Holy Tears

 

Texts for the Feast of All Saints here.

Today we are celebrating All Saints, a great feast of the church, the day in which we sing For All the Saints, and pray the prayer about ineffable joys and remember the big names in Christianity, the ones who show up on stained glass windows and have their own special days in the church calendar and such, those men and women who have given themselves to God through the ages in a big and sometimes public way. 

Connected with All Saints are two other days on either side of it, All Hallow’s Eve (which everyone now just calls Halloween), and The Commemoration of All Faithful Departed, (which many folks call All Souls). The All Faithful Departed are those who have died in our own day, the little saints - compared to the major names of All Saints Day if you will. These three consecutive days go together to give us some time and space to consider our mortality, to (in faith) also mock death (which is what we might do on Halloween with its ghosties and ghoulies), and to remember that we are all connected to one another, both the living and the dead, as part of the great Communion of Saints that is part of the bedrock of our faith for many of us who worship the Living God. We mock death and we celebrate saints great and small who have not only gone before but who are still among us in our remembering that death is the gate to eternal life, not the end, of life. And so the Feast of All Saints, which I have always loved, is always a great celebration.

And yet, it is worth noting that all three of the readings assigned for today speak of tears. 

Because always with these commemorations, we cannot celebrate eternal life and its eternal and ineffable joys without coming to terms with that which is part and parcel of earthly life: its sorrows. Those sorrows are sadness, grief, loneliness, frustration, guilt, and loss, to name a few. Those who are our saints are also those whom we have lost, and their lives were fraught with pain of every kind because life is hard. Life is just hard. And so Jesus wept at the grave of his friend Lazarus, he wept with Mary and Martha and their friends, he was greatly disturbed in his very body, not just in his feelings, even through he trusted in God completely and he knew that Lazarus would rise from the dead. Still, he wept. His face, like the faces of his friends, was covered in tears.

And so the Scriptures confirm for us what we already suspect: that when we finally meet God at the end of our earthly life, our faces too will be covered in tears.

I find so much comfort in the readings for today. They speak to something so very real. They say that God will swallow up death forever, that God will take away disgrace and pain and frustration and guilt and loss and grief and all of that, and that salvation is like a mother with her child who with her own hands takes us in her arms and gently and lovingly wipes all those things away. They say that we do not need to fear what comes after this life, and they acknowledge that what we feel now is holy, too. They say that our tears are as sacred as haloes and wings. They say that in the end God will come to us and will take away all those things that have caused us so much sorrow in this world. These words are trustworthy and true.

Given the times in which we live now, in which we have had to quarantine and change our routines, when we’ve had to miss out on hugs and holding one another and visits with our families, when we have watched friends succumb to illness and loss of vitality and health and bore witness to those who were overtaken by death, when we’ve had to give up a lot while trying not to give in to fear: these words could not have come at a better time.

This is our God for whom we have waited, who has prepared for us a great feast and who will destroy the shroud that is cast over all of us. Let us rejoice and be glad that this God for whom we have waited will save us by taking away the frustration and pain and guilt and loss and grief that have beset us in this life, will save us by taking our sorrow away and free us from their oppressive and life-draining weight. 

Let us rejoice and be glad that this is our God, for whom we have waited, who also waits for us and who knows that on the day of our meeting, we will come to him in tears.