Scriptures for today are Here
Years ago, when we were younger and living in Texas, Tom and I used to take a vacation each year to the Big Bend Country – the part of Texas where the Rio Grande curves in a kind of elbow – a mountainous, desert country. It’s not so different from the desert mountains around here, except for the fact that it is right on the border between Texas and Mexico. In the Big Bend Country, you travel through a vast, empty national park on the US side, so there’s no real difference between the desert on one side and the desert on the other – the only way you know where the border is, is by the river, the Rio Grande.
One day, Tom and I were out hiking in the park, and we saw a trail that led down to the river. The river was just a small, gentle stream, and there we found an old Mexican man with a raft. He didn’t speak English but we managed to communicate; $1 each to go across. So we paid the money, and he poled us across to the other side.
On the Mexican side, we walked up the riverbank, fended off the children trying to sell us pretty rocks for a dollar, and walked up a dusty path to a tiny town, where we sat on the porch of a rickety restaurant and ordered the only things they had on the menu: borracho beans with fresh-made tortillas and Dos Equis. We sat on the porch, swatted flies, listened to the ceiling fan and the recorded conjunto music, and watched what little activity took place on the dirt main road of this tiny town. And then, after awhile, we decided to walk back down to the river and cross back over to the U.S. side. **
I don’t know if it was because it was a different place, or a different era, but there in the Big Bend Country, there were no passports, no checkpoints, no guards. The border was thin and porous, hardly recognizable as a border at all.
The ancient Celts, living in Britain and Ireland long before Christianity came there, recognized certain places as “thin places,” border crossings between heaven and earth. Somehow at these places, they felt the borderline was thin and porous, and the spirit world could pour through at any moment. So they built shrines at those places, and later Christians built churches and cathedrals and graveyards on top of the old shrines. And I’m told if you go to those places, sometimes you can feel the border between heaven and earth crack open just a little bit, and feel the presence of God.
The Celtic people also recognized certain times of the year as border crossings, such as the three-day harvest festival when they remembered their ancestors. Later Christians baptized and made this festival our own in our three-day festival of Halloween, All Saints and All Souls, all three of which happened this past week. And today, we are observing All Saints Day.
All three of these days in a way take us down to the border crossing between heaven and earth; they help us to look at questions of life and death. Halloween does this in kind of a parody – dressing up as the things we fear – monsters and ghosts, and the living dead, vampires and zombies – to somehow shake our fists at death, laugh in its face, proclaim life instead. All Saints was originally the time when the Roman Catholic Church remembered saints and martyrs, who they believed were able to skip Purgatory and go straight to heaven; and All Souls was the time when they remembered all the faithful departed, and said masses for ordinary dead loved ones.
For us Episcopalians, we’ve never believed in the idea of Purgatory, which is found nowhere in the Bible; though we do remember many people as saints, heroic examples of witnesses and martyrs for the faith. We also recognize that there are many faithful people, quietly living lives of devotion to God and service to others, and it is up to God to recognize their quiet sainthood; so we don’t make that much distinction between All Saints and All Souls Days. We believe that it is up to God to bring all of us, as God’s children, into God’s home: that country that waits for us beyond the final boundary of death.
Which is a faith that is beautiful and true, and I believe it. But we should not make the mistake as Christians of thinking that the whole goal of our life of faith is to escape from this life into a better life on other side. Chrstian author Brian McLaren (Everything Must Change) states, "More and more Christian leaders are beginning to realize that for the millions of young adults who have recently dropped out of church, Christianity is a failed religion. Why? Because it has specialized in dealing with 'spiritual needs' to the exclusion of physical and social needs. It has focused on 'me' and 'my eternal destiny,' but it has failed to address the dominant societal and global realities of their lifetime: systemic injustice, poverty, and dysfunction”, i.e., life on this side of the border between life and death. McLaren asks, "Shouldn't a message purporting to be the best news in the world be doing better than this?"
Well, the answer is yes – Christian faith should focus our eyes on this world too. Because if our lessons for today make anything clear, it is the fact that the life of the Body of Christ takes place here on this side of the border as well as in the heavenly court; it takes place now, in this moment, as well as in a future hope. The Christian life is not only about escaping suffering into the beautiful vision of the heavenly city in our lesson from Revelation today, where we will hunger and thirst no more, and every tear will be wiped from our eyes.
The Christian life is also about working to alleviate hunger and thirst here, to wipe tears from the eyes of people who are suffering now: taking our life of sainthood seriously here. It is about becoming a community grounded in love, the love that God has given us (as 1 John says) – “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God.” What we will become, the communion of saints that lives through eternity, has not yet been revealed, but children of God is what we are. And because God loves us, God gives us love to share with others.
In fact there is something beautiful and true about this fact: that in the earthy reality of our lives right here, in places of suffering and anguish as well as times of joy and laughter, Jesus is here, loving us, making our life holy.
I believe this is what Jesus is talking about in our gospel lesson today, one of the most famous passages in all of Matthew’s gospel, known as the Beatitudes (“Blessed”). The original Greek word translated here as “Blessed” is “Makarios,” which means “happy.” Jesus seems to be saying not so much that God will bless you in your suffering as that happiness comes in the midst of suffering – you are “happy” now. This doesn’t seem to make sense – we all know that suffering is real, and it is hard to find happiness in the midst of it. Yet Jesus seems to say with no irony, Happy are the poor in spirit, happy are those who mourn, happy are the meek.
And to me, this seems the opposite of truth, it almost seems to promote a Pollyanna style of faith. But the truth is, of all world religions, Christianity may be the one that is most realistic about suffering, because we worship a Savior who suffered . We worship a Savior who chose on his own to cross the thin and porous border between heaven and earth, to leave the place where there are no tears, to come to a world where suffering, hunger, thirst, death are everyday affairs.
In 2006, the rock star Bono, lead singer of the band U2, spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast, a famous speech that has been quoted thousands of times: “God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill. I hope so…. But the one thing we can all agree -- all faiths, all ideologies -- is that God is with the vulnerable and poor. God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.”
I think this is what Jesus means when he says to the sick, suffering and poverty-stricken folks who crowded around him in the hills of Galilee to watch him heal and to hear him speak, Happy are you when you are poor in spirit. He is saying more than just the kingdom of heaven will be yours someday. He is also saying, the kingdom of heaven is among you now. He is pointing to his own presence, for the kingdom of heaven comes to us in the person of Jesus, the one who loved us so much he came to be among us. The border has already been crossed, the barricades have already come down. The kingdom of heaven has already leaked across the border into this world. And it is here among us; it is here IN us. It is what empowers us to live as saints in the world.
It is in the name of the God who crosses all borders, that we live our lives as baptized saints and citizens of God’s kingdom. Making choices, crossing borders to be with others who need our help. Because he is here with us, we make the choice to be with them. And we know that someday a new border crossing will open up for us. And we will be with him, God’s beloved children, every tear wiped away.
So, on All Saints and All Souls Days, we remember all Christians who have died, and give thanks for their lives. Because we believe the promise of Jesus was true for them, and will one day be true for us, that as we make that final border crossing between earth and heaven, that our Lord will be there to greet us, welcome us, and pole our raft to the other side – where there is no crying, no sighing, but life everlasting.
** Years after we crossed the Rio Grande at Boquillas, I happened to be listening to Robert Earl Keen one day and I realized that he had crossed the Rio Grande at the same place. There couldn't possibly be another crossing just like it. He sang about it in his song "Gringo Honeymoon" - click the link to hear his amazing, fabulous song. He had the same experience we did, except -- we didn't rent the donkeys (too expensive); we didn't meet the cowboy who was running from the DEA; and we sadly didn't hear the crusty caballero play the old gut-string guitar.
No comments:
Post a Comment