Nov. 6 -- All Saints Sunday

Nov. 6 (All Saints Sunday)

lectionary

Haggai – Thessalonians

Again we hear from a prophet whose name comes with many different pronunciations. My teacher enforcing the British pronunciation made us say “Hay’-gay-ai”.
As I previewed the passage last week, I smiled because it was a perfect example text for my Old Testament class. The timing was perfect – In the second year of King Darius,… . The prophet looks back at a nation, a religious faith, a way of life, an extended family – that had been utterly destroyed. He looks and sees a time to come: “Once again, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land; and I will shake all the nations, so that the treasure of all nations shall come, and I will fill this house with splendor, says the Lord of hosts.”
Remembering the past glory, promising a coming splendor and glory
Second coming, delay of parousia
Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”
Haggai the prophet’s words may help us to look out and see the glory of the Lord that is all around us.

The coming splendour

Mother T. saw it in the slums of Calcutta
I felt it when Pres. Obama led the nation (as it were) in singing “Amazing Grace” at the memorial service at Mother Immanuel in Charleston.
I saw it in the short video we shared on Facebook, a woman catching a cab in New York, in response to the question where to? she said anywhere. Explaining that she was on her way to the hospice and she wanted to see the living world one last time.
This is available anywhere
it doesn’t need a successful church program
a church that has genuinely prayed in provides it
I was in such a church somewhere off a small road in the woods, built in early 1700’s right here in South Carolina.

After the storm, a song, Google it, Haggai starter

irish band
… (end)
And there will come a time, you’ll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.
After the Storm is a story about that emergence – a story of people encountering a new world, encountering loss, and then learning how to keep going.

All the saints, gone before, have prepared the way for us to see the splendour

so that we can see
“Nana” remember the student conversation in Old Testament where she wanted to tell me about the great faith of her nah nah. When I sought to confirm what I was hearing she just repeated na na expecting me to know perfectly well who I was she was talking about. The point about na na was that she quote probably had lots more faith than the student does. But was clearly a wise person for the student. If it hadn’t been class I might have pursued the notion of her being a saint.
each of you has your own personal “Nana”
This community has its own
we give thanks today for all the saints who have prepared the way for our eyes and hearts to be open to the splendour before and on its way
After the storm
We have endured a storm in this country and indeed the world:
Change in us, region, world
This is not the church I grew up in
Declining communities
Tornado, flood, earthquake - my mother’s word - seeing the ruin. The promise of rebuilding.
Freshness of the smell, clean, no asthma.
I can remember my mother promising to us kids, growing up in Denver suburb, that we were safe from those things that children fear: floods, earthquakes, tornadoes.
After the flood of 1965 a large recreational lake appeared behind the dam to control the South Platte. I have a good friend who lives near there. After the earthquakes – that were man-made – Denver International Airport was built on the reclaimed land. The Tornadoes – well, I’m not sure. But I do know that everytime there’s a fiersome thunderstorm, the air seems to be clean, the dry ground watered, and there is a promise of new life.
wonder of life itself
oldest living man @ 113 is a survivor of the Holocaust – he witnessed the ruin, now a sign of the splendour of the living God
st. Louis rolheiser
Gospel lends itself to a message about resurrection, about life after death,
the communion of the saints is a shorthand for the community of all those alive in the resurrection

Elizabeth Johnson, leaning on Karl Rahner, adds this thought: “Hoping against hope, we affirm that they [our loved ones who have died] have fallen not into nothingness but into the embrace of the living God. And that is where we can find them again; when we open our hearts to the silent calmness of God’s own life in which we dwell, not by selfishly calling them back to where we are, but by descending into the depth of our own hearts where God also abides.”

These are the saints we remember. It is on their shoulders that we stand. Because of them we are granted the privilege of seeing the splendour around us and awaiting the glory that is to come.