A Fourth Church Sermon by Victoria G. Curtiss

August 15, 2010 | 4:00 p.m.

We’re Surrounded!

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Hebrews 11:29–12:2, 12–13

Don’t you love the image of a “great cloud of witnesses?” That’s what the communion of saints means: those who have gone before us. “Everyone we ever loved and lost” is the way Frederick Buechner puts it. Everyone—relatives, teachers, models, mentors, and cheerleaders, “including the ones we didn’t know we loved until we lost them.”

As Barbara Brown Taylor has said, we have a “need to remember those who have died, to acknowledge the gulf between the living and the dead but also to reach across it . . . and to recognize those who have gone before us and who we are certain to follow” (Barbara Brown Taylor, “A Great Cloud of Witnesses,” Weavings, Sept./Oct. 1988).

The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews remembers and recognizes that need. He is writing to people who needed some connection to and encouragement from those who had gone before. The Christian men and women in the last decades of the first century faced a truly frightening future. There weren’t very many of them; they were small, weak, powerless. Even so, Rome had decided they were a public and social threat, and the whole weight and might of the Empire was about to turn violently against them. Jesus was gone, and the apostles had all died. And so the writer remembers for those frightened people those who have gone before, who have fought the fight, finished the race, and are now a resource, an inspiration, a hope. “Remember Noah and Abraham and Sarah and Samson and David. . . . We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses.”

Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest, tells of a Halloween party held in her church. It was on Halloween night and was to help the congregation prepare for All Saints’ Day. Instructions were that everyone was to come dressed as one of the saints of the church. So John the Baptist was there in his camel hair. Saints Paul and Peter, St. Cecelia and St. Catherine, St. Nicholas and St. Valentine. Then there were a few who had not read the instructions—or ignored them—because Elvis Presley and Barney and Garfield the cat were there, too! There was the judging, awarding of prizes, and then everyone was to go to the sanctuary for a brief worship service.

As each person passed out of the fellowship hall into the sanctuary, they were handed a flimsy little halo to put on their heads. Barbara Brown Taylor describes the darkened sanctuary as both funny and eerie. She said, “It was like looking at a time exposure, with characters from all the centuries gathered around, appearing in us, becoming incarnate in us, their faces behind our own. What bound us all together, what all of us had in common, were those delicate, bobbing halos, linking us with each other and with all God’s saints in all times and places.” She goes on to suggest that that comical congregation was a very accurate representation of the communion of saints, because contrary to the impression of many, sainthood is not something one earns, but something we are given. She writes,

What makes a saint? Extravagance. Excessive love, flagrant mercy, radical affection, exorbitant charity, immoderate faith, intemperate hope, inordinate love. None of which is an achievement, a badge to be earned or a trophy to be sought; all are secondary byproducts of the one thing that truly makes a saint, which is the love of God, which is membership in the body of Christ, which is what all of us, living and dead, remembered and forgotten, great souls and small, have in common. Some of us may do more with that love than others and may find ourselves able to reflect it in a way that causes others to call us saints, but the title is one that has been given to us all by virtue of our baptism. (“A Great Cloud of Witnesses,” Weavings, Sept./Oct. 1988)

A former colleague of mine in Cleveland, Ohio, was a Presbyterian pastor who was frequently asked to fill the pulpits of other churches. She was a young, vibrant, African American preacher who always greeted every congregation with the words, “Good morning, saints!” I always wondered if her repeat invitations came because of her vitality or because people liked that she called them by their true names, the names we were given in our baptism.

To be part of the cloud of witnesses doesn’t mean one is “saintly.” The people of faith in Hebrews 11 were not perfect models of virtue. Yet each in some way was faithful against all odds. The cloud of witnesses includes those whose lives were transparent to something else, something larger. We each have our own particular set of saints. Your saints are those who have had a strong, positive influence in your life: your heroes and heroines, your models and mentors, your ancestors. There are some you never met but they influenced and helped shape you. There are some people known to only a few, and there are some really big names: people whose lives inspired you from afar and called out of you deeper faith and courage and stamina and love and discipline.

I have had the privilege of encountering many saints in my life. Thirty plus years ago, I met one of those saints, whose name was Gertrude Bartlett. Gertrude was an older woman in the Presbyterian congregation where I grew up in a small, rural town in central Illinois. She never married, lived alone, and wore men’s clothing because it was more comfortable for her than women’s styles. She was short and wouldn’t stand out in a crowd. When she smiled, it seemed like her face split in two with a grin from ear to ear. She always paid her bills on time, walking her payment to the post office the same day she received the bill. I hardly noticed her until my pastor told me that Gertrude planned to leave $10,000 in her will to me to help pay for my seminary education because she felt that I would do in my life what she would like to do with hers if she could live a lot longer. So my family invited her for dinner, and we got a bit acquainted. But she did not call attention to herself. It was only later, after she died, that I learned that she was the first woman to be licensed in Illinois as a physical therapist and that she had written one of the first exams for others to get licensed. She was a pioneer, and when I think of her investment in me, she helps me be a pioneer, too.

In Hebrews, we are encouraged to run the race set before us, run it with perseverance, laying aside every weight that would hinder us. “Lift your drooping hands, and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet,” looking to Jesus Christ as the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. We are helped by the cloud of witnesses who surround us. Hebrews gives me the image of a stadium, and we are on a race track, part of a relay team passing the baton on to the next person, each with our turn in the race. And the people in the stands, cheering us on, are the saints, the cloud of witnesses: all those who have gone before, who have run the race and crossed the finish line, who now encourage us, believe in us, and strengthen us by their faith and hope.

As you fill out your prayer cards today, I want to encourage you to write the name of someone who is part of your cloud of witnesses. It might be someone many of us know, such as Martin Luther King Jr. or it might be someone such as your old coach, your piano teacher. We can be strengthened by their witness and presence. Let us not just call upon them today, but often, so we may faithfully run the race God now sets before us.