All Saints Communion Meditation

Psalm 24

November 7, 2021

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab22oeZYNsk

“The earth is the Lord’s.” So says the psalmist. But not only the psalmist. It is a consistent Biblical theme. It’s found in Exodus and Deuteronomy. Hannah prayed it as she dedicated her son Samuel. And in the law about property, God declares “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine;” The earth is the Lord’s. It all starts there.

God has an intimate relationship with every aspect of creation. I hope you got a sense of that from James Weldon Johnson’s poem. There is an energy, a force, a invisible power that holds creation together. While God is unseen, what we can see is interdependence. What we can see are ecosystems which thrive and flourish when things are in balance, a cycle of seasons, of springtime and harvest, a water cycle in which rain falls and waters the earth, then gathers in streams and pools and then evaporates to the clouds only to return as rain or snow again. What we can see, with a microscope, are cells which form organisms and organisms which support larger ones which support even larger ones. The largest things we can observe – blue whales or sequoias – are sustained by things so tiny that we can barely grasp their existence.

“The earth is the Lord’s” means that God pervades every bit of creation with purpose and beauty. The order and rhythm and inter-connectedness surely tell us something about who God is and about who we are.

I have followed some of the stories from the climate conference in Glasgow this week, as I know many of you have. I’ve heard about droughts and floods which destroy farms, raise food prices and leave the most vulnerable even more hungry. I’ve heard about the women in Colombia where erratic rain falls are forcing them to walk longer and longer distances in more dangerous places simply to bring water to their families; and about the ones in rural Indonesia, which has lost almost 40% of its tropical rainforest in recent decades. Women are the strongest defenders of the forest and bear the worst impacts of deforestation, but must function within a culture that silences them in the public sphere. [1] Environmental degradation is a major factor in civil conflict and cross-border migration, including our own borders.

Creation’s interdependence is its strength, but also a point of vulnerability. Everything is connected to everything else and it all flourishes together or withers together. If the last 20 months have taught us anything, it is surely that we are truly all in this together. If, as the poet John Donne said, any person’s death diminishes me, how much more are we diminished by the loss of 5 million people to Covid, by the extinction of unique species, by the death of corals in the Great Barrier Reef.

On this All Saints Sunday, we pause to remember our connections, particularly our connections to those of every time and place who understand that they belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God. We use the word saints as it is used in the New Testament. Not Saints with a capital S, not super-hero Christians recognized for their piety or the strength of their faith under persecution or for their martyrdom, but saints with a small S, the people who live their ordinary lives in everyday obedience to the teachings of Jesus.

Richard Rohr is an American Franciscan priest and writer. Many of you have shared with me your appreciation for his thoughts on spirituality. On the subject of saints and connections, he says this, “Saints see things in their connectedness and wholeness. They don’t see things as separate. It’s all one, and yet like the Trinity, it is also different. What you do to the other, you do to yourself; how you love yourself is how you love your neighbor; how you love God is how you love yourself; how you love yourself is how you love God. How you do anything is how you do everything.”

He continues “Faith is not simply seeing things at their visible, surface level, but recognizing their deepest meaning. To be a person of faith means you see things—people, animals, plants, the earth—as inherently connected to God, connected to you, and therefore, most worthy of love and dignity.” [2]

Many of us here today may need that steadying, that reminder that we are connected and sustained by the Body of Christ. In the words of Elizabeth Johnson, we are “one community of memory and hope, a holy people touched with the fire of the Spirit.” And we “are summoned to go forth as companions bringing the face of divine compassion into everyday life and the great struggles of history.” [3]

Beloved ones, we are not alone. We are held securely in the mystical web of the faithful. Our lives are guided by those who came before us, just as we are shaping the lives of those who live alongside us or on the other side of the world or are coming in the future.

We are not alone because the earth is the Lord’s. The power that sustains creation also sustains us.

Richard Rohr concludes, “You don’t go to heaven; you learn how to live in heaven now. And no one lives in heaven alone. Either you learn how to live in communion with the human race and with all that God has created, or, quite simply, you’re not ready for heaven. If you want to live an isolated life, trying to prove that you’re better than everybody else or believing you’re worse than everybody else, you are already in hell. You have been invited—even now, even today, even this moment—to live in the Communion of Saints, in the Presence, in the Body, in the Life of the eternal and eternally Risen Christ.” [4]

Thanks be to God. Amen.

[1] Kathy Galloway in her blog on COP26 https://iona.org.uk/2021/11/02/from-the-dear-green-place-a-daily-blog-from-kathy-galloway-during-cop26-day-two-monday-1st-november-2021/

[2] https://cac.org/the-communion-of-saints-2016-12-14/

[3] Elizabeth A. Johnson, Friends of God and Prophets: A Feminist Theological Reading of the Communion of Saints (Continuum: 1998), p 240, 243.

[4] https://cac.org/the-communion-of-saints-2016-12-14/