Feast of All Saints, Year A November 6, 2011
1 Kings 5:1-5, 12-13, 8:1-6, 27-30 St. Alban’s, Austin
I read this week that it was a custom in the ancient Near East that a king would build a temple to his god or gods very soon after his succession. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. What a powerful way of stating in bricks and mortar, in gold leaf and brilliant jewels and pre-cious metals what it is that you value and worship.
You say the name Solomon and opulence comes to mind. Caravans laden with chests of treasure,
harems of beautiful women. Maybe wisdom, too, you know, the story of the baby with two mothers, but if you read on it soon becomes clear that Solomon was all about power. He was all about status among not only his people but the high muckety mucks of the neighboring kingdoms. And this is exactly where the story of the children of Israel begins to go off the tracks.
My favorite hymn in our hymnal is #665, All My Hope on God is Founded. I love the tune but even more I love the words and what they say. My favorite is the second verse:
Mortal pride and earthly glory,
sword and crown betray our trust;
though with care and toil we build them,
tower and temple fall to dust.
But God’s power, hour by hour,
is my temple and my tower.
We have so much going on today that I’m going to keep this sermon very short. We’re baptizing little Hudson Sanders and reading the names of beloved saints who have gone before us and listening to another stewardship moment and commissioning fourteen new lay chaplains who have taken the rigorous training for Community of Hope, and it’s very important to get David to choir rehearsal on time.
So I’m going to pose some questions for you to ponder this week: what temple would we build? What does church mean to us? How does St. Alban’s embody what we truly cherish? And why should any parents bring their darling babies here and what difference does it make that they are baptized? Who are the saints, anyway? Actually, I’m looking at a lot of them. Yes, you.
We could spend hours unpacking these questions and still only come up with partial answers.
But I think we could do worse than go back once again and look at those five questions that are our entrance exam to our membership in this body of Christ, which is the body of Christ to the world. Jennifer and Brad will take the test for Hudson. He hasn’t had time to study up – he’s only been here for eight months -- and he can’t read yet, so they will answer for him. Oh, and we will answer for him as well. We all take this test over and over because we need to be reminded exactly what it is that is our temple and our tower.
We’re going to say these words in a moment, and then we’re going to listen to the names of people we love who have given what they had to give to this world and gone on to the next, leaving us their legacy of faith. And we’ll listen to the witness of another of our peers who is willing to get up in front of you probably with knees shaking to risk telling you why this parish family is worthy of the investment of their financial resources.
Pledge cards will arrive in the mail later in the week, and I imaging you will look at that blank space with the dollar sign by it and wonder what you need to be writing in it. It’s daunting every year. We come together as church, specifically as St. Alban’s, because when we pool our resources we can make a bigger difference in the world than any one of us can do alone. My energy is more efficacious because it is joined by your energy. I’m so grateful for that. I would feel so small and useless by myself, but with you, I feel as if what I have to give matters.
I want to share a case in point, something that happened to me yesterday in the midst of all the chaos of our pet blessing. I took a minute to go inside the school to the library to thank the librarian for getting us the Clifford costume and for all the work she has done with our Early Readers’ Initiative. For those of you who don’t know, in hopes that the children would not lose their reading skills over the summer, we bought twelve new books for each of the 115 first graders at Menchaca in May, so they’d have books to read over the summer whether or not their parents could afford to buy them.
One of the second grade teachers was there, so I asked her if this project had had any effect. She said that they expect the children to slip one or two reading levels over the summer, but this year in her class, EVERY CHILD save one (and her parents switched her from reading Spanish to English over the summer) was reading ON LEVEL at the beginning of school this year.
My favorite hymn says it all for me. All my hope on God is founded. Not some of it. Not most of it. All of it.
And the way I express that hope is in the words that we are about to say together, the promises of our baptismal covenant. I don’t need to say another word. All I’m asking is that as you say these words once again, you will listen deeply to the promises you are making and that in your heart of hearts you are meaning what you say.
Amen.
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