Psalm 146; Hebrews 11:32-40

Bethel 11/2/03

The Reverend Marc Sherrod

A little later, when the low G sounds on the organ, announcing that we are about to sing Vaughan Williams’s tune to “For all the Saints,” I will know that it must be the first Sunday of November, All Saints Day. It is as though the rumbling of that low bass note calls us to the remembrance of the “communion of the saints” in whom we profess our belief in the ancient words of the Apostles’ Creed. We have spiritual bloodlines that go back to all those names with “St.” in front, men and women now commemorated in stain glass, marble statues and hagiography, but we also have bloodlines that go back to biological and spiritual ancestors who sat on their hands, who cared only for themselves, and who thought little about the impact of their actions on future generations.

We remember, of course, not just the saints but the sinners, too, for we are “the spiritual grandchildren of wonderful stewards who gave their all, [as well as] generations of curmudgeons who threw water on the Spirit’s fire every chance they got.” (Christian Century 10/18/03, 21).

Truth is, one of these All Saints’ Days, our name will be read, too, and if we truly believe what the writer of Hebrews announces, the work of the saints gone before us will never be complete without our efforts, too. We are all ancestors in the making, saints for a generation yet unborn. Hebrews declares: “all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.”

Perhaps you caught the Writer’s Almanac on October 21.

It's the birthday of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor who founded the Nobel Prize. He was born in Stockholm (1833) and moved with his family to St. Petersburg, Russia when he was nine. His father was an engineer who made weapons for the Russian army. Alfred grew up thinking he might like to be a scientist too. As a young man, he moved back to Sweden and worked with his father at an explosives factory. . . . In 1867 he patented his greatest invention, which he called dynamite. Alfred became very wealthy and ran an international explosives empire. He continued to dream up new inventions all his life. He wrote, "If I come up with 300 ideas in a year, and only one of them is useful, I am content." . . .

Nobel was known as a gloomy sort of person; he never married and he tended to keep to himself. He was called "a man nobody knew." Even though he invented a powerful new weapon, he later became an advocate for world peace. . . .In 1888 his brother Ludvig died and a French newspaper mistakenly reported Alfred's death instead. The obituary called him the "dynamite king." He read that he was a "merchant of death" who spent his life finding new ways to "mutate and kill." He was so upset to be leaving that kind of a legacy that he rewrote his will to establish a set of prizes celebrating the greatest achievements of [human]kind.

Obituary. If yours, by some fluke, were written long before your death, would you like what you saw in print? It might sound like a hokey exercise for some new age weekend encounter group, but chances are, have any of you ever considered writing your own obituary? Would you have too much, or too little, to say? Could you be honest without slipping into maudlin eulogy?

We might think it nice if our obituary could read like this passage from Hebrews, the famous “Roll Call” of the faithful, although few today, at least in our part of the world, seem to have the faith that the early church celebrated in Hebrews 11 -- what with the mouths of lions be closed shut or escaping the edge of the sword or living in caves and desert places to keep the faith alive in a time, unlike our own, when Christianity was not the state’s official religion.

All that suffering, all that dying, all of that living life on the run, that is mostly beyond our field of vision when it comes to the version of Christianity we know best. I doubt seriously that any of us could honestly include such language in our obituary.

What would we include that might testify to the faith that we anticipate another generation will be remembering, come some future All Saints Day?

Since I began by mentioning the low bass G rumbling on this day, let me suggest that many of the hymns of our faith could be easily assimilated into an obituary. Try them on some time and see how they fit the experience of your faith..

If you are evangelical about what you believe, then you can’t go wrong with “Just as I am, without one plea, but that thy blood was shed for me . . . “

If you have more of a natural theology, feeling close to God in nature, then “God of the Sparrow, God of the whale, God of the swirling stars” ought perhaps to mark your gravestone.

If you prefer the solemn, mystical magnificence of God, why not “Of the Father’s Love Begotten, ere the worlds began to be, He is alpha and omega, He the source, the ending He”

Or, if you have felt the call to work for justice and righteousness in the world, then perhaps these words are your words: “I, the Lord of sea and sky, I have heard my people cry . . . I who made the stars of night, I will make their darkness bright . . . Here I am, Lord, Is it I, Lord?”

We could go on and on through each page of this wonderful resource we have for worship and devotional practice.

The point is, could your obituary declare that you, indeed, had lived a “singing faith?” And if not, just where did your faith go wrong?

Saint Augustine observed long ago that whoever sings, “prays twice.” And John Wesley, the 18^th century founder of the Methodist movement, and himself, along with his brother Charles, an author of hundreds of hymns still being sung today, Wesley once said that hymns are “a body of practical divinity,” that is, a “sung theology.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who dared to oppose Hitler and who was executed because of that opposition, in his book Life Together, says, “It is not you that sings, it is the church that is singing, and you, as a member . . . may share in its song. Thus all singing together . . . must serve to widen our spiritual horizon, make us see our little company as a member of the great Christian Church on earth, and help us willingly and gladly to join our singing, be it feeble or good, to the song of the church (quoted by Don E. Saliers in “Singing Our Lives,” Practicing our Faith, 187).

I like Bonhoeffer’s phrase, that our singing “be it feeble or good” is to be joined to the song of the church. You know, aside from our often feeble attempts to sing “happy birthday” or “take me out to ball game,” the church remains one of the few public places where “public singing still offers formation in a shared identity.” Writes Don Saliers, “In our present North American cultural context, the singing assemblies in our churches and synagogues are among the very few remaining places where words and music actually form human beings in a communal identity . . . This identity flows out of an ancient story that continues to take on new life, in words and tunes that speak today” (“Singing our Lives,” 192).

Before you could sing, you first heard someone else sing, whether singly or in a group like here, at church. I know the word “saint” gives Protestants trouble, but perhaps your saints are those who taught you to sing, and more, how to sing your life. Not a day went by growing up that I didn’t hear my mother sing, huddled over the stove or the sink, folding clothes, not really caring whether she was on key or not, and always from that same corpus of hymns that many of you in her age group still prefer, “Blessed Assurance, Jesus is Mine” “Stand Up, Stand Up, for Jesus” “God of Grace and God of Glory on Thy People Pour Thy Power.” I admit, it got rather redundant after awhile, but that, along with being in a singing congregation each Sunday morning, it is the place where I did learn that the experience of faith should be sung and that we learn much of what we believe through what we sing.

Whether we learn them by rote or by note, songs enter personal memory. More than that, I am convinced, songs enter, Jungian-like, into the church’s collective unconsciousness. And once there, our “hymns and psalms and spiritual songs” (Colossians 3:16) mingle belief and feeling and provide a vocabulary for how we should live our lives. And maybe, one day, too, even words for our obituary.

Once we have done with the low G bass note and you have brought the names forward of those saints and sinners whom you want to be remembered, we conclude by singing what the church historian Martin Marty has called the best all purpose hymn ever written: it can be sung at a baptism, at a funeral, at an ordination, during communion, during any liturgical season.

And what better words could there be for my obituary or for yours?
Now thank we all our God with heart and hands and voices
Who wondrous things hath done, in whom this world rejoices
Who, from our mothers’ arms, hath blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today. Amen.