his wife to town, where he will put her on a train to Rochester, Minnesota, where she go to the Mayo Clinic to be treated for cancer. He would like to go with her, but someone must return home to be with the three boys, age 12, 10, and 4, and the little girl, Adeline, age 7.

The children wave as the wagon drives off, and their mother turns to wave back at them, and gives one last special smile to her little girl. Late that afternoon, the winter wind changes and begins blowing hard, from a different direction. A blizzard blows up. The father is still not home. The two older boys go out to the barn and do the evening chores. Little Adeline takes out some food from the pantry and serves a cold dinner to her brothers. The children eat and, not knowing when their father can return home in this blizzard, put themselves to bed.

In the night, the blizzard dies down, and in the morning a neighbor comes to their farm. This neighbor is richer than they are, and so he has a telephone. The children’s father has called him to tell him his wife died before he could get her on the train. In the blizzard, he was unable to come home to care for his children, so the neighbor takes them to his house. Quietly, they absorb the news of their mother’s death, and wait for their father to come home.

That little girl, Adeline, never forgot what it meant to have a mother. She grew up, married, had four girls of her own, and devoted her life to caring for her family. She helped her husband run a farm in Oklahoma, taught her children to read and to love each other and take care of their own families, and cared for her father in his old age. Her steady, calm, kind wisdom was the foundation of her family’s life.

Adeline was my grandmother. She taught my own mother how to be a mother, and my mother taught me. My grandmother Adeline died last year at the age of 97, still steady, calm and kind as always. She was a saint of God.

This All Saints weekend is a time when we remember those saints who have gone before us: the famous saints like martyrs Stephen and Agnes, evangelists Paul and Patrick, people who changed the world like Mary, mother of God, and Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King Jr. But this weekend is also a time to remember the ordinary saints who didn’t work miracles but who lived courageously, living out the ordinary virtues of care and concern for others and following Christ in their daily lives. It’s a time to remember the ones who have gone before us. And it is a time to remember that Christ promises us that death does not have the final word: the final word of life belongs to God.

This whole weekend, from Halloween through the Nov. 2 feast of All Souls, is a celebration of the triumph of life over death. Like many Christian holidays, Halloween was originally a pagan holiday that has been baptized – the ancient Celts celebrated a Day of the Dead, when they believed that the spirits of departed loved ones wandered free in the world, often returning to their ancestral homes and visiting descendants.

In celebrating a Day of the Dead, these ancient pagan people recognized the basic, most fundamental questions of human existence: what happens to us when we die? Where have the people gone whom we have loved? Can they still have a relationship with us? Will they live again? Recognizing one basic truth of human life, they knew that their ancestors left more than memories behind – they left whole ways of being and acting, family dynamics, habits of love – they believed that they still had relationships with those who had died. So they would leave doors and windows open for the friendly spirits, leaving fires burning and food out for the spirits to eat – the origin of trick-or-treating.

Early Christians brought Christian faith to bear on this custom, showing a genius for relating God’s truth in the gospel to local customs which, they believed, showed that God’s influence had been at work before them. They followed the Celtic Day of the Dead with a day to celebrate All Saints, the faithful baptized people, famous and not, whose souls rest in hands of God: a day to remember the ones who have made us what we are, to celebrate the love they have given us, and to give thanks for God’s promise of eternal life.

Which is why I got a kick out of the latest from televangelist Pat Robertson. The website of the Christian Broadcasting Network had an article by one Kimberly Daniels, who asserts that demons sneak into bags of Halloween candy at grocery stores. “[M]ost of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches,” Daniels wrote. “I do not buy candy during the Halloween season. Curses are sent through the tricks and treats of the innocent whether they get it by going door to door or by purchasing it from the local grocery store. The demons cannot tell the difference.”

“Halloween is much more than a holiday filled with fun and tricks or treats,” she wrote. “It is a time for the gathering of evil that masquerades behind the fictitious characters of Dracula, werewolves, mummies and witches on brooms. The truth is that these demons that have been presented as scary cartoons actually exist. I have prayed for witches who are addicted to drinking blood and howling at the moon.” Well ... if I knew people like that, I would pray for them too.

OK, time to take a deep breath – let’s calm down about Halloween. Far from a day for demons and werewolves, the feast of All Saints, including the eve of All Saints, Halloween, celebrates the greatest Christian hope. We believe that in Jesus Christ, God has overcome death with life; that Jesus’ own resurrection was the sign of that victory; and that the resurrection of Lazarus demonstrates that resurrection was not just something that happened long ago and far away to the Son of God, but it is something promised to every saint of God, every member of Christ’s Body, to you and to me. The original Halloween sight must have been the sight of the body of Lazarus, wrapped in grave clothes, emerging from the tomb, blinking in the sunlight, to the wails and astonishment of all those who loved him. But Lazarus was no zombie, no demon, no walking creature of horror. Lazarus was a person, called from death into life by God’s cry of love.

Our scriptures tell us that Lazarus’ story is our story too. Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans that we are baptized into Christ’s death – as we entered the baptismal waters, we died with him, and as we emerged, dripping, into the sunlight, we were also raised with him. We have already been reborn into the promise of eternal life. We are already saints, baptized people who live in truth of Christ’s salvation.

And so on All Saints’ weekend, we remember those heroes of the faith, heroes of history and heroes in our own personal lives, whose souls are already in the hands of God. In their stories, we celebrate our own origins, the things that have made us who we are, like a young motherless girl who never forgot what it meant to have and be a mother, and passed that knowledge down through generations.

And we celebrate the fact that the ordinary and extraordinary saints of our past have made us their heirs – we celebrate the fact that we are saints too. In the rather quaint words of our closing hymn today, “You can meet them in shops, or in lanes, or at tea … and I mean to be one too.” In our baptism, we are raised with Christ, and in our baptismal covenant, we make promises about how we will act because of that salvation. We will renew our baptismal covenant in a moment, and you will have a chance to see those promises we have all made. What those promises tell us is that in Christ, we are all saints – baptized members of the body of Christ who promise to live according to Christ’s call.

My grandmother Adeline is with God now, along with the communion of saints, and I remember and honor her today. In their stories, the famous ones we have heard of and the not-so-famous ones we have loved, we remember our past. But in their stories, we also celebrate our destiny – not just things past or things present, but things yet to come. In Jesus, God makes us a promise that is eternal. Our Christian faith gives us a hope beyond hope, and a promise beyond promises. Lazarus was only the first to rise from the dead – but we will rise also. And if this is true, then there is nothing left to fear. Halloween is a time to laugh, because Jesus has already entered into death and conquered it. And All Saints is a time to celebrate the joy of eternal life, through Jesus Christ.