When someone dies, Americans are afraid to speak their name. We don't want to disturb the widow by mentioning her husband's name. We want to distract her! Talk about the weather, about buying clothes, about the economy, but avoid her pain at all costs. That is the LAST thing that she wants to be reminded of (as if she was thinking about anything else but her loss all the time!). Her husband is gone and we cannot bring him back, so why remind her? Right? After all, he is gone and never coming back.
He's gone and never coming back, right?
Today is All Saints Sunday. It is traditional on this day to baptize new Christians into the faith. Here at the Cathedral, we enjoy a great celebration as we baptize twelve people. It is one of the greatest joys of my life, to have the honor of baptizing people into the body of Christ, into the family of God. As the water runs over the heads of these twelve, God is welcoming them into heaven and this fact is so ultimately, mind-blowingly good that I can hardly take it in. Every time I baptize I am overwhelmed. How can I explain to you what we are doing? It is something so significant, so deep, that I don't even come close to understanding it myself.
This week, an image came to my mind...
The heaviest living organism on this planet is located one mile southwest of Lake Fish in Utah. Can you guess what it is? It is a grove of aspen trees! These trees are called Pando. They are given one name because they actually consist of one living organism. Also known as The Trembling Giant, this grove of trees is actually one living being. They have one, enormous, underground root system that unites them all into the heaviest known organism on the planet, weighing in at 6,600 tons! The root system of Pando is about 80,000 years old.
Whenever there is a forest fire, these trees will be burned to the ground, leaving nothing but ashes. But underneath the ground, their root system is still alive. And they are reborn once more, to ascend to the sky with beautiful leaves that dance in the wind.
Paul once spoke of Christians as one body, one living organism. When a person is baptized, roots are laid that bind them to the rest of us in Christ. We cannot see these roots but they unite us all into one body, and they are stronger than death.
We are a family of God. And we are bound together by our faith and our relationships with God and one another. Once you are baptized, your life belongs to something larger than just yourself. You are part of a living entity, a life larger than your own.
Jesus asks us to love God first and love our neighbor as ourselves, because everything that we do, we do in relationship. Jesus' Great Commandment is all about relationships. We are bound to one another and to God. Together, we are called to usher in the kingdom of God.
I am reminded of how at the healing service on Wednesdays, we always join hands to say the Lords Prayer together. No matter how many of us are there. We unite as one. We are rooted in Christ at that moment, joined to Him and to one another.
We are bound not just to the living but also to the dead. On some instinctive level, you already know this, don't you? If someone that you love dies, whenever there is a special event in the life of a family, it is evident that someone is missing. The holidays are hardest for those who are grieving. A mother whose son died in a car accident once looked at me and said, "I can manage OK, but then Christmas comes along, or Easter or a wedding or a baptism, and I realize that he is not here with me. And the void in my life is unimaginable."
Someone is missing. Who is it? Your mother? Your grandfather? Your friend? Your child? Who do you wish were here? Who are the ones that you love who have died?
Jesus says we are blessed when we are poor, when we don't have enough, when we grieve and miss the ones that we love who have died and left us here alone. We are blessed in that emptiness. Blessed. Because the emptiness proves to us that we are still connected. We miss their physical presence but they still live with us, underneath the surface of this life, in something much more vast and beyond our understanding. They exist with us in bonds of love that transcend death and bind us all together, both the living and the dead.
That is what the communion of saints means. It is the root system of the Body of Christ. It means that you and I are linked and not just with each other but with all the people who have shaped and molded you into who you are. The relationships of our lives shape us and they live in us.
Did you know what Michelangelo said about carving his famous statue of David? He said that David was in the stone, waiting to be carved out. And what would carve David out of the stone, his relationship with the living hand of Michelangelo.
God carves you into who you are using relationships. Your mistakes and failures as well as your greatest achievements make you the person you are and the most important relationship is the one that you have with God. You are baptized ones, children of God. All other relationships are secondary to the one that you have with God.
Joseph in the book of Genesis that we read, he only becomes the fullness of who God calls him to be when he suffers a LOT. He suffers because of the strained relationships that he has with his brothers, relationships of favoritism, ignorance and jealousy. Only after he is sold as a slave by his own brothers, wrongly convicted of a crime and thrown in prison, does he begin to become the man who will rescue his entire family from famine. Joseph knew that even though his family mistreated him, they were still fundamentally a part of who he had become. Joseph is carved into who he was meant to be, carved by suffering and loss.
One of the greatest parts of the Christian faith is that we are not afraid to speak of the dead, because we are still in relationship with them. The saints are those who have left us physically but with whom you are still linked in love. If you cannot imagine heaven without someone, then that person has become your saint.
The baptized can not only talk about death, we can name the dead. We can speak their names. Why? Because we know that we will see them again. We believe in a life beyond this life. We believe in eternal life. We are not afraid to name the one who is missing. And let the loss of their physical presence shape us into people of God. We know that our roots are still linked to the ones we love, even after death. We are the family of God, the body of Christ.
