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Sermon 11/06/2005
Keeping the Lamps Trimmed
and Burning ~ by Tom Kinder
November 6, 2005, Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost:
All Saints Sunday
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont,
UCC
Psalm 34: 1-10, 22; Matthew 25: 1-13
Last week Eleanor Zue spoke about visiting old
churches in England. At the time she thought it
would be a wonderful life to dedicate yourself
to keeping those churches well maintained and
beautiful. The simplicity appealed to her of spending
days polishing brass door knobs or candelabra
– keeping the lamps trimmed and burning.
Then Eleanor shared her realization that this
is what we do here, those of us who work to keep
this old church in shape and carrying on all its
activities. It turns out not to be as simple as
her image of it was, but it is still a privilege
and an honor to do this work, contributing our
part to the beauty and goodness of this place,
serving and praising God with all our attending
meetings, or singing in the choir, or teaching
Sunday school, or calling and caring, or coming
to worship, or greeting a stranger or making a
pledge to buy oil for the lamps. We take our place
in a line that goes back 232 years and stretches
ahead who knows how far, helping this church make
a difference in people’s lives.
I found Eleanor’s words to be deeply moving,
in part because I feel they are true – it
is a gift to us to be able to serve here. But
I was also moved because these words came from
Eleanor. She has been giving extraordinary gifts
to this congregation for thirty years or so. At
the moment she is the Chair of the Mission Committee,
a member of both the Music and Nominating Committees,
the Clerk of the church, our Calling and Caring
Coordinator, a faithful member of the choir, a
delegate to the Grafton-Orange Association and
Vermont Conference of the United Church of Christ,
and she serves on the conference’s Uprooting
Racism Task Force and perhaps another committee
or two I have forgotten. On top of all that, if
she doesn’t polish the door knobs here, she
at least can often be found at our kitchen sink
washing the dishes.
Eleanor is a super saint, but this church is full
of saints. As I said at the beginning of the service,
every year on this Sunday I remind you that you
are all saints – all sacred children of God,
all making your lives sacred by accepting God’s
love and living a loving response to it. Some
saints are able to give actively at this point
in their lives. As the poet John Milton said,
“They also serve who only stand and wait.”
The important thing is to come to the feast and
be willing to serve as you can, even if it is
just to be fed.
My first All Saints Day Sunday here nine years
ago came right after the famous chicken pie supper
when the power went out. We were in the middle
of the second of three seatings. The sanctuary
still had a throng waiting to come in to the feast.
We were still cooking their chicken pies when
we blew a breaker out on the pole. We quickly
lit candles so the people filling the Newcomb
Room could keep eating. Then the twenty or so
of us who were working crowded into the kitchen
to decide what we would do.
I can still see our flushed and glowing faces
in the candle light as we debated whether to cancel
the last seating. It was a short debate. Marilyn
Stone said she had ovens down at Cedar Circle
Farm that could finish the cooking if people could
shuttle the pans down and up the hill. Someone
pointed out that we could save the clean-up for
after the power came back on. We announced that
we would continue the supper, which brought cheers
from the hungry waiting in the sanctuary. It was
one of the most exhilarating things we’ve
done here. Ever since then we have made candles
a regular part of chicken pie suppers because
the Newcomb Room looked so beautiful that night.
It was such a great introduction for me to the
spirit of the congregation I had just joined.
Faced with a challenge, we are at our best. We
saw it then, we saw it during the Open and Affirming
process, and we saw it again during the Open to
All campaign and construction.
Behind all the mundane details and hard work involved
here in keeping the lamps trimmed and burning
is a light, a light that I saw shining through
those radiant faces and gleaming eyes nine years
ago. That light is love. It is partly the love
of God, and it is partly the love of this church,
but it is also the love of each other – and
maybe it is primarily the love of each other,
because it is in our neighbor that we meet God,
and it is in the individuals here that we encounter
the church.
We have been in a period of rest for the past
year after the enormous effort of the Open to
All project. We have been resting, and now I sense
that we are getting restless. It is time for us
to get going again on the next leg of our journey.
Not that we haven’t kept lamps trimmed and
burning, but we have been more in a holding pattern
than in a forward motion.
As we take up the long range planning process
at the Church Council meeting this coming Thursday
evening, and as we move forward from there, the
most important thing we can bring into our planning
is the light of love. It is a lamp for our feet,
as the Psalms put it. We need the guiding love
of the wise bridesmaids who cared enough to make
sure they were prepared to greet the bridegroom.
We need love because, as the Apostle Paul said,
“If I have all prophetic powers and understand
all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have
all faith so as to move mountains, but do not
have love, I am nothing.” (I Corinthians
13)
The work ahead is too great for us to amount to
nothing. We have not only this old church to take
care of, we have a new society to create. Christ
calls us to establish a corner of the realm of
God on earth around us here, and to try to transform
the nations. This week the United States Senate
voted to cut health care assistance for the elderly,
the poor and the disabled, even while continuing
huge tax cuts to the rich, and huge subsidies
to energy corporations. At the same time it voted
to open up one of the last great wildernesses
on earth to oil drilling. We heard of more Americans
and another Vermonter killed in the war this week,
and we were reminded of the lies and distortions
that people in the Administration used to get
us into that war, over-riding every major religious
leader in the world who said that it was an utterly
unjust and immoral war for us to begin.
The poor are getting poorer and are receiving
less support from our government. The environment
is rapidly tilting toward a global climate change
catastrophe which our nation will not stop because
of its greed. Big oil and the weapons industry
and megacorporations and the Administration that
serves them are driving us into massive war debts
for their own profits, debts that will be paid
not by them or their children, but by the poor
and middle class and our children.
These are exactly the kinds of social evils that
Jesus calls us to resist. Jesus saw similar corruption
in the Roman Empire and kingdom and priesthood
of Israel. This was the kind of oppressive, greed-corrupted
situation he had in mind, sitting there on the
Mount of Olives, looking at Jerusalem, when he
told today’s parable. Jesus calls us to create
a different kind of society based on justice and
compassion, harmony and nonviolence, light and
love, a society in which all life is treated as
sacred. Not only that, Jesus says that this realm
is coming. It will come. God will make it happen.
The question he poses to each of us is, are we
doing our part to keep the lamps trimmed and burning?
Are we preparing to help usher in God’s realm?
Are we ready?
The gospel hymn says, “Sisters, don’t
grow weary. Brothers don’t grow weary. Children
don’t grow weary, for this work’s almost
done.” If the departed saints of this congregation
could speak today, I suspect they would say the
same thing. They would tell us that our time here
is very short. Even if we live to be over 100
like Virginia Anderson or to be a member here
for seventy-five years like Lillian Vaughan, our
time is short. Even if we are in the middle or
beginning of our life, our work is almost done.
It will be over sooner than we would like for
most of us. So while we have the chance to do
our part, let us remember what an honor and privilege
and gift it is to serve along with the saints
of all ages here – even if our serving is
only faithful waiting at this point in our lives.
Children, don’t grow weary. Let the hope
of the vision Christ gives us light our way. Let
the love we find here refresh us. Let the love
of God, the love of this church, and the love
of each other make us radiant, and make our lamps
shine, so that we can be part of the great day
that is coming when this world wakes up and throws
off corruption and oppression, and a new era of
light and love begins.
That day is coming. As Martin Luther King Jr.
said, “The arc of the moral universe is long,
but it bends toward justice.” We may have
a hard time believing God’s day will come,
but the important question is not whether we believe
or not. The important question is, what can we
do to help it come?
Let us pray in silence...
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