Welcome on this All Saints Sunday, one of the feast days of the Episcopal Church that I discovered when I came to the Episcopal Church and really fell in love with.
This morning in Sunday School we talked about the saints of our lives, and brought photographs and objects with us to share with the stories we told. And if you’ve seen my office, you won’t be surprised to learn that I brought books. And one of the books I brought was this one – not a very fancy cover – it’s been repaired – the binding has been replaced, glued on. The title is “The Story of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, Told in Simple Language, Adapted to All Ages, but Especially to the Young.” My mother gave this to me at my ordination, almost two years ago.
And on one of the first pages is the signature of my great-grandmother, Martha Ellen Kauffman – I am partly named after her – with the year 1880. Mom found it on a bookshelf in our house just a few days before my ordination – she hadn’t noticed it there before. We realized when looking at it that it was a book my dad had talked about before he died. He remembered when he was a child sitting in a rocking chair in the farmhouse where he grew up, and his grandfather, my great-grandfather, Martha Ellen’s husband, who also lived in the farmhouse with them, would sit and read Bible stories to him. I never met Staige Hite Modisett, my great-grandfather – he died when Dad was 10 years old. But I hold this gift, from my mother, from my father, from my great-grandfather, this passing along of story and of faith, from elder to child to elder to child.
So yesterday, some of us witnessed the passing of an era in another piece of family history, the Episcopal Church history. The Most Reverend Michael Curry, the first person of color to serve as Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, retired, handing his pastoral staff to our newest Presiding Bishop, Sean Rowe. Nine years ago, Bishop Curry received the staff himself from another history-making clergy person, the Most Reverend Katharine Jefferts Schori, who was the first woman to serve as Presiding Bishop in the Episcopal Church.
As with many such historic firsts, they seemed a long time in coming. Both Presiding Bishops served their terms, a total of nearly two decades between them, adding their unique voices to the voices of the 25 presiding bishops who have gone before, all of whom have joined the communion of saints.
Yesterday’s consecration of Sean Rowe was quiet compared to past consecrations. It was held not under the soaring stained-glass windows of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., but in a relatively small sacred space – the Chapel of Christ the Lord in the Episcopal Church’s headquarters in New York City. It was an interesting choice of venue, modest, low-key – the choir was just four voices plus organ and piano and percussion; the gathering was small, but we heard so many voices, so many languages: Arabic, French, Mandarin Chinese, Eastern Shoshone, Spanish, Hebrew. We heard the names of our saints, our ancestors in faith – Moses, Deborah, Solomon, Esther, Peter, Martha, Mary Magdalene. The bishop, and the congregation, spoke the words of our baptismal covenant, promising to strive for justice and peace among all people and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
In its simplicity, the consecration was an event in sharp counterpoint to the events and emotions of our political present. And celebrating All Saints there and here on this particular weekend reminds us that both the political and the sacred call on us and connect us, as citizens of earth and as citizens of heaven, across miles and years and thousands and thousands of life stories – we are all part of this family of humanity and this communion of saints. At the Feast of All Saints, we remember all those we are connected to here and now and past, in prayer, in hymns and in the telling of their stories.
This past Friday evening, at our All Saints Eucharist, Father AJ reminded us that All Saints is partly an Easter service. This is true of every funeral and burial service we hold, remembering those who have died – while there is grief – and a funeral service holds space for weeping – it is not a liturgy about loss. Just like All Saints, it is a liturgy of new life, of resurrection. And in fact, two of today’s readings for All Saints are also among the reading choices for funerals – the passage from Isaiah and the reading from Revelation.
And Revelation? Isn’t that the book in the Bible that talks about the end of the world and the four horsemen of the apocalypse and dragons and nightmares, the book of the Bible that inspired things like the “Left Behind” series and the idea of the Rapture?
Revelation is a much misunderstood and misinterpreted book that almost didn’t even make it into the Bible, centuries ago. It is called “apocalyptic” literature – not because apocalypse is about disaster or about the end of the world – apocalypse actually translates as unveiling, as understanding or seeing something that was hidden before – revelation. The book of Revelation was written at a time when Christians were persecuted and suffering. It lifted a veil that hid them in their present suffering from the vision of a future joy, a time of a new heaven and a new earth, when there would be no more sorrow, where death and pain will be no more.
The writer of Revelation envisions a new world, not a world where people are raptured up into the sky, but, as Barbara Rossing, a Lutheran theologian, observes, God is raptured to earth. The kingdom of God comes to the world of humans – the veil between the temporary and the eternal disappears.
“See, the home of God is among mortals…
God will be with them – he will wipe every tear from their eye.”
What a revelation – what a vision beyond the veil, of God dwelling with God’s people, moving among us, a new Garden of Eden, an echo of Isaiah, a return to the beginning – “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” In this new heaven and new earth, we come full circle, as a people, as heaven and earth, as the communion of saints held together in God’s love.
In Revelation, we hear not the endings of things, but the beginnings. We hear not destruction, but hope. A new heaven and a new earth – God dwelling among us, sharing our grief, and then setting us free.
Our Presiding Bishop yesterday preached on the Gospel, that Resurrection story of Lazarus, saying that:
“Jesus again reminds us that the kingdom is here, that it is near to us, right here, right now, among us. He is the resurrection – the future promise – and the life…now.”
And when we hear those words at All Saints, we are reminded that God is with us not only in the time to come, not only in our past, but in our present. Whatever the days bring, whatever our present grief or anxiety, this week or any week, the seemingly overwhelming chaos of the world right now – it is not permanent. As God dwells with us, we dwell with God, and with God we can see a new heaven and a new earth – and we can help bring it about. Whatever our present time is, God is in it. Hope is in it. Peace is in it. The kingdom of heaven is not unreachable. It lives and breathes among us. And we, as part of the communion of saints who have passed along their nurturing, quiet faith, especially in times of anxiety and division, we can seek and build peace together, we can pass the love and faith of the saints who came before to the saints who come after.
Amen.
Sermon preached by The Rev. Cara Ellen Modisett at Trinity Episcopal Church, Staunton, Virginia on November 3, 2024.
