For all saints day...

NOTE:  Here are my worship notes for this week - it will be our observance of All Saints/All Souls Day.  We just finished a killer rehearsal for a jazz vespers we'll be doing later that day, too.  Life is good and full and blessed.

Introduction

Today is our observance of an ancient and sometimes misunderstood holy

day:  the celebration of All Saints and All Souls Day.  Its roots in both Eastern and Western Christianity go back to an era before the church even existed.  And it embraces the wisdom and experience of a farming people who believed that there are moments in time when the spirit and material worlds draw closer to one another than normal.  Many today would call their assumptions superstitious – certainly unscientific – but these ancient souls sensed that there was a reality beyond the obvious – a life beyond this life.  So with genuine humility they tried to live in harmony with the truths of both the spirit realm and the physical world. 

Like our forbearers in Judaism, they created seasonal holy days that paid homage to the Lord of the harvest, honored the movement of the sun and moon in the skies and tried to listen for and see the sacred insights the material world offered to those with ears to hear and eyes to see.  In time, as Europe came to organize their religion within the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the old holy days were reformed, renamed and reinvented so that they reflected a part of the Christian story.

·    + The ancient spring time agricultural celebration in Israel of Pesach that later became the Passover, for example, was transformed into the Paschal Feast we now call Easter.  Even the word Easter was borrowed from the Germanic/Old English goddess of the dawn they called Eastre.

·    +  Something similar happened with the Celtic end of the harvest feast of Samhain that was observed on November 1^st:  in time it became All Saints Day with the day before morphing into All Hollow’s Eve – or Halloween – and the day after that was once known as the day of the dead becoming All Souls Day. 

Even after the Protestant Reformation in the 16^th century, the old holy days – including All Saints Day – were retained within the church albeit in slightly new ways.  All Souls Day was folded into the celebration of All Saints Day and both were given a new emphasis:  a time to mark and remember those unique people in history and in our lives who have shown us some-thing of God’s grace and glory.  All Saints Day was to be moment for respect and remembrance, a chance to listen carefully to the wisdom of those who came before us, so that we might grow in humility and practice applying their hard won truths.   

Many of us today, however, no longer revere or even know the historic saints of the church – and that’s a loss that cuts us off from our history and creates the illusion that ours is the only moment in time that matters.  What incredible hubris and ignorance, yes?  I like the way the Christian ethicist, Samuel Wells, puts it when he writes:

By committing themselves to meet regularly together, Christians become aware of those who are not gathering together – those who are absent.  This is one of the ways the community develops the practice of pastoral care and evangelism – the skill of memory for those missing – the virtue of love for the lost and the notion of the communion of saints.

So, today as we mark All Saints and All Souls Day I want to consider with you three inter-related insights:

·    +  First, the value of regularly pausing to remember the saints of our past: this might include the historic saints of the church or it could be the ordinary saints who have touched our lives over the years.  Taking time to remember their wisdom and impact helps us grow in humility and gratitude.

·    +  Second, I want to remember out loud one of the saints who changed my life forever. His name was Michael Daniels and just last week I learned that he had died.  It is most likely he was buried in a pauper’s grace so I want to honor both his pilgrimage to God and the blessings he shared with me.

·    +  And third, I want to invite you to find a way to make All Saints Day important for your walk with Christ.  Our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers have named it a day of holy obligation – it is that important to them – and while we NEVER do anything with such severity, we could reclaim this practice in ways that are liberating and significant.

Insights

All of our readings today point towards a single thought:  the lives we live

here and now are not the end of the story.  There are still more blessings and challenges to come whether they look like the mystical and other-worldly images of Daniel or the ethical demands of Christ’s blessings and curses.  One way that All Saints Day matters, you see, is that it asks us to become familiar with the lives of those who have trusted God’s blessings in life changing ways.

·    Over the past few months I have been fascinated with this volume – All Saints by Robert Ellsberg – that is a collection of daily readings summarizing the life of faith of a different saint.  And Ellsberg is radically inclusive in this collection adding people like Gandhi, Mary Magdalene and Martin Luther King, Jr. into the mix along with those you might expect like St. Paul or Ignatius of Loyola.

·    Take what he writes about St. Henry David Thoreau of Concord, MA:  Thoreau’s message had little immediate impact in his own country in his life time.  Most of his neighbors regarded him as a harmless crank, if not a social deviant.  But by the end of the century his essay of civil disobedience had been discovered by the Russian novelist and moralist Leo Tolstoy. From Tolstoy this wisdom was passed on to Mahatma Gandhi.  And from Gandhi it was discovered by Martin Luther King Jr., the leader of the non-violent freedom struggle for civil rights in the United States.  By this route of remembrance, the spirit of Thoreau returned to his native land.

There is value for us on so many levels if we would but take time to pause and listen to the lives of our saints:  some of our saints are secular, some are spiritual, some are artists and others are soldiers and politicians.  We learn of common sense governance by listening and learning from our saints.  We discover the heroism and genius of our species – as well as the depths of our sins – from our saints.  Like George Santayana said:  a country without a memory is a country of madmen.  And in this age of Tea Party madness and mean-spirited partisan bickering, All Saints Day grounds us in the wisdom of the past and invites us to pause in humility.  That’s my first concern.

My second has to do with honoring a very ordinary and broken saint who changed my life:  Michael Daniels.  Those of you who regularly read my blog will know this story already but it warrants repeating – I owe it to Michael and to the Lord – so let me tell you his story.

Last Sunday, after returning home from Cleveland, OH I received word that my old friend, Michael Daniels, had been found dead in his apartment.  He had a hard, complicated and beautiful life and I loved Michael:   I helped him on the road to sobriety and he helped me open my heart.  I give thanks to God that for the past 25 years he was clean and sober and that now he has gone home to the Lord.

I met Mike on a nasty cold and windy night in Cleveland.  Our church office had received a call that Cheryl Daniels' father had recently died and she wanted to plan a memorial service.  I set up a pastoral call and headed into one of the rougher West Side public housing projects in the rain.  When I got to their house both Michael and Cheryl were trashed. He was the blackest man I had ever met and was very suspicious of this youngish, white clergy man.  We sat in their living room trying to plan the memorial service amidst garbage and liquor bottles.  And while they were fumbling around to find something on the coffee table, a loaded 45 caliber pistol fell to the floor. I was certain I was going to meet my death that night.

The funeral came and went and I wondered if I would ever see anyone from the Daniels' family again.  As is often the case with people wrestling with grief AND addictions, they come and go and disappear and return without any discernible pattern and that was true with Mike and Cheryl. Then, after about 10 months, I got a call from Michael that Cheryl had disappeared.  She was being treated for bipolar issues and had gone missing after going off her medication. We searched bus stops and homeless shelters for a few nights until we eventually found her in the psych ward at the county hospital.

After a short time, she was released with meds that made her almost catatonic. I helped them move into a new apartment after they were evicted from their old home.  And things seemed to be getting better for about a month and I was hopeful.  Then I got a frantic and weeping call from Michael telling me that he had been arrested and needed to be bailed out of the city jail.  When I got there he told me that he had gone out that Saturday morning for cigarettes and while he was gone Cheryl put his gun into her mouth and killed herself.  Once again, she had gone off her meds and now he was being held for murder.  You see, she was white and he was black – and that reality still matters in Cleveland town.  When it finally became clear to the police that this death was a suicide, Michael was released and I drove him home.  Only problem was that after the police had arrested him, his landlord had thrown all his belongings out on the front lawn. So when we arrived in the pouring rain, almost everything of value had been taken and picked over by scavengers and junkies.

With nowhere else to go and shocked by this wife's death, I brought him home and put down a mattress on our living room floor.  He adored my two young daughters - who were very apprehensive of this alcoholic black man - but he stayed with us for about two weeks, scavenging stuffed animals for my girls from out of the trash and trying to find a way to fit in.  I finally got him into transitional housing and one of the requirements was that he get straight. He lasted 3 days, stumbled and fell off the wagon but was given one last chance.  The day after we buried his wife, however, Michael fell off the wagon in a BIG way and was kicked out of his last hope - so he called me weeping.

I sat with him and listened to his broken heart - I wept with him, too about the hopelessness of his life - and then said:  Brother, the time has come for you to make a choice. I can't bring you back to my home.  So either we say good-bye and who the F*** knows what will happen next or I drive you to the county detox unit and we start to get you clean. With almost NO hesitation he said, "Man, I've done lost EVERYTHING that I loved... just take me to the center. It can't be worst than this." And after 28 days of treatment, he came out clean and sober.  And Michael STAYED clean and sober for the next 25 years until he died.

He used to kid me that I was the blackest white man he ever knew. "Dude,

you are PASSING" he used to tell me.  "You have them big lips and nappy hair and you're favorite color is red.  And you preach like a gospel man... so don't bullshit me.  You be black!"  For the next 12 years Michael rode shotgun in the church van and was faithful at church and AA.  He got me hooked up with a number of AA leaders and they, too changed my world.

When we were at our recent conference in Cleveland I said to somebody, "My old buddy Mike Daniels used to work over there parking cars... I wonder what's going on in his life?"  And when we got home, I found out he was dead. Michael didn't have any living family that I know of and I suspect he was buried in a pauper's grave.  But he was a man of depth, integrity, wit and commitment who took the hard breaks of his hard life and turned them into something of beauty and integrity.

·    +  He served his church with vigor and helped other drunks get sober – and I loved that little black man who once scared the crap out of me. 

·    +  And he loved me – we were black and white together – East Side and West Side of Cleveland together – educated and deprived together.  I know that I am a better man because of this saint and that’s another reason to mark and honor All Saints Day.

And the third is this:  All Saints Day reminds us that there are problems and wounds we can never fix or heal.  We don’t have it in us – it is beyond our pay grade – so either we despair and become cynical – or we learn to trust that God’s love is bigger than our pain.  That is something the saints show us over and over again:  when WE can’t find or see a way, God MAKES a way.  It might be a light in the darkness; it could be the grace of forgiveness when our heart runs cold.

·    +  But if all our news comes from CNN or Fox – if all our input comes from popular culture – if all our wisdom is grounded in the status quo – we won’t know the miracles and blessings of faith.

·    +  For faith we need the stories and the evidence of that great cloud of

witnesses we know as the saints.  They don’t have to be Roman Catholic saints – but they could be because, you know, those old saints are saints for the WHOLE church, right? Christianity did NOT begin with the Protestant Reformation and those wild and crazy Pilgrims who came to found Plymouth Colony.

Conclusion

So take a moment right now and see if you can call up one of the saints you know – someone or some story of someone who has touched and maybe even changed your life – just close your eyes right now and see what grows in your mind’s eye.  The saints give us pictures of the gospel made real – the words of Jesus become flesh – and they speak to every situation of life we could ever imagine.  Martin Copenhaver of the Congregational Church of Wellesley said it well:  

Protestants need more saints. The Roman Catholics have over 10,000 canonized saints.  By my count, we Protestants have as few as five:  Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Dietrich Bonhoeffer . And while these folk ARE saints, they are not ordinary enough… they are almost too heroic.  What we need are more examples of people like us have let the love and light of the gospel change their hearts and lives. 

So please, in the quiet and beauty and safety of this sacred place, take a moment right now and see who rises to the top in your All Saints Day… because we need their guidance profoundly.