Remember the Living

Ephesians 1:11-23

If there is one thing that the annual observance of the feast of All Saints can teach us, it is that we do not come to know Jesus in a vacuum. None of us is a product solely of our own originality, but rather a mosaic of all the little pieces we have been given by the people who shape and form us. We do not encounter scripture in isolation- we receive it in our language because others worked hard and studied long to make it possible that we might know the word of God in the languages we’ve spoken since childhood. The way we pray is taught, formed, shaped by the people who modeled communion with God for us, and by the people of our tradition who preserved and continue to steward our prayerbook. Our sacraments always take place in community, in numbers. To be baptized requires at least two people present, a marriage requires at least four. Confessions are made and absolved in pairs, and ordinations require representatives of all the orders of the church- laypeople, deacons, priests, and bishops. A priest in the Episcopal Church cannot celebrate the Eucharist without at least one other person present to witness and receive it, because Holy Communion is always a public act. There is no such thing as private Communion, or private Baptism, or private Confirmation in our tradition anymore, because our community recognized a long time ago that these are contradictions in terms.

When we are being the Church, we are acknowledging and living out the truth that being isolated and alone is not our natural state. Just as the very nature of God is a Trinitarian community, so the nature of God’s church is to bring people together. And not just together in a surface-level way. The Body of Christ is a commitment to being interconnected and interdependent. We are meant to bear one another’s burdens, even when our own bodies or minds become the burdens, something that many view as a fate worse than death.  We are supposed to need each other, to be needed by each other, in a way that doesn’t happen much in our majority culture. To be a Christian is incompatible with the modern idea of the individual. I think this is why so many of us struggle to find a synthesis between our life out there and our life in here. The world out there, and honestly for most of us also the messages we’ve internalized in here, are constantly telling us that everything is up to us, up to the individual, up to each household to fend for themselves except when a little extra money or time or energy can be spared toward charity. That’s a lonely way to live, and an exhausting one. It expects each of us to be a village unto ourselves, capable of meeting needs and accomplishing labors that have historically been spread across entire communities. If every one of us has to do everything for ourselves, that leaves little to nothing left to give to one another. That is not the picture All Saints paints for us.

In the letter to the Ephesians, the author pens a prayer for his audience, the Christian community in Ephesus. He gives thanks for their faithfulness and love, and prays that God may give them a spirit of wisdom and revelation as they continue to get to know Jesus. He hopes that, with the eyes of their hearts enlightened, they might know the hope and the glory and the greatness which are theirs in Christ Jesus. It is likely this passage was included in today’s readings for two reasons- our eternal inheritance with the saints is an important theme of this feast, and the author mentions “love toward all the saints” in the opening of his prayer. In this case, the Ephesians are showing love not just toward those who have died in faith but also toward one another, the whole body of the faithful. Just as elsewhere Christians have referred to one another as brothers and sisters, there are also places, like this letter, where the living members of a congregation are called saints. The gathered believers are active in their work together, and interconnected and interdependent, and they are identified as saints. These are not people who have died or been martyred or seen visions or performed miracles like the saints we picture with golden halos encompassing their heads. Their sainthood, their identification as those who will inherit redemption, comes down to a belief in Jesus and an active love for one another. All the saints of Ephesus are just church folk like you, giving of every aspect of themselves in order to continue the good work of community in Jesus.

We spend a good deal of time in this season of the church calendar remembering our dead, and this is a good and holy thing. On Tuesday in the Memorial Garden at St Mark’s we read the necrology, a list of names of those who have died who were dear to this parish. On Saturday at Grace, we said the burial office for our brother Phil Welker, a teacher and mentor and friend to countless many who will now be added to the list of those who have gone ahead of us. After both of these services, memories were shared and stories were told about the ways these remembered saints lived among us, who they were to us and how they continue to impact us. This storytelling is healthy, and holy, and good. And it’s revealed an opportunity as we celebrate this All Saints Day. If we, like the Christian community in Ephesus, are called to live together in love and service in the name of Jesus, why is it that we so often wait to name the ways we have impacted one another until someone dear to us has died? Are we not all saints, imperfect people striving to live together and love together as the church has done since her birth on Pentecost? On this All Saints Day, I invite you to remember and pray for our dead who have taught us so much. And, I invite you also to remember the living, the saints among us who have made us who we are and shown us what living a Christ-centered life can look like. Don’t wait to tell those stories until the funeral. Tell those stories now. Thank those saints now. Write it down, say it into the phone, show up on a doorstep or send a text. Remind one another how much better we are together, and how vital each one of us is to the survival and joy of all of us. Today is the day we mark the feast of All Saints. That means all of us, too.