I was reading through some of my older sermons in preparation for this week’s celebration of All Saints’ Day at the congregation I serve, and I was reminded of this gem—possibly one of the best sermons God has ever shoved through the matrix of my heart-mind-voice. In it I trace the outline of my theology of hope, itself rooted in the mystical insights of Cynthia Bourgeault. It was preached at a community requiem mass at St Thomas Episcopal Church in Battle Creek, Michigan on November 6th, 2021. The text is John 6.37-40.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I must confess that, in the early days of the pandemic, in the tail end of February of 2020, just as the first few headlines about a weird new virus from China were starting to pop up on my Twitter feed, back before “Dr. Fauci” was a household name, before we started turning handkerchiefs and old shirts into masks by the gross, I did not take COVID-19 seriously at all. I thought that those who were beginning to panic-buy toilet paper at Meijer amid murmurings of something about a “global pandemic” were nothing but the anxieties of a fear-addled society bubbling over like unattended pasta. 

I continued in my error for a couple of weeks; I was preparing to move from Kentucky to begin my ministry here in Battle Creek, and my vision zeroed in on all the newness and possibility that would unfold as I began my new life here.

And then, about a week into this all, the very day that I started unpacking my books into my new office, I found out that the father of one of my close friends had contracted this weird new viral import from China and wasn’t doing well. Two days after that, my coworker Jaimie was in my office at FCC bringing me up to speed on the unfolding COVID situation, and all of a sudden I was making decisions that nothing in my seminary education or my experience to this point had prepared me for. Another day passed, and my friend’s dad was moved to the ICU. Another day, he was put on a ventilator. And just a few days after that, he died. That was, for me, the watershed break in my understanding of what was going on. COVID was here, it was real, and it was lethal.

As the reality of my friend’s father’s death washed over me, as I held her and her family in my intentions during that time, I began to sense something like a smothering cloud of dread hanging in the atmosphere. You could feel it most intensely whenever you went to the grocery store: a heaving, electric heaviness in the air when you were standing in line with your food, dutifully maintaining your six-foot social distance and checking in on the latest pandemic developments on your phone. It was like we had been caught in a net of fear that threatened to choke the very life out of us. 

In those first few weeks as infection rates were soaring, as nurses and first responders were being worked to the bone, as the death toll rapidly ticked up toward a fourth, a fifth, a sixth digit, the colossal inbreaking of this reality shattered so much of what we previously took for granted: our work, our schedules, our relationships, our communities, and the priceless gifts of physical touch, of holding one another, and of presence. Yes, we wrangled and jangled with live streaming and we all got used to spending hours a day on Zoom with coworkers and loved ones, but all of these ersatz gatherings felt like a cruel caricature of actual physical presence.

And through it all was woven this bitter thread of deathly realization: none of what we once took for granted was assured, and indeed, all it would take for us to meet our end too might be this simple strand of life gone sideways that we call a “virus” making its home in our bodies. And then, three months into the pandemic, the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the ensuing aftermath, pulled away another veil from our eyes, galvanizing a worldwide movement for Black lives. 

This moment in history has felt apocalyptic because it has truly revealed, or unveiled, so many of the cracks in our world, its systems, and the little island empires we construct of our lives to stave off both our mortality and, especially for us white folks, the ways in which we have a colossal amount of work to do in dismantling white supremacy within ourselves and within our world.

The question that has haunted me throughout is this: where is God to be found in this? What is God’s will in this? What is God’s will for us as people of faith in the crucible of this crisis, in the midst of our grief, as our old ways of seeing and understanding the world are crumbling before our eyes?

Jesus spells it out in these immortal words from John’s Gospel: “This is the will of him who sent me, [namely] that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. This is indeed the will of my Father, [namely] that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.

God’s will is that we be raised, that we be lifted up, that all of our human fragility, messiness, and mortality find its home in the divine embrace, held in the gravity of love, and that we may find our very ground of being there. A life lived from such a place is nothing less than true freedom. It is nothing less than the Life of the Age, or Eternal Life.

The Episcopal priest and mystic Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault writes this. “Real spiritual hope is not a happy feeling based in the expectation of some future satisfaction of desires. It is rather a wellspring, the infusion of Zoe—higher, vivifying life—directly into the individual at the deepest ground of his or her being. It is the living water of John 4, breaking out in the depths of the soul to empower and restore” (Love is Stronger than Death, 98).

“Eternal Life” is a life that is rooted in, and draws its being from, the life of God, the zoe of God, and in that life is our present hope. It is a wellspring from which we can draw on, not just when our own resources run dry, but rather, as the deepest groundwater of our being. 

As Christ is being formed in us, we join in his work, in his purpose, of raising up and holding all those who have been given to him—that is to say, all of Creation that has ever been, is now, or ever shall be, and gathering them into the embrace of love. Christ calls us to gather all these things—most poignantly our loved ones, and all those who have died, but also strangers and enemies and all the broken, gnarly places and stories of this world, wrapping them in loving intention as though wrapping a shawl around the shoulders of a loved one, bundling them up, and holding them in the crucible of our hearts.

Although circumstance has robbed us for so long of our ability to physically embrace and lift up those who suffer in this world, we have yet to be robbed of the embrace of the heart. That embrace of the heart is visible in this world as hope. Hope is what holds us together as persons and communities in the face of our present chaos. And, of course, hope is what kindles within us a vision of God’s dream for the world, impelling us to action, service, and solidarity with our fellow human beings. Such is the fruit of eternal life on this side of the veil.

And such life is not postdated. It begins now, insofar as we have truly “put on the mind of Christ;” in other words, this undying hope is available to each and every one of us to the extent that we consent to the presence and action of the divine life within us. That is what we are here to do today, and moreover, that is the medicine that we are to receive, both in the sacrament of the Great Thanksgiving, in the visionary harmonies of Fauré’s “lullaby of death,” and in the mystical weight of these sacred texts that, when taken all together, train the eyes of the heart to behold that of God shining in all things and in all circumstances.

By consenting to be here today, we are being formed in heart and mind and spirit and body to bear more consciously that which is our meet, right, and bounden duty: to hold this good world tight in the bands of love, and to raise it up, an offering of gratitude to God. This is the work of the Church and her People, a People held in bands of love that bridge even the cavernous abyss of death.

As the lover and beloved sing to one another in the ecstatic ending of the Song of Songs:

“…for love is strong as death,
passion fierce as the grave.”

The pandemic is not over, nor is the long task of justice. But my hope is that the chaos of this moment in history, of this eye of the needle through which we are passing as a people, might yet distill from us a tincture of goodness whose inestimable value we are only beginning to discover. As our hearts are being formed to take our part in Christ’s work by clothing those who are afraid and those who struggle for right with the garment of hope, that tincture will be the fruit of our patient bearing of this uncertainty, and this grief, with open hearts. 

In doing so, we take our part in making God’s will manifest, which is nothing besides what it always has been: to see the world made whole again, made new again, “raised from Death,” shot through with eternal life. May it be for those dead whom we hold in our hearts today, and may it be for each one of us. Amen.