A Great Day for the Race

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the feast of All Saints by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.

My father is an unapologetic virtuoso of the “Dad Joke.” I remember getting up as a grumpy, groggy teenager for band practice in the middle of winter (any time that is not August in Toronto). Going to school meant bracing myself against the biting cold in a kind of controlled shiver and trudging through mailbox-high snow to the bus and the subway on my way to school in the dark and repeating the process as the sun dipped below the leaden horizon at 4:30. Rinse and repeat. A miserable affair. I was sitting in the kitchen drinking my coffee--I think we were allowed to drink caffeine as soon as we were weaned--and my dad smiled and chirped cheerily, “It’s a great day for the race!” “Race? What race?” “The human race!” Ugh.  Deacon Holly and I were talking about baptism last week with Nathaniel and she said, “I think All Saints is the best day to be baptized.” Of course, any day is a wonderful day to be baptized, but there is something to Deacon Holly’s insight. It’s a great day for the race. But what is it about being baptized, and reaffirming our baptism on this day that stands out, that makes it especially profound?

I think it has something to do with the saints--those ordinary people like you and me who’ve had their lives “knocked sideways by God’s love” as Rowan Williams puts it. Those ordinary Janes and Joes who reveal, unveil, apocalypse to us, for us, what a life lived transparent to God in Christ through the Holy Spirit actually looks like in concrete terms. Saints are splinters of the full, complete, once-and-for-all manifestation of what God’s love looks like in a human life that we see in the person of Jesus. Saints are those who say with Paul, “No longer I, but Christ in me who lives.” Saints are those folks who give themselves away to love in love and for love. And what we see in that cloud of witnesses is not a stultifying sameness, a bland, cookie cutter anonymity, but a unique, unrepeatable, minutely particular instance of what the light of God’s love looks like shining in and through a life: “To be a window, through thy grace” as George Herbert writes. And that’s the paradox of the life of discipleship--the more we give ourselves away in self-forgetful love to God, the more we actually become the unique person God created us to be. Losing our life, we find it shot through with, saturated with God’s love so as to be that love--right here, right now, in this particular place, at this particular time--for others. 

That’s why All Saints is a particularly apt day for baptism, and for those of us who have been baptized to remember (re-collect in such a way as to make really present) our baptism. Saints hold up for us the telos, the end, the goal of the Christian life: Union and communion with the Living, Loving, and Liberating God. Saints turn--again and again and again--to source of beauty, goodness, and truth and come to resemble inevitably and inexorably that to which they turn--like an iron that glows with the heat of the flames into which it is thrust. The iron remains iron, but glows, sings, and hotly hums with the flame of love. Saints are made blazingly holy by graced participation in the love that is God’s nature. Love, in the words of our reading from the Wisdom of Solomon, is like a purifying fire that refines the gold, burning away the dross until, like sparks running through the stubble, what love looks like in each particular one shines forth unveiled, unbushelled, unbound and walking down from Tabor’s heights  into the marketplace as bliss-bestowing hands.

In baptism, when we go under the waters, something dies, something is drowned. Our usual way of navigating the world with ourselves as the measure of all things--my wants, desires, requirements, demands, prejudices and preconceptions--goes under the sanctifying waters of grace and what emerges is a new creation--“See [behold], I am making all things new.” Our bursting up from the depths, is simultaneously the coming down of the New Jerusalem out of heaven. We die to all the ways we’ve tried through our piddly promethean promiscuities to secure our peace in power, possessions, and prestige and live from and for the Beautiful One who is, “the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” We find out who we are and what our purpose is in union with Christ. He is our beginning and our end. He is the one seated on the throne in the depths of our being. “It is done!” rings out as the triumphant proclamation that everything we need has already been gifted to us, free, and unmerited, by God in Christ through the Holy Spirit. All we have to do is receive it, consent to God’s pressure in our lives, and let God be God in us for others.

Saints model for us an alternative to business as usual: the stuckness, boundness, the pain and suffering that comes from having anything but the Living God at the center of our lives (“He stinketh, Lord!” as the King James version so colorfully puts it). The lives of the saints make manifest the disturbing freedom and strangely ordinary beauty that arises from a life that heeds the call to step out of the tomb of self-enclosure, a life that “gets up” and runs to Him with an open heart. Everything else is “waterish, bleak, and thin.”

That’s the trick, really, of being a Christian. Noticing all the subtle little ways that we don’t live from the freedom that is promised and gifted to us in baptism. All the ways we substitute what we think will make us happy, what our consumer culture tells us will make us happy, for the love of God. If only I were skinnier. If only I were healthier. If only I had more money, a better relationship, a new iPhone, a trip into outer space with 90 year-old William Shatner… then I would be happy. That orientation, those “if onlies,” are the strips of cloth that bind us, prevent us from knowing and experiencing our inherent belovedness: the wholeness, completeness, the absence of any lack whatsoever, that is abiding in the tear-drying, fear casting out, air-freshening love of God. Interesting that there is cloth covering Lazarus’ face when he emerges from the tomb. His visage, his true self in Christ, is uncovered when he heeds the call and consents to the action of God’s hands and feet in the world--the Beloved Community gathered around Christ--who gingerly unbind him, help free him from the constraint of looking for peace, happiness, and joy anywhere else but in God.

It’s important to notice how much God desires this peace, happiness, and communal flourishing. Before we were formed in the womb, God’s deepest yearning is for all of creation to be united with Godself. God so loved the world that he gave his only son for us to drag us to Godself. God will stop at nothing, will go to any place no matter the cost, no matter how deathly, no matter how stinkethy, no matter how tomb-like--to bring us home. God in Christ is “greatly disturbed” and “deeply moved”--agitated, troubled, stirred up--by the various tombs we find ourselves in at different points in this difficult and perplexing thing we call being human. But the astounding thing is that no matter the detour we’ve taken, no matter how lost in the weeds, or tossed in a ditch we’ve become, God is always there, shouting in a loud voice over the din, hand outstretched ready to pull us up in an unshakable, unbreakable fireman’s hold of love.

Once we start to realize that this Prodigally loving God will journey even to the far country among the pigs and dine on slop in order to draw us home--that this strange God-man breaks bread with us sinners and tax collectors--we stop trying to look outside of ourselves for the happiness that is our birthright. We come home to one who has made his home in us and realize whether we are at home or abroad, God and the freedom of God’s love is always with us, always available, always whispering--“Get up! Be opened! Be unbound! Do not be afraid! No more if onlies! I am with you even to the end of the age. Have a kleenex to dry your tears.” 

 And then it occurs to us, that if God is for me, with me, God must also be with you and you and you and you. Baptism is not initiation into a privileged elite, a badge of honor, or a membership in a private club of the elect. Baptism reveals the reality that we are all elected in Christ. Baptism is the death of all tribal affiliation. We die to I, me, mine and rise in Christ through whom all things are made. We wake from our slumber to find ourselves each morning pledged anew to each and every member of the one body. A “private club” consisting of the entire and ever-expanding universe whom we are called to serve in sacrificial, self-forgetful love. 

That means working for peace and justice--the mutual flourishing of all God’s people and not just a few at the top of the heap. That means stewarding mountains, rivers, the good earth, and the dazzling firmament. That means being the hands that unbind our siblings trapped in tombs of exclusion, discrimation, inequality, and racism--uncovering the intrinsically dignified faces of each and every person without exception. That means turning and returning to the love of God in the prayers and the breaking of the bread, making space daily for God to get at us, letting the spirit move over our depths, call us forth and make us new. That means sharing the Good News of the work our living, loving, and liberating God is doing in us with others. That means breathing the air Jesus breathes, standing where he stands and going where he goes--to the left for dead in the ditches of despair, those scapegoated in the latest tweet--as the same outstretched arm that grabs us and won’t let go. His hand as our hand. God's unbreakable bond with us manifest as our unbreakable bond with all of God’s people and all of creation.

At the Deacon’s dismissal, we really do run like sparks through the stubble from this place as what we have received from God--oil to heal, water to wash, bread to feed, wine to slake the thirst of thirsty. Each in our own unrepeatable way, cookie cutters tossed to the wind, we branch out as little, living flames of love, flickers of new light in the tombish darkness. It’s a great day for the race.