All Saints, Proper 26B, November 4, 2012; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
Revelation 21:1-6a See, I am making all things new.
Mark 12:28-34 You are not far from the kingdom of God.
O God of all things new, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
Some days in the life of the church are really big – Christmas Eve, Easter Day, Pentecost and All Saints are generally the four biggest for us. Today is the Sunday in the octave (or eight days) of the great feast day of All Saints, a day on the Christian calendar to celebrate the saints, known and unknown. This past Friday was All Souls’ Day – the day set aside in the church calendar for commemoration of those who have departed this life. So this is a Sunday to remember the past – to honor all those who have gone before us – all saints and all souls.
There will be a time in the Eucharistic prayer when I will recite the names of those, in and around our community, who have died in the past year. But I want to ask you to take a moment right now and think about some of the people who have been saints in your life – people who have modeled fidelity, and vision, and big expansive love for you; people who have demonstrated with their lives, their commitment to living in right relationship with the Divine and with one another. Name their names in the silence of your hearts. Call the spirit of those people into this place, into this time. Feel how much more full this sanctuary suddenly is. We simply wouldn’t be here now without them. There are countless others who have made a way for us to be here today, whose names we might never know, and who never knew us, but nevertheless, we are here because of them.
Today is also one of the four extra special times in the liturgical year to celebrate baptisms and renew our baptismal vows. That makes today not just about the past, but about the future. And not just our future, but the future of people we don’t know yet and may never know. We are the forebearers of a future we cannot see. We can peer in that direction, and we can hope. So I want to ask you to take a moment right now and think about your hopes for the future. Think about how you will model fidelity, and vision and big expansive love for others and demonstrate with your very life, commitment to living in right relationship with the Divine and with one another. Name the names of your hopes in the silence of your hearts. And call the spirit of those hopes into this place, into this time. Feel how much more full your heart suddenly is. There are people known and unknown to us for whom we are making a way even now, as we bumble along with our “sack[s] of sorrows, regrets, shattered dreams and betrayals…[in what can sometimes seem] a messy abyss” [1] on our spiritual journey toward loving the Holy One and our neighbors.
Our scripture lessons for today are something of a mix from the regular sequence of lectionary readings and the readings appointed for All Saints’ Day. The reason is that I just love the readings from Ruth and from Mark too much to skip over them when they only get scheduled once every three years. And so in this mix, we have one of the most beautiful love stories in all of scripture – the story of Naomi and Ruth; we have the glorious vision of John the Divine – of the Holy One completely at home among mortals, a dream of all things new, all things reconciled one to another. And we have the story of Jesus quoting the Torah in response to a question that has arisen during an argument about religious doctrines and customs.
Believe it or not, 2000 years ago religious leaders were disputing issues of marriage and heaven and the real meaning of scripture. Jesus’ exasperated response to religious leaders was then (and is now) “you are constantly missing the point!” Then a scribe – someone with a high degree of skill with reading and writing and considerable knowledge of the law – in other words, a wise and learned man – asks Jesus which commandment in the Torah is most important. Maybe it’s a trick question. Maybe it’s an innocent question. The Gospel of Mark doesn’t say.
Jesus’ answer is so familiar to us that it can sound trite. It was even a well-known answer back then. The Babylonian Talmud contains a story of a Gentile who sought the wisdom of two Pharisaic teachers: Shammai and Hillel. The Gentile asked them to teach the whole Torah standing on one foot. The story goes that Rabbi Shammai shooed him away with a stick, but Rabbi Hillel said, “What you hate for yourself, do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole law; the rest is commentary. Go and learn.” (Shabbat 31a).
Love of God and love of neighbor as oneself are essentially, radically, and primarily handed down to us from Hebrew scripture. We should treasure this inheritance and claim it for our own, but we Christians must stop claiming it as uniquely ours just because Jesus said it. More on that later for those of you who are able to be here at 4:00 this afternoon for our Corrective Lenses program!
In asking the question of Jesus, I think the scribe is inquiring, “What do you stake your life on?” And the answer is: listen to — hear the Holy One, and listening will lead to loving the Holy One, which will lead to loving others, which will lead to needing to listen to the Holy One. The only verb that is in the command form, is the word for hear, whether in the Greek (ákoue) of this Gospel passage, or the Hebrew (sh’ma) of the scripture that Jesus is citing from Leviticus and Deuteronomy. The commandment is to hear. Listen deeply. Wake up! Pay attention to the Holy One Who is very near!
In Deuteronomy, where this first commandment resides, the instruction for Israel to listen is found five times (Israel means one who struggles with God). Here are the five times: “listen to the commandments so that it may go well with you” (5:1), “listen – you are about to cross over the Jordan” (9:1), “listen, you are drawing near to battle – don’t panic” (20:3); “listen, you have become the people of God – so act like it” (27:9), and this one, “listen so you will love.”
Grammatically, the command is not to love; the command is to hear – to listen; and the consequence – that is, what follows – will be love. [2] Listen and you are going to love God with your whole heart (which back then meant your intellect); with your whole person (the essence of your being – your soul), and with your whole strength (literally, “your very muchness”). And when they say strength, what the rabbis have always meant is wealth – abundance. It’s not about your physical prowess. It’s not about exerting as much effort or force, trying as hard as you can. It’s about sharing all of your abundance as a consequence or compassionate response to waking up to hearing the Holy One.
Jesus’ response invites and encourages us into loving with a more open mind, a more gracious spirit, and more generous giving out of our abundance. I don’t know about you, but I want to be inspired to go further than I’d thought possible when I’ve hit some kind of wall, when I’ve bumped up against one of my many limits. I need all the help I can get – and often I get that help in a community like this. In fact, I almost never get it by myself, which is a little surprising, as introverted as I am. I find that the help I give myself is never as good as the help I get from a community of faith when it comes to expanding my capacity to love.
You know, sometimes people ask me why one would need a priest or a faith community or saints to get to God. “Can’t people get directly to God?” they ask. “Yes,” I always say, “of course they can but they don’t.” Most of us need the help of the community. And on those days when we don’t need so much help, that only means that we have extra capacity to offer help to someone else, knowing that it will be our turn again to need help sooner or later!
I want to say something to the parents of the two babies who will be baptized in a few minutes. Jill and Nat, Betsy and Sam, thank you for bringing Anders and Mabel into this world and thank you for bringing them into this church. Anders and Mabel, you are being baptized on an amazing day in the liturgical year, and an amazing day in the life of this historic parish. You are children and grandchildren of Emmanuelites – and now you are becoming Emmanuelites too, on a day when we remember and honor all those who have made it possible for us to be in this moment – and on a day when we celebrate turning a corner and seeing a vision of the future that is hopeful and bright, full of promise and possibilities, just like you two!