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Sermon at The Church of
the Holy Apostles, New York City,
November 1, 2006, All Saints Day:
Year B
162nd Anniversary of the Incorporation of the Parish
The Reverend Elizabeth G. Maxwell
Ecclesiasticus 44:1-10, 13-14
Psalm 149
Revelation 7:2-4, 9-17
Matthew 5:1-12
In
the name of God, the holy and undivided Trinity, Amen.
This is an especially grand and wonderful night, for it
is not only All Saints Day, but we also celebrate the baptism of
Benicio Frederick Kime this night. And because it is his
baptismal day, I’m going to address my words tonight specifically
to Benicio – but all the rest of you are encouraged to listen in.
From what I’ve observed of Benicio, he may very well
talk back!
Benicio, this, your baptismal day, is the festival of
all the saints; it is a time when we remember God’s people across
the centuries and also across miles and cultures. Some of the
people we remember are the luminaries of the faith: Mary, the
mother of Jesus, the holy Apostles, Saint Augustine, Julian of
Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther
King Jr. Some of the people we remember as our saints are
cherished by a relative few of us who knew them. We cherish them
because we experienced the goodness of their lives. Parents,
Sunday school teachers, teachers, poets, inspirational people of
all kinds. And some of the saints are those whose names we will
never know, but whose love and prayers have kept the world going.
Saints are both those people who are special examples
of the faith, and all believers – we’re all called to be saints,
and on this day we recall with gratitude all the people who in
their own particular and quirky way have let the light of Christ
shine in their lives, showing us something essential that only
they could show us about what God is like. And we reflect on how
we’ve been brought to this night by their faith, their witness,
their loving action, their prayers.
This night for Holy Apostles is also a special night
because it’s the feast of our incorporation as a parish, the time
we particularly think about those people, one hundred and
sixty-two years ago, who caused this church to be built and all
the ones, some of whose names we know and some of whose names we
don’t know, some of whom we remember in our own day who have kept
this parish going with their love and their prayers and their
witness.
And more mysteriously yet, as we celebrate this feast
of all the saints, we know and believe that we are even now
surrounded by this great cloud of witnesses. We are connected
across time and space with the saints who are alive in God,
present here with us, continuing even now to love and support and
pray for us.
Benicio, when water is poured on your head in just a
few minutes in the name of the Trinity, you enter into the mystery
of Christ’s dying and rising. But, because it is All Saints Day,
we will all be particularly reminded that this sacrament is not a
private matter. Benicio, you are claimed as part of this company,
this body, this family of faith – the people gathered here tonight
for sure – but also the saints across time and space, all those
who have loved and followed Jesus, and who have been enlivened and
emboldened and strengthened and healed by Jesus’ love.
In the service we say, “We receive you into the
household of God. Confess the faith of Christ crucified, proclaim
his resurrection, and share with us in his eternal priesthood.”
To be baptized on All Saints reminds us that the Holy Spirit works
through human beings. We know Her primarily through those, in
Madeleine L’Engles’s wonderful phrase, “with skin on”- people who
touch us with grace and who love us into life. We become saints –
we become human – we become ourselves in relation to others. So,
because you are baptized on this day, you and all of us, Benicio,
are reminded of our own responsibility to bear the love and grace
of God to one another, in our own particular and quirky ways.
Benicio, I don’t know who your special saints will
be. I do remember one of mine on this night, and perhaps it’s
especially appropriate that she’s my godmother. Her name is
Charlotte; she’s 96 now. She’s the author of children’s books,
and a particular lover of animals. She raised dogs and took in
abandoned ones when I was a kid; you can easily see, those of you
who know me, how this influenced me. But she was one of the
adults in my life who took me seriously, who wanted to know what I
thought about things, who shared with me her love of animals, her
love of books, her love of poetry, and her deep conviction that
human beings needed to be kind to all God’s creatures.
When I was just a little older than you are, Benicio,
she wrote me a letter that I didn’t read until I was eighteen or
nineteen. And in she said, “Elizabeth, you are very young now,
and the things that frighten you are manageable things – ghosts in
the night. Someday later, perhaps, you will grow up and there
will be things much bigger to be afraid of. I hope, then, that
you will remember that I love you and that I pray for you.” It
meant a great deal to me to read that and to know of her love and
prayers all those years.
The gospel for this day is the Beatitudes; it’s Jesus’
teaching about those who are blessed. That word can also be
translated “happy”, or even “filled with God.” In a sense, the
Beatitudes are the attitude of the saints. I was reflecting on
Jesus blessing those folks, and Benicio, I wondered about your
name. Benicio…Benicio…I couldn’t find the etymology of it
anywhere, but it does to me to seem to have a hint of that word,
‘blessing’ in it. So, you are blessed this day, but it’s true
that at first glance the people in the Beatitudes may not really
seem like the happiest ones. There’s something very
counter-cultural about this passage: Jesus blesses the poor in
spirit, those who mourn, the humble. It seems that these are
people who lack very basic things, but the blessing that Jesus
gives them is for their awareness that there is something needed
in the world. He blesses their longing for more than this world
gives them, and then out of that sense of need that they have, he
blesses their responsiveness to need.
Jesus blesses those that hunger and thirst for justice,
the merciful, the peacemakers, the pure in heart, which is to say,
those of integrity and wholeheartedness. He blesses those who are
willing to suffer for what is right. He says the kingdom of
Heaven, the realm of God, is theirs. Jesus blesses those who
yearn for God, who find in that longing their utter dependence on
God, and out of that, act in the way that God acts to bring mercy
and justice and peace to a world desperately in need. They see
and feel their own pain and the world’s pain, and they do
something about it.
These who Jesus blesses tell the truth, Benicio, and
they see that there is much suffering and injustice as well as
beauty and love in this world that you have so recently come
into. They feel the absence of God’s realm and it stirs them up
and draws them on, but they also find God’s realm along the way.
They touch and taste it, in their longing and in their doing – in
the good they do, in the love they bring into the world, their
work for justice and peace. They find God’s kingdom in their
commitment to something much larger than themselves, in the
presence of Christ among them. Their happiness, their blessing is
in those glimmers of God’s realm that they experience and in the
presence of God with them and with us always.
God’s people are blessed when we find the courage to
see and name what is wrong, and even more, the courage to live in
active hope and trust, doing what is right. And we don’t do that
alone; we can’t do it alone. We do it as part of the communion of
saints, which is a community on pilgrimage, living in this tension
of the kingdom of Heaven, which is here and now but also yet to
come.
Another thing that Jesus said about the kingdom of God
is that whoever wants to receive it must do so like a little
child. Otherwise we can’t enter into it. So, Benicio, your
baptism really brings a gift to all of us in reminding us of how
we must enter God’s realm.
Now, I have been watching you over the last few
months. I have seen that you are full of wonder, that you are
curious, that you have a lot of energy, that you love to flirt,
that you are entirely charming. When we met to plan this baptism
and my dog was there, you hugged him from every possible angle.
You are discovering the world with every breath you take, and
also, Benicio, you are completely dependent on your parents who
love you – deeply needy and entirely vulnerable. I see that you
receive the world and life itself as a gift, and it’s the gift of
your parents’ love, surely, but even more deeply, the gift of
God’s love.
We baptize you, Benicio, this night, as we baptize all
infants and young children, because God loves you before and
beneath and beyond your understanding of that love. God loves you
before you know about it, way before you can try to deserve it or
strive for it. God loves you and invites your love in return.
Now, others – your parents, your godparents, and this whole
community of Holy Apostles, will say ‘yes’ to that love on your
behalf, and say ‘yes’ to you. And we will pledge to raise you as
best we can to know that love, until you are able to say your own
‘yes.’
And it may be that wandering a bit, even saying ‘no’,
will be part of your journey to and in God, even an essential
part. We all have to learn to say ‘no.’ But God’s ‘yes’ will
never leave you. We say in the service, “you are sealed by the
Holy Spirit in baptism, and marked as Christ’s own forever.” Just
as God’s love holds us always, it’s my experience that the
communion of saints holds us too. The body of Christ, the
Christian community, can challenge us, can comfort us, can call
out our own gifts, can pray for us when we are not able to pray
for ourselves.
I said earlier that we celebrate the particularity of
the saints, their quirky, personal, particular ways of expressing
God’s light in the contexts of their own particular time. A
favorite song for this day speaks of this – as we talk about one
who was a soldier and one who was a queen, and one who was a
shepherdess on the green, we say all of them were saints and I
want to be one too. I want to live into my baptism; I want to
find my own gift.
But, Benicio, your gift is all of who you are- it’s not
what you do, as much as your being. Your precious, precious
being, receiving the love of God, the gift of the kingdom of
Heaven. In who you are, Benicio, you are infinitely loved and
infinitely precious. It is not only you, though, who are
infinitely loved and precious; it is each and every one, every
person that God has made across space and time. So, as you grow,
be alert to that mystery. Seek and serve Christ in everyone you
meet. Sometimes it will be easier to see than other times.
Benicio, in just a moment, we will gather at the font,
the entrance at the back of the church. Your godparents, your
parents, and all of the community of Holy Apostles will be there.
I hope you will also sense that great cloud of witnesses, the
church invisible, which is with us too. Together, we learn how to
be in Christ, interdependent, one with another, honoring the great
diversity of Christ’s body, longing for God’s reign, living out of
and towards that promised hope and grounded in God’s unshakeable
love.
Amen.
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