Holey Nets and Holiness

Today is All Saints’ Sunday – the day when we celebrate all those who have gone before us in life. And it is a day when we remember that saints are all around us and that each of us is called to holiness. It’s a day when we remember the big things in life, the things that will last forever and never fade away.

The past couple of weeks have focused most of our attention on other kinds of things – things that are passing away even as they are happening. There was the World Series and mid-term exams with outcomes that may have been pleasing for some and unpleasing for others. There was the election which left some triumphant and others near despair. And, most importantly, there were the death of a sophomore, the deaths of parents and friends, and the remembrance of other losses.

These events of the last couple of weeks loomed large in our lives and they still seem significant and important, often pushing out all other thoughts and concerns. After all, what could be more important than the biggest election in a generation or the loss of a loved one?

Our lives are bound by time and space. We live our lives in a particularity of the here and now. Our minds are not capable of embracing any other kind of reality for more than a few fleeting moments.

But in fact our lives and the world in which we live, and move, and have our being are like the city of Octavo in Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities. Octavo is a spider-web city, a city hanging between two mountains, existing entirely through a system of webbing and nets. Marco Polo, one of the novel’s principal characters, says that the inhabitants do not live in fear of their existence like other city-dwellers, for they know that the netting will only last so long.

We exist on nets like that – nets that will not last for very long. For now they seem strong enough, substantial enough to hold us up, even though every now and again we see someone slip through the net as part of it breaks away.

Imagine that! Living in a city made entirely of rope nets that you know will eventually give out. And imagine not being particularly concerned about that inevitability. It’s a difficult stretch for us, isn’t it. The immediate circumstances of our lives are so consuming. We worry about our nation and the world. We are heartbroken over the death of a friend and classmate. We fret about all the things that are on our “to do” list that seems to grow geometrically every day. We feel we are losing our moorings, especially as the end of the term or the end of our time at Princeton draws nearer. And as we live these lives that sometimes are so full of worry and longing, fretting and disorientation, we put things in compartments that are of our own making – compartments of body and soul, head and heart, mind and spirit. Life is complicated and messy and in the midst of it, as we attempt to file away the experiences of our days in neat compartments, it seems as though this is all there is.

But, of course, we are not just a collection of compartments or file cabinets full of neatly labeled folders, but whole persons. And our experiences are not all there is. The Christian message of hope in an everlasting life promised to all is that there much more. And those of us who can grasp the reality of that promise even for a moment are like those inhabitants of Octavo who are mindful of, but unconcerned about the fragility and transience of our spider-web lives.

I know it’s not easy for us to be like those net dwellers of Octavo because we’ve been distracted, polarized, and hoodwinked. Over the last hundred years or so the Christian world has divided itself into two broad camps. One camp, that we might for convenience sake call the right, thinks of salvation mostly in terms of heaven and hell and in terms of what happens to us after we die. The other camp, the left, if you like, sees salvation mostly in terms of economic and political liberation and social justice in this life on earth. To be sure, each has aspects of the other, but this division can be seen in a good deal of religious debate and plays itself out in the so-called culture wars.

Richard J. Foster, the leader of a Christian movement of reconciliation and balanced living called Renovaré, who has called my attention to the division I just described, points out that the Jesus we encounter in the gospels and the writings of his apostolic followers focused their attention on the inbreaking of the kingdom of God both in this life and in the life to come. This point of view knows no boundaries of life and death, of earth and heaven. As Foster writes “The circumference of their message embraces 360 degrees.”

He goes on to say:

“The failure of the right is a blindness to the fact that salvation is for here and now as well as for there and then. The failure of the left is its inability to have any redemptive word for life beyond the grave. Most striking of all, both fail to address the means for transforming the human personality into Christlikeness, and neither gives sufficient attention to the radical fellowship-forming power that comes from rightly understanding and proclaiming the everlasting gospel of Jesus Christ.” [R. J. Foster, “Salvation is for life.” Theology Today, 61:3, 297-308, October, 2004]

In the gospel of John (10:10) Jesus tells us he has come so that we may have life and have it abundantly. And having this life entails allowing Christ into our lives. It requires us to conform our lives to Christ. This, not heaven, is the goal of the Christian life. Heaven is a destination. We’ll get there – all of us, one way or the other. But that’s really not the point. The point is whether we, who have been introduced to Christ, will embrace Christ in our lives so that we will experience the abundant life. Right now – and forever!

Well that begs the question how we will set about doing that. And the 2000 year Christian tradition tells of six practices that will bring Christ into our lives.

The first is prayer – a regular routine of prayer and meditation by which we practice the presence of God.

The second is striving for virtue – a life of love and mercy – by avoiding those things that take us far from God.

The third is actively welcoming the Holy Spirit into our lives by nurturing those gifts that we have been given.

The fourth is compassion – striving to see Christ in all other human beings and to work tirelessly for justice.

The fifth is to make the word of God – the scriptures – a central part of our lives by studying them and sharing God’s good news with others. This is the dreaded “E” word – evangelism.

And sixth is what we have come here to do tonight – make Eucharist. Around the table of the Lord we engage in an incarnational, sacramental act of using ordinary bread and wine to celebrate the presence of God in our lives. This act of thanksgiving and mystery makes Christ truly present to us in bread that is no longer bread, and in wine that is no longer wine.

These six practices – prayer, virtue, welcoming the Holy Spirit, compassion, evangelism, and the sacramental life – are not items on a Chinese menu that we can choose from. This is what many Christian communities have done and this has led to many divisions. Instead, these six practices are like items on a fixed price menu where you take the whole package. It takes all six to transform our lives – to make us into saints of God.

This is the meaning of our final hymn – “I sing a song of the saints of God.” It’s a sweet, almost childlike hymn and I invite you to sing it with gusto when the times comes. It is a simple, childlike declaration that it is possible for each of us to be a saint – that is a holy, sanctified person. It is a declaration that we mean to be saints of God by living lives of prayer, virtue, welcoming the Holy Spirit, compassion, word, and sacrament.

If we can keep our sights fixed on this goal then we can be like those people of Octavo who have no fear of falling through the net. Because we will know, with them, that this life is just a fleeting part of a larger, never-ending life of abundance in the presence of God. This is a detachment from the world that is hard to achieve and it is only based on the sure and certain hope that in Christ there is no death – all are alive!

So tonight we give thanks to God for the saints of God and we ask God’s Spirit to come upon us as we strive to become Christ like and to become saints ourselves.

Amen.