November 3, 2024

         All Saints’ Sunday is one of my favorite Sundays of the year. We get to sing one of my favorite hymns: “For all the Saints” Sine Nomine.  In recent years, it’s also the Sunday that marks the end of Daylight Savings Time; not something to celebrate, even if we’re supposed to get an extra hour of sleep. We have cats, so that doesn’t happen. Suddenly, darkness descends earlier in the evening and it feels like late fall, even if the temps don’t. For me, All Saints’ Sunday marks the beginning of the end of the liturgical year; we’re moving away from reading the gospel stories of Jesus’ ministry and over the next few weeks hearing from his final sermons in the temple, full of apocalyptic imagery.

It’s a day when we remember those who have died, and hopefully, baptize people, bringing them into the body of Christ. It’s a day of reflection and celebration, of remembering and moving forward. It’s a Sunday when we connect the body of Christ as we experience it here at Grace Church, with all those who have gone before us in these pews over the last almost two centuries, and those who have gone before us across the globe and across two millennia.

It’s a commemoration that helps us to look beyond our own immediate lives and concerns and to put our lives and the lives of those we love in a much broader context, to see our connections across time and space. That may be especially necessary today with election day two days away—our fears and anxieties running rampant and keeping us awake at night.

However real our fears, whatever happens on Tuesday and the days that follow, today is an opportunity to remember that the Church and its members have survived through two millennia, sometimes in great suffering and against great odds. Indeed, the commemoration of All Saints’ is itself a witness to that untold, unremembered suffering, for it emerged as an occasion to acknowledge and honor those whose memory wasn’t preserved in story, legend, and saint’s cult, unnamed martyrs and eventually, in the commemoration of all souls, even ordinary, unremarkable Christians who lived and died faithfully and obscurely, remembered only by their family members, or perhaps, by no one at all.

On the surface, our scripture readings may not seem to have a great deal to do with the themes of the day. In fact, all three are among the suggestions for readings at the burial office—funerals; and the first, the reading from Isaiah 25, is among my favorites, if loved ones don’t have preferences, I always select it as the first reading.

In fact, something a bit strange happened just a couple of weeks ago. I was in Cleveland for my brother-in-law’s memorial service. My sister had selected readings and hymns, and I had put the service together. But as I listened to one of John’s friends share his memories of John, it occurred to me that I should have overruled my sister’s choices and used this reading. For John was a wine lover. He had cases of it in his cellar. But he was also a tinkerer and experimenter, and at some point he had begun to make wine; an elderberry sherry. 

Now, I love wine and although I’m no wine snob, I can tell a decent wine from a bad one, and I’m very suspicious of the products of amateur vintners. So when John first invited us to try it, Corrie and I were very leery. Boy, we were surprised. It was rich, subtle, complex, good enough to grace the wine list of a fine restaurant.

But the story doesn’t end there. After John’s death, there were about five cases remaining from vintages going back as far as 1980. My sister decided to bring all that wine to the memorial service and invited attendees to take a bottle or two home with them—and at the end of the day, there were none remaining. They will contribute to many feasts of well-aged wines in coming years.

Recently, I also entered into another story, one of Grace’s. I was asked to share a bit about the history of the men’s homeless shelter at Porchlight’s annual gala this coming week. So for the past few weeks, I’ve been digging through our archives, leafing through newspaper clippings, vestry minutes, and other sources on its history from the time it arrived in 1985 until its departure at the beginning of the pandemic. 

It’s a story of the vision and faithfulness of those who came before us: Fr. Wiedrich and the lay leadership who invited it here; to the volunteers who helped out over the decades, and those who defended it against its detractors. There are stories of the lives that were transformed as well as stories of unhoused people who died in extreme weather. And new stories are being written, with the presence of the Off the Square club now occupying the space where the shelter had been, and volunteers from Grace serving lunch at the Beacon regularly.

Today, we are writing the first chapter of another story—that of Leia Waldo who will be baptized in a few minutes. We don’t know what the arc of her story will be, even as we don’t know how any of the stories that we are inhabiting will develop. But even as her story is being written, with her baptism she is entering a much larger story that began with creation and is centered on the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. 

With her family, we will play roles in her story, at least for a short time. She will grow in faith, be nourished by the sacraments, experience the joys and heartbreak of life in community. Her story will be her own to live and to experience but through it all, she will be marked by Christ in baptism. There are many such stories here today, where our lives intersect with each other, and encounter Jesus, for a few weeks or months, or for many years. 

As we face the coming days, and all the uncertainties and anxieties that surround us, may we take heart that we are all carrying with us the sign of the cross, marked as Christ’s beloved forever, and that through his cross and resurrection, there is new life ahead, and that whatever comes Jesus will be with us.