BLEST BE THE TIE

October 28, 1990

8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Matthew 5:1-12
Hebrews 11:1-3, 13, 12:1-2

“Since we are surrounded by sa great a cloud of witnesses,...let us rim
with perseverance the race that is set before us." -Hebrews 12:1 (NRSV)

has described his formative memoriés of church and religion in a way that
sounded familiar Ao me and whi May cause you to smile in recognition as
well. He was wfiting an essay’ In a wonderful new collection entitled
Incarnation, contemperary Writers on the New Testament. Mr. Shaw's
assignment was to write on the Book of Hebrews.

—— "My mother's father was a Presbyterian minister, and
until I was four my parents, my brother and I lived with

my grandparents next to the church. We spent a lot of
time there perforce. My first impressions of Christian
worship were vividly sensory in ways that my age would
explain. Parents attempting to make small boys look
proper far Sunday dressed them in suits with short pants
then, and I remember how the cushions of the pews,
stuffed with horsehair, prickled my legs as they dangled
ahove the floor. Sitting next to wy grandmother I would
look at the stained glass or the people around us, most
of whom seemed very old. The white—haired ladies,
always wearing hats, all knew my name, aithough
I could never tell them apart. They carried large
pocketbooks, which were black in the winter and white in
the summer, and out of which came lavender-scented
handkerchiefs, change purses, spectacles, peppermints
and much else. My grandmother had her own supply of
peppermints which she doled out to me if I seemed
restless." [p. 268]

Robert Shaw, whois a es eS see of English at Mt. Holyoke,

What Mr. Shaw is writing about is the Communion of Saints. In
particular he is reflecting on the intriguing image in the 12th chapter of
Hebrews:

“Therefore, since we are surrounded hy so great a elond of
witnesses...let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us."

When he hears that phrase, “cloud of witnesses," Mr. Shaw thinks
“mostly of my grandfather and others of that generation of my family, of
those old ladies with their pocketbooks, whose names T wil] never know, and
of many more." [p. 280]

Mr. Shaw's reflections prompted my own reminiscences which is what he
intended of course, including short pants and peppermints and scented
handkerchiefs and stained glass and dear peaple who knew my name even
though T did not and do net knew theirs — except for Mrs. Crawford who sat
in the pew immediately in front of us and who was responsible for one of
the profound insights in my life, a moment of pure revejation. Mrs.
Crawford wore a fox wrap of some sort in the winter. The fox's head,
complete with open eyes, teeth visible — clamped around his own tail, was
part of the garment. And when we settled in for the sermon and Mrs.
Crawford slung her wrap over her shoulder, there he was staring at me for
twenty or thirty minutes... a real fox, that rascal who loomed large and
ferocious, in so many childhood stories, actually very smal], manageable
almost even by my modest standards. He and I spent a lot af time staring
each other down.

Mr. Shaw, the poet, suggests that the “cloud of witnesses" in the
12th chapter of Hebrews includes Mrs. Crawford and maybe even her fox.
Psychologically he's correct. We are influenced by many people whase
identities are long forgotten. We are indebted to parents, family,
friends, a widening circle of peaple whose lives intersected with ours and
who in one way or another, positively or negatively, had a profound impact
on us.

Theolagically he's right as well. Religious faith is shaped, ta a
great extent, by relationships, communities. It has been said that there
is no such thing as a solitary Jew or Christian hecause you need the
community. God calls, not just individuals, but individuals who are to be
“the people." Jesus calis disciples into a new community. After three
years of early ministry, what Jesus leaves behind are not just isolated
individuals here and there, but a cammunity... the church

Communities are health giving. Jean Vanier, founder of the 1l'Arche
Communities in France which care for mentally handicapped adults in the
context of a religious community writes:

“There are times when together we discover that we make

up a single bady, that we belong to each other and that 4
God has called us together as a source of life for each Ww

other." [Weavings, July/August 1990] TN 4 (

The idea is that we become more in relationship than we are in
isolation. And furthermore that human communities, even the sm
most modest, have generative and healing and life-giving powei%,
has a church, someone observed: whether or not you belong to the
institution. Everyone has a small group of people - maybe onjy one other -
with whom you share joys and sorrows, whose presence affirms and supports

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ANSE = Ler

you, whose company you seek“ When someone you love dies,-the. hands of that
cammunity begin to reach out to you to touch and to gather you in. When
your prandchild is born, it is te these people you bring the pictures. “A
church within # church" it has been called...realistically acknowledging
that in a large, diverse, urban congregation like this one, nat everyone
can be connected toa everyone else...

Group therapy, a family reunion, coffee together, a phone call ance a
week... the religious word for it is Communion; the creedal designation is
“Communion of Saints." The Biblical image is that "cloud of witnesses"
which surrounds each of us.

You dan't have to he saintly to get into that cloud of witnesses.
“Saintly” has come to mean pious or a paragon of moral virtue. "She's a
saint,” “he's no saint," are moral descriptions, ordinarily. Originally
“saintly” didn't mean that at all. The writer of the Book of Hebrews was
addressing a community of Christians in the First Century whoa were facing
almost certain persecution and who were not at all certain that they were
strong enough to endure. Some of them were going to suffer, he arrested,
maybe tortured, executed. So instead of admonition, the writer calls the
vale of heroes and heroines from the past; men and women who were faithful]
against all the odds and in the midst of some very frightening circum-
stances. That's whats in the cloud of witnesses for you he told them: You
aren't alone! Noah and Abraham and Sarah and Moses and Gideon and David
and Samuel are with you... and Rahab the harlot!

Just in case you are thinking that only saintly people get into the
communion of saints, there's Rahab, a prostitute whose clients one day
include two Israelite spies who are on a reconnaissance mission in Jericho
for Joshua, but end up at Rahab's establishment and she hides them from
the authorities and thus plays a major role in Joshua's successful campaign
against Jericho. Rahab the Saint. Rahab wha was faithful by doing what
she had to do when she had to do it. Rahab whose presence in the cloud of
witnesses encourages us ta see that there are Many people there who were
our enablers, our supporters, whose timely faithfulness is somehow and in
some way responsible for our being here. Karl Barth said God commandeers
people for sainthood.

At the time of the Reformation the new Protestant Church
discontinued the tradition of canonizing saints. And so there are no
official saints in Protestantism as there are in the Roman Catholic
tradition. The Reformers hoped to recover this very ancient notion of the
Communion of Saints,

But what actually happened throughout Western culture was a radical
individualism which in some ways was and is directly counter ta the notion
of community, communion of saints. Instead of celebrating the life-giving
potential of community, we have celebrated the good of individual autonomy,
independence. It has served us well sametimes. lt has fostered individual
initiation and responsibility. But sometimes the results have not been so
attractive. The deterioration of life in some urban areas is, it has heen
suggested, a result of individualism run amok. Our inability and
unwillingness to take care of our poor and weak and helpless, from infants
whase mortality rate is appalling to the homeless elderly, whose presence

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on our streets, sick, eating out--efgarbage cans, cold, unable to cope...
results from a radical individualism that will not acknowledge corporate
responsibility for anything. And a political impasse between left and
right, both absolutely committed to the entitlements and rights of the
individual, has left the middle nearly empty and the system incapable
therefore, for the time being, of leading the nation, the community.

So this precious notion is timely and critical; this old notion that
no one of us is an island; this lovely suggestion that we are in this
together, that there is Jife in togetherness and furthermore that cach of
us is surrounded by a cloud of witnesses...

Of course there are saints. They are the ones who point the way.
They are the ones whose lives are transparent to something else, something
larger, said Paul Tillich. Saints are those who point sometimes tno
something in us that we could \see in ourselves.

In his autobiography, Frederich Buechner tells about writing a
flerid, over-blown essay at prep school and being stunned when Mr. Martin,
the teacher, gave him an unheard of 100%. “I think it is not too much to
say that from that moment on, I knew that what I wanted ta be more than
anything else was a writer. Mr. Martin may just have changed the whole
course of my life with that preposterous grade." [The Sacred Journey,

p. 74]

Your saints pointed the way by having confidence in you, by aspiring
much for you, by giving you opportunities, and most of all by showing you
strength and resolve and competence in yourself that without them you
never would have discovered. Sometimes your saints jolted you. Sometimes
a saint has to be pushy and almost rude, sometimes uncompromising in
expectation of you and hope for you.

And sometimes by example your saints showed you how to live; showed
you how to believe, how to trust, how to love and forgive, how to weep and
Jaugh, how to be a Christian.

Befare the Reformation, Al NSaints' Day was November i, a busy,
festive and increasingly profi ccasion. Pilgrims flocked to the
elics of the saints. Vi ating in
Smooth by the
bones for
robe, and, for a
the excesses that

instance, vials o ary's milk, a tattered pi
fee, put them display on All Saints' Day.
prompted theMeformers to eliminate the notion frow the new, reformed
church. #lloween, by the way, is a derivative Hallaws' Eve, the
night before All Saints' Day, when the spirits-of the dad are out and
abou

But of course there are saints. And on All Saints’ pay Hes a good
idea to identify them and acknowledge their presence in that cloud of
witnesses and to thank them. “Mentally populate your own cloud of
witnesses," Robert Shaw urges us. Do it today - over Junch - identify your
saints. Better yet, take a quiet moment and write out their names...

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~ The elementary teacher who recognized something in you and would nat... +...
let you gn.

~ The scout leader who helped you learn that even your twelve-year-old
fingers conld funetion and actually tie a clove hitch.

~ The coach who caught you accepting mediocrity in yourself and
insisted that you had more to give physically than you had ever given to
anything and therefore didn't know was there.

~ The friend who accepted you and overlooked your foibles and stood
with you and showed you what Joyalty is, or the friend who stepped in and
fought a fight that was yours and taught you courage.

- The parent who taught you to share and to be strong and to he brave
and to forgive.

- The dear ones who knew your name and called you by name and gave you
an identity.

~ And later, the precious ones who shawed you how to be vulnerable and
net so strong, how to be sick and how to die

There is for each of us a great cloud of witnesses. TI like ta think
of them as a cheering section, full of faces we knew and loved, faces of
people we have admired from afar and whose example has given us strength,
and faces of people we never knew at all but whose lives continue in
ours — great, great, great grandparents, professional predecessor,
politicians and poets and generals and reformers - Martin Luther King and
Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Abraham Lincaln and John Calvin and Martin Luther,
Joan of Are, Francis of Assisi, Juliaaof Norwich, Peter and Mary and
Martha and Jesus: they're in that cloud teo, that cheering section,
pulling for you.

We affjrm something of ali of that today - this Sunday before All
Saints'Day. his occasion’ when we dedicate for the use of this community of
faith books/which wi be used in worship for a long time to come. Many
of the Bibles and mnals are dedicat to the memory of specific people.
They contain, like the Book of Heb tws, the names of the saints... and
those namfés wil] remind us, every time we use the books, of our
indebtedye to the past and e fact that when we gather here to sing
se, and to hear d's word, the great cloud of witnesses is

here te.

On a hot Sunday afternoon every August there was a family reunian.
In this particular extended family my own was out on the edge. The only
time I saw those people was on that inevitably hot Sunday afternoon. When
it came time to eat, and all the dishes of baked beans and baked corn and
meatloaf and jello salad and fried chicken stretched aut on the pienic
table, the family was called to order by an old man, a retired Methodist
lay preacher wha told us who had died and who had been born during the year
and then prayed a very long prayer which included the ones who had died and
the ones who had been barn and the cousins and uncles fighting the wars,

A

IN /7R/AaN

everybody knew even without having the words in front of ther It's not
very strong music as hymn tunes go and the tune was not in thevdld Hymnal.
But it's in the new one, and it seemes Fitting to me, on the Sunday

before All Saints' Nay and the occasian when, on the dedication of Bible and
Hymnal, we find ourselves looking both backward and forward, to sing
topether about the Communion of Saints, that great cloud of witnesses, who
in God's eternal Jove are still with us, still cheer us On, still hold us

up in love and confidence. a a

and of course, the grace before the meal. And then we oF thom [1 which
1.

o

vw

"BRlest be the tie that binds
Our hearts if Christian love:
The felloyéhip of kindred minds
Ts like Aa that above."

And it is. Than be to God.

Amen.

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