A Great Cloud Sermon
Revelation 7:9-17, All Saints A
Buddy Summers, Pastor,
Prelude
It’s a cool late October morning. I’m waiting for inspiration in my favorite plastic upholstered corner booth. Breakfast came and went. It’s just me, coffee and slack key---the ebb and flow of voices, laughter, and the “t’ta…t’tat” of the cash register printer.
The waitperson is an old friend by now---one of my “sistas.” She calls me “Fabian” (from my VISA card). That’s how close we are. From time to time I ask if she has any sermon ideas. “You tell me the subject, and I’ll tell you what I think,” she says.
“What you preaching this time
Fabian?” she asks breaking my “concentration.”
I say I’m going to preach against the war. It’s been weighing heavily, especially this
week with the announcement of the 2000th
“Good,” she says, “good. You know, I ask these young boys Friday night
when they come out of the bar…they’re from
“Pray for the President,” I’m
thinking. We can do better by the boys
from
Another Text
1Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of
witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so
closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, 2looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith,
who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross,
disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne
of God.
---Hebrews 12:1-2
The Fog
The image of the “great cloud of witnesses” is a powerful one in my faith experience. I can almost feel their breath upon the back of my neck when I stand with you at the communion table. The communion of saints, they are. Those who have gone before surround us with eager anticipation, hoping for the best, believing with God, in us.
And today, as All Saints (November 1st) and All Souls (November 2nd) lie just ahead I want to reflect upon how we may honor them---how we may honor those who, in the image of the Revelations passage, have come through the ordeal (of life) and who now stand in God’s presence shouting, “Salvation belongs to God and the Lamb.”
I confess I am distracted by the
relentless and distressing news of our times.
Anyone else? Incompetence,
cronyism, indictments in high places.
Earthquakes, floods and famine. A
person at one of my favorite restaurants in
An early 19th century
Prussian general referred to the chaos of the battlefield as “the fog of war”
(von Clausewitz, I think.) And in the
documentary “The Fog of War”,
I’ll say that life is so multilayered with self-serving interests that a
new fog has rolled in---the fog of twenty first century living in the free
world---and (it must be said) ---we are killing people unnecessarily.
Even the national newspaper of record, The New York Times, appears to have colluded with an Administration intent upon selling an invasion of Iraq based upon information known to be disputed and unverifiable if not downright false. Whom can we believe? Are there any trustworthy sources?
The comfortable and inspiring cloud of witnesses (now populated with more than 2,000 dead U.S. military, several hundred coalition soldiers and 30,000-100,000 Iraqi men, women and children, and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of victims of famine, free trade and all forms of violence) has become for me simply a fog, an impenetrable fog----a great cloud---of unknowing. Are you tracking what I’m saying?
Need to Backtrack
I’m stuck. I can’t see a way forward. Perhaps, it’s the twenty first century fog. In the past, it has helped to backtrack, see if I can pick up the trail. Do you do this? Once on the Camino Santiago, Estelle and I followed a fence line for half an hour in the dark until we finally realized that were off the trail.
After backtracking into a tiny
village, and (since, by then, dawn had broken) we found the turn we had
missed. By the way, we should have taken
a right turn—but before you make too much of it, the
Returning to the lectionary passage, we hear those who have gone before, the White Robed Ones, those who have come through the ordeal of life and are gathered in God’s presence, not only praising God in song but shouting it reads, shouting “Salvation belongs to God and the Lamb.”
It’s a stretch, but suppose honoring the saints and the faithful departed requires listening, actually listening to what they are shouting? Still with me?
So, what does it mean today---salvation belongs to God and to the Lamb?
Here’s the President’s take---
Once again this nation and all our friends are all that stands between a world at peace and a world of constant chaos and alarm. Once again we are called to defend the safety of our people and the hopes of all humankind. We accept this responsibility. We will accept no outcome except complete victory. (http://www.bushflash.com/antivic.html
According to our President, the
hopes of humankind, safety and peace are the responsibility of the
Salvation
belongs to God and to the Lamb!
Stephen Moore, President of the Free Enterprise Institute and former Cato Institute Director of Fiscal Policy Studies has this suggestion---
[C]apitalism really is the panacea to better
health and greater wealth. Just about
the only place on earth where economic and health progress has not occurred has
been
http://www.cato.org/dailys/09-25-00.html
To paraphrase a no longer generally accepted theological saying ---“There is no salvation outside of capitalism.” Can this be true? Listen to those who have gone before. Listen to the White Robed Ones.
Salvation
belongs to God and to the Lamb!
In contemporary terms, the Biblical vision of salvation includes public safety, meaningful employment with living wages, access to health care, nutrition, shelter and Sabbath rest. It includes social well being and social justice grounded in Jubilee, a periodic and dynamic redress of accumulated inequities and a care for the earth and all living things.
And who is The Lamb to whom along with God salvation belongs? As you know, the Lamb is Jesus whose nonviolent trust in God, in God’s generosity and love was not disappointed even in death. The Lamb is Jesus whose way on earth revealed God’s way for us and with us.
That salvation belongs to God and the Lamb reminds us that salvation comes through mutual respect, care and vulnerability rather than through private accounts and global hegemonies created to secure for private use oil and other dwindling resources upon which to base life styles unattainable for 99% of humanity.
Salvation does not belong to Lady
Luck, heredity, hard work or good breeding.
Salvation does not belong to the swift or the strong. Salvation does not belong to the President of
the
Salvation is not about bailing out failing corporations by dumping their pension commitments to retired employees nor is salvation achieved by balancing our good lives on the backs of impoverished, uninsured, and hidden neighbors.
Salvation is the realization, in word and deed, of the realm of God, the ways of God---on earth, here and now in plain view, as it is in heaven.
Salvation
belongs to God---and the Lamb!
The Cloud of Unknowing
All Saints, All Souls and everyday, I’d like to honor those who have gone ahead. Wouldn’t you? Imagine where we would be if we truly believed that salvation belongs to God and the Lamb? We wouldn’t know which way to turn. We would be lost. And frankly, when it comes to seeing my way from here into God’s ways among us, I am lost. You? The fog. Remember?
An anonymous 14th century English mystic wrote a pamphlet to help those who truly wanted to know and love God. He called it “The Cloud of Unknowing.” His sense was that in the realization of being truly lost, in the utter humility of that realization, there arises the possibility of being touched and guided by God’s outstretching hand.
We truly know many things. We know Democratic and Republican things. We know depression, Cold War and shopping mall things. We know upper middle class and North American things. I’m good with a credit card, lap top, and email. I travel well.
For God to be able to reach us with his most intimate love (and before we can behold our neighbor in God’s love), the writer says we need to forget these things that we already know---laying aside, in the words of the Hebrews passage, every weight and the sin that clings so closely.
And from within a cloud of unknowing, in love and humility, he says, pray with focus and determination---even to the point of reducing prayer to a single phase or word—like “love”, “O God” or “thank you”---concentrating upon the possibility of being grasped by God’s gracious love and led through the fog.
The hairs on the back of my neck are standing up. Did a cloud pass? They are stirring, those who are with us even as they stand in God’s presence, those who are loving us, hoping, with God, for the best in us and from us, they are whispering. “Yes, yes, yes.”
Postlude
So, I went back to Zippy’s last night. I was going to show “sista” my sermon, explain to her the connections I was making between the Cloud of Witness, the Fog, and the Cloud of Unknowing. She wasn’t working that shift. But she did visit me in a dream last night. I awoke with a start. All I remembered was her saying,
I don’t know anything
about that cloud business Fabian.
I do know this: Salvation belongs to God and the Lamb.
