The Rev. Alanna C. Sullivan, Associate Minister and Directory of Operaction, the Memorial Church. File Photo by Jeffrey Blackwell/Memorial Church Communications.
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By the Rev. Alanna C. Sullivan
Associate Minister and Director of Operation
The Memorial Church of Harvard University
(The following is a transcript of the service audio)
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts and minds be acceptable in your sight. Oh God, our rock and redeemer, amen.
So a few months into the pandemic, my family stumbled into a new ritual on Sunday mornings. My son Henry, was about two years old at the time and had abundant energy to wear off, and we still didn't know much about how the coronavirus spread at that time. So we had to assume that it was safer for us to remain apart than to be with other people. So we had to be inventive about finding alternative play spaces to our usual neighborhood playground. And so my mother-in-law suggested a cemetery. We happened to live near one.
So each Sunday we would bring Henry to a cemetery and I would listen to our worship service through our headphones. The gravestones were just the right height for him to hide behind. There were plenty of pine cones for him to pick up and examine. There was dirt for him to dig and eat. And there was something hauntingly reassuring about watching this little boy dance among the tombstones of those long deceased while I worshiped alongside you.
Although we appeared to be alone, somehow I felt so connected to the past, present, and future in those very thin moments. And for me, All Saints Day is another one of those thin moments when the boundaries of time and space appear to dissolve. In a recent podcast, author Tembi Locke shared that any conversation about death is really a disguised conversation about living. All Saints Day is when we take stock of where we've come from, where we are, and where we're going. For how we remember those who've gone before us molds, the very lives we lead today, and what we hope for for the future.
This week, churches around the world, Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, all come together to remember those faithful and beloved servants who shared God's love with this broken and hurting world. The Roman Catholic Church has over 10,000 canonized saints. And now I must admit I'm a little bit jealous of our Catholic siblings. So often in Protestant circles, we seem to only recognize five or so individuals as saints. Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Dietrich Bonhoeffer or sometimes Dorothy Day. And are these people of great faith? Absolutely. Were they saints? To be sure.
But when their names are invoked so often and other examples drawn upon so seldom, it doesn't stretch our imagination, but rather constricts it. They become petrified when we cast them as perfection instead of recognizing the fullness of their humanity and the messiness of their lives and the difficulty of their choices.
Social justice activist and preacher William Sloane Coffin put it this way, "The saints do not look at the harsh realities of life through the softening mist of sentimentality. They are fully aware of humanity's capacity for idiocy and brutality, yet they are steadfast in their love of people near and far."
Today's gospel lesson read by Julia Shepherd gets at the heart of just how hard it is to be faithful followers of Christ. The lesson is Luke's accounting of the beatitudes, the blessings that God will share when the kingdom arrives. Now, this account is less frequently told than the beatitudes from Matthew's gospel. Instead, Matthew's lofty sermon on the Mount that shares a mountaintop view of what is to come. Luke's sermon on the plane is flatly literal. God is to be found with the poor, the hungry, the mournful, the outcast. Luke is always clear that God is on the side of the oppressed.
And here he puts bad news right next to the good news. For every blessing is accompanied by a woe. Woe to you who are rich, full and laughing now. Even saints must have struggled to hear these words. Now at first glance, it might look like Jesus is creating a fateful binary to separate the blessed saints from the woeful lost. Yet Jesus is addressing one audience. His sermon is not as sorting exercise between the good folks and the bad folks. He addresses every blessing, every woe to every person. It is almost as if to say, this is what it means to be human. This is where all of us live. We move from blessing to woe over and over again in the course of our lives. We invite blessing every time we open ourselves up to God's transformative love, and we invite woe every time we separate ourselves from seeing the needs of the world and thereby knowing God.
In other words, our God is a God of both comfort and challenge because each of us is blessed and woeful, saint and sinner. We occupy the plane of this beautiful and broken world together.
This week, Henry asked if he could watch a YouTube video of children dressed up as cops and robbers for Halloween. I told him, Henry, I really don't want to watch that. And he said, Why? And in a maternal exhaustion haze, I said, it's complicated. And without skipping a beat, he said, Mom, we are all complicated.
Ain't that the truth? We are all complicated. So maybe this is the calling in this gospel and of this day to share God's love with the world even when we don't get it right. Even in the tensions and complexities of this both and world, God beckons us to resist our own defensiveness, to overcome our feel of leaning into God's blessings, to humble ourself beneath God's woes. We come here to name and venerate a few famous saints, but we also come to celebrate the everyday saints of our lives. The ones whose memory is in the hearts and minds of each of us sitting here today. The people we have known and admired, the people who believed in us when we had trouble believing in ourselves, people who gave us a glimpse of what God's love looks like, however imperfectly.
I can imagine family weekend being another thin moment for first year students and their visiting families. When you feel the presence of those who accompanied you here to Harvard and those companions being more than those who were sitting next to you in the pew, most Harvard students are keenly aware that they did not make it here alone. It was the collective support and sacrifices of so many saints that helped them get here.
The mom who worked an extra shift to pay for music lessons. The physics teacher who stayed after school to explain the law of relativity, again. The coach who pushed you just a bit to break that record when you didn't think it was possible. And the grandfather who loved you, no matter what grade you got on your report card. The love they poured into us spills over when we love the world. They are the saints whose humanity we know fully and whose love we know unconditionally. And that's what I think makes them even more remarkable. In the challenges and trials of life, we witness that they choose love. Bell Hooks writes, "when we choose to love, we choose to move against fear, against alienation and separation. It is only by choosing love that we can begin to build God's kingdom here on earth."
One modern saint who I mentioned earlier, Archbishop Oscar Romero, was martyred in El Salvador. And he would always read at the Eucharist the names of those in the community who had been killed or kidnapped. He would call out the names and the congregation would respond with "present." They maybe were dead, but they were not gone. They are here because in God, any separation in time and space falls away. Any rupture in relationship can be mended and any wound can be healed. And none of us is perfect, not even the saints, but they are saints because somehow God's love shown through them.
So when we partake in the Lord's supper today, who is present with you? Who has pulled up a chair to feast alongside you at this table? And who is the community of saints that surrounds you? Thanks be to God.