Scripture text: Revelation 7:9-17
This week has been a roller coaster ride. Highs and lows. Rising and falling. Back and forth. And I stand before you on this All Saints Day with a bit of metaphorical motion sickness. Stop the world! I want to get off.
I saw my friend Greg this week. Greg is one of my closest and dearest friends. We met when I was in seminary. He and his wife Keli were very much my support network through those four years of school. We played games together, computer games, board games, card games, and more than a few sessions of D&D. We would spend vacations together; many a Labor Day weekend spent together at a G3 event (Great Geek Get-together). Lots of good memories.
Greg and Keli moved to Charlotte, NC about ten years or so ago. But thankfully, Keli is from the Ephrata area, so one or both of them is around a few times a year visiting the parents/in-laws. That was the case this week. I saw my friend and poured out my soul to him. All the wonders and great things that are happening in my life since I moved here to York county. Greg commented later that he saw me the most contented and happy that I’ve been in all the years we’ve known one another. It felt good to hear that.
I wasn’t home an hour from my dinner-and-drinks outing with him on Wednesday when I got the phone call. Kathy calling me to tell me her mother was in the hospital, diagnosed with a brain tumor. One of our beloved members here at Canadochly, a person everyone in this room knows, loves, and respects. That just came out of nowhere...for all of us. And Millie’s family with all that they’ve gone through over the years. Sitting in that hospital room with everyone was...well, I don’t know what word I want to use here. It was emotional. It was scary. So much was uncertain and still is.
Then just yesterday, as I was sitting at my computer watching football scores come in from the Penn State and Virginia Tech games, I glanced over to Facebook to hear the news that my friend Dan had died suddenly the night before. I met Dan on the anime-con circuit during the 90s; we worked several of those conventions together. We hadn’t seen each other in several years, but we kept in touch. I was just teasing him about being at another sci-fi convention, not more than a month ago, in my home state of WV. I’ve known him for almost 20 years and now he’s gone, just like that. He was my age, maybe a little older. Far too young.
(Dan's on the left here, in the white shirt.)
Highs and lows. Rising and falling. Back and forth. Stop the world! I want to get off.
We’ve all been there, haven’t we? Life, it seems, is full of these chaotic lurchings from one extreme to another. From joy to sorrow. From contentment to pain. And back again. You never know from one minute to the next what the world is going to throw at you.
The ancient traditions of this day, traditions that truly stretch back to even before the founding of the Church and Christianity, mark this as a time of remembrance of the dead. But the Christian name of this day, this festival, is the Day of All-Saints and by that name includes implicitly also the living. Thus it is not just death that we speak of on this day, but also life and all the ways in which the two intermingle with one another.
And they do intermingle. One of the things I’ve come to learn over the course of my years is how illogical life often is. We exist in the midst of paradoxes and contradictions, contrasts and opposites. Life and death together. Joy and sorrow together. Good and bad together. Saint and sinner together. A robe washed white in blood and a Lamb that stands as our shepherd. Logically, none of these make sense. But truth is nearly always stranger than fiction and life is truth. So life really doesn’t make sense. Our experience of life is the experience of these opposites, these contradictions.
When John of Patmos learns the origins of the great crowd of witnesses before the throne of God at the end of time, he is told they are those who have endured “the Great Ordeal.” My friends, the “Great Ordeal” is life itself. Highs and lows. Rising and falling. Back and forth. Stop the world! I want to get off.
We are living through the Great Ordeal, each and every day of our lives, enduring its uncertainty, its chaos, its contradictions, its joys and sorrows, its life and death. It’s being human in this broken and fallen world. It’s the cross that we bear day in and day out.
But there is also a promise. God’s promise to the world and to everyone in it. A promise of salvation. The promise that where there is a cross, there is also an empty tomb. Life, death, and also resurrection.
This is what we celebrate this day. This is what we remember. That we who endure the Great Ordeal have also received a promise, the promise of a robe washed white in the blood of the Lamb, the promise of a shepherd upon the throne, the promise of a time where there are no more tears and no more pain. A promise of salvation that belongs to our God, a gift given through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. A promise that this is not all that there is. There is so much more than this life of contradictions and chaos.
I spent part of my sermon today talking about my nerd hobbies and a couple of my nerd friends. (I know, big surprise). But what may really surprise you is that all-time favorite film is not some nerdy sci-fi spectacle, but the 1959 William Wyler epic Ben-Hur. There’s a scene in that movie where Ben-Hur’s sister and mother, after years of torment, are now condemned to live as outcasts because they are lepers. Esther, another character, is trying to persuade them to leave that valley of death and pain and go find Jesus and to hear his words and to maybe receive healing from him. Esther says to the mother and daughter as they hesitate to leave. “The world is more than we know.”
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The world is more than we know. Beyond all our experience, beyond our pain, our fears, and our sorrows, he is there. His mercy, his love, his compassion, and his promise await us. Stop the world? There is no need. There is a lot more to life than this world. Amen.
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