First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
21 November 2004
By So Great a Cloud
Last Sunday, I had the pleasure of attending our Children's Worship and Other Arts program. I was there when they named the giant puppet saints that stand tall and proud behind me now. St. Baja. St. Helen. St. Steph. As you can see when you read the descriptions of these saints in your bulletin, the kids felt free to use their imaginations as they conjured stories to go along with each name and puppet. What a gift to us all! These puppets are not merely props for our service today but they are concrete, or maybe paper mache, reminders that on this All Saints Sunday we are all invited to use the gifts of our imaginations. We are invited to imagine that our church is so much more than who and what we can see with our eyes when we come here from week to week. I recently read about a sign on the Winchester cathedral in England that starts to get at this wider understanding of the church. It says, as you enter the church, "you are entering a conversation that began long before you were born, and will continue long after you're dead." I love it! As we enter a church, any church and this church, we enter a conversation not only with one another but also with those who have come before us and with those who will be here after we are gone. It is a conversation with our biblical and spiritual ancestors, with our loved ones who have died, with our children and with their children and with their children's children. How can we begin to imagine a conversation so broad and a church community so wide, one that includes all the saints of the past, present and future?
Paul offers a rather mystical sounding suggestion that we heard in our Prayer of Invocation and in Paul's Letter to the Hebrews: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith." Talk about imagination! A great cloud of witnesses that surround a footrace? What a strange and profound image. It takes me back to the days when I was about ten years old. I was never much of a runner but I did compete on the swim team at the local Y in Wayne, New Jersey. There was a balcony on one of side of the pool that was more or less filled with parents and friends during our swim meets. Because I swam backstroke, I could see these people through my perpetually foggy Speedo goggles standing up and cheering me along as I made my way down the pool. Maybe it was the kid in the next lane that they were cheering for but even setting aside the athletic metaphors, we know there is something deeply comforting and inspiring about a crowd, or a cloud, showing their support for you when you are giving something your best. Seen in this light, that conversation we enter when we come to church is not merely a steady stream of words—of stories and traditions and knowledge handed down—it is conversation which also contains this quality of encouragement. If we could look through our own foggy goggles, we might see an entire balcony of First Church saints that are up there cheering us on and encouraging us to persevere in our faith, to not give up, to not lose hope in these despairing times. After all, the saints of this church have a lot invested in our success. They built this house of worship. They have through years left us our sizable financial endowment. They wrote the hymns we sing and the Covenants we pray. They gave us a legacy of speaking out about matters of peace and justice. You can bet they want us to keep the faith and to build upon it even further for future generations of this community. They have already made the move from relying on God's grace to resting in God's glory and they want the same for us. Can you feel the encouragement that surrounds us in this place?
When we begin, as one writer says, to "mentally populate" that great cloud according to our own stories of people who we've known and loved and even those who have inspired us from the pages of history, the image of encouragement becomes all the more powerful.1 I wonder what names and pictures of people come to your mind? I haven't been around First Church long enough to have much of a sense of what that cloud would look like here but I know that for me personally, it's Wilbur Vandergoot, my next-door neighbor in New Jersey who cared for pheasants and sheep in his own backyard and who would wear wooden shoes. He'd be in the balcony. It's my grandmother Daisy Smith who was a nursing home worker, and my grandfather Wilbur Applegate who built me my first workbench and passed on his woodworking tools to my father and so to me. It's my father, Albert A Smith, who was a minister. It's my utterly brilliant college roommate V.J. who suffered from bi-polar disorder and ended his own life. It's those people who I've been incredibly privileged to minister to and to sit with during their last days and in some cases as they have taken their last breaths.
As I conjure names and pictures of people in my head and heart, as I imagine their smiles and their frowns, I've come to cherish these images and metaphors that can help me place them somewhere closeby. I don't mind calling it a cloud, or even a balcony. And I love to think of them all sitting at a heavenly banquet and keeping a space open for you and for me. What choice do we have but to use our imaginations when we consider what happens to all the saints that have come before us, and even when we wonder what heaven is like? We should be grateful for the richness of the language of our faith, whether it comes from Paul or from Revelation or from Allan Happe's version of For All the Saints. We need these words and images to give expression to our own experience of this larger conversation that spans the gap between our past, present and future brothers and sisters in Christ. Truth be told though, what's more important to me than any particular language or idea or vision of heaven is what I know in my bones—that the love and friendship I shared with these individuals has not ended. My faith in God and my own heart have left me utterly convinced that their spirits are still alive and the bonds of our love and friendship will continue until I too am in God's nearer presence and so in theirs. I hadn't expected that I would say these names in this sermon but I could think of no better way of explaining the communion of the saints than by simply sharing my own experience of it. In speaking the names that mentally populate the great cloud for me, my hope is that you will take the opportunity to speak those names that come to your mind and heart. Indeed, you will have such an opportunity in just a few moments when we come to the table and commemorate the saints.
Yes, we still miss the saints, we miss their smiles and their voices and their conversation, but to remember that we are always surrounded by that cloud of witnesses is to remember that in God's abiding and eternal love the conversation goes on. You know the line from Corinthians. Faith, hope and love abide and the greatest of these in love. Love endures all things. Love never ends. As people of faith, the invitation to enter into a conversation with the saints is always there, the bonds of love that we knew in life do not disappear. We affirm, with John Greenleaf Whittier, that "In hours of faith, the truth to sense and flesh unknown, that Life is ever Lord of Death, And love can never lose it owns." To imagine and remember that great cloud of witnesses is to know and to remember that each of our lives and each of our loves will never be lost in the capital L Life and Love that abides in God, made known through the body of the eternal Christ. It is to remember that in life and in death, we are never alone, we are never our own, and we will always belong to God. What's more, to situate ourselves in that larger conversation that spans the ages is to know that we ourselves are saints in the making and that one day we too will be remembered and perhaps even conversed with when we are gone from this place and when our own names are called out.
William Stringfellow once wrote of saints "Contrary to many legends, the saints are not spooky figures, morally superior, abstentious, pietistic. In truth, all human beings are called to be saints, but that just means called to be fully human, to be perfect, that is, whole, mature, fulfilled. The saints are simply those men and women who relish the event of life as a gift and who realize that the only way to honor such a gift is to give it away."2 And you thought having Pledge Sunday and All Saints Sunday on the same day was a matter of logistics. No way! What better time to affirm our calling to be saints and to stand in line with those that have given and with those who have yet to give of their time, talent and treasure. What better time to listen for the encouragement from the saints and then in turn to pledge our own encouragement to this and future generations? What better time to continue the communal conversation that was and is and will be First Church in Cambridge.
When we come to take our places at the communion table in a few minutes, a table that was set by God long before we were born, and that will be set long after we die, we participate in that larger conversation of love. When we come to break bread together in this feast of love, we do so as so much more than the gathered community that we can see. The last scene of the movie, Places in the Heart, in which Sally Field played a recently widowed, depression era farmer, beautifully captures this wider, ongoing conversation. As a communion plate was passed around through the pews, all the living characters of the movie were gathered, but thanks to a little Holywood magic, tucked in between them was the husband who had died and the young man who had shot him. Even stranger for the 1930's at least, the scene depicted black people and white people worshipping and breaking bread together. All of them shared in the sacrament. The scene depicted a vision of the communion of all the saints, resurrected, redeemed and reconciled to one another. Though we don't have Hollywood magic here today, thank God, we do have the gifts of our imaginations and we have St. Baja, St. Helen and St. Steph to remind us as we come to the table that we are surrounded and encouraged by all the saints. We remember the perseverance of those who have come before us. We remember the perseverance of Jesus who live and died and who lives again that our own lives and loves will never be lost. At the table, our imagination of where the saints are now, of what heaven will be like for us, becomes real as we take and eat of and participate in the Body of Christ. This welcome table is nothing less than a foretaste of heaven itself, of that larger welcome table where there will always be an extra seat, of that larger conversation and communion of all the saints that knows no end. Thanks to be God! Amen.
1 Robert B. Shaw, "The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews" in Incarnation: Contemporary Writers on the New Testament, ed. by Alfred Corn (Penguin Books, 1990).
2 In Simpler Living, Compassionate Life: A Christian Perspective, ed. by Michael Schutt (Living the Good New Press, 1999).
© 2004, Daniel Smith