Holden Village
All Saints Year C
Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18
Luke 6:20-31
11.03.13
Tonight we stand in a thin place – a
place between physical, rational existence: what we can see, touch and know and
a place beyond all that. A place we have
only known in our reaching imagination, our nightmare scenarios, our visioning
for the future of our lives…experiences we cannot touch except with our hopes.
Our Old Testament lesson is from Daniel,
a man known for being thrown into the lion’s den and for seeing visions and
talking about the apocalypse.
Truthfully, this reading was just crazy enough to have me flipping
quickly to the incredibly rich Ephesians readings…and then Bible and Brew
happened. The craziness of Daniel was
not enough to distract the faithful crew gathered for bible study yesterday
morning; instead we discussed the importance, power, and perhaps even truth
telling of our dreams and the dreams that appear not just in the Old Testament
of the bible, but throughout the entire Living Word.
Daniel dreams of four beasts emerging
out of a raging sea and an Ancient One who sits on a flaming throne…in the
reading for tonight we do not get the gory details, but they are there if you
are brave enough to read the book of Daniel; there is terror and earthly powers
engaging in battle. And over the raging sea Daniel sees an image of hope, the
Ancient One riding down on the clouds of heaven and he hears the good word, “The
holy ones of the Most High will receive the kingdom forever – forever and ever”.
There is woe in his dream, there is
blessing in his dream, and he brings this vision to another to share what he
has seen and heard and now feels. Daniel does not dream alone.
It is difficult to know what to do with
dreams and visions and especially difficult to know where and what God is doing
through these middle of the night trips, if God or the Holy Spirit is doing
anything at all. But even up here in the
mountains we have a troupe of folks meeting regularly to share and wonder about
their dream lives. I do not remember
many dreams, but the ones that stick most closely with me are the dreams that
feature people I have loved that have died.
I would like to share one of these dreams with you…
I first arrived at Holden Village as a
musician on teaching staff in July of 2010.
We took the cross-country train trip with very little luggage, yet I was
carry a heavy, unseen burden with me. In
June – just three weeks before our Holden trip, one of my very best friends
died suddenly and unexpected from an undetected auto-immune disease. Her name was Breanna, we met in college and
lived together for two years with two other women. The four of us were fused together with a
mighty bond and saw each other through new jobs, sick parents, marriages,
divorces, children and all the adventures of early adulthood. Those three weeks between her death and our
trip to Holden was spent in haze of grief, talking with her mom on the phone,
planning the funeral and travelling to be with the small community in Minnesota
that was grieving as mightily as I was. In those three weeks I got up every day
and went to bed every night carrying a heavier burden of grief than I could
believe. Breanna, inspiring teacher,
faithful wife and love-struck mother, fierce friend and sister – she was a saint
of God and if we did not recognize it in her living, certainly her shocking and
unjust death made it clear.
In the months following Breanna’s death
she visited me in my dreams. One dream
began in her backyard, her handsome husband was grilling and the sprawling lawn
was filled with people there for a good meal and party (which Breanna would
have loved!). I had a short and very
ordinary conversation with Breanna as she bounced her baby around. Then I found myself milling about when two
familiar men approached me, in real life the two men and I were intern
chaplains together and had spent many hours processing difficult ministry and
life events. In my dream I was so
excited to see them so I could introduce them to my darling friend Breanna, the
one I had just shard about a few days ago in chaplaincy group. The men looked at me funny, and one of them
said “You mean the friend who died?” With those words, with the acknowledgement
of death and reality spoken alund the party disappeared, the dream was over.
For me that dream was holy land, after
waking from the dream I knew I was in a thin place where I had seen real people
I loved speaking a real truth, yet it all unfolded in an impossible place and
was truly an unrealistic experience. It
was a space where I could process my current reality, a world without Breanna,
a world where caring men helped me name the difficulties I could endure, a
place where parties and joy and celebration can actually be the setting for
such understandings.
It was a dream full of blessings, and
woe and the communion of all the saints.
Blessing and woe are central words from
our gospel reading where we hear Jesus teaching the disciples about life
together on the earth. Blessed are you
who are poor, blessed are you who are hungry now, blessed are you who weep…and
woe to you who are rich, woe to you who are full now, woe to you who laugh.
These words of Jesus have been called
many things: a sermon, a teaching for his closest followers, in Matthew’s much
more poetic version we call these words the beatitudes (no woes over there!)
and given our scene from Daniel tonight and the spirit moving in this
community, I wonder what happens to these words when we consider them a
vision…or a dream.
Perhaps this is Jesus, as crazy as
Daniel, spelling out what he has seen in the night when he falls asleep. Perhaps his spirit is as troubled as Daniel’s
was so he brings it to the disciples – not so they will interpret it, but so
they will live it. Jesus is sharing the
dream of God for the world – that all may know fullness, that all may feel
laughter, that all would have enough and that we would live, make decisions and
remember one another enough to make it so.
Blessing, woe and the community of all
the saints.
It has been an All Saints triduum here
in the village. On Friday night’s prayer
around the cross our worship was framed in the all sinner, all saint paradox of
faith. Last night we gathered to
celebrate the day of the dead. And
tonight we will read the names of the saints in our lives that have gone from
this earth, but not so far from our hearts and minds and maybe even our dreams.
Every life remembered this weekend – be it of an inspiring saint or be it of a
scandalous sinner – every life lived is holy and beloved by God and every life
lived and concluded in death is a window through which we gaze outside of this
world of woe and blessing.
One biblical commentator has this to say
about the world we tread in and the world beyond…she writes, “Saints do not come
into the world apart from suffering. Nor
will we be able to find the light of God in our own lives, apart from
ours. For the saints are not among us to
show us the way into easy, comfortable lives.
They are here to show us how to keep going in deep darkness…how to have
hope in mean times.”[i]
I do not know all that is at play in our
dream life, or in the spaces between living and dying. But I know about a God who went to the place
of death – the places where hopes die, where loves die, the places where
nations crumble and abuse makes way for death – God went to these place, came
to earth to touch and feel and known them…and now and forever promises to stay
in the places of death and suffering always.
For those we have loved who have died, God was with them and they rest
now in God’s love. For those of us still
living, we live with the woe, with the blessing and with the entire communion
of saints and we are all bonded through God’s love.
We are a part of this community of
saints that we can touch, hear, feel and where members of this communion can
feel real hunger, poverty and weeping as well as fullness, riches and
laughter. We too are a part of the community
of saints that we cannot longer touch and who live in the thin spaces of our
dreams or memories or through the various movements we make to honor their
lives.
Tonight, together, we stand in the thin
places, where God is always present to receive the dying, comfort the grieving
and inspire the living with dreams that move us to that great day of unity with
all who have died, all who have lived will receive the kingdom of God––
forever, forever and ever.
Amen.
[i]
Nancy Rockwell, A Bite in the Apple, 2013
