Year A All Saints Wednesday Homily 2017 Now and Always

Year A All Saints Wednesday Reflection, 1 November 2017

St. James the Less Episcopal, Ashland, VA

“Now & Always”

One day. One day I will…

I think of all the times I did not live in the now. I think of all the times I named what I was gonna do “One day…”

Today is All Saints Day, and coming out of Celtic theology, today is the day when this world and the next are the closest. It is why we scare off those dear departed that have wandered back and those evil things that have wandered near. We spook the spooks with our scary costumes and carved faces in our vegetables. And those early superstitions have evolved.

Now we pause and remember those that have come before. Even if they did not come near in our plain of existence, they can come near in our hearts. Today I remember my scoutmaster Sydney “Mike” Mitchell. He was a major influence on my life, and I am a better man for the role he played in my life.

I also remember Velma Knight. She was my wife’s grandmother-by-choice. She lived to be 80, and had lived a life worth remembering serving in the Foreign Service of the State Department for years. She was on vacation in Pearl Harbor when it was bombed. Not lucky by most people’s standards, but she lived quite the life. She was the first person I was with when they passed.

Today I remember my father, William Worth Higgins, Jr. Bill to his friends. An electrical engineer at the Shipyard in Newport News. He died far too young. And I remember all the things he would talk about doing One Day. And on the day he died I thought of that, swore I would try to live a life without regret for tomorrow is never promised. I try to be the man he hoped I would be.

But as a believer, I also think on all of these and I know that they are part of that “great cloud of witnesses” as it is put in the book of Hebrews. And they are only as far from me as thoughts, and my prayers, and my love.

1 John 3:1-3
See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.

I remember these that I have loved and seemingly have lost, but in Christ they are not lost, only transformed. For what they have become has not yet been revealed, yet.

So on this All Saints Day, we remember our beloved dead. “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.” And we live in the hope for them and for us. And why do we have this hope? “Because we are God’s Children now…” Now and always. Amen.