A Reflection for All Saints Day
(Transferred) All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC
November 6, 2016 Thomas E. Wilson,
Rector
Saint Facing Dreams
Fellow Saints of All Saints, I bring
you good news. You have two more days to vote, two more days to
listen to political ads, and then this election season will be over.
Despite words from both sides that respect of others was the hallmark
of their lives, it has been a very discouraging time in which some
good people were slandered and some scary people cheered as they
attacked. It is hard to believe that the harm unleashed can ever be
redeemed. Yet in the middle of all this broken landscape of
incivility, we come together as brothers and sisters to be the body
of Christ, which is what Paul calls the church. The church, like the
bread, is gathered by Jesus, blessed, broken and given for the
feeding and healing of a broken world.
The Hebrew Testament lesson for this
late celebration for the Feast of All Saints is from the Book of
Daniel. Daniel is the legendary figure of a prophet in the time of
the exile in the 6th Century BC, but much of the book
seems to be written in Aramaic and Greek in the 2nd
Century BC when Israel was being victimized by the misrule of the
Seleucid Emperor, Antiochus IV Epiphanes.
In this passage (we read only six
verses of the twenty eight in this 7th chapter), Daniel
has a dream, a vision, which disturbs him. He then approaches one of
the heavenly attendants around the Ancient of Days, a circumlocution
for God, and asks the attendant to interpret the dream for him. This
is a standard practice in dream interpretation. The dreamer picks
one of the images in the dream and asks it questions, what a teacher
of mine, Bob Hoss, calls the Six Magic Questions:
1)
Who or what are you (name
and describe yourself as the dream image)?2) What is your purpose or function?
3) What do you like about what you are?
4) What do
you dislike about what you are?
5) What
do you fear most?
6) What
do you desire most?
In dreams all figures in the dream have
to do with parts of us. As he questions the attendant, Daniel comes
to the understanding that he too is an attendant of God. In this
case, the attendant is an angel who is attending God, working to
being God's will on earth as it is in heaven, who is disturbed at how
the world is suffering from the damage of people and institutions
that act like beasts and yet finding hope. The attendant in Daniel
finds hope by seeing with the eyes of faith, finding in that new
vision that God will redeem all things by using what the attendant in
Daniel's dream calls a “bar enash”, an Aramaic phrase
meaning a “human being” which is translated into “Son of Man”.
In his letters to the churches, one of
which we have as our second lesson, Paul uses the word “Saints”
when he is referring to those who serve God by their lives, their
words, thoughts and deeds. In the dream and in Paul's letters and in
the real world, the world looks like a horrible place, but the Saints
find hope seeing that the Christ is redeeming all things. Paul, who
was raised reading the scriptures, says that the Christ, the one who
appeared as a “bar enash”, was the one known as Jesus, the one he
calls Christ Jesus, and is the one in whom we place our hope, not for
our individual redemption but for the redemption of all creation.
Jesus will use that phrase from Daniel
as he describes himself as a person who comes at the end of the old
way of living in the world and into a new way of living into a
broken world. In the Gospel lesson for today, Luke passes on one time
that Jesus describes the Christ-vision of the saint, the one who
looks deeper and sees in the middle of all the brokenness the hope of
the future. Luke remembers Jesus seeing the Saints working to comfort
the weeping, to feed the hungry, and to share the riches of God's
Kingdom with the poor.
Hope is not closing our eyes and
crossing our fingers, wishing that things could be better. For a
saint, human beings who serve God in their lives, it is the opening
of hands and hearts as the Spirit of Christ gives us strength to work
for that new future for which we pray every Sunday, that God's will
be done on earth as in heaven. Emily Dickinson wrote:
“Hope” is the
thing with feathers -
That perches in
the soul -
And sings the tune
without the words -
And never stops -
at all -
And sweetest - in
the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be
the storm -
That could abash
the little Bird
That kept so many
warm -
I’ve heard it in
the chillest land -
And on the
strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in
Extremity,
It asked a crumb -
of me.
A Saint is not a pristine, sanitized,
plaster figure of a good person in the past, but a flawed human being
holding on to hope who works in the present to bring hope into a
broken world. A Saint sees the world, and the people in it, as God
sees it and them, loved and incomplete, who God keeps calling to live
in the Divine Love, working to bring about our living into God's
vision, Daniel's dream, Paul's letters and Jesus' words and following
the one who came into the world as a human being so that we might
become God filled complete human beings being the outward and visible
signs of the body of Christ in this world.
Saint Facing Dreams
Wishing could be good saint
but fall short of what I ain't.
If I hear one more smear
delivered with a sneer
by one more smiling toad
I with rage will explode.
The thing is that I can see
that that toad is part of me.
I pat myself on my back
that silence gives me slack.
Nightmares are but dreams
coming back with screams.
So now I will pay attention
to patterns of condescension
snaking out of my thoughts
nourishing clever pot shots.
Christ give me strength today
to act fully as I would pray.
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