Kristin White, All Saints
Kristin White
The Feast of All Saints – November 2, 2014
1 John 3:1-2
This is the feast of all the saints. There is a place for you at this table. Help us keep the feast.
If you have come here today to sing those saints into our midst, to remember the ancient stories of who we have been as a Christian people, there is a place for you at this table. Help us keep the feast.
If you have come here today to honor someone you love who has died, to hear their name read into our holy communion; if you, truth be told, come with a heavy heart in that loss, wishing instead to have that person living and breathing in the pew right next to you instead of borne witness by reading and the lighting of a candle, there is a place for you at this table. Help us keep the feast.
If you hunger after logic attached to circumstance, if you can’t stomach platitudes and easy responses in your grief, in your loss, there is a place for you at this table. Help us keep the feast.
If you long for justice; if you recognize that the acts of the saints are always and only acts of grace and love, lived out over the space of a lifetime within a community of people trying and trying again (ever imperfectly) to do the same; if you hope to join that witness in your own imperfect practice within this loving and imperfect and grace-filled community, there is a place for you at this table. Help us keep the feast.
If you are new to this Body, seeking a place in which to belong…or perhaps not even knowing what exactly you seek, but longing after something bigger than you can name, there is a place for you at this table. Help us keep the feast.
If you have been a part of this Body for a very long time; if you know the stories of who we have been, and long to tell those stories again to your children and grandchildren, to others who would take their place alongside you, there will always be a place for you at this table. Help us keep the feast.
If you trust that this is the place and moment where heaven meets earth and earth meets heaven, together with angels and archangels and all that sacred company; where we catch a fleeting glimpse of the holy banquet to which we are all bidden, together with everybody, everybody, everybody who has ever received “bread and wine and been told it was Jesus and it was for them,”[1] there is a place for you at this table. Help us keep the feast.
If you are skeptical but seeking, struggling with what any or all of this means; if your doubts outnumber your certainties and your questions still go unanswered, there is a place for you at this table. Help us keep the feast.
If you are young and unknowing, growing in faith and still discovering the story of who you are, of who we are; if you long to know the prayers by heart and to clothe yourself within this narrative of hope, there is a place for you at this table. Help us keep the feast.
If you are elderly and striving to remember; if you know all those prayers by heart; if you hope to share this story with others longing for words of faith, there is a place for you at this table. Help us keep the feast.
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This is the time, this is the place, where we remember who we are, reminding ourselves that we have good reason to hold our confession of faith, because we have experienced its truth in our very existence as a community.[2]
“See what love the father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”
“That is what we are,” writes the author of the first letter of John that we heard Carrie read. And before that occurs, earlier in the same book:
“We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life…”
Children of God (for that is what you are): this is what I declare to you about what was and is, what I have seen with my eyes, what I have heard, what I have looked at and touched with my hands concerning the word of life: there is a place for you at this table. You who are children, still learning our stories; you who are elderly and have our prayers in your bones; you who sing of the saints; you who grieve unspeakable loss; you who strive after justice; you who seek to belong; you who have belonged for a long time (and still do, and always will); you who believe; you who struggle with belief…
Children of God: there is a place for you at this table.
This is the feast of all the saints. Help us keep the feast.
[1] http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2013/11/778/
[2] http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2243