Last night at Mass down the street, we sang one of my favorite hymns, “I am the Bread of Life.” For the last few years, that song has almost been impossible for me to get through. It was one of the keystones of our church drama group in college, which we sang together after our play about the raising of Lazarus. It was the hymn we sang in full-voiced chorus, with clapping and an extra refrain, at the funeral of the theater professor who had created and directed that drama group since the eighties. I still can not quite sing it through in full voice, not if I’m paying attention, because I want so desperately for the words to come true - right now. “And I will raise you up on the last day!” It is a hymn which brings back to me all of the deep love from that funeral, and not only our love and loss when our director died, but the love and passion he gave to us in service of making the Scriptures come alive among us.
I am tempted to make this worship today a tribute to all of those who have died, all who we miss terribly, all who have left their mark on us and are no longer physically among us to interact with. I am tempted to make it that and to leave it at that. We have this activity before us, this chain of saints to put together as a visual reminder of the great cloud of witnesses, an idea offered by the living witnesses of ELCA clergy on Facebook. But even as we celebrate the impact these saints have made on our lives and in the world, remembering how the world has changed since they’ve gone, or since we’ve moved and changed, it is only a small glance into the larger celebration to come.
When we gather around the Table, we pray “with the choirs of angels, with the church on earth and the hosts of heaven.” That means this little table here is connected by some Mystery to every other table where people gather for the Lord’s Supper, and when we gather at it for prayer and eating together, we are eating and praying with everyone who has ever eaten and prayed around this Meal. Which is pure gift. It is not something we can ever earn or understand, it is just given to us. This amazingly global community that God has brought together by his sacrifice for us. The same Body and Blood of Christ shared throughout the ages, where we may not see anymore at the table those who have died, but they are there gathered with us. It still is yet a foretaste of the feast to come, but God knows what and who we bring to this Table when we gather together, both the joy and the struggle.
If we were not moved by those who loved us, it would not ache so deep when they left us. And “blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted,” is a word Jesus speaks for us, today. There is also the beatitude of hungering and thirsting after righteousness, being filled in that hunger. How many of our saints have lived with that sort of thirst, for a more just world? And the meek, the poor in spirit, the merciful, the pure of heart… Jesus holds up these types of people before the disciples as reminders to them of the diversity of people who make up the kingdom of God. The people they will meet in their journeys, whom the world will misunderstand and deride and shame and even throw away or ignore completely or downright persecute, these people, all appearances to the contrary, are blessed.
They are blessed, not because they have earned it, but because Jesus says so. Because Jesus welcomes them, embraces them, walks with them in their grief and their hunger and their mercy. Just as Jesus is the one who makes saints of our beloved dead, and of us even here and now, Jesus is the one who makes blessing root and grow in the most unexpected of places.
Whomever you have named on your slip of paper, whomever you remember today in our prayers, know that they are with you at this Table, that all of us are united in the love and grace and mercy of a God who has done all that is necessary to bring us together into a single communion. Children of God, you have been claimed by Christ, our beloved dead have been claimed by Christ, we celebrate this day that the love, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, has destroyed this barrier of death which would keep us from God and from each other. Sin can no longer have the final word over us, and neither can time, no matter how it marches on. I wear the color of Easter today as a reminder to that promise of resurrection, which has been secured for us by the blood of his cross. For the saints gone before, for the saints of today, and for all who are yet to come.
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