I brought a rock to church. There it is. It's not a very distinguishable rock, although I will say that under certain light it kind of looks like a face. I was told that the line in it is a fossil, a worm casting. You know what that is, right? It's what the worm leaves behind when they eat something.
And it's fossilized. Don't you love that? That is not particularly why this rock is important to me. And in fact, if I were to go by a riverbed, in fact, the riverbed called Four Mile Run in Arlington, Virginia, where this was found. Apparently, um, there are probably a hundred rocks like it, you know when you see a rock that looks interesting and then you look out at the riverbed and there are a thousand more rocks that look just like it.
The thing that is distinguishing about this particular rock is that it was given to me, it was given to me by an aging friend that I had met here in Montgomery as a young kid, a member of my father's church who had moved in the meantime to Arlington, Virginia, lived in a facility there where she got the care she needed.
And when I went by to see her. She handed me this rock. She said, do you see the face in it? Do you see the worm castings? And she had a gleam in her eye, like she thought it was pretty funny too. She said, Mark the good life is shaped by looking for the good in life.
The good life is shaped by looking for the good in life.
I delight in this rock. I've used it as a paperweight. I've used it as a decoration on my desk at work. I have decided that sometimes looking for the good in life means I need to add to my rock collection. So I have several hundred rocks I think, at home that I have found, and look for the beauty in them.
And you may know what I mean. You see a rock that stands out because it's distinctive in color or it has a pattern in it. I've gotten to the point where I have actually asked friends to bring me a rock from their travels. This is what I refer to as the evangelism of looking for the good life. By looking for the good in life, it gives an opportunity for people that I know to get from behind their camera and start looking around for beautiful things.
I have a rock from Machu Picchu, from The Great Wall of China, from Hadrian's Wall. I have a rock from Normandy, from Alaska. Ask me which one is which. It might be a little tricky, but still. They're important to me because of what they symbolize. And there may be a million rocks that look just like them, but these came from friends, or I attach to meaning to them.
That makes me associate that rock with a good life, with a connected life, with a life that appreciates and values the world around me. Life gets busy and it's easy to miss those things. Sometimes my rocks remind me they may not be appropriate to put 'em on the mantle piece or on the kitchen counter.
Like I've tried several times. Someone y'all know has thought that that wasn't necessarily the right thing to do.
But there is an aspect of that for me, and the message from my dear friend who gave me this rock is that there is an aspect of life that is like treasure hunting. I'm not a scuba diver. I don't go for deep sea shipwrecks. I, but I look for beauty in places where you might not expect them. And I have actually discovered some of that treasure in being on the staff at St. John's. This may seem obvious to you, but my previous parish did not have a midweek service. It was small enough that that might have been, um, an onerous activity to expect people to help establish a midweek service. But here we have two and occasionally what we've switched back and forth. But I've come to value, well, I'll show you that in a second.
I've come to value the calendar of the church. It's like treasure hunting, the calendar in the church, which begins on page 13 in the Book of Common Prayer. But please don't open it yet, you'll get distracted. The calendar includes people. We remember since the publication of the book in the pews, the church has gone on to ha add dozens, maybe, more than a hundred certainly.
So that this book would not fit in our prayer book, would it? This is the book called Lesser Feasts and Fasts, and in this book there are treasures. There are people. That have come to stand for faith, to stand for sacrifice, to stand for, um, service in the world, all for the sake of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
It is so wonderful to discover some of these folks, Samuel Seaberry, the first bishop of the church. Fascinating man, but I prefer Samuel Isaac, Joseph Shaki, who was a translator and he went to China instead of teaching at Harvard, and he ended up translating the New Testament into Mandarin. Imagine that there's Hildegard of Bingham who wrote music and prayers, and you probably don't know this, but in our church calendar, Johan Sebastian, Bach.
How about that? There is, um. Bert to the saint from North England, who I revere. But there's also Ka Maya, who was the king of Hawaii, who brought faith to the islands there in the mid 19th century.
The calendar of the year is a little bit like looking for treasures in the riverbed to look for those rocks, and you find something, you feel deeply connected. But this is maybe more important in addition to the people that we admire for their example of faith, for their sacrifice of their careers or even their lives.
We have saints in our very midst. The New Testament says that we are called as saints, each one of us Paul's letter and in the letter to the Ephesians today, it says, we all have access to the glorious riches of the saints and light. We each have access to the very same gospel, the very same truth, which is beauty in knowing that God is with us in all things.
Some of you all know my mother at age 97 and a half and crippled by some mobility issues, arthritis and uh, macular degeneration. She doesn't get to participate in the ways in life that she used to recently. I said, mom, how long has it been since you played the piano? And she looked at me like she didn't know she played the piano, but I took her to the piano in the common room over at John Knox, and it took her a while to orient her fingers not being able to see well.
And because her chair sits kind of low, it was unfamiliar, but she started playing a hymn that she had memorized about four or five years ago when my father was so sick. I should ask our organist or Joel to play it. But I will read to you the wonderful words here. Who are these like stars appearing these before?
God. Who's throne? They stand each. A golden crown is wearing all, who are all this glorious band? Hallelujah. Hark. They sing Praising loud, their heavenly king. It is not a particularly familiar hymn, but she learned it and, and, and when she memorized it, she played it with such musicality. And I think it was because the last verse here was an ode to my father o clergyman here in the Episcopal church.
These being the saints. These like priests have watched and waited, offering up to Christ their will soul. Embodied, consecrated day and night. They serve him still now in God's most holy place. Blessed they stand before his face. My mother, who can't see, can't really have much mobility in her body or her hands, played it as if she had never forgotten it.
So musically, so beautiful. Just like she played it before Dad.
That is a song dedicated for all Saint Sunday, which we celebrate today. One that is very dear to my heart and one that gives me great joy that she found it deep inside to play.
The restrictions she experienced are not unlike the restrictions all of us might face in our daily lives. Maybe not for vision or mobility, but certainly possibly
Nadia Bolz Weber once rephrased the beatitudes that we heard this morning that Jesus speaks of blessed are the poor for there's just the kingdom of heaven and blessed are the hungry for they will be filled and those who weep for they will note joy. She rephrased it this way, and while I will paraphrase it for me, becomes a litany of a calendar of the church, of a list of the saints in light of the company of sainthood that you and I are called to celebrate and participate in.
Blessed are those whose livelihoods depend on the forecast. Blessed are those who make the most of the public library. Blessed are those who read aloud to children. Blessed are those who write their city councilmen. Blessed are those who wait in doctors' offices for a diagnosis. Blessed are those who have remains on the mantle in their living room, awaiting the trip to disperse them in a special place.
Blessed are those who have to put up with impatient customers, and blessed are those who inherit a piece of furniture they don't quite know what to do with. Blessed are those who are new in town. Blessed are those who struggle to find a handyman. Blessed are those who are not so good at math.
Blessed are those who meet a sibling that they didn't know existed. Blessed are those who have a hotel window that looks out a brick wall. Blessed are those who always watch the clock, who sift through smoldering remains of their home. Blessed are those who look up words they don't know, and blessed are those who have a hat for those days when their hair just doesn't cooperate.
Blessed are those whose team lost. God is with us throughout. It's all the text to the hymn that I read. It says they like priests have offered up their souls to God's will. You and I are saints in that, in each of those challenging moments of our life, those difficult ones and the joyous ones, those disappointing ones, and this ones that we celebrate in each moment.
God is there. God is will for us is that we acknowledge that he is there to celebrate, to commiserate, to mourn, to look at the clock on the wall with us, to agonize over what to do with that piece of furniture or those ashes on the mantle piece. God is there. And when we acknowledge, when we, when we acknowledge and receive the glorious riches of the, of the grace that is ours through Christ, as Paul writes, we too know what it means to be one of the many Saints.
All Saints is a celebration of those who've gone before and those who are sitting in the pew next to us. Amen.