All Soul's Day homily
Berkeley Morning Prayer
Hymn: "Be Thou My Vision"
Gospel Reading: Luke 12:13-31
Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest? –Luke 12:25-26
I could stand here, and tell you about how as graduate students in divinity school, you should take this message to heart.
That you should take and make of this message a shield with which to guard and protect your burgeoning and precarious practices of self-care, such as they are.
(sarcasm)
I could tell you that we third-years have been to the mountaintop!
And that as third-years we've seen the wisdom of Jesus’ teaching,
that we are experts in self-care,
that things no longer matter to us,
that we’ve shed all vestiges of worry,
and that we can impart this knowledge in pithy statements at Morning Prayer!
(/sarcasm)
I’m not going to tell you that.
I instead want to tell you about someone I knew, who taught me what this passage of scripture looked like in its living.
My great, great aunt Mable was born in 1916, within months of the end of World War 1. She was a poor farm girl from Mississippi who moved to Alabama. She did not have any children of her own, but she was like a grandmother to me, having raised my mother and my mother's siblings.
She seemed ancient by the time I could start comprehending age.
Around 2006, she turned 90, and her health deteriorated fairly rapidly. She passed away in 2009, and I had the honor of officiating the graveside portion of her funeral. This became the single most important event in discerning my call to ministry.
Over the 20+ years I spent with her, she showed me a living example of these words from Luke. She had seen much, experienced much, and displayed in her life a calm that comes from knowing what to worry about, and what to let go of.
Almost everything could be let go of.
She trusted in God in ways that I could not understand, and yet she was able to trust in ways that I came to recognize and appreciate, even when I had left the institutional church. In my more rebellious thoughts, I saw her faith as simple. I’m slowly coming to see how profound simplicity in faith can be, even when one's theology is complex.
By the end, in her last two years, she was flipping this worrying business on its head. She was ready to die before the rest of us were ready to let her go. I am struck by how she faced each day in those final years. She did not worry. She faced each day not simply from the viewpoint of one waiting to expire, but as one waiting for a final appointment.
She wanted, more than anything, to finally see God face to face, and to greet God.
By the end, God was her vision.
Her thoughts in day or night,
Her wisdom,
her inheritance,
her treasure,
her heart.
As I watched her in her living, I learned what it would mean to settle not for earthly things. From her I learned lessons about leaning on God in a faith that brings one not to worry, but to a longing for our better nature, which Christ exemplified.
I could talk to you about the passage from Luke, but instead I’d like to ask you a few questions.
Who in your life has already taught you this lesson?
Who taught you about longing for God instead of lesser things?
Who taught you to trust God?
On days like All Saints and All Souls, how could you best thank them for the gifts they have given you?
Amen.
