Isaiah 25:6–9
Psalm 24
Revelation 21:1–6a
John 11:32–44
Year B
I.N.I (In the name of Jesus)
You know what I like saying? That it’s a feast day today. It’s festive! If I were inclined to speak it in Spanish, I would say fiesta! Putting it plainly, I would say party!
I’m proud of being the youngest child in this way. The story goes: For a festive occasion in my youth, my mother would prepare the table. She would take a tablecloth handed down in our family and carefully lay it over the dining room table. She would go to a special box with the silver set that required polishing and would never go in the dishwasher, and set places with the appropriate forks, knives, and spoons. My mother and father might have a little wine, which would require uniquely colored wine glasses. She would work up a sweat in the kitchen and confess that most times she would rather be left alone to her rolling up onions, and bacon in a thinly sliced meat dish that Germans call rouladen. And if there was anything for children to do, it would be setting and clearing the table, using cloth napkins in napkin rings, pouring the drinks, and from the dining room hutch procuring the Royal Albert English bone china my mother and father had purchased in Bermuda. Now, because I had acquired the reputation of being “accident-proned,” as the youngest child I was forbidden to handle the fine china in setting or clearing the table, so I was most happy to oblige being stripped of my duties in performing this household chore. It really was pretty china.
The church has a bone china day today on All Saints, where extra effort is made to feast. While we honor four young men for their very public way of claiming their Christian faith, hearing their gratefulness for engaging in the life of the baptized, we are in effect allowing them to handle the fine china. We are welcoming them fully into the trajectory of new life in Christ, just like at their baptisms, while they are a little more able to understand and perhaps appreciate this opportunity to ask for the gifts of the Spirit, to jump into the stream of water-washed identity, and to party!
And if you know anything about Tom, Kyle, Andrew, and John, you would use words like enthusiastic, wild about life. I know how much they each have dived into their sports (Tom dove a little too much sliding into second base this Fall and broke his shin) when I have heard about Kyle’s hockey team advancing into playoffs, how Andrew’s crew team bettered another team they weren’t expected to. And I’m so thankful that despite the excitement that sports have given to them, each has also been eager to show up on Wednesday nights and in our quiz show—skit—Guest Speaker—Bible Study Confirmation format, contributed additional enthusiasm and zest. In their autobiographies look at what they wrote about their lives, and you’ll see that they still want to be around on Wednesdays if they can, which is a great testimony to our ministry with youth.
Today we look at them as if they were somehow different than they really are. We use the words saints, in Greek hagion meaning holy, consecrated to God, and we might look up to heaven, and then we look at these high school sophomores and say St. John, St. Andrew, St. Thomas, and even St. Kyle? Can you imagine a St. Kyle?
Today we welcome them into the company of those who have gone before them, in the baptismal life, in confirmation, in the journey of faith, and in the face of death. We think of these young men, with others who have been baptized, and we ourselves, marching with the saints of old like St. Francis, St. Mary, St. Peter, Johann Sebastian Bach, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jacquie Tiedeman, Marge Atkinson, and Barbara Bartsch.
We imagine a table set with a seven-course meal, including maybe New Orleans’ gumbo or etoufée, maybe pizza, certainly with bone china, and with the vision of one like the prophet Isaiah see that at the head of the table is the biggest and best of all, God, with those saints around it, too.
Everyone around that table used to have puffy eyes, and the sniffles, requiring lots of tissues, because they also were face-to-face with death. There was one whose body just gave out, because at his age well there was not anything that could be done and prolonging life at all costs did not seem good and godly. There was one who had a terrible cancer, who battled through chemotherapy and radiation, and was missed by her daughter, grandchildren and was not able to see her great-grandchild born. And there was Lazarus, whose sisters Mary and Martha loved him so, and was a friend of Jesus. Lazarus’ story was that his body was so completely gone that you could smell the rotting flesh through the poor grave cloth. Others around Lazarus were previously crying and moaning, and even Jesus had leaky eyes.
But at this table set by God and attended too by today’s confirmands and the rest of us, there is a glimpse of life beyond death. There is a glimpse of the faithful elect, who gave themselves over to one whose loves breaks all boundaries, and who invites the living and the dead to new life.
At this heavenly banquet, it is hard to know just what is otherworldly and what is this worldly. Skillet music is playing alongside Handel’s Messiah, lovers of lacrosse are joining hands with angels, and God is telling stories about the youth who wore bandana masks for fun at a Youth Gathering while in the same breath that remarking about how well they looked on the day of their confirmation in white robes with red boutonnières.
Here on this day we are meeting with God, and the four guys are handling the china, they are presenting the menu, they are bucking for sainthood, they are living in the Spirit, they are in league with Jesus who in the midst of death found new life.
With us and countless hosts, we look death in the eye and say “Christ makes all things new.”
Confirmation is not a sign that things are over. Youth are not waiting in the wings while adults run the show. Old people are not out to pasture. Pastors who have been at it over twenty years are not fuddy duddies.
Parents, children, Lutherans, newcomers, grumps, serious, and playful, we are joined together in the mystery of a love that crosses all sorts of boundaries—prejudice, divorce, denial, age, illness, economics, and death, and creates something beautiful and lasting.
In the life with Christ we march and sing and speak and eat and drink as those saved and safe.
In our conversations, in our play and our work, in our highs and our lows, we will by our story-telling, through the Word and feasting on the Eucharist, will make it a feast day, a fiesta, a party.
Tom, Andrew, John, and Kyle, let sainthood out as you confirm your faith, as the Spirit is offered, as you serve us and the world around us, and as you continue to dive into life that has been made holy by Christ’s cross, death, and resurrection. Go ahead, we say, handle the fine china!
I.N.I.
The Rev. Timothy J. Keyl, Pastor
Christ the King Lutheran Church
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