Sermon by The Rev Susie Shaeffer, 11/6/2022, All Saints Sunday
Sermon – All Saints Sunday 2022
Sunday, November 6,2022
St David’s Southfield
The Rev. Susie Shaefer
Goodmorning–I’m so happy that Chris invited me to be with you on All Saints Sunday. Part of my love for this observance is that this day has great music – later, we’ll sing Lesbia Scott’s famous song of the saints of God, a surviving piece from this amazing writer and parent who used the power of music, and her own gift of poetry, to teach her children about faith in God.
And we’ve already sung the piece Ralph Vaughn Williams’ called Sine Nomine - Latin for without name – when he set Bishop Low’s poem “For All the Saints” to music. This hymn captures the essence of today’s feast: that the saints of God, across time and space, have struggled and worked in their own way to shine the light of God in the world, and are connected to one another still. Bishop William How’s original – even longer – poem includes more verses about various types of saints– evangelists, martyrs, prophets – and yet, he never names a single one of these heroes of faith.
By not naming anyone in particular, of course, we are able to include all our specific saints as we are moved in our hearts. That is what All Saints, and its twin feast day All Souls, are about–these are days to celebrate our memories and the truth of our ongoing community in the Body of Christ, with those who have inspired our faith and taught us the way of Christ, the famously inspirational saints and the more personal ones who shape our stories, and even the ones whose names we will never know.
Afterall-Whocansayhowtheparticularactionofasaintacrosstimeandgeography has had a ripple effect onto our own traditions and experiences of the Holy One?
My stole was intended to be for Easter – because of course, butterflies are one way we think about Resurrection and new life. But I brought this stole with me today as a reminder of what conceptual physicists call the Butterfly Effect. The idea has been seized by popular culture and science fiction, but essentially came from this: a meteorologist by the name of Edward Lorenz posed a theoretical question at a conference saying ‘Can the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? "It’s not a yes or no question – rather, he was capturing the idea that the smallest shift in one place can have enormous, though unpredictable, effects across the world – changing the outcome of entire systems.
Now, Lorenz wasn’t the first person to talk about this idea, but the butterfly connection somehow caught on and took off–proving his own point, really, since his first attempt to describe this phenomenon used a seagull’s wings, and the seagull metaphor just didn’t take off in the same way.
We might wonder: does one gun, bought with love and money, and removed from the world in Southfield, cause a ceasefire to be reached in Ethiopia? How about 200 guns? Chaos theory teaches that yes – events that seem unrelated and disproportionate on their face can be connected across time and geography, even if we could never trace the effects. The world is interconnected at a deep level–whether we look through the lens of physics, or as members of the mystical body of Christ, into which we have been woven with all the saints.
That’s why I love the Butterfly Effect for All Saints Day -it enables us to see what we are a part of, and imagine what we, as the Body of Christ, might be capable of in the world.
There are so many saints of God–soldiers, queens, and shepherdesses, folks in trains and shops and church, as we’ll sing later – and their actions, both big and small, have changed the world in ways that they could not have imagined.
Each time we live into God’s dream for the world – where the hungry are fed, the poor are valued and filled; where injustice and inequity are dismantled rather than celebrated as victory or success–that effort matters. Even when our efforts to create peace, or feed the hungry, or care for the sick, or shelter the unhoused seem infinitely small in the face of the woes of the world – our belief in the mystical communion of All the Saints can keep our spark of hope alive across the years, that through the power of God even our most feeble struggles for the good can ripple throughout creation – wings of mercy that might make enough wind to cause a tornado of grace.
I have one more butterfly-themed story for us this morning, as we celebrate the feast of the living and the dead, the saints before and the saints we are called to be. This one comes from the powerful world of…. Disney. Disney movies get a lot of play this time of year–from Hocus Pocus to the more recent, and completely beautiful movie Coco, about El Dia De Los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead –which, I highly, highly recommend, but is not the Disney movie I want to talk today. Maybe next time I come.
Anyway, I want to talk about butterflies, and specifically, the way they show up in Disney’s Encanto. For those of you who haven’t seen it, the basic plot is about a family in the mountains of Colombia where each member has a particular magical gift – super strength, shape-shifting, that kind of thing. Abuela, or grandma, is the matriarch of this family, and understands that these gifts were given to serve and protect the village where they live. Without giving too much away, Encanto tells the story of what happens when gifts that were given as good news for the oppressed, the refugees, those fleeing danger – are held too tightly, and how the intense protection of our gifts can end up hurting the fellowship it was meant to serve, particularly, in this case, a family member named Bruno. That’s probably enough of the story for those who haven’t seen it–after all, as you may have heard, we don’t talk about Bruno.
Instead-back to our butterflies. There is a scene in the movie that traces the origin of the family’s “miracle” – these gifts and powers that they hold, set to the song, Dos Orugitas, or "two caterpillars." The song uses butterflies to connect the story across the three generations, beginning with Abuela as a young woman, meeting and marrying her love; their tragic separation as their village is destroyed by war, and the original miracle that creates their new home. How did this belief, this connection of love and sacrifice, lead to their new home? The Spanish lyrics give this answer about those two caterpillars becoming butterflies - In order to build their future, the song asks them to believe from inside the chrysalis: Ya son Milagros.
The English version of the song shapes the lyrics as “wonders surround you” -but a more direct and simple translation is this: Ya son Milagros – they are already miracles.
They are already miracles, now, in the present, and it is time to move toward the future that is based on that grace.
The poor, Jesus says, are blessed, now, in the present, and it is time to move toward the future that is based on that grace. The hungry, the hated, the abused - Whatever group we want to think of as “them” or “other” - they are already miracles, and as followers of Jesus, we are committed to seeing them with the eyes of the Body of Christ.
Jesus says that woe is already here as well-that what might seem like successful, or beauty, or happiness is not as it appears, and how do the saints of God act with courage in the face of war, hunger and injustice? How do saints take small steps against inequality and violence when the problems are so big? Because the saints also know that through the power of God, each person is already a miracle, and even the smallest miracle can change the course of the world.
The saints of God – all saints – are simply the ones who do their best to live in the hope and power of resurrection life, like transformed butterflies. They remind us that all of these lessons, from physics and Disney movies, from other languages and our own lives are all part of the ways that the saints of God make the beautiful truth of God’s liberating love visible in the world, bringing hope and good news to life.
And the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too.
AMEN