Who’s That On Your Balcony?
Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church
November 2, 2014
John Buchanan
I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Halloween. But living where I do, a block from Michigan Avenue in Chicago, and Macy’s, Bloomingdale, and Neiman Marcus, we all know that Halloween is really the kickoff of the holiday shopping season. I always loved Halloween, carving the pumpkin, the mysterious grinning or scowling face flickering in the darkness. Planning, long ago, a suitable outfit from the modest materials at hand, an old bed sheet with holes cut for eyes, mother’s old housedress and dad’s old hat, long before the plethora of ready-made, gorgeous costumes – Spiderman, Batman, Wonder Woman – a family I know, and some of you do as well, dressed as the entire cast of The Little Mermaid, complete with a King Triton, a menacing and cruel Ursula, Sebastian the crab, and Flounder. And then, out after dark with fellow conspirators to rain terror on two elderly sisters who would not allow us to retrieve stray baseballs from their carefully cultivated flower garden – by ringing their doorbell and then hiding across the street to watch as they emerged on the porch and peered into the darkness and called out, “We know you’re out there and we know who you are and we’re going to tell your parents.” It was quite thrilling. The ultimate terrorist activity was soaping windows, which I was strictly forbidden to do by my parents. I did it just once, to the elderly sisters, and still feel guilty about it.
I continued to love Halloween when we carved the pumpkin and helped with plans and then escorted a ballerina, clown, nurse, cowboy, and tiny tiger up and down dark streets with sacks filling impressively with treats – some of which we used to enjoy ourselves after the collectors had retired for the night – the Snickers bars particularly, which, after all, we told ourselves weren’t good for them.
It all began as a Christian feast day, one of our own, an attempt to express one of the great mysteries of our faith, the Communion of Saints.
Actually, the origin of Halloween pre-dates Christianity and is found in the ancient Celtic festival of the dead, called Samhain. November marked the end of one year and the beginning of a new year in Celtic culture, when sheep and cattle were moved from the hills to closer pastures, the grain stored and darkness was about to descend. The Celts believed that the spirits of all who had died during the year also moved to the otherworld on Samhain. So, on the night before, the spirits or ghosts of the dead were out and about. The Celts made it into a festival, with feasting and a great bonfire and gourds, hollowed and lighted with a candle to ward off any spirits that intended harm. It was all a little frightening with all those ghosts and spirits on the loose that night.
When Christian missionaries came from Ireland to Scotland and the Celtic lands of Northern Europe, their strategy was to attempt to convert cultural customs as well as individuals. They redefined Samhain and renamed it All Saints Day, the occasion to remember and celebrate the lives of the departed and to revere particularly those women and men who were recognized as saints by the church. The night before All Saints was called All Hallows Eve, and Hallows Eve evolved into Halloween.
Cultural conversion never works very well. Samhain simply went underground and emerged centuries later as Halloween with many of the myths still intact. All Saints became one of the seven feasts or festivals of the early and medieval church and remains so for churches in the liturgical tradition and ever, now, our own. And Halloween bumps along with much of the old Celtic mythology intact.
Barbara Brown Taylor reflects: “The ancient customs survived for thousands of years for a reason and that reason seems to have everything to do with our need to remember those who have died, to acknowledge the gulf between the living and the dead but also to reach across it, at least this day of the year, and to recognize those who have gone before us and whom we are certain to follow.” (A Great Cloud of Witnesses, Weavings, September/October 1988)
The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews recognizes that need. In fact, he is writing to people who desperately needed some connection with those who had gone before. Those early Christians, in the last decades of the first century faced a truly frightening future. There weren’t very many of them. They were small in number, weak and vulnerable. Rome had decided that they constituted a threat to the order of society and the enormous weight of the Empire was about to turn against them, violently. Jesus had been gone for decades, and now the last of his disciples had died. And so the writer remembers for those frightened people, those who had gone before, had fought the good fight and finished the race – “Remember them: Noah and Abraham and Sarah and Samson and David. We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses.”
Don’t you love that image of a “great cloud of witnesses”? That is what we mean when, in the Apostles’ Creed, we say that we believe in the Communion of Saints. “Everyone we ever loved and lost” is the way Frederick Buechner puts it. Everyone – our parents, our grandparents, our teachers and models and mentors, our cheerleaders, including, Buechner says, “those we didn’t know we loved until we lost them.”
Thomas Lynch is a fine poet and essayist who happens also to be a funeral director in Milford, Michigan. Among his books is The Undertaking, which won the Heartland Book Award. In it, he reflects, with respect and admiration and humor and love, on his profession, the community he and his family’s business serves, and his own family.
Every year he buries several hundred friends and townspeople. “For every home made memorable by death, dozens are made memorable by the lives that were led there utterly unscrutinized by the wider world – lives lived out by the ordinary triumphs of daily life: good gladiolas, the well-shoveled walk, the mortgage payments made, the kids through college.” (p. 106)
Midway through the book, Lynch discusses his parents’ death. “My mother’s funeral was a sadness and a celebration. We wept and laughed and thanked God and cursed God and asked God to make good on our mother’s faith…It was Halloween, the day we buried her – the eve of All Saints.” (p. 98)
Whenever he has business in the local cemetery he stops in section 24, where his mother and father are buried. He writes, “I miss them so…sometimes I stand among the stones and wonder. Sometimes I laugh and sometimes I weep. Sometimes nothing happens at all. Life goes son. The dead are everywhere.” (p. 98)
When we travel back to our hometown in Pennsylvania, we visit the two cemeteries where our parents are buried, find the place, stand and look at the inscriptions, the stunning experience of seeing their names there, and grandparents and aunts and uncles and some you never knew but share your name – the Communion of Saints.
Have you noticed how your parents keep showing up in your life, how you find yourself saying the things your parents said? Have you surprised yourself, as I have, by expressing an opinion about this or that and saying to yourself, “Why I sound just like my father”? My companion tells me straight out – “You’re sounding like Blanche now.”
And have you noticed the mystery that your relationship with those who have died continues somehow, that you still seek and enjoy your parents’ approval, or you wonder what they might say about something happening in the world? It is important, psychologists tell us, to continue working on unresolved issues. Sometimes painful ones. It is important, and possible, to forgive someone who has gone. In fact, forgiving a parent, a brother or sister who died before there was opportunity for the gradual process of acceptance and reconciliation to happen, can be very important.
Who doesn’t know their parents better at the age of forty or fifty or sixty than we did when we were fifteen or twenty or twenty-five? Who doesn’t understand what Madeleine L’Engle meant when she said one time that she understood her father far more after his death than she did during his life? (Walking on Water, p. 80)
There are no official saints in Protestantism or Presbyterianism, and I’ve concluded that that’s too bad. At the time of the Reformation the entire system of canonizing and venerating saints was abolished by the new Protestants. The Episcopalians have saints – 140 or so – and I think it is time for us to reconsider. Four centuries ago the system was corrupt. Everyone acknowledges that now. In fact, it was the corrupt practices around veneration of saints that inspired Martin Luther to nail his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg – on the day before All Saints to make his point. The idea was that the saints were so good and pious and holy that they had more righteousness than they needed. The excess was available – for a price. It was called an “Indulgence.” The church sold them, in effect. The faithful purchased them in order to shorten the time they would have to spend in Purgatory.
That’s what Luther wanted to discuss and when his internal reformation failed and a new reformed church began to emerge it threw out the whole system, saints and all.
Too bad, because in the process we gloss over and miss one of the profound mysteries of our faith. The fact is, we have saints. The Presbyterian Church USA has saints. Every congregation has saints. You know who the saints of Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church are. When you introduce a guest to one of your leaders, I’ll bet some of you say “I’d like you to meet one of the saints around here: Mildred Smith. She has taught Sunday School and sung in the choir forever - and she calls on the sick and bakes cookies and goes to the homeless shelter once a week.”
And – you and I have saints, even if we don’t call them that.
The best reflection on the communion of Saints I ever heard or read came from the late Carlyle Marney, a big, robust, scholarly Southern Baptist. It gave me a title for this sermon: “Who’s That On Your Balcony?”
Marney said your personhood, personality, persona is like a house and it’s a fairly complex structure. Some people’s houses are fancy. Some are sophisticated. Some are simple and functional. Some are ostentatious. Some are plain and modest. Just like people. Each has a number of rooms. There is a formal parlor where you meet guests, there’s a family room, bedrooms and kitchen. And there is a basement in everyone’s house where the plumbing is and the trash and garbage are stored. Everyone has a basement, but there’s no need to spend your entire life down there, Marney used to say with a twinkle in his eye. Sometimes, he said, we act as if the plumbing and trash are all there is to us.
Come on up, step outside into the sunshine, look up and you will notice that the house that is you has a balcony, a spacious, gracious balcony. There are people on your balcony. Marney was a thorough Southerner so he said his balcony had white wrought iron and wicker rocking chairs. The people in the rocking chairs are sipping Bourbon or iced tea, depending on whether you are a Baptist or Presbyterian. When it came to alcohol, Marney said the only difference between Presbyterians and Baptists – he was speaking at a Presbyterian seminary, is that your Presbyterians drink your Bourbon out in the open, in front of God and everybody. We Baptists drink our Bourbon in secret.
The people on your balcony are the strong, positive influences in your life. Your heroes and heroines. Your parents are probably up there, your grandparents, a coach, a math teacher, a band director, a scout leader, a favorite aunt, maybe even a pastor.
There are folks up there in your balcony you never met but they profoundly influenced you and helped shape who you are, and who they were continues to inspire you and give you strength and courage and faith. There are some really big names up there…Peter and John, Franics of Assisi, John Calvin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King…those people whose lives continue to call deeper faith and commitment and love out of you.
The people on your balcony are your saints. The way to observe All Saints day is to walk out onto your lawn and look up, name them, greet them. Call the roll. Wave to them. Your saints – your dear ones – great ones and small ones.
The very notion of the Communion of Saints, I have noticed, makes more sense and becomes more precious the longer you live. The longer you live the more people are on your balcony.
A former colleague and dear friend of mine, Joyce Shin, wrote a devotion for the congregation she serves recently. She reflected on a phrase from the great hymn, The Church’s One Foundation:
“Yet she one earth has union
with God, the Three in One,
and mystic sweet communion
with those whose rest is won.”
Joyce wrote:
“I have yet to meet one side of my family. They live in North Korea. Over sixty years ago, my father was the only one in his family who did not remain in North Korea. He has never seen or heard from his family since.
“When the church sings about the ‘mystic sweet communion with those whose rest is won,’ I pray for the day my father will be reunited with his family. Though it may never happen in their lifetimes here on earth, I am comforted by the knowledge (faith?) that someday he will see his parents face to face – who lived their lives without knowing if their son had survived the war. Someday, he will be with his sister and brothers, no longer separated.”
The final mystery of our faith is that those who have gone before us are with God: that God “will wipe away all tears, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow or crying.” The final mystery of our faith is that in Jesus Christ, whose own death did not defeat him, but led to the victory of life and love…that in him, our Lord Jesus Christ, although we do not have words adequate to say it, we know that nothing of love is ever lost, that we can trust those we have lost to God’s care, that:
“when the strife is fierce, the voyage long,
steals on the ear the distant triumph song,
and hearts are brave again, and arms are strong.
Alleluia, Alleluia!”
Amen