The Sunday after All Saints' Day-The Rev Melanie Lemburg
Sunday after All Saints’ Day Year B
November 7, 2021
This time of year, a lot of people like
to hang out in graveyards. I’ve seen lots of folks decorating their yards with
skeletons, bones, and tombstones this year, and this time of year always sees
an increase of interest in cemetery or haunted walking tours. Just
this past week, some of us spent some time hanging out here in the Memorial
Garden, our church’s very own graveyard, as we held our All Saints’ service in
the Memorial Garden for the second year.
We wrote the names of the Saints and our faithful departed on luminary
bags that we lit up with candles and placed on different graves and on the
pathways in our church’s graveyard.
After the brief service, many of us lingered, talking with our fellow
worshippers among the graves as we waited for darkness to fall to better see
the lighted luminaries. I found it to be
such a profound moment of peace in the midst of a very full week.
Not so long ago, Scott Tanner oversaw a
project to clean up the Memorial Garden.
In addition to placing new sod and cleaning the markers, Scott ran
plumblines through the garden and then straightened the grave markers to be in
better alignment. One day, as Scott was
out there working in the heat, I went out to check on him toward the end of the
day. (He’s said it’s ok that I share all
this with you.) Even though the work was
grueling, and he was clearly tired, he was strangely luminous. He told me he was actually enjoying the work,
and he talked about how, while he was working, he would talk to his friends and
loved ones who were buried nearby where he was working, how he could almost
just hear how they were responding to him—some were offering him words of
encouragement while others were heckling him or still trying to boss him around
even from beyond the grave. (I’m sure
those of you who have been around here a while can guess who was doing what!)
I couldn’t help remembering Scott’s
peace and his joy when he told me that he was working among friends and loved
ones as we sat among friends, both living and dead, and waited for the darkness
to fall this past Monday.
The Celtic people-both pagans and
Christians-had a name for this. They
called it a “thin place,” and they had an abiding awareness of these thin
places in their lives and in their world.
Harvard
theologian Rev. Peter Gomes writes this about thin places: “There is in Celtic
mythology the notion of ‘thin places’ in the universe where the visible and the
invisible world come into their closest proximity. To seek such places is the
vocation of the wise and the good — and for those that find them, the clearest
communication between the temporal and eternal. Mountains and rivers are
particularly favored as thin places marking invariably as they do, the
horizontal and perpendicular frontiers. But perhaps the ultimate of these thin
places in the human condition are the experiences people are likely to have as
they encounter suffering, joy, and mystery.”[i]
Thin
places are places and moments when we recognize that the veil between our
current life and our eternal life is thin, sheer, even, at times,
non-existent. Thin places, both
physically and spiritually, transport us to a place of homecoming and
belonging. In the liturgical year, the days surrounding All Saints’ Day are one
of these thin places.
We
see Jesus standing in one of these thin places in our gospel reading for today,
as he raises his friend Lazarus from the dead and invites him to come out of
his grave. And we see another thin place
in the vision of the celebratory banquet in Isaiah, a joyful vision of a time
when the scattered will one day be regathered and restored.
Today
is such a thin place in the life of this church. As we turn in our pledge cards and ask God to
bless these gifts that we offer back to God from the gifts God has given us, we
stand in the thin place between the past and the future here at St.
Thomas. On one side are all those saints
who have come before us, who have shined the light of Christ’s love for us in
this place. And on the other side are
those who have yet to come, to whom we are called to shine the light of
Christ’s love—our companions and children and grandchildren and
great-grandchildren in the faith—generations yet to be born. We mark our place here in this thin place by
making our pledge commitment and by renewing our baptismal vows—reminding and
encouraging ourselves and each other of what it means to be bearers of Christ’s
light in this place and in this season.
Years
ago, in the early days of my priesthood, I performed the funeral of a woman
named Virginia Stephens. Virginia, who
was a wife, a mother, a grandmother, and a great-grandmother, had been a
life-long Episcopalian, and she wasn’t so different from most of those folks
buried out in our graveyard. She had
been secretary of the parish for a season long before I got there, was a member
of the altar guild and a choir member among many other things. One of the gifts Virginia gave to her family
and to me as a baby priest, is that she planned her entire funeral. (Perhaps she didn’t trust me or her family to
not mess it up!?) As we processed out of
the service, her grandchildren bearing her body out of the church for the last
time, we sang the hymn Virginia had chosen for her exit.
It
was hymn 400 which we sang last Sunday and is the same hymn tune as the hymn
we’re singing today. It’s a hymn, whose
words are attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, and which talks about how all of
creation is invited to join in praise of God the Creator. There’s an optional verse that Virginia had
us sing, and singing that verse in that moment opened up a thin place for me;
even now I can’t hear it without wanting to weep with a strange mix of sorrow
and joy.
“And
even you, most gentle death/ waiting to hush our final breath/O, praise
him. Alleluia!/ You lead back home the
child of God/for Christ before that way has trod/O praise him! O praise him!
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!”
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