All Saints’ Day (with alt second reading), November 1, 2015; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of all, 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 on the church calendar are really big – Christmas Eve, Easter Day, Pentecost and All Saints are generally the four biggest for us. Today is the great Feast of All Saints; it’s a day to celebrate the saints, known and unknown. Tomorrow is All Souls’ Day – the day set aside in the church calendar for commemoration of all those who have departed this life, whether they were saints or sinners or both. So this is a Sunday to remember the present as well as the past – to honor all those who go and have gone before us – all saints and all souls.

There will be a time just before the Eucharistic prayer begins when I will recite the names of those, in and around our community, who have died in the past year, since our last All Saints’ Day. But I want to ask you to take a moment right now and think about some of the people who are or who have been saints in your life – people who have modeled for you fidelity, and vision, and big expansive love; people who have demonstrated with their lives, their commitment to living in right relationship with the Divine and with one another. That’s what righteousness means, by the way, right relationship. 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 on our ritual calendar to celebrate baptisms and renew our baptismal vows. That makes today not just about the past and present, but also 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, the providers 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, so that those hopes are made manifest. Name the names of your hopes in the silence of your hearts. 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 what one of my colleagues calls our “sack of sorrows, regrets, shattered dreams and betrayals…” [1] on our spiritual journey toward more fully loving our neighbors and the Holy One.

Recently I was talking with a parishioner who has been living in the diaspora for the last ten years and who has, at last, returned to Boston. Pavel Hradecky was telling me about his travel through Europe to the US, made easier – made more smooth because of the well-thought out and well-supported transportation infrastructure. He told me that, having made flight connections that he had feared would be impossible, he began to reflect on the ways in which Emmanuel Church creates and maintains a spiritual infrastructure that allows people to make connections that would otherwise be impossible. Emmanuel Church creates and maintains spiritual infrastructure that facilitates our connections with other people, past and present, inside and outside of 15 Newbury Street, our connections with the Divine, and our connections within our own hearts and minds. We have a wonderful spiritual infrastructure in this parish.

I want to push that metaphor just a little further because it occurs to me as we begin our pledge drive for our 2016 annual fund, that our spiritual infrastructure needs to be tended and supported financially – just like a good transportation infrastructure, so that the pieces of it don’t crumble. I am asking everyone who values the spiritual infrastructure provided by Emmanuel Church to make a financial pledge for the coming year so that we can make commitments to staff and support our mission. Like an airport, we might not use it every day or even every week, but others do. Most of us want it to be here when we need it, and we want it to be here for other people too. We want the spiritual infrastructure to be here now and in the future, and it doesn’t take care of itself. It doesn’t happen by accident that the spiritual infrastructure of Emmanuel Church has been ahead of its time for much of its history – the spiritual infrastructure of Emmanuel, radically inclusive and expansive, looks to the future, leans into the future, steps boldly into the future again and again, and hopes become real. Seemingly impossible connections become possible.

I highlight these things because we are about to do something radically inclusive and expansive (again) at Emmanuel Church. We are welcoming Jackson Jeffrey Stein to Christianity through our initiation ceremony, our Christian naming ceremony of Baptism. Jackson has already had his Jewish naming ceremony – his Bris. Jackson is the fourth child of Emmanuel Church to receive this double blessing as an infant having a Christian mother and a Jewish father. (A rabbi friend told me last year that what we are doing wouldn’t be considered “mainstream” in either Judaism or Christianity. “I know,” I said, “not yet.”) Like we did for Jackson’s big sister, Abigail, we are asserting – re-asserting actually — a very ancient and scandalous idea that a child of God can be not half Jewish and half Christian, but fully Jewish and fully Christian: a son of Israel and a member of the body of Christ. By our ritual actions and by the promises we are making, we are going way out on a limb to actively engage in the repair of the world (tikkun ha’olam).

We are way out on a limb, with our safety harness, which is of course, the grace of God. We are declaring that Jackson has dual and full citizenship as a Jew and as a Christian. I want to be clear that this is not some kind of “Jews for Jesus” activity, any more than if he had an Irish passport and a French passport, he would be imagining that he was a French citizen for Ireland or an Irish citizen for France. He is not half and half. He is both. We are declaring Jackson to be a full member of a people chosen to be a light to the nations and a full member of a people called to be the light of the world, both of whom declare God is with us.

This double blessing comes with double responsibility – double honors and double obligations. Fortunately for Jackson, there is a great deal of overlap in the honors and obligations of Judaism and Christianity. We are calling on Jackson to be faithful to the particular teachings of the Torah which has a universalistic vision for the well-being of all humanity. And we are calling on Jackson to be faithful to the Gospel, the particular teachings of Jesus whose universalistic vision was for the well-being of all humanity. And most important for each one of us, we are promising to support him because we know what he does not yet know – that he is going to need a synagogue and a church to help him grow into his faith, to navigate the contradictions and ambiguities, to rejoice in the abundance of God, and grieve at how we fail to see that abundance.

People will keep telling him it’s impossible to be who he really is. We will need to keep assuring him and the rest of his family by our witness that with God, nothing is impossible. We will need to remember the words from the Wisdom of Solomon, that all the souls of the righteous, even the ones who seem to have been disgraced, are in God’s hand. We will need to remember the words of Revelation, “Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever.” And we will need to remember Jesus’ words to his dear friend Lazarus – “come out!” and Jesus’ words to the larger community, “unbind him and let him go!” We will need to remember that all people, everywhere, are God’s children, whether they believe it or not, whether they know it or not, whether they act like it or not.

You might remember Reza Aslan’s column in the New York Times Magazine last December. [2] Aslan told of navigating a multi-cultural, multi-faith family holiday dinner where members of his family “for a good 10 minutes…stood around the dinner table arguing about how to thank God for the meal [they] were about to eat.” He wrote about the realization that although they speak different spiritual or religious languages about the ineffable, their dreams and aspirations, fears and anxieties, and their gratitude for the many gifts they receive are very similar – they just use different words and symbols in their religious practices. Aslan tells “a Sufi parable about four hungry travelers from different countries who are trying to decide what to buy with the single coin they hold in common. The Persian wants to spend the one coin on angur; the Turk, on uzum; the Arab, on inab; and the Greek, on stafil. Confusion turns to anger as the four travelers argue among themselves. It takes a passing linguist to explain to them that they are all, in fact, asking for the same thing: grapes.”

That’s it, isn’t it?

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