+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
A sign of the difficulty currently besetting the publishing industry, several magazines in recent years have enticed potential subscribers with a free gift subscription for the primary subscriber to pass along. So, we have given a subscription of The New Yorker to a friend for a few years, and just this week, said friend shared with us a gift subscription to The Atlantic. So I got the Atlantic app installed on my phone, opened it up, and the very first article that loaded up meant I had to read it right then and there. The title: “How Is the Israel Hamas Ceasefire Deal Like an Anglican Wedding?” That’s “clickbait” for a very particular type of person, and I am he.
If you’ve ever been to a wedding here or in any Episcopal Church, you may remember that after the couple exchange their “I do-s” (or actually, “I wills” in our service) there is a question for the congregation: “Will all of you witnessing these promises do all in your power to uphold these two persons in their marriage?” And we respond “we will.” Why do we say “we will”? Because it’s printed in the book. Do we mean it? I try at wedding rehearsals to say to everyone gathered there that they will say “we will” because they mean it; because they are themselves making a solemn promise to support the couple over the course of decades, and I hope that they take that seriously. I’m sure some (maybe several) do, but I’m not sure everyone does. We say it, because the rubrics in the book instruct us to do so.
The writer of that piece in the Atlantic assumed that very few at your typical wedding do, though, and he feared that those who helped broker the increasingly fragile ceasefire in the Middle East—the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Qataris, maybe the Americans—won’t hold to their own vows when things get tough. And unlike your average marriage, which typically takes some years before the couple want to murder each other, there will be no honeymoon here. I hope he’s wrong. I just don’t know.
But I really want to focus neither on Holy Matrimony nor on Gaza this morning. I bring it up, because there’s another time when we are called upon to make a similar solemn vow. At every Baptism we are asked this question: “Will you who witness these vows do all in your power to support these persons in their life in Christ.” And we answer “we will.” Are we just saying it because it’s on the page or do we really mean it?
We are in the business of making saints. Or rather, God is in the business of making saints, and we have the privilege of helping a little insofar as he gives us grace to do so. You’ve heard me say a thousand times that there is a difference between the majuscule and the miniscule, the “upper-case S” Saints and the “lower-case s” saints, and that all of us and all of those whom we’ll remember in a few minutes during the litany are probably in the latter category (though I encourage you to prove me wrong about that). I guarantee there will be no processions through the streets for St. John Drymon of Findlay day fifty or a hundred years from now. There are the famous men and women of whom the writer of Ecclesiasticus speaks and those who have no memorial.
But there is something which fundamentally connects all of us in the church—militant, expectant, and triumphant. Each and every one of us has been washed in the saving laver of Christ’s Blood. Life may seem a great tribulation sometimes, but we’ll all be clothed in white on that last great day, bearing branches of palm in our hands. The blessedness of the poor and the meek and the persecuted and the downtrodden will be ours then, and in can be ours today to a greater extent than we might imagine.
God being our helper, we can not only reach out to that crown of triumph even now when we allow him to work through us in supporting each other in growth in holiness, in upholding all our sisters and brothers in keeping the vows they made or that were made on their behalf and thus grow in holiness ourselves. This can be a virtuous cycle, and in that sense the church militant here on earth can serve as a sort of school for virtue, educating us, leading us toward the God who is love that we might become a bit more loving. All this can be accomplished when we take that baptismal vow “we will” as seriously as we ought to do.
And if you look around and scoff and say, “this peculiar lot is meant to teach me how to be holy!?” look again. You might be astounded when you sit in this classroom long enough. And ever give thanks that we can also look up to that great cloud of witnesses—the church expectant and the church triumphant—both for their examples and (I believe) for their intercessions for us before the throne of God. Thank God for them, and thank God that we’ll have an eternity of fellowship with them as we praise God together unto the ages of ages.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.