Love's One Note Solo - All Saints 2022

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Feast of All Saints Day (transferred), November 6, 2022 by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.

The trouble, of course, with any talk of sanctity, holiness, or saints, is we so easily confuse this with “being nice,” and “being good,” as if it were some kind of self-improvement project successfully carried out to its desired end. “Mission Accomplished!” pronounced from the Pearly Gates. We think we know what sanctity looks like, and the risk is that we merely execute our idea of sanctity under our own steam to the bedazzled applause of our adoring fans. To paraphrase George Tyrell, we look down the well of history and see our own face reflected back–saints look remarkably like our idea of how saints should look according to our time and context.

But Saints are always surprising, unsettling, and supremely odd. They are rather uneven types, whose lives have been “knocked sideways by the love of God,” as Rowan Wiliams puts it. Saints are people whose lives have been illuminated by the light and love of God shining through the cracked and crazed glass of a life in unpredictable, and unconventional ways. Just as prayer, as Ruth Burrows was reminding us a couple weeks ago, is God’s work in us where our only effort is to dispose ourselves to the healing and transifiguring light of God’s presence and action in our lives, so sanctity is not our work. It’s God who stirs up the stale and stagnant waters of our life, who troubles the comfort of self-centeredness and lures us into going towards the stranger–crossing to the other side of the road as healing oil, a helping hand who foots the bill. It’s God in Christ “who accomplishes all things… according to the working out of his great power.” The new song that the Lord sings in the lives of the saints comes from their availability to dispose themselves to something other than  this “out of tune” “world [that] is too much with us.” 

When “getting and spending” are the stream by which we are planted, when power, possessions and prestige are the well from which we drink, the result is what we see on the news that’s too much with us–wars and rumors of wars, calving glaciers, unbreathable air, racial violence and structural inequality, the body-politic shriven by division and dangerous rhetoric that erupts tragically, but predictably, in violence. The question every saint’s life asks is a rather blunt one–where are you planted? By the stream of living water? Rooted and grounded in Christ? Or in the stagnant mudpuddle of life lived with I, me, mine at the center that brings only suffering to ourselves, and others? Where are we planted, and what fruit is being borne? The fruit of human and non-human flourishing as beloved community with no dog-licked Lazarus left outside the gate, or Billie Holliday’s ghastly “strange fruit swinging from the poplar trees?”

The poet Jack Spicer used to speak of poetry as “the practice of the outside,” by which he meant poetry as an intentional exposure, laying bare, of ourselves to that which is “other.” Instead of mastering words, the poet, in Spicer’s view, is mastered by words. New ways of seeing, being, speaking and singing emerge from this “outside” “Martian” receptivity. Saints, too, planted by streams of living water, open their hearts, minds, souls, and bodies to the outside–to the new song being sung in Jesus and that can come to be sung through us, as us–cracked, and crazed, and warbly-voiced as we are. And while this new song might seem to be “outside” of us at first, something we acquire or add on, the more we come to harmonize with its sycopated praise and thanksgiving, its swinging timbrel and harp two-step that shakes the walls of the city, the more we realize that this song has always been singing itself in us. This song is the song we were made to sing. It’s the song that sings us into who we really are. And what is this song? Rather like a Neil Young guitar solo, it has only one note: love. 

Saints are those who like the woman at the well, arouse with eager longing, and holy urgency, a yearning to drink deeply from the waters of peace, justice, love: “Lord, let me drink this water always.” Saints are those pliant, supple souls who consent to being knit–just as they are–into the tapestry of the mystical body of Christ. “True union,” as Teillard de Chardin writes, “differentiates.” So sanctity doesn’t result in the stultifying sameness of the cookie-cutter. It’s in giving ourselves away as an offering, a ceaselessly surrendering self-dedication to God that God’s work  (often hidden, unnoticed, and unremarkable) is done through us. Each unrepeatable, unique thread, just as it is, woven by a willingness to be woven (rather than weave it according to a pattern of our own devising) into what God dreams for the world–that God’s will (not my peevish, tiny, defended, self-protected will that is too much with me) be done.

That’s really what we’re doing when we sing, when we’re sung by, the baptismal promises. The old song of I, me, mine, goes under those waters and we come up thoroughly drowned, gulping down that new song that Christ is singing into the deepest part of ourselves as our very breath. We’re “marked as Christ’s own forever” with the “seal of the promised Holy Spirit”--an indissoluable bond of love forged between us and God that nothing can break. Our life–whether we were baptized as children, or whether we’re undergoing it as adults–is always the gradual working out in the minute particulars of daily life of the stunning reality that we have been buried with Christ in a death like his that we might be raised in a life like his and walk in love as Easter people.

Our task in this short span of days is to actualize, manifest, realize (make living and real, through hands, feet, and voice) what has been done for us. To allow God to be manifest in our lives. To render ourselves transparent to the Father’s love in the Spirit as the whole of Jesus’ life (not just his death on the cross, of course) is transparent. To harmonize, to rhyme, to ring like the peculiar tuning forks that we each individually are with that song, the new song God is singing in Christ. The one-note solo played from before the foundation of the world–love. All inclusive, indiscriminate, radically welcoming, boundary-crossing, poured out for others, love. 

When Jesus delivers the Lukan version of the beatitudes there is an interesting contrast with the Matthean account. In Matthew, Jesus ascends the Mount and is seated in the traditional teaching posture as the embodiment, the enfleshment of Torah. No longer a book, but a life revealed. And the disciples, looking up at Jesus, see the big broad open blue sky, the heavens. In Luke’s account, Jesus is down in the muck–healing and laying on hands. The Sermon on the Plain is delivered with Jesus looking up at the disciples. It’s an image of total solidarity with the least of these. Jesus goes where the least of these are and calls the disciples to do the same. When the disciples look to Jesus delivering the beatitudes in Luke, they see his face framed by the poor, the hungry, weeping and mournful. That’s why baptism is not a mark of specialness, or a badge of membership, but a sacrament of implicatedness and solidarity in the lives of others–all others. We learn, as Christ comes to live in us, that in fact it’s his face we see in the faces of others. It’s his face in the stepped over one outside the gate of our sumptuous feast. The great chasm between us and them is erased in baptism and saints are those walking sacraments who manifest this reality in flesh, bone, and blood.

But, we ask, how? Enemy love. Doing good to those who hate us. Blessing those who curse us. Turning the other cheek. Not witholding anything from anyone. That sounds impossible. And it is. As a project of moral perfection undertaken by our own efforts, it is impossible. I can’t do it. You can’t do it. But Jesus can. God in Christ through the Holy Spirit can. With God all things are possible. And so we dispose ourselves, open ourselves, become little and childlike so that Christ might come to live Christ’s life in and through us as self-emptying love poured out for others. We make space for God to get at us and do God’s work in and through us. We surrender to love that we might be loved into loving others. We consent with the little mustard seed of our “yes” to God’s presence and action in our life that we might become a tree without boundary welcoming all into the branches of warm embrace. 

The invitation is to take off your shoes and turn aside. To leave behind stories of not enough. To lay aside familial, tribal, and institutional affiliation. To lay aside our roles, our masks. To lay aside our judgements and requirements and demands about how we should be, how others should be. The invitation is to come home to God who has made God’s home in us. To lay aside our busyness. Our frenetic doings and efforts to manipulate and control. Our efforts to be a somebody through our doings. The invitation is to rest. To be. To abide in love. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. Nothing to accomplish. Nothing to attain. Just love. Just belovedness descending bodily like a dove breathing its healing breath into you. The leaden skies of shame and blame and indifference and self-protection torn open. Enter there. Enter here. Be disposed. And then live its consequences out for others–all others without exception. Let your life sing with Jesus’ song. Be danced away from yourself towards others as water to wash, bread to feed, oil to heal, and wine to slake the thirst of the parched. Little Christs, little saints sung and streaming out the great doors–love’s one note solo on our lips.