All Saints Sunday
4 November 2012
Saint Faith’s Anglican Church
Vancouver BC
Propers: Isaiah
25.6-9; Psalm 24; Revelation 21.1-6a;
John 11.32-44
In the
early summer of 1976 David Hansen, my former supervising teacher during my
student teaching internship, called me and asked if I could quickly get a
passport. It turned out that he was
leading a group of high school students on a three-week trip to Germany and
that his only male chaperone had had to cancel due to illness. Now I was not about to pass up a free trip to
Germany and so I quickly obtained a passport, something that was easier
thirty-six years ago, and I was off to Germany.
During the
trip I made the acquaintance of students from both Colorado and Minnesota. One of the Colorado students, a young man I
will call ‘Brian’, became a good friend and we corresponded off and on after
the trip. Our correspondence became less
frequent and I then went off to seminary.
In the summer of 1979, however, ‘Brian’ and I met again, but in very
different circumstances.
In those
days all American Episcopal seminarians were expected to complete a term of
Clinical Pastoral Education, a programme intended to help us understand our
pastoral roles and to learn about how we responded to stressful situations. I was assigned to the adolescent unit of a
Denver-area mental hospital where I spent my days providing educational support
and some, some, pastoral care. It was a
very difficult summer for me, that summer of 1979.
I was able
to find inexpensive accommodation in my old fraternity house where, to my
surprise, I found ‘Brian’. He was also
doing some sort of summer internship and was staying at the house. One afternoon, after a particularly difficult
day, ‘Brian’ asked me why I kept going back, day after day, to work with kids
who could care less about education and even less about pastoral care. “Because,” I said, “I have chosen to follow
Jesus who said, ‘I was in prison and you visited me.’ These kids are in a kind of prison and I am
one of the only people who visits them.”
That was the sum of our conversation about the hospital.
Three years
later I became the curate at Christ Church in Denver. One Sunday, early in my time there, a couple
came up to me and said, “We’re ‘Brian’s’ parents. We want to say, ‘Thank you.’” It turns out that my brief conversation with
‘Brian’ had led to a change in his perspective on life. He told his parents about our conversation
and that he realized that his Christian faith actually meant something and that
he was going to have to make some changes.
Evangelism
is a difficult word for most Anglicans.
We associate the term with an intolerant and sometimes aggressive
approach to the Christian faith that gets into our faces with the question,
“Have you been saved?” We might even
occasionally make jokes about people who seem to have been ‘saved’ or
‘converted’ and who now are quite open about their faith and seem to bring it
up at every possible, or even impossible, moment.
Have you
ever noticed that when two or three people are gathered together stories
quickly emerge? We tell stories so that
other people can understand us or so that we can lighten the atmosphere of the
occasion or so that we can help our friends and families understand the events
of their own lives. What you and I as
Christians can tell people is that our stories, the stories of particular lives
lived in particular places and particular times, are actually part of a greater
story.
Recently
someone asked me why I was a Christian.
My answer was simple: “I find the
Christian story far more compelling than any other religious or secular story
that claims to say something about what it means to be a human being and what
is the future of creation.”
Evangelism
is about story-telling rather than confrontation. For example, today we are celebrating the
feast of All Saints. We celebrate this
feast and the feasts of numerous other named saints in order to tell their stories. By telling their stories, the stories of
thousands of people, many of them quite ordinary, we begin to see how their
stories and ours are connected. In fact
all of our stories, the stories of the Christians who have come before us and
the stories of Christians today, are chapters of THE STORY, the story of God’s
relationship with all of creation and, in particular, God’s relationship with
human beings.
We are
surrounded by people who are living their lives as part of stories that are
neither life-giving nor life-affirming.
These stories have various names and themes such as ‘success’ or ‘do it
yourself’ or ‘the one with the most toys at the end wins’ or ‘there is no
meaning to life’ --- you certainly know some of the titles. Our story is one that says that the glory of
God is a human being fully alive and that God has given us a model of what it
means to be fully alive in Jesus of Nazareth.
Our story is one that says that this story has been lived out in
thousands, millions, perhaps even billions, of lives over two thousand
years. The story is still being told in
the lives of billions of people today.
So let us
tell our stories to people. Let us not
be afraid to tell others about how our story is part of a greater story that God
is weaving in the world today. This is
the evangelism that we need to exercise, an evangelism that brings people
together as part of God’s saving work for this world in the here and now rather
than some form of fire insurance for an uncertain future. We can do this because we all have stories to
tell. We can do this because the story
that we are a part of is truly wonderful, life-giving and life-affirming.
Let us pray.
O God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we
cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage,
not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love
supporting us; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen. [Evangelical
Lutheran Worship, 304]
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