From Generation to Generation
Church of the Redeemer UCC, New Haven, CT

November 3, 2013

J. Bennett Guess

Ephesians 1:11-23

It is a great honor and privilege to be with you for this special day as we commemorate and celebrate Church of the Redeemer’s 175 years of ministry here in New Haven and beyond. It seems like just yesterday that you were a little up-start, renegade, break-away congregation, and look at you now all grown up.

The New Haven Register nailed it this past week, I hope you saw it, when its lead paragraph called you a bunch of “rabble rousers.” Jesus would be proud. Jesus is proud. And I’ve come from the national offices of the United Church of Christ in Cleveland to tell you that we are proud, proud of your incredible witness over these many years as you incarnate the best of the who we say we are and aspire to be as a united and uniting church, living out so extravagantly the distinctive vision, values and voice that is the UCC.

I bring you greetings from the national United Church of Christ, and more than one million of your sisters and brothers in faith who are gathered in some 5,100 congregations this morning, and I carry with me best wishes to you from my three other colleagues who make up the UCC’s Collegium of Officers: Rev. Geoffrey Black, our General Minister and President, who right now in Busan, Korea, along with a dozen or so other UCCers, attending the 10^th international assembly of the World Council of Churches, a gathering of thousands of global Christians that takes place every 7 years. Rev. Linda Jaramillo, executive minister of Justice and Witness Ministries, who is at the UCC’s Western Reserve Association meeting in Ohio this weekend, and Rev. Jim Moos, executive minister for Wider Church Ministries, who just recently returned from a three-week trip to visit our mission partners in Japan, China and the Philippines. But it is my distinct joy and privilege to be in New Haven today, to celebrate the joy and witness that is Church of the Redeemer

I would be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to say thank you to your excellent senior pastor, Shelly, for her incredible leadership, not only here in this congregation, but in this city, the Connecticut Conference, the national church and beyond. And also you new associate pastor, Marilyn, what a great team they make. And also to thank you, the members of this church and your lay leaders for being a congregation that understands and supports covenantal and connectional ministry through your monetary support for Our Church’s Wider Mission (OCWM), the common fund that supports the regional, national and global work of the United Church of Christ. Every day I have the opportunity to see the huge impact the UCC has in this country and around the world, and as you celebrate all the ministries that have the finger prints of Church of the Redeemer on them, I hope you won’t forget that you’re a part of this much-larger thing, and its impact is your impact. So thank you.

And now to our text for today: In Christ, we have obtained an inheritance, having been destined, so that we, who first set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of Christ’s glory.

Well, Halloween is over. Time to take down the blow-up witches and ghosts, and put away the plastic pumpkins, and hoard a few more snickers and take all the rest of the candy you don’t like to the office, so you’ll look generous and health-conscious.

And in case you missed it, all that hoopla was actually a big spooky set-up for the day that follows it, All Saints Day, which was this past Friday, but in many places we observe it today, on the first Sunday of November.

It is a time when we honor the prayerful spiritual communion that exists between all people who have ever lived in faith… not quite the “great pumpkin,” but it is the “great continuum” between the first Adam and the first Eve throughout every subsequent generation, ending not just with us today, but far beyond today. Until that one day when Jesus Christ, the Alpha and the Omega, will stand as the gap joining beginning and ending, welcoming all of us – full circle – into that heavenly family. Great day!

It’s hard to count that many souls, so this morning we just resonate with McDonald’s and talk about “billions and billions served” by a living God, a holy spirit, who wills and works for faith, hope and love to be breathed into the lives of all people, no matter where or when they live.

It’s the one time in the Christian year when we are called to think not only about grandparents and great-grandparents, but also their great-great-grandparents as well. As far back as we can remember. The names we know, but also the names we will never know or could never know. Those who persisted in faith, despite all the evidence to the contrary, who believed in God’s loving presence and purpose even at times when that mindset is hard to hold.

It’s fitting you know, and probably no accident, that we’re celebrating this big anniversary of yours on All Saints Day, because both of these occasions are quite similar. These are times to reflect on the balcony people that fill our lives and who cheer for us in our race toward life’s finish line. Those forebears who share – still – in our hopes and convictions and dreams for the world – and see in us the best potential to see their deepest aspirations realized by the work we do today. You can almost hear them whispering in your ear, “Are you going to give up now?”

And whenever you find and map yourself somewhere along the great continuum that is the history of God, you can’t help but feel a little small. Because, in the whole scheme of things, each of us is pretty insignificant really. Just a blip on the screen that is the universe.

A seminary president told me she’s recently preached a sermon she called, “What if none of us are special?” And she said people didn’t like it one bit. Because we’ve all been taught how special we are, how unique we are. But what if we’re not. What if the other 7 or so billion on this planet deserve the exact same thing you do? Now multiply that by the history of time and you get the idea. Pretty small.

Yet, at the same time, All Saints Day reminds us of our huge potential – to attempt and accomplish great things for God, the grandness of scope to which we belong, the bigger purpose to which we are blessed to be part of: God’s mission neither began with us, nor will end with us. But it does include us, nonetheless.

Every year about this time, I am transported back almost 25 years when, as a then-recent seminary graduate, I planned an All Saints Day service at the small country church in Kentucky I was serving. I was a freshly-minted pastor. It wasn’t the custom of that congregation to have a service on All Saints Day, but I thought they should have one, so I organized one and promoted it for several weeks on Sunday mornings.

When that mid-week evening arrived, November 1, I had about 25 folded bulletins in the narthex and my typed sermon waiting on the pulpit. I had practiced the hymns for the evening, since I was not only preacher but also the church musician.

I lit the sanctuary candles and dozens of those little votive candles around the chancel, before getting dressed in my black robe and white stole, and then waited patiently in my little office, just off the sanctuary, listening for any sounds of the big-wooden church doors opening or car doors slamming in the gravel lot just outside my office window, so I would make my way out to greet people.

Nothing. Not a sound.

As about 7:03 p.m. rolled around, I had the realization come over me that not a single person was going to come and, I was feeling quite foolish, stupid really, but I comforted myself by deciding it would be okay anyhow. I’d just save the order of worship and the sermon for the following Sunday and I’d never say a single word about it.

And it would be the last time I’d ever try anything special for these miserable people.

But just as I was starting to blow out the candles and take off my robe, a door of the church opened. It was my mother who had driven about 30 miles or so to attend the service. Looking at the empty sanctuary, I could tell she, too, was confused … I remember she even asked me if she had the day or time wrong, and I remember barking back at her abrasively, “Well, we’re not having it.”

But, being the strong woman she is, and catching on quickly to how deflated I was feeling in the moment, as only a mother can, she said emphatically, “Well I’m here and I came to worship.” And, despite a few minutes of my protests and her consoling, I could tell she was dead serious. The service would go on as planned, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.

So….feeling a little bit like a mother and child at a pretend worship tea party … I relit the candles, zipped up my robe, stepped up behind the pulpit … and started the call to worship. “May the Lord be with you,” I said. And my mother replied back said back from the fourth or fifth pew, “And also with you.”

And, then together, we shared a call-and-response litany, much like the ones recited by world-over on All Saints Day, calling forth all creation, all humankind to come and sit with us, to stand beside us, recalling all that God has done for us and remembering God’s mercies from generation to generation to generation.

After a few moments, even the awkwardness started to subside as, together, we felt that room becoming filled with all the love that a mother and son could have for one another — which is a pretty good metaphor for the occasion, given how history is nothing more than love and hope and faith being passed down – from parent to child – from generation to generation – which is, in essence, what All Saints is all about.

We didn’t miss a beat. Every hymn was sung, the sermon was delivered, prayers were said. I made sure we took up an offering. And the Eucharist blessed and shared. The benediction pronounced.

As you might imagine, not an All Saints Day goes by that one of us doesn’t remind the other of that strange, but very special worship service.

Sometimes during holy communion, I have this crazy halucination. I see people who aren’t really there. I know, I said it was crazy but I imagine a much longer line coming forward to share in the bread and the cup than is actually present in the room. Like how, if I’m presiding at the table, sometimes I see myself serving my grandparents (all of whom are dead). I can envision my great-grandmother walking down the aisle, although I have very little memory of walking when I knew her alive when I was as a child.

I’ve trained my mind’s eye to look for them, and it’s one of the rare times when I find myself communing with them, somehow across the chasm of life and death, for I know my life and service in the church is, in great measure, the result of what they nurtured and planted in me, but before me was also nurtured and planted in them as well.

But more than relatives, I find myself giving bread to complete strangers as well. Those yellowish-gray people that I see in the old photographs that hang in our church basements. Or people I admire and look up to, Rosa Parks, or Martin Luther King, or Archbishop Romero. People who are not there at all, and yet they are. Is that crazy? I hope it’s not crazy, because my faith teaches me that they are here. They are here. Your people are here.

But you know, it’s not enough to only look back. It’s not only not enough, it’s not fair. It lets us off the hook. Because a day like today should be even more heavily weighted toward what is next and what we are doing and building for generations after us, yes even to the point of sacrifice.

In my work, I am constantly aware of the broad shoulders on which we stand as a church. Somebody way back then really was thinking about us. They really were.

I often think of Congregationalists from New England who gathered in 1853 to pool together offerings to help “the feeble churches of the west” and by “the west” they meant west of the Hudson River. Today that modest sum of money they pooled together is more than $58 million, held in perpetuity for loans and services to new and renewing congregations. You can go to dozens of churches in northeast Ohio where the chandeliers and stained glass windows were literally gifts from congregations right here in Connecticut.

Daniel Hand may not be a name you know, but just down the road here in the southeast corner of New Haven County, there is a high school named in his honor, in Madison, his hometown. And if you go to Guilford, his stately home has been preserved as a historical site. The story and legacy of Daniel Hand is twisted and colorful and incredibly inspiring. It’s the story of a hugely successful white businessman who made his money in the South before the civil war and was so profoundly moved by the plight of slaves he encountered there, he gave the outrageous sum of $1 million in 1888 (the equivalent of $33 million today) to the American Missionary Association, the predecessor body that is today Local Church Ministries of the United Church of Christ for the purpose of educating “colored” children and youth, and from that legacy gift, as many as 300 community schools were established across the south and millions upon millions of dollars, to this day, have been and continue to be contributed to African-American students at UCC-related schools like Dillard, Fisk, Talladega, Tougaloo, Huston-Tillotson and LeMoyne-Owen.

What will our legacy be? I’m not just talking money, but I’m talking comprehensively, creatively, organizationally, theologically, what are we preparing to pass on?

Because sometimes it’s really important to remember that faith did not begin with us. It surely will not die with us. Don’t think that highly of yourself.

But faith has grafted us in, and so we do have a role to play in preserving and passing it along, hopefully helping faith itself to grow up a little bit and come a little closer to achieving the high bar, the high ideal, it sets for itself, helping it to become more honest, more authentic, more salvific even, than it has come to us. And there is both honor and responsibility that comes along with that.

In the last congregation I served, there was a woman named Kathy who had thrown herself fully into the life of that congregation for many months, but — for whatever reason — she just didn’t want to join. You don’t know Kathy, but you know Kathy. (I don’t know, maybe she’s here this morning!)

She and I met and had talked about it many times, formally and informally, and I knew she was wrestling with the decision, taking it far more seriously than most people I know.

Finally, I said in desperation, “Kathy, what’s holding you back? You obviously love this place. You’re here all the time. You do all the work. Why won’t you join?”

She said, “It’s just that what this church is about -- justice, love, community and hope – it just feels so big, so important.” (She didn’t play loosely with things like that.)

“So big, so important” … her words still haunt me at times when I forget that. And her deeper understanding of commitment convicts me at moments when I might just forget why all this stuff we do matters so.

You know, every time I hear someone lump all churches together under the same monolithic definition of what religion stands for and categorically dismiss every church as an out-of-touch relic of superstition and exclusivity, I am saddened by what they have never experienced. It’s certainly not my testimony, and hopefully not yours, but you and I both know that for far too many people that is their only reality, their only experience of church – how truly sad – which is precisely why a church like Church of the Redeemer must not only survive, but thrive in its future.

Saints, it is worth giving and investing your whole life in. It is just that important. There’s no other way to express it. AMEN.