Rector's Sermon - Sunday, November 7, 2004

First Reading	Psalm	Epistle	Gospel
Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18		Ephesians 1:11-23	Luke 6:20-31

    As a number of you know, in 1859 the people of St. John’s decided to tear down the original church structure on this corner that had served them for some thirty years, and erect a larger and taller, carpenter gothic church whose spire would soar up from the valley. While the people in Ithaca were optimistic, the larger situation beyond these hills was increasingly unsettling. James Buchanan was halfway through his presidential term. No one would have imagined that a lawyer from Illinois would succeed him and later be considered one of our greatest national leaders. The parish didn’t raise all the money beforehand, but planned to raise the money in the ensuing years. Yet shortly after the structure was finished, the nation was plunged into crisis. It was not a dispute that would last a few months as generally believed. As the months went by, and parades sent boys off to war, the trains would bring back wooden coffins in return. It was not a propitious time to continue to ask for money to pay off a mortgage. There was plenty of reason to retreat into a shell of despair or protect oneself inside a vault of rage.

    However, the people of this parish, while praying for the dead and ministering to the wounded, and worrying about friends and relations on the other side, raised the money and paid off the mortgage so that the new church could be consecrated in 1866. That structure is substantially the nave that you sit in today. The decades that followed the 1860’s left plenty of open wounds that were not quickly healed. Indeed slavery exposed larger issues of racism and civil rights for all people that we are still struggling with. Nonetheless, the people of St. John’s continued to have faith in God’s enterprise and continued to worship, support, and expand the parish’s mission here in Ithaca.

    That is precisely why we celebrate the Holy Day of All Saints. Saints are those who in every era are willing to prepare foundations, to build bridges, to pass down to future generations a legacy of hope in God’s mission of reconciliation and justice among all people. The people who laid the foundation and paid for walls that shelter us never could know us or imagine what challenges we would face, but they knew that there would be challenges in our time and they wanted to leave us fruits of their faith. They believed that God had a plan, that God was ultimately in charge, and that the best days for this parish were ahead of it, not behind it. That is what All Saints is all about.

    A young monk once asked the abbot, “How does one keep from drowning in cynicism in an habitually disappointing and dreary world?” The abbot replied, “If you fall into a deep lake and you don’t know how to swim, you are tempted to panic and think I must not let my head go under the water. You begin to wildly thrash your arms and legs, and in the process of keeping your head from going under, you begin swallowing water, coughing, and quickly exhausting yourself and are soon in danger of drowning. But if you would allow yourself to go under the water, your body would come back to the surface on its own, and you would float with little effort and there would plenty of time for others to help you.”

    There is a medieval folk tale about a monastery that began to experience tough times. Since fewer young men wanted to join, the community began to die off. They called in experts on monastic growth from the diocesan office, they tried new forms of worship and growing different crops in their fields, but nothing seemed to arrest the steady decline. Hence the monks began to blame each other for their situation, and the atmosphere around the monastery became bitter and disillusioned.

    The saints of times past, who have gone before us, are those who, while thrown into deep and choppy water, learned to float and, as a result, have given inspiration and encouragement to us and generations to come.

    The Book of Daniel was written around 165 years before the birth of Jesus. It was a bad time for people of faith who were oppressed by one beast of an empire after another. But Daniel reaffirms the dream: God’s vision of how humanity is intended to live will not perish. God’s purposes will endure; they will not disappear into the mouths of the beasts of the earth. Today’s Gospel has Jesus teaching the people on a plain, level, face to face. They are ordinary, everyday people who have been pushed down and degraded for generations. Yet Jesus affirms that God’s blessings are still operative and warns them about relinquishing their heritage and buying into the way the world operates. “Don’t be conformed to the retaliation and vindictiveness of this world,” Jesus urges them. “You have a higher calling and a much great task. Let the vision of God live in you.” Hence, if we are tempted to think that no one else has seen or dealt with the troubles and terror we face, All Saints’ tells us we are wrong, dead wrong.

    People of faith, called to be saints, learn to float in God’s hope. They neither sink in despair, waterlogged by the world, nor are they tossed up on shore, beached, dried out and cracking into splinters like driftwood around Adirondack lakes. Take a moment today to look at one of the plaques or nameplates, around this place. In one sense this is a museum, for we are now the curators of the hope that incubates the birth of change in the world. The key to perceiving God at work in our busy, anxious, and troubling world is learning to float in God’s hope, together with all the saints whose legacy is all around us.

    And I offer this to you in the name of the Living God, Amen.