Ambassadors of Reconciliation

St. Paul, in writing to the Colossians said, “May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light…. For in Christ all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”

Today as a central part of the Offertory we are all invited to give thanks to God for his abundant gifts.  We shall bring our pledge cards, our commitment to support the work and ministry of All Saints’ Church, to the Altar and place them in the basket.  The ministry of the church is not only important, it is absolutely necessary in encouraging ourselves and others “to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light,” and to work in reconciling all things to God.

Many years ago when I was ordained a priest in the Diocese of Southern Ohio, my bishop was Roger Blanchard.  Roger was a person of towering stature. He was committed to young people, especially those of college age, and he was persistent in the pursuit of justice, compassion, equality, and opportunity for everyone.

During the time of his ministry in Southern Ohio Bishop Blanchard sent a regular letter to all the clergy.  It had a title, the A.O.R., which stood for Ambassadors of Reconciliation.  That phrase taken from the fifth chapter of Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians summed up for him and for the clergy and parishioners of the diocese what we are all called to do.  We are to be ambassadors of reconciliation, bringing “all people to unity with God and one another in Christ.”  This is our mission, and it is why we give thanks to God for his abundant gifts.

After Bishop Blanchard’s death an endowed fund was established to carry on the ministry to which he was committed during his life.  Among the areas of his ministry was an emphasis on social justice to affirm the dignity of every person.  He said, "We take our stand on the theological conviction that a new humanity was created in Jesus Christ, to every member of which he has given equal worth by dying for all without discrimination"  Roger was an inspiration to me and the values he espoused have had an enduring impact on me everywhere I have served.

The ministry of the Episcopal church and all of us at All Saints’ who profess the Christian faith is our responsibility.  It is your ministry and what you do as we work together to reconcile all people to God through Christ.  Our pledges, our energy and commitment to the ministry and the work of our church involve several areaas: worship, pastoral care, education and ethics, and management. 

The first area is worship.  Worship, giving praise and glory to God is at the center of our Christian life.  It involves our services of Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Eucharist, Evensong, weddings, and funerals.  All of us participate by joining in the prayers, hearing the Word of God through our Biblical readings, singing hymns as members of the congregation and the choir, serving as readers, acolytes, altar guild members, Eucharistic ministers, or pastoral care givers.  Our worship and our use of the Book of Common Prayer unites us theologically and spiritually as the people of God here at All Saints’ and wherever we go. 

The second area is pastoral care.  It includes the ministry we do through outreach to those in need, providing food, clothing, thanksgiving baskets, visiting those in nursing homes or assisted living centers, making sandwiches for Crossroads, or listening and responding to the stories of people who come here simply because they know they are welcomed and cared for. 

The third area is education and ethics.  What we provide in Sunday school for our children, adult confirmation and inquirers’ classes, occasional forums, and entertainment for children from Crossroads Family Center are all part of this ministry.  Another part is the work that each one of us does beyond the walls of this Church – your employment, your concerns about peace, justice, opportunity, and reconciliation – all of this is your ministry. 

The fourth is management.  Management includes all the work that is necessary to maintain this magnificent building, our programs, our hospitality to others including AA, the City Meal Site, and La Iglesia Luterana.  Your vestry, committees and teams that enable us to fulfill God’s call are all part of the fabric that makes up our common life.  Our relationship to the Diocese of Rhode Island and the national church is reflected in the apportionment payment we contribute each year.   All of this is what I have labeled “Life Together” in our e-parish messenger.

I share these several areas with you because it is important for all of us to understand and know how we depend upon one another and how each person here participates in fulfilling our ministry of worship and service.  I give thanks for all of you, and I invite you to join me in giving thanks to God for his abundant gifts.  To quote again our reading from Colossians, “May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.” Amen.

The Peaceable Kingdom

Our Scripture readings this morning focus on the tensions we experience as people of faith.  This tension is the on-going human struggle between the realities of our lives and the vision of new life, a new creation, new heavens and a new earth.  It is our spiritual struggle for a more just world.  We live with the hope and expectation that life for everyone and all the life on our planet will be better.

For example, we see the injustices that surround us, the homeless and hungry people who have little or no hope, the uninsured and the unemployed, the victims of violence and the victims of natural disasters like this past week’s typhoon in the Philippines.  We are familiar with injustice at many levels, but we also have a sense, a hope for a better tomorrow, a time in which there will be greater understanding, compassion, care and opportunity for everyone.

We heard in the Gospel of Luke, “When some [of the disciples] were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, Jesus said, ‘As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down…. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.’"  It sounds so much like the circumstances that affect the lives of so many of our citizens and people around the world.

Against the dire prediction about the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, we also heard the words of Isaiah who had prophesied many years earlier.  Isaiah wrote, the Lord God said, “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.  But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight…. The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent -- its food shall be dust!  They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the LORD.”

Isaiah had predicted the restoration and rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem in 515 BCE following the Babylonian captivity.  Hundreds of years later Luke has Jesus foretelling the destruction of the temple.  It happened a generation after Jesus’ death in the year 70 CE. The building, destroying and rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem represents the tension that exists between what is and what is to be.

Edward Hicks was a painter who spent years working on paintings titled, “The Peaceable Kingdom.”  He was born in 1780 in Pennsylvania.  His parents were Anglicans.  His mother died when he was just eighteen months old and he was then raised in a Quaker family.  In 1812 he became a Quaker minister.

On the Wikipedia web site there is an article about his life, his working career, his paintings and exhibitions.  The article points out that Hicks' Peaceable Kingdom exemplifies Quaker ideals.  He painted 61 versions of this composition.  What we are looking at today is the culmination of his work, and the original of this painting is in the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts.  The animals and children are taken from Isaiah, including the lion eating straw with the ox.  Hicks used his paintings as a way to define his central interest, which was the quest for a redeemed soul.

John Braostoski, a Quaker member of the Shrewsbury, New Jersey Meeting, wrote in the February, 2000 issue of Friends Journal that Edward Hicks was a painter who “had a genuine feeling for the Scriptures along with hope for a continuing sense of insight open to all.”  Over a period of several years he portrayed in his paintings titled The Peaceable Kingdom “a delicate balance of difficult and unresolved issues.”  His Biblical text was from Isaiah chapter 11: “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.”  Our passage from the 65^th chapter of Isaiah is similar: “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox.”

Look carefully at the photo.  Edward Hicks’s “wild animals are seemingly domesticated and brought into line with loving kindness…. The sense of light in the gorgeously rendered creatures, trees, and air becomes the subject…. Hicks believed in the Inner Light and its power; he felt it, therefore he saw it.  Most importantly, he saw it in others, including the lion…. The world was all light to him, that special Light…. [He] allows us to see the Light coming out of all living beings and the world, speaking to that which shines within every one of us.”

It is important that in our present-day human condition we continue to embrace the tension between what is and what can become in realizing a vision of new heavens and a new earth. The ongoing struggle between what is and what can be better is a spiritual struggle.

Katie Givens Kime, writing in the current issue of The Christian Century magazine (November 13, 2013, p. 20)  says, “The paradox of God’s lofty promise in Isaiah is that all will be resolved and that all is resolved.  The good news is that this frees us: we are not prisoners of our circumstances.  The world is and shall be bigger than all the limitations we encounter in ourselves, in others, and in the material universe of gravity, violence, aging, suffering and injustice…. Living in the moment is a continual spiritual struggle…. In seeking… to imagine and to insist on God’s intention for a just world, we participate in it, which may be the best news of all.”  Amen.

Ethics of God’s Grace

On All Saints’ Sunday we call to mind the size and solidarity of God’s people.  The people of God comprise a vast community that spreads beyond the boundaries of race, language, religion, and condition; beyond time and space, and across the divide of death.  In each faithful person, the Christian proclamation of hope and promise for eternal life is an actual reali

The hymn by William How that we sang as our processional hymn praises all the saints.  “From earth’s wide bounds, from ocean’s farthest coast, through gates of pearl streams in countless host,...Alleluia.”  In singing praise to the saints and the faithful people of every age we praise God who has triumphed through them and whose bountiful grace and mercy we see in their lives.  They are examples of God’s grace.

The word “saint” means “holy.”  In the Bible, the saints are God’s holy people.  As we heard in the Book of Daniel, his dream was interpreted to mean they are the angels who share God’s divine nature,  “the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom for ever—for ever and ever."

Christian orthodox churches list the saints of the Hebrew Bible in their liturgical calendars, and for all Christian teachers the holy women and men of ancient Israel provide a rich resource of illustrations for describing their sanctity or holiness.  The late William Stringfellow, an attorney and lay theologian who lived on Block Island, described saints as “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.”

The celebration of All Saints is not just a recollection of the martyrs and prophets of every age; it is a festival commemorating all who are faithful.  On All Saints’ Day we celebrate our lives and the lives of everyone within the vast community of God’s people today and every day throughout the ages and into eternity.

Our reading from the Gospel of Luke, called the Sermon on the Plain, is chosen for commemorating all the saints.  It is a shorter version of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount.  The sermon provides the basis of Christian ethics, how we are to act in relation to others.  It was addressed to the disciples and others in the hill country of Galilee in the early days of Jesus’ ministry.  A group of blessings begins the sermon, the Beatitudes, and then it deals with social duties in a series of contrasts between the teaching of Jesus and the ancient legal traditions of that time. 

Jesus directs his words, “Blessed are you” to the crowd around him, and he matches each blessing with a woe. The need for social change and transformation is apparent.  It may well be that Luke, in expressing both blessings and woes, is not making simple comments of joy and grief, but is stating prophetic words that are intended to bring to pass the things about which they give promise or warning.  Let’s look at each blessing in its particular situation:

“Blessed are you who are poor” reflects a strong characteristic of Hebrew religion in which God is the vindicator of the poor and the needy.  The ruler or government authority, as God’s agent, has responsibility for the poor.  In the time of Luke, in first century Palestine, a large class of destitute, unemployed, and landless peasants lived side by side with wealthy farmers, great landed proprietors, and rich bankers.  Do you see a similar situation in our cities today?  God’s kingdom belongs to the poor; the rich already have their reward.  The implication is that God is actively at work and will demonstrate his rule with power.  Those who heed the promise and warning will share in God’s reign.

“Blessed are you who are hungry now” reflects the ancient theme of God’s readiness to relieve both physical and spiritual hunger.  Throughout the gospels the actions of Jesus include a dominant focus on the importance of meals.  He shared meals with the disciples, he ate with sinners and tax collectors, he fed the multitudes.  In his teachings he referred to someone who gave a great banquet, and he told a story about a fatted calf and killing it so they could have a feast.  In these events both the spiritual and literal senses of being hungry are held together.

“Blessed are you who weep now” is a beatitude that must be seen against the actual distress of an occupied country.  Its roots are in the prophecy of Isaiah who proclaimed the promise of the new Jerusalem: “To proclaim the year of God’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn.”  The meaning is more inclusive than personal or individual bereavement.

“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you.”  This beatitude predicts suffering for the disciples and draws an analogy with the fate of the prophets with whom they are compared.  The meaning is that when God’s kingdom is fully realized, God will give a great reward to those who suffer.  Those who suffer and are persecuted because of their faith will share the reign of God.

All four of these blessings are addressed to people who are poor, hungry, miserable, and expect to be treated harshly.  The kingdom of heaven is promised to them and it will be their happiness and satisfaction.  Both the physical and spiritual life is included in these promises. All of them form a revolutionary messianic proclamation.  The gospel has been called an ethic of grace.

The culmination of this ethic of grace is to “love your enemies, to do good, and to lend expecting nothing in return.... Be merciful, even as God is merciful.”  “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”  “Blessed are you” who live in this way.

The beatitudes and woes provide us with the real meaning of sainthood.  The saints are those who possess the love and grace of God.  We celebrate the great women and men of the Bible and all those throughout history, as examples of God’s grace.  They are examples of this ethic of grace because they fed the hungry, clothed the naked, built houses for the homeless, freed those who were in prison or oppressed, comforted the broken-hearted, and worked for justice and peace.

Saints are all around us.  They are the teachers in our schools; the medical personnel in hospital emergency rooms and trauma centers; workers in assisted living settings and nursing homes; volunteers who tutor school children in need of skills to read and understand math and science; social service personnel who aid immigrants, the poor and downtrodden.  They are the people who have gone before us here at All Saints’ Memorial Church, and they are all of you who gather each week to worship and give glory to God.  Later in our service we shall “sing a song of the saints of God, for the saints of God are just folk like you and me.”   Amen.