As I began preparing my sermon last night I sat at the computer looking at the electric clock on the desk "4:22". Down in the corner of the computer screen the minutes ticked away, 4:23. Every once in a while I would glance at my watch, "4:25" and when I would get restless I 'd slip to the kitchen to be assaulted by the wall clock above the sink or the digital on the microwave or coffee pot. In case the time was registering only on an intellectual level on the quarter hour the soft chimes of the grandfather clock reminded me that time was flying.
How many times a day do you check you watch? How often do you glance at the time in the car and on some subliminal plane register the minutes. Time. Has any generation in the history of the world ever been so bound by time? Has any generation ever been so tyrannized by time? The best that people might be able to say in Jesus time was "I'll be there in the afternoon, the late afternoon." Our lives are compassed by time, they are scrutinized, evaluated and assessed by time.
I dare not venture into a philosophical explanation of time but there are some I am told who would suggest that time is our own creation. We listen to physicists and cosmologists. They seek after The Theory of Everything and talk about string theory. They order their calculations and strangely enough, everything comes into focus if we assume not four dimensions but twenty-six dimensions! Not four, but twenty-six dimensions compressed into what we can see and what we cannot. Please understand. By no means am I wishing to introduce the notion that the "the holy city, the new Jerusalem; where "God will wipe away every tear from their eyes" is tucked away in some yet unseen dimension of twenty-six. I would suggest, however, that when physicists are so bold to imagine unseen dimensions, should we not also be daring in our imagination and not too quick to dismiss hope by cursory examinations of what we deem possible.
It occurs to me that that is perhaps what our
lessons this morning point us to and that All Saints Day itself
wants to challenge us to understand. Our time-begins at birth
and ends at death?
Our time is all there is?
We live in a world that is guilty of a kind
of intentional amnesia, that self-centeredness
and arrogance which believes that we stand at the summit of human
development, that we know more than any generation before us.
All there is is our time. Margaret Mead once called us Americans
"neophiles", that is lovers of the new. We worship the
new and improved model of everything. We don't care for history
very much. Technological societies tend toward that sense of immediacy,
nowness.
In the traditional agricultural society, the elders had something to teach the young. They are the repositories of the centuries of received wisdom about seed time and harvest, the changes of the weather, the ways of the world. But in a technological society the old seem to have nothing to teach the young. Technology renders the older generation ignorant. So you hear said "My grandchild at six knows more about computers than I do at sixty." And you are right. So who cares about yesterday in a world where we are imprisoned in the "now."
God cares. Our time is not God's time. In God's time we are part of a great history. We hold hands with those who have come before and those who will follow us. Therefore, All Saints Day is a celebration of our living not in our time but in God's time. We celebrate those who have gone before us; the famous and the un-famous;the people that have touched our lives and brought us from death into life; the people that have loved us along the way. All Saints Day is not just an attempt to get all our mourning out on the table so then we can forget and move on. Rather, on All Saints' we engage in a profound remembering. The beginning of the prayer we pray as we come to the Lord's Table is called the anamnesis--the not-forgetting. We gather to worship and we do our remembering before God's face, certain of God's time.
Frederick Buechner reminds us:
On All Saints' Day, it is not just the saints of the church that
we should remember in our prayers, but all the foolish ones and
wise ones, the shy ones and overbearing ones, the broken ones
and whole ones, the despots and tosspots and crackpots of our
lives who, one way or another, have been our particular fathers
and mothers and saints, and whom we loved without knowing we loved
them and by whom we were helped to whatever little we may have,
or ever hope to have, of some kind of seedy sainthood of our own.
Such remembering, however, far from being a sentimental act of
nostalgia is a profound act of hope. We remember fearlessly because
we hope courageously for a place, a Kingdom, where "death
hath no dominion," and loss is not forever.
On All Saints' Sunday the Church summons all its hope and courage
to declare an alternative vision: "death hath no dominion,"
because all power and glory and dominion have been given to Jesus
Christ, the Risen One.
Our Bible Study is reading a story by John
Updike, who is a professing Christian. In one of his collections
of essays, reviews and occasional pieces, he included a short
piece on "spirituality."
A spiritual person . . . embodies an alternative to the obvious--to
bank accounts and syllogisms, to death and taxes. Pressed, I would
define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it
moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.
That is what we offer in worship: "an alternative to the
obvious," a "shadow of light" cast against the
darkness of death;s dominion.
"Here may . . . the bereaved find the truth that death hath no dominion over their beloved . . .; Our faith "embodies an alternative to the obvious." But if All Saints Day is truly not to be bound in our time, if we can embrace a vision of God's time then we must look ahead as well. We must acknowledge the countless generations that will follow us. We must see ourselves as the saints who will pass on the alternative vision to those who are to come.
Steven T. Davis edited a book about the the
Spiritual Journeys of 11 great thinkers. In his introduction he
writes, "My favorite track and field event is the four by
100 meter relay. It is a team event. You can have the fastest
sprinters and still lose the race if you drop the baton or pass
it poorly. ..Countless Christians-our spiritual forebears from
the time of Jesus until today-are to be thanked. We are Christians
because of their faithfulness. They ran the race and passed the
baton. Jesus gave the mission of baton passing to his disciples,
they turned it over to the people and generations who followed
them; and because of their trustworthiness we are Christians today."
And so we will turn it over to others. Just as surely as we look
back we must look ahead. We must dedicate ourselves to passing
the baton.
What binds Lazarus in our lesson today is not
the burial cloths it is the conception that he lives only in this
earthly time. That is what appearances say but Jesus speaks an
alternative vision. Of Lazarus he says "Unbind him."
Jesus speaks that to us as well, Unbind us, free us from our conception
of time to see a vision of God's time where we gather with the
communion of saints of every timeand every place.
Amen.