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Texts: Wisdom of Solom 3:1-9; Revelations 21:1-6a
Growing up in the Roman Catholic Church, the concept of the
Communion of Saints was very meaningful to me as a child and young adult.
Almost every single day of the year was the feast day of some historical saint,
and the daily mass would be dedicated to that saint,
and we would read the lives of the saints in catechism classes and at home.
And we would read the biographies of other Christian servants
who hadn’t yet been proclaimed saints by the church.
The saints were our superheroes.
One of my favorites as a teenager was the story of Josef de Veuster,
a young Dutchman who joined a religious order and took the name Damian,
and later became known as Father Damian of Molokai,
because in the 1870s he voluntarily exiled himself onto the leper colony
of Molokai in Hawaii, to be pastor to all those who were afflicted
with leprosy and quarantined there for life.
After a decade, he developed leprosy himself, and died on the island.
Just last month, Pope Benedict officially canonized Damian
as a saint of the church.
But there have been hundreds of thousands of saints throughout the centuries –
some formally canonized, some proclaimed by popular legend and acclamation,
and some living their holiness quietly, without fanfare,
in their own families and communities and churches
– but truly saints nevertheless.
In Catholic terminology, they talk about the church militant and the church triumphant.
The church militant is us
– Christians still living, still striving to fight the good fight every day
and the church triumphant is those who have come before us
and gone on to their reward.
As Saint Paul says, they have fought the good fight, they have finished the race,
they have kept the faith, and have received the crown of righteousness.
But the point is, there is still one communion of saints;
there is a spiritual connection and a spiritual continuum between us and them.
In Christ, and in the hands of God, they still live, and their lives
and their deeds and their prayers still resonate in the community of faith on earth.
I want to share an image with you that a clergy colleague shared
with me last week at a meeting. She said,
“When I think of prayer, I think of a super highway,
with vehicles constantly moving on it. But the vehicles are prayers.
Somewhere in the world, someone is praying every second of every minute
of every hour of every day.”
“I’m a visual person” she said, “so I think of it up here,
a superhighway of prayers constantly moving up to heaven,
every second of every day, 27-7.
And that highway goes back in time and forward in time
– all the way back 2000 years, even 5000 years.
And it keeps going forward into the future, till the end of time;
beyond the end of time.”
That, to me, is a good image of the Communion of Saints.
Somewhere, always, every second, every century, someone is sending a prayer.
Prayers of praise, prayers of thanks, prayers of petition;
prayers for healing, prayers for peace, prayers for justice;
prayers in laughter, and prayers in tears;
prayers in solitude, prayers in silence, prayers in song;
prayers in community, prayers in every language under heaven;
prayers in action, prayers in protest,
prayers expressed in acts of kindness and deeds of courage.
Someone, somewhere has prayed, is praying, will pray at every moment of history.
And all those prayers still resonate in the universe, on earth as they do in heaven.
I want to share another image with you that speaks to me of the Communion of Saints.
In the 1970's and 1980's, paramilitary Death Squads were very common
in Central and South America.
Secretly sponsored by government and business interests,
these Death Squads acted with impunity.
In El Salvador alone, they killed tens of thousands of peasants and activists,
including nuns and priests who resisted the oppression.
The victims were called “the disappeared”.
In response, the Christian Church developed a dramatic means
of expressing their faith, their hope and their resistance .
During the liturgy, they would read aloud the names
of those who had been "disappeared."
When each name was read, the congregation would call out, "¡Presente!" (Here!)
They were affirming what the Church has believed from the beginning:
that others may have the power to destroy our mortal flesh,
but in Christ, God has destroyed death. . .that our dead are not dead.
They are alive in Christ.
The Death Squads in El Salvador wreaked their havoc to be sure.
They caused terrible suffering and untold sorrow.
But they were impotent against the Church's claim
that death is swallowed up in victory,
and that the Communion of Saints is not bounded by time.
And so we claim that whenever and wherever Christians gather
to break bread together in Christ's name
the whole company of heaven and earth are gathered:
the angels and archangels are here; the saints and martyrs are here.
Our departed loved ones are here.
This is the Communion of Saints. And they are all here.
¡Presente! Can you say that with me? All of you? ¡Presente!
Peter, James and John, Simon and Andrew? ¡Presente!
Zacchaeus and Bartimaeus? ¡Presente!
Paul, Martha and all the Marys? ¡Presente!
Augustine and Aquinas, Francis, and Theresa? ¡Presente!
John Huss and Micheleangelo, John Calvin and Martin Luther? ¡Presente!
Albert Schweitzer and Damian of Molokai? ¡Presente!
Archbishop Romero and Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks? ¡Presente!
And not just those … not only those who make the news.
Eliot Church has its own Communion of Saints, whose life and love and prayers
and deeds still fill this sanctuary with blessing and grace and holiness.
Helen and Isabel Conway? ¡Presente!
Henry Shepard and Harold Fray? ¡Presente!
Kimra Graves? ¡Presente!
Jean Schafer and Edna Achuff? ¡Presente!
Ken Gleason and Jim Humphrey? ¡Presente!
Jo Starbuck and Virginia Webber? ¡Presente!
These are some of the recently departed saints of Eliot Church.
But the list could go back 165 years just in this sacred space alone.
And during our Communion Prayer we will name other dearly departed loved ones,
the names and memories you have brought here today.
They too, are present in the Communion of Saints, and so we proclaim of all of those
whom you are naming in the privacy of your own hearts: ¡Presente!
Just one more thought.
As I said earlier, it is not just the Church Triumphant who are part of the Communion of Saints.
It is also the Church Militant.
That’s us – the saints on earth who love and labor and strive every day
to walk in the Way of holiness.
We too are part of the great communion.
And we do not labor alone.
We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses,
borne up into a web of blessedness woven from centuries of saints before us,
carried along on a super highway of millennia of prayer.
When the roll call of the saints of God is called, we too can say "¡Presente!"
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