"Who fills all in all"-Sermon for All Saints, Ephesians 1:11-23:
While in Fort Worth recently for one of my daughter’s away field hockey games, I was able to have dinner with my uncle, David. He lives there…never left after graduating from TCU many, many years ago. And, I really don’t get see him that often…so it was a blessing to have a couple of short hours with just him and my immediate family. David and I share, in particular, two great loves…two passionate hobbies, so, when we are together, they often dominate the subject of our conversation. We can really nerd out on both. And, those two hobbies are electric trains and BBQ. He would surely be in awe of our new smoker, and, though travel is hard for him in this season of his life, I hope he gets to see it in person someday. He would be immediately lost in determining how many turkeys he could fit into it at one time…the answer would be a whole lot…smoking turkeys, especially at this time of year, is his specialty.
And, in that conversation, David reminded me that I first fell in love with cooking outside…over smoke and flame…by cooking with my father, Nathan, who died a year or two before we began St. Julian’s together. And, indeed, my earliest memories are filled up with backyard BBQ’s…lots of family and friends gathered…my dad often at the center. He loved his wife and children, which I knew, as surely as I knew the sun would rise in the morning. Nathan was fun and funny. He was also kind, gentle with his children, and a good friend. Loyal friendship with sacrosanct to him. He filled our home with music…mainly country western and classic rock…and with stories, most of which couldn’t be repeated in church. Good food and festive occasions seemed to just follow wherever he led.
And, as my uncle reminded me, I think these early life experiences, most of which happened before I was 6-years-old, profoundly shaped who I have come to be as a storyteller, a lover of music, a loyal friend, and a passionate amateur chef…and, maybe even more so, as a spouse, parent and priest. For surely, here, in this family and at this weekly festive occasion, we get to revel in nothing less than the greatest story ever told, make music together, and feast on our sacred, life-giving meal, at which, we commune with each other and God in Christ, who is both our host and the spiritual sustenance we receive. Thus, on this All Saints’ Sunday, as we give thanks to God for the lives of the saints…those like Julian with an ST period before their names…and give thanks to God for those more intimate saints who we have known personally and who have sown into our lives the life-shaping, meaning making love of God…on this All Saints’ Sunday, a time when we are often thinking especially about those we love and have passed into our Lord’s nearer presence, I am, indeed, giving thanks to God for, among others, my dad, Nathan.
Now, I also want to say that I have other memories of Nathan that are much more complicated…much harder to recall and tell. You see, when I was in about 1st grade, my parents divorced. And, though many things said and not said…many things done and left undone contributed to that divorce, I believe one of those things was that my dad lost his real-estate appraising company during an oil bust in the late 1970’s, and the shame of the economic hardship that resulted for our family and the, at least felt, stigma of that professional failure broke his spirit. And, rather than leaning in…into honesty…into hard conversations…into, most of all, the ones who loved him most…and the support and accountability he would have found there…he stopped coming home…often for days at a time. I remember well, despite my young age, my mom driving by local watering holes, with me and my brother, 4 and 6, in the back seat…her eyes filled with tears and heart breaking…hoping to see his car in a parking lot to try to just talk to him…to try to bring him home. But, eventually, he just didn’t…didn’t come home again. Now, we would see him again…though not often enough…when he would find a job and dial back his drinking. There were more sporadic cookouts and fun afternoons filled with laughter…with Longhorn and Cowboys games…but they never really lasted. When he died too young at 58, his body ravished by addiction, I am happy to say he had been sober for several years. And, at the very end, my brother and I were with him…holding him, as God welcomed one of his saints home. And, like in those early memories, we knew that he loved us entirely, and he knew that we loved him entirely. Love and gratitude…mingled with regret and sadness for what was and for what was not. Like all of us who love Jesus, and he did, he was both sinner and saint.
Yet, even in his profound limitations, in the time spent together and the time spent a part, which was most of the time, Nathan gave me a profound gift, beyond the love of storytelling, music, and cooking…beyond deeply appreciating the value of friendship and gathering with community…which was the knowledge of who I wanted to be in the God-given life I get to live…which was and is…like Nathan…the life of a sinner and a saint…redeemed by grace alone. And, that person I want to be is one so aware of the grace I continuingly receive, in my own brokenness and beauty, that I can only extend it, endlessly and without reservation, to others and to myself…for as long as my life may last. For, friends, the crown of glory that we claim this day and that each of us wears as the saints of God alive and active in the here and now, is given, not earned. It is given to each of us by God’s grace…that we might wear it proudly and publicly…in witness to God’s forgiving, redeeming and unconditional love in our own life…for all the world to see. A crown forged not in gold…but much more powerfully…in word and deed…in grace upon grace. God’s grace poured out of our lives…that others might know that God can use imperfect people, like Nathan, like me, like you, as God’s saints to do miraculous works of love…that those suffering from their own poor choices and the poor choices of others heaped upon their shoulders might know that our past does not have to determine our future…that those suffering from isolation, loneliness and grief might know that God’s love can wrap them up and hold them, just as my brother and I held our dad, as they die to the power of sin and are reborn to new life…to their own sainthood.
For about a decade I served on the Commission on Ministry in the Diocese of Texas, which helps oversee the discernment process for those people seeking ordination in our Church. And, we always asked those in discernment to write a spiritual autobiography…essentially the story of their life and God’s work within it. And, then, after completing it, we asked them to tell us what would they change about their story. And, surely there were things like experiences of abuse and loss that people would understandably erase from their past…not to have had to live through, but, in general, the answer was almost always…that they would change nothing, nothing…maybe especially their greatest failings and most painful falls…their sin. For in those moments, they came to know in the most personal, intimate and transformative ways God’s grace, God’s love and forgiveness, as a real-life, lived experience. It was out of those healed and redeemed wounds that flowed…that flowed God’s call on their life, their power to minister, to be healers, to extend God’s grace to others, to know what they are really capable of, to witness to the love of God to overcome all things, to claim their own sainthood. One of our early Church saints, Augustine, wrote, “There is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future.” No saint without a past…no sinner without a future…and, to that, I will add, “Thanks be to God!”
All Saints’ is major Feast Day in the Episcopal Church, but unlike say Easter or Christmas or Pentecost, it is unique in that rather than focusing on a member of the Holy Trinity or a specific moment in Jesus’ life…it, instead, focuses on people who, like us, follow Jesus. For the word saint, in a New Testament sense, are all those, past and present, who have sought or, again, like us, are seeking to incarnate the love and grace of God we have come to know in the life of Jesus in the very midst of our sorely divided and pain filled world…and in the very midst of our own faults, failures and our own beauty and giftedness. And, though I believe following the example of those saints who have lived their faith heroically and transformatively and giving thanks to God for the ways our own saints have filled our lives with love and meaning is right and good to do…with some life now behind me…I have begun to wonder if this is entirely correct…that this day we celebrate each year is really focused first on Jesus’ followers. For, I have begun to see All Saints’ as what I will call the “Feast of God’s Grace”. For any and everything we do, saintly or otherwise, begins with receiving God’s grace lavishly poured into our lives, both sinners and saints, through Jesus’ glorious resurrection, which is, as Paul writes in our New Testament lesson today, “[T]he fullness of him who fills all in all.”
It is grace, as that great hymn proclaims, that makes our hearts to sing. Grace that helps us see ourselves and those who look, love and live differently that we do as family, all equally and entirely, redeemed by the unconditional love of God. Grace that makes our own stories of overcoming, of healing both possible and a powerful witness to others. Grace that claims that imperfect people can accomplish great acts of love. Grace that can only be responded to by extending it endlessly and without reservation to those who desperately need it. Grace that promises past performance doesn’t have to dictate future outcomes. Grace that reminds us that there is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future. Grace that provides and illuminates our saintly crown of glory. And, grace…God’s never-ending, ever-present grace, when the time comes to go marching in, that leads us all, who are both sinners and saints…Nathan, you, me…home. Amen.