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As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.
This is a turn of phrase you may be familiar with. It is a core part of our work, our liturgy, the work of the people, which is why it shows up in worship… “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit as it was in the beginning is now and will be forever. Amen.”
We are made by this God, each one of us, children born to parents, yes, but more importantly providentially placed by God, at this time and in this place.
And so, as such, it is important to remember that we are very pleasing to God, in our uniqueness, but also in the family resemblance we share with God.
Earlier today Kate talked about how we are uniquely saints, tonight I’m going to talk about the universality of our eternity, because we too were, and are, and are yet to come.
We know this intellectually, as Christians, this Imago Dei, this God design. We learned it at church. But we also know it intuitively, this sense of our eternity. We feel it in our bones, and not just as followers of Jesus, but as human beings. For there has never been a community, tribe, nation, people… even family, who has not intuited their eternity.
In China this became the Qingming Festival. In Japan the day of Obon. In African and Caribbean traditions Vodou seeks communion with the eternal dead. And there is Día de los Muertos in Central and South America, an indigenous and Catholic blending to celebrate the presence of the dead.
In the Celtic tradition there is Samhain, which marks the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter. It is an event set upon the thin boundary between this world and the next…
A boundary that feels like standing on thin ice. There can be anxiety, uncertainty in the mystery imbued with incredible power that can send shivers down our spine, as if there is something else there, near by, very close to us.
All Hallows Eve is the feast that celebrates this thin ice sensation. It is the first service in the Autumnal Triduum.
We celebrated it last Sunday at the 4PM Come As You Are service. Kate spoke beautifully about the mystery and the unease we feel about our mortality. Death can be scary.
And All Hallows Eve honors this unease, allowing the spooks to come out and say boo.
Saints, it seems, feel less uncertain about the thin ice upon which we stand. It has to do with their trust in God, the God who was and is and is yet to come, the God who is present at all times and in all places.
And while this reality might not make the boo less scary, it does reinforce that God is in charge, and this is God’s world, and God’s got this… which is why we can trust that the scary thing is never the last thing.
The tradition of the All Saints service, designed to honor and reinforce trust in God, began with the annual remembering of the martyrs whose graves the early Christians would visit yearly. The martyrs were those who would not place anything above their commitment to God, which made the powerful mad: mad enough to murder them, over and over again, as many as they could get their hands on, in the most gruesome way possible.
But the martyrs trusted God more than they feared death, because they trusted the promise of the Resurrection, that the bad thing is never the last thing.
By the 4th century there were too many martyrs for the community to visit all their graves, so the church instituted in 373 AD a feast for all the martyrs, which came to be known as the Feast of All Saints.
But what about those poor souls who weren’t saints, who weren’t martyrs? Who didn’t trust? Who lacked faith? Who lived and died in fear? That was the question that came to the mind of Odilo of Cluny in the 10th century.
The Old Testament suggested there was some place called Sheol, a shadowy place of purgatory where souls wandered indefinitely, disconnected from the God who was and is and is yet to come. This theology of lost souls did not make sense to Odilo. For he believed, as St. Paul wrote, that Jesus descended to the dead (Rom 10:6-8), where he sprung souls from Sheol, and invited them into the light of God.
So Odilo directed his monks to pray for these souls, to pray that they may join all the saints in the eternal embrace of God. And soon thereafter the service of All Souls came into being, the third service in the series of the Autumnal Triduum.
All Souls service is built on our trust in God, that the bad thing is never the last thing, even unto death. This trust is core to Christianity, liberating us to be the kind of people who are fearless even when we are standing on thin ice.
But tonight this service is about more than trust. Tonight is also about communion with the souls that have gone before us. Tonight we celebrate the connectivity, the unity of souls—who were, who are, who will be… Celebrating the dead reminds us to notice souls… and thus as Paul notes in his letter to the Thessalonians, “to not be uninformed.”
The hope in the noticing is that we experience the point Jesus is trying to make in the Gospel we hear tonight… that our God is the God of the living.
The Sadducees, who do not believe in life after death, come to Jesus, disingenuously, to ask, “whose wife will she be in eternity?” And Jesus’s response: Do you not know our God? Ours is the God of the living, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.
What these Sadducees were uninformed about is that when God gazes upon us, God sees us as resurrected people, as soul-first beings. And if God can see that, so can we (Imago Dei). We train our eyes to see soul first by practice trust in God; trust in the resurrection; believing that the bad thing is never the last thing.
This can be difficult, even in the presence of resurrected Jesus himself. In the Gospel of Matthew 28 in Galilee we hear: “Now the eleven disciples went to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.”
Then there was confusion about who the resurrected Jesus was on the road to Emmaus. And you may remember the apostles fishing on the Sea of Galilee in the Gospel of John, when the resurrected Jesus calls to them from the shore and at first they do not recognize him.
It takes practice seeing an inverted person, seeing soul first, then body… as God sees. Which is yet another reason to celebrate this service of All Souls. Tonight we gather to practice seeing soul first, by communing with those souls who have passed beyond our sightline.
Tonight we let the thin ice upon which we stand break apart under our feet, falling, so as to float with all the souls. So shut your eyes. Look with the eyes of your heart (as Kate instructed us to do). Breathe in from the depth of your soul. Say to the God that was and is and is yet to come… I trust you. And sense the souls in this room. In this community. In this world. In your family. For eternity.
We are connected to them because they are of God… and God never puts an end to anything that God loves. Name them: parent, child, sibling, a dear friend, an Epiphany pilgrim on the way.
This is the night when we celebrate souls, and their continuation with the God who was and is and is yet to come… who loves us, who really, really loves us.