Sermon — November 7, All Saints’ Sunday
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings
Even if you don’t live in Boston, you probably know that we just had a mayoral election; you could hardly open the Globe or turn on the radio without hearing about it. City politics are so different from national or even state politics. Most issues in a typical mayoral race don’t fall along our partisan lines. It can be surprising who ends up on one side or another of any particular local issue. City politics are messy and complicated and—as anyone who’s worked in municipal government, could no doubt tell you—unpredictable.
City politics are messy because city life is messy. We live stacked on top of each other, and it means that the things we do affect one another in an immediate way. When we play our music a bit louder than we should, there’s no pleasant half-acre of woods to dampen the noise. When we work from home or learn from home, we sometimes have to invent quite ingenious ways to find some space. When our children drop their toys methodically out the window onto the street below, the extraordinary quality of our parenting is visible to twelve to fifteen of our neighbors.
(To be clear, that’s a true story, but — ist wasn’t Murray.)
Every community, of course, however dense or spacious it may be, has drama, and it’s because the messiness of human life is not really a function of population density. It’s just what happens when two or more humans, imperfect saints that we are, have to work together on anything, from a middle-school group project to a marriage to a City Council or Select Board.
So I think it’s remarkable that when God delivers one final vision to St. John the Divine in the Book of Revelation, one last idea of what our eternal life with God will be, it’s a city.
Revelation is the last book in the Bible. Not because it was the last written, which it wasn’t, but because it deals almost entirely with the last things. Revelation is a strange and confusing book, but at its core it is a vision of the future into which God is leading us, the end of the story that God began writing thousands of years ago in the books that now make up our Old Testament, the story that God is still telling today, in and through each of our lives.
It’s often tempting to imagine and to pray for a return to some golden age of the past: to the way things were before Covid, or before our nation was so divided, or before whatever honeymoon period we remember fondly ended. But the Book of Revelation at the end of the Bible doesn’t take us back to the Book of Genesis at its beginning. When St. John receives this vision of the final form of the people of God, he doesn’t see Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; or Noah and his family with all the animals in the ark; or the family of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob whom God calls and through whom God works.
John doesn’t see a tribe or a nation, like the people of Israel whom Moses freed from slavery and the judges and prophets led, a holy people, through whom and for whom the world would be redeemed.
John doesn’t even see a kingdom, like the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven that Jesus so often proclaims.
John sees a city—a holy city, a “new Jerusalem” where we live, together, with God, but a city, nonetheless. (Rev. 21:2)
The story doesn’t end where it begins. We don’t return to the good old days, to the perfect innocence of life in the Garden of Eden with its population of two. We move forward instead, growing innumerable with the passage of time, from the garden through the desert and the wilderness and on toward the City of God, a city in which we all one day will dwell, with all the saints.
And I mean all the saints. Not just those whom we have loved and lost and whose souls now rest with God, whose names we remember today. Not just all of the saints in our official calendar of saints’ day, James and John, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Mary and Joseph and several hundred more. But all the saints, all the holy people of God, all of us who journey toward that city, ever growing in number even as each one of us grows in wisdom and in days.
That’s why All Saints’ is a day for baptism. “The saints” are not the handful of exceptionally holy people on whom we want to model our lives. The saints are all of us, all the citizens of this City of God, messy and imperfect as we are. We’re called “saints” because we’re a holy people, and “saint” just means “holy” in Latin. We are holy, not because we are perfect, not even because we are good, but because by our baptisms God has set us apart for lives defined by love of God and love of our neighbors. We baptize sweet and innocent babies not because they need to be forgiven for their sins now, but because they will one day need to ask forgiveness, and God will already have made a promise to love and forgive them always, here, today, in this sacrament of baptism. Like the people of God in the Bible, like all of us in their own lives, they will begin in the innocence of the garden. They’ll probably wander in the wilderness. But every step they take, like every step that any one of us takes, will lead inexorably on toward the holy city where “God himself will be with them; [and] he will wipe every tear from their eyes.” (Rev. 21:3-4)
This Wednesday, November 10 is the 180th anniversary of the consecration of this building as a place of worship for the people of St. John’s Episcopal Church. In a few minutes, we’ll sing the words of the final hymn sung at that first service here 180 years ago. For eighty-something of those years, St. John’s has been shaped indelibly by members of the Isom family, many of whom have led this church over the decades. This past year has been one of transition and loss, as Marie Hubbard died nearly a year ago and Marion Wood moved away more recently to be with her family on Cape Cod. But this morning, we welcome not two but three of their family into this church for baptism as new pilgrims on this journey together. Wherever they live, wherever they go, they will be our fellow pilgrims. We may not always walk along the same paths or live in the same earthly city, but we will walk alongside them on the same journey toward God.
So we journey on toward the City of God, but we already have a place in it. By virtue of baptism, every one of us is already numbered among the saints. We live, as always, suspended between the “now” and the “not yet,” between what is already reality and what has not yet come to be. We have “raised” “these walls” to God’s honor, that old hymn will say, but still we wonder when and whether God will “on earth establish [God’s] abode”; we have made a home for God in our world and in our hearts, and we still wait for God to move on in.
But as we wander together toward that holy City of God, we face a choice. Do we avoid the mess of living together in a city of pilgrims, or do we embrace it? Do we try to go back to the identities and ways of the past, looking out for our own family or tribe or people or nation? Or do we move forward together as fellow travelers on the way, as neighbors bound together in love, as fellow-citizens with all the saints, past, present, and yet to come, of every tribe and language and people and nation? Do we have the courage to accept our baptisms for what they are, to be washed clean of the past and allow ourselves to be shaped into something new, by God and by our neighbors, in all our chaotic difference? Or do we resist, and try to stay exactly as we are?
The secret is, we can’t stop what God is doing in our world. We will be remade. We will be renewed. One way or another, we will be transformed. For “see,” says God, “I am making all things new.” (Rev. 21:5)
