The Feast of All Saints
November 2, 2008
The Rev. Steve Smith

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer.
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, and the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

The year was 1920. The War to end all wars had ended, but in its wake lay the greatest carnage and devastation the world had ever known. The Bolsheviks on the left held sway in Russia, while fascism was on the ascendancy on the European continent. For three years, the great Influenza Pandemic had infected one third of the world’s population, killing an estimated 100 million individuals.

In the midst of this watershed period, William Butler Yeats, the poet laureate of his generation, and arguably of this last century, wrote these words I have just recited.

And 88 years later, here we are, the heirs of this distant legacy, living within another historical watershed. As it was in the time of our parents and grandparents, the words of Yeats hold within them a ringing immediacy. Our economy is in a shambles. The war in Iraq rends us asunder. Our fragile earth, our island home, is held in the balance. Things seem to be falling apart. The center cannot hold. On the eve of a presidential election, we are split into red and blue, left and right, haves and have nots. Our political discourse has devolved into demagoguery, sound bites, and cynicism. Extremism is flourishing. The best in us has lost its conviction, and the worst in us rises up with passionate intensity.

And yet… and yet, friends, here we are, gathered together, on yet another All Saints Sunday, placing our selves and all that in us lies within the communion of saints. Here we are, holding fast to those we love but see no longer. Here we are, knit together in one communion and fellowship in the mystical Body of Christ. Here we are, welcoming the newly baptized, confessing the faith of Christ crucified, proclaiming his Resurrection, sharing in his eternal priesthood. Here we are, drawn together with the heavenly host, standing before the throne of God because, in the words of the Book of Ecclesiastes, “God has set eternity into our hearts.”

Yes, friends, it is true: God has set eternity into our hearts. The Kingdom of God is within us. We are called the Children of God because that is who we are. Things may be falling apart, the center may be lost, the best in us may be wanting, the worst in us may be on the rise, but for us, who bear the mark of the living Christ, we stand secure in and with the great multitude of John’s Revelation, that no one can number, from all tribes and peoples and language, crying with a loud voice: “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb.”

We are heirs of eternity. And if this is so, if eternity is where have come from, and eternity is where we are bound, then the only thing that is necessary, the only thing we need to do, the only thing God asks of us, is to be present in the here and now. For in the words of Kahlil Gibran, “the timeless in (each of us) is aware of life’s timelessness, and knows that yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream.”

To live in God is to live in eternity, and to live in eternity is to live fully in the present. Now I am the first to admit that living fully in the present is something I rarely achieve. I spend most of my days captivated by the past, or imagining the future. Far too much of the time, I am aware that things in me are falling apart, and that the center in me cannot hold. Far too often, the best in me lacks conviction. Far too often, the worst in me rises in passionate intensity.

But then there are those moments when I am held in the eternal now, and when they come, it is pure blessedness. And by blessedness I mean it in the way Jesus describes it today in our Gospel. For Jesus, to be blessed was to be divinely favored, to be blissfully happy or contented, to be drawn into the sacred or holy.

There is blessing in this life, Jesus says, for each of us who is poor in spirit, and for each of us who mourn, or who walk humbly or who hunger and thirst for righteousness; and there is blessing for each of us who practice mercy and for those who of us who are pure in heart; there is blessings for each of us who pursue peace or who experience persecution or the revulsion of others. In each of these ways, Jesus says, we are drawn into God’s embrace, and therein experience the joys of heaven, the bliss of eternity. In each of these ways, angels guard our steps lest we dash our feet against a stone. In each of these ways, our eternal souls are joined with the great company of the saints in light.

Generations ago, Emily Dickinson wrote: “Forever is composed of nows.” In our own generation, Martin Luther King spoke of the “fierce urgency of now”. The past is gone. The future is not yet. But now, now is the time, now is all that we have, now the best in us is urged to stand, the living with the dead, before the throne of God, worshipping God day and night within God’s holy temple; now eternity beckons us to heal this broken world, and guide it to springs of living water, where no more is there hunger, no more is there thirst, no more crying, no more dying; where there are only those ineffable joys prepared for us who live in the glory of the Eternal Now.