Episode Transcript
[00:00:32] Speaker A: Alleluia.
Alleluia.
Alleluia.
The Holy Gospel of our Savior Jesus Christ according to Matthew.
Glory to you, Lord Christ.
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain and after he sat down, his disciples came to him.
Then he began to speak and taught them, saying, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
The Gospel of the Lord SA.
[00:02:50] Speaker B: Children ages 3 through 10 are invited to join Katie for story time and they'll return at the peace.
[00:02:58] Speaker C: In the name of one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated as is comfortable for you.
All right, today I want to talk about the cosmic web of a communion of saints, indigenous wisdom and epigenetics, legacy building, stewardship, liturgical theology, and my parental grandmother.
It's All Saints Day, baby. Let's do this thing right.
Got a lot of territory to cover.
This is a major feast day in the life of the church.
On this Feast of All Saints, we celebrate those who have gone before us, who have so embodied the beatific life that Jesus lays out for us in the Gospel today that they have received the title saint.
In our modern celebration of the feast day, we also remember those saints lowercase S in our lives who have helped us grow in our faith, those saints who have helped make us who we are and for whom we still carry with us.
They have given us a legacy of faith that helps us feel knit together with them, as our colleague says today, in the cosmic tapestry of life that spans beyond time, space, and indeed even death, as our revelation reading tells us today.
And we are also called on this feast day to take very seriously the call to become saints ourselves, to become, as the prayer book describes it, the chosen vessels of God's grace and the lights of the world. In our generation, it's a call to be willing to learn how to follow God in our lives and then to leave a legacy with our faith and take up the mantle of spiritual ancestry that the saints have given to us.
It's all pretty cosmic and yet is lived out in the ordinariness of our lives.
And it's indeed a matter of stewardship, because as we live this out in this mystical thing we call the church, we are able to be to give their gifts that were given to us and pass them on.
So to explore how this spiritual ancestry works and how we receive it and how we give it, I'd like us to look at some indigenous wisdom.
I believe that the Native American concept of blood memory does a very good job of, of trying to describe how something so mystical can work in the indigenous worldview. Our ancestors, what we call the communion of saints, are ever present with us, and not just a we carry them in our hearts kind of way. As nice as that is.
They mean our ancestors are so within us that the virtues that they lived we can pull upon their resiliency, their joy, their strength. They are in us as a kind of a strength, spiritual DNA, one that's less about the color of our eyes and hair, but rather about the kind of quality of life we want to embody.
Native Americans will say that we live for seven generations. They mean that backwards and forwards, that what we do will change seven generations of those who come after us, but also that we can give healing back to those who have gone before us.
Now scientists are catching up to this wisdom in the field of epigenetic studies. We are finding that indeed we do indeed pass more on to our descendants than we might have first realized.
For example, they have found that stress and trauma can have generational effects mentally, physically, spiritually, for at least three generations. And I bet as they keep studying it, they'll catch up to that seven generation number.
So, for example, if your grandmother was traumatized, your mother, and probably you will be predisposed to depression, ptsd, addiction, and the like.
That has just been shown across the board in their studies.
And they've also seen that these spiritual matters have an effect on the cellular level.
But there's good news too, because people can change for positive reasons as well as traumatic ones.
The things in the church that we've classically called the parental virtues, spiritual legacies that, when passed down to us, will give birth to more life, more joy, more hope. Those things can also change us. Body, mind and spirit.
Gratitude's a great example of this.
When people practice gratitude, their bodies, minds and souls change. We find that they sleep better, they have Better mental health, Their organs function better, they live longer, they have stronger relationships. Not bad. Pretty good stuff.
They are building a blood memory that will lead to generations of healing.
Now, one really important note. Even though we're talking about the science of epigenetics that deals with DNA, this is not just about blood relatives.
Especially in Native American wisdom and in the communion of saints, we feel that we are all family when we are baptized into this one body of Christ.
There are many of us who may be adopted or don't have contact with our DNA ancestors. And this spiritual concept still applies because the concept of blood memory and the communion of saints is. Is about not just the DNA of it all, but that spiritual DNA. The spiritual practices that we learn from our saintly community, the legacy they pass down to us in this beautiful thing we call the church.
It can be that book from an ancient mystic that seemed to speak right to your soul. The person in Sunday school who taught you how to pray. Hopefully some preacher somewhere preached a sermon that helped get into your soul. Please, please, God, all of these are your ancestors because they helped to change you on that deeply spiritual level. They've been knit into your heart by virtue of our baptism, which is a stewarding of spirituality that goes beyond birth family to this wonderful body of Christ.
So I'm going to give you an example of how this concept works by telling you about my grandmother. But please remember, as you pick your own spiritual ancestor today to think about your own saint to call upon as an example and inspiration because they live within you, it need not be a blood relative, but just one who has been joined with you in Christ.
So my grandmother, Jean Dowling, would want me to start introducing her to you by telling you that she was not what she deemed a typical grandmother.
She felt that she was too much of an original, too modern, as she would say, to be a Grammy who knit a who would take the grandkids on shopping trips or a bubby who would bake for them. She did none of those things. Trust me.
She would want you to know that I didn't simply have a grandmother. I had a Mimi, which was her chosen moniker for herself that she insisted we call her.
Indeed, Mimi had a flair all of her own, from head to toe, literally. She had light up necklaces and earrings, and one of her most famous pairs of shoes sported a snow globe in the heel. So every time she walked, it was a wintry landscape.
Her home's decor was best described as a cross between Liberace flair and Graceland. Music notes everywhere I am telling you because that spunk that she best expressed came out best in her music.
Oh, that woman could play the piano and the organ. She was a church organist, in fact, from Gershwin to Calypso to Bach to jazz, you name it, the woman could play it, and often once more with feeling. That was her vibe.
Some of my favorite memories with her are of us sitting on the very same piano bench, at the very same piano that I sat with my own child after she gifted it to me to make way for her brand new baby grand piano that she was quite excited for.
But the piano, incredible as it was, was hardly the most amazing gift that Mimi gave to me.
When Mimi would come to visit us in our small mountain town, my father, who was our church warden, would whisk her away for hours at a time to our little Episcopal Church of St. Peter's Tunic for her work, to work her magic on our midi.
A midi is a way to capture an organist playing on the organ. And if it's an electronic organ, they can play it back to you during the service.
This was no small thing, since we could not afford an organist in our church.
Now, it took years of her playing to catalog the entirety of the 1982 Episcopal hymnal, but she did it.
I got one enthusiastic hymnal person over here week after week. It was her music that taught me the hymns, which, despite having a doctorate in ministry, still remain, alongside the prayer book and the Bible, the most important source of my theological knowledge.
So in a real sense, Mimi taught me more about God through her music than any seminary professor ever would.
For example, there's this moment at the communion table that Christians consider to be the most cosmic. The place where heaven and earth join together at the heart of. Of our ecclesial blood, memory practice, where we join in the body and blood of Christ and with each other.
It's at the heart of the Eucharist, which of course itself means thanksgiving. When we with our prayers get into our very selves together as the family of Christ.
A gratitude practice of the deepest kind, given to us through the generations of the saints.
The word for the moment I'm describing is called the Sanctus. That moment when we join with the angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven, the company of saints that revelation describes as being around the throne of God singing Holy, Holy, Holy Lord, God of power and might. It's where that whole host of heaven gathered together around their table and ours.
Angels sing, we sing. Those who have died sing. Those who have not yet been sing all together in this one unending hymn of praise and God's presence. It's like when an A string on the violin gets plucked and the E string starts reverberating. So too do these two tables on heaven and earth come together with a frequency in that wavelength of so song.
And so we can help that resound throughout the ages as our legacy is passed down through these words and these musics. And Mimi taught me how that worked by adding her own flare to that very moment.
My favorite setting of that music goes Holy, holy, holy Lord God of power. And might many of you, I'm sure, know that one very common episcopal setting of the songtus.
But my grandmother, my Mimi added a note.
She added a high tenor beat, almost like a desk can or a drone. Over the blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. She added a just a sustained note.
I had no idea that that was only her version.
None, because it was the one I heard my whole life growing up. And she chose that because my dad was a tenor. And so my dad would sing it from his place in the choir. I only ever heard it that way. I didn't know there was another way till I went to another church in seminary and was perplexed not to hear that all important note. I always listened to it, her playing it, my dad's voice ringing out in response. We call it now the dowling note, the Mimi note that the courts of heaven, even with all those angels and musicians who had gone before her, lacked before she put it in there.
It's a little note, a flourish, a flair that they now gain because of Mimi, who is so bold herself to sing her song, to add her own blood memory to their and our unending hymn.
She gave that gift to her son, who sang it to his daughter, who now tells it to you.
Most of us could never dare to add a moment so cosmic that the very heavens themselves sing out to transcend time and place.
But maybe we should.
Mimi did.
And that's why I will be eternally grateful that I did not have a grandmother.
I had a meaning.
Because like all the saints who've gone before us, that kind of gift can't be lost to me. I still hear it even when we don't sing it.
Somehow in heaven and earth, someone is singing it. And I hear it all these years later when I stand at the table praying with you all.
We can hear it together. It's in you, it's in me. Because the saints have passed it down in Christ. All the virtues, the healings, the resistance. The daring. They are all ours to call upon when we need to stand up and be the lights of hope in our generation to bring healing and goodness back to the body of Christ.
We can do this.
In fact, we must do it.
If we are not bold enough to sing out our own eternal song given to us by the saints and God, then generations will not hear it. If we are not willing to steward the cosmic gifts of saintly legacy for generations to come, who will?
In this stewardship season, on this All Saints Day, my friends, let us claim this. Let it be our ancestral stewardship.
Let us give God thanks for those saints who've gone before, whose lives are knit together with ours in this body of Christ.
With our pledges, our gifts, our prayers, all the ways that we ensure this community continues to be a place where the saints songs are sung for generations to come.
Let their songs, their witness, their words, be the things that motivate us to keep this cosmic thing called church going with the Holy Spirit.
It's been given to us as a gift. It's incumbent upon us to return it.
Let us mean to be the kind of saint who helps heal this world forever and ever. So that your song and the song of the saints will listen to the very core, down to our very blood, knowing that it was sung for you and now you sing it for others.
Amen.
