6 November 2005

Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

Church of the Redeemer

New Haven, Conn.

Scripture:  Matthew 5:1-12

Blessed Mourners

Our worship service today draws deeply on our roots in faith.  It was the ancient Hebrew poets and song writers who made human memory a sacred art.  Stranded in exile on the banks of the rivers in Babylon, the harpist said, “If I forget you Oh Jerusalem, let my right hand wither.” (Ps. 137)  Jerusalem was where God was, in the temple.  The musician of memory leaps heart, mind, and soul over the long and winding road that leads to home and says:  if I can remember you I can be there with you, oh Lord my strength and my Redeemer; and if I forget you, oh sacred place of God, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.

The Hebrews had long prayed that God not forget them;  now in some forgotten corner of their world they received the gift of believing that they could remember God—and it was almost as good as being there!

We are, of course, grateful that the founding religion of Jesus gave us monotheism—that God is one, the Shema.  But it also gave us the religious imagination to believe that memory is a sacred form of consciousness—not just a waste of time.  It is no mere coincidence that the founder of modern psychological cures, Sigmund Freud, was a Jew and that he believed that to redeem memory was the royal road to cure.

So, today, in a word, faithful to the religious imagination of the Hebrew Bible, we remember our dead.  It’s not that other cultures don’t remember their dead.  The Biblical thing is:  we are with God when we remember our dead.  This is not nostalgia, nor ancestor worship, nor idolatry, nor bunk:  this is dynamic living spirit, presence!

Along with our roots in the Hebrew Bible, Jesus’ Bible, today’s worship service also draws deeply on our roots in the Roman Catholic Church.  All Saints Day goes back to the first millennium and really characterizes one of the enduring—and reemerging—gifts of Catholicism and that is spiritual practice:  everyday rites and rituals that alert our mind and body to the invisible presence of the almighty and everlasting God.  Our Puritan and Reformation forbearers—that we were so excited about last Sunday, Reformation Sunday, wouldn’t have been caught dead (so to speak!) celebrating All Saints’ Day and the Catholic list of saints.  Our Puritans just exploded the whole concept of sainthood and addressed each other among the elect as “saints.”

But a practicing church, a church that engages in religious practices, isn’t just Catholic:  it’s alive!  From  testimonials to Ash Wednesday soot and/or oil, to wearing crosses, doing something “religious” as well as believing something theological is good for us and can bring us closer to God—who is already here.

There is a third root deep in our service today.  All Saints Day used to be in the early months of the year.  There are those who think that it is no accident that the ancient Celtic Christian and Celtic pagan holiday of the New Year, the end of the summer, the hibernating dying of the fields and the rising of the spirits, is why we have All Saints Day and Halloween here in the subliminal leap from October to November—and the howling of the wind and the dying of the leaves.

But it is our roots in Jesus Christ that most give life and meaning to our service of memory and the naming of our dead.  For today we bring to life and alternative world of Jesus created from his worlds we heard this morning:  the Beatitudes.  Most especially the Beatitude, the blessing: blessed are those who mourn—for they will be comforted (Matthew 5:4).

This morning we have practiced mourning.  Lest we forget.  It’s not that we have to cry or even feel a feeling.  A spiritual practice is more than a feeling:  it’s an act, and even we know that actions speak louder than words.  And so we can silently write out names of those who have died whom we remember.

 Can you remember what your father’s signature looked like?  I can remember mine.  Can you remember seeing your mother’s name on a check or on your report card?  Can you recall your children having printed their names in the cover of a book they valued?  Do you still have a holiday card from someone dear with their name written by their hand at the end of it?

I hope I don’t lose you all to reverie and loss here.  But there is mystery and spirit in a name, especially in a hand-written name.  When he was a boy, Abraham Lincoln was himself greatly moved by his own name and his ability to write it with his own hand.  Taking pen in hand one day, and we can imagine some sort of quill, he wrote a little poem:  “Abraham Lincoln is my name, he will be good but God knows when.”  The core of his life is in that second line.  He was good.  He did become good—he had one of the most unlikely second chances in a life work imaginable—becoming President after losing innumerable elections.  And his belief in Providence:  “and God knows when.”  His favorite theological line was Shakespeare’s “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.”

Earlier Lincoln had just written his name once, “A. Lincoln,” and just stared at it with amazement.  “A. Lincoln”:  the same way he signed the Emancipation Proclamation:  “A. Lincoln,” some 40 more years later.  To his childlike amazement with his name he commented:  “it don’t look a blame bit like me”--inviting the way a visible word holds but cannot contain the invisible self.  Just as when we write the names of our departed we are oh so connected to them and oh so not connected the way we most want to be.

And that is why our prayer is that God hold us together with the persons whose names we write just as the ancient Hebrew poet prayed and sang and believed that God would be there on the banks of the rivers of Babylon just as God was in the temple in Jerusalem—if the poet would just and only remember as we do this day.

So much of our lives we try—we say—to make a name for ourselves.  For generations men particularly internalized that task:  “make a name for yourself, son.”  The preliminary commandment.  That imperative injunction has cost men as much spirit and life as it has cost women to believe their true worth was only in the married name that could add to theirs or their children’s.

We are baptized only in our Christian name and our Christian name is enough for us to be remembered by, at least by God, who is, by the way, unlike us, known to be very good with names!

And so, blessed are we who carry sorrow, for we shall comforted be.

Amen.