SERMON FOR ALL SAINTS SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2021
     At the time of the Reformation the church had built up a lucrative trade around the dead. No person still carrying the marks of their earthly sins could come into the presence of God, and that was pretty much everybody.  As the 6th-century pope Gregory the Great stated, “a shoddy unfinished soul” is not prepared to meet God. Some form of cleansing was required to purge the soul of blemishes, to make of the ordinary sinner a saint. That reasoning, along with some slight scriptural evidence, gave rise to the doctrine of purgatory and its cleansing fires that prepare the dead for entrance into heaven. Hell and purgatory were similar in that both subjected souls to punishment but with this crucial difference. The souls of the damned suffered eternally for their earthly transgressions, while the souls in purgatory endured their pain for a set period of time so that they might ultimately be saved. They depended on the living to help shorten their stay in this intermediate realm. That is why the sale of indulgences, which so outraged Martin Luther, was such a money-maker for the church. You could buy an indulgence and have it credited to the account of a deceased loved one. It took time off their purgatorial sentence, although it is not clear how an early release would advance their purification, which was the point of purgatory in the first place. Indulgences had earthly benefits as well. For example, some of the proceeds from the campaign that prompted Luther to write his 95 theses were used to build St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. 
     For the Protestant reformers, the traffic in indulgences represented the worst of works righteousness and ecclesiastical corruption. They insisted that the grace of Christ alone was sufifcient for the sinner’s salvation. There was no need for some intermediate state where the efforts of human beings, deceased and living, were required to reach the heavenly goal. The dead were safely in God’s hands, wholly beyond our reach, and so the lighting of candles and prayers for the dead, as well as the saying of masses in their memory and the purchasing of indulgences on their behalf, were all done away with by the Protestants. These reforms aimed to keep the believer’s eye on the one and only thing necessary, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. To forgo all the familiar rituals performed for those who had died, to walk away from the grave and trust that they would be granted a place among the saints at rest without the continued advocacy of the church on earth, took a great leap of faith for that first generation. It still does. It is never easy to let go that completely.
     When I first saw my mother in her hospital bed last month, I was taken aback. I thought I was looking at my grandmother. The resemblance was uncanny, from the sharply etched cheekbones, to the patches of discoloration under her eyes, that when she opened them were still the same vivid blue. Grandma Ethel, my maternal grandmother, lived to be 92 years old. My mother was an only child. Her father died not long after she graduated from college. On his deathbed he told her to look after her mother, a responsibility Mom took on with an open heart and fulfilled faithfully, from that time until the day she sat with Ethel in the hospital as she died. 
     Grandma was much longer a widow than a wife, and although she had a picture of her husband, my grandfather, in her home, she never once spoke of him by name in my hearing. He was always “Betty’s father” or “Dottie’s brother.” There was a hollowness in that distancing. After Ethel’s death, while conferring with the social worker at the hospital, my mother acknowledged that despite her best efforts, she could never relieve my grandmother’s unhappiness. Neither could she make sense of it. The social worker suggested that Ethel was bitter because she felt abandoned. “By whom?” my mother asked. “Her husband,” she replied. My mother was genuinely shocked. “But it’s not as if he chose to leave,” she objected, “he died.” “Whether it was his choice or not, the result for your mother was the same,” the social worker replied. Who’s to say? Grandma never shared much about the life she knew before I was part of it. 
     Ethel was a difficult person. She was suspicious of other people and harbored prejudices typical of her time yet indefensible. She suffered from a severe case of oppositional defiance disorder and made others suffer for it as well. When any member of the family was stubbornly unreasonable and nasty, my dad would say their Ethel genes were showing. She could be downright mean to my mother, even as she appeared a benign old lady to the world at large.      
     But Grandma Ethel was unfailingly generous to us, and she was a terrific grandmother. She cherished my brother and me. She always had time for us and abundant patience when I took out all the treasures from her cedar chest, bedecking myself with heirloom cameos and beaded evening bags and carrying around the picture of her as a bride, taken just before she descended the stairs to the living room of her family’s home, to marry the man whose name she never spoke in my hearing. When we cleared out her apartment after her death, we found  the silly greeting cards my brother had drawn for her when he was a little boy, a bouquet of kleenex Mothers’ Day flowers we made for her in Sunday School, as well as the various offerings of our older years. Ethel loved us unconditionally, and we knew it. For as long as she lived she was one of the best things in my life. The complicated role she played in my family never changed that.
     The nurse came into my mother’s hospital room, peered at the two of us and exclaimed, “You look just like your mom!” I suspect a nurse will be saying the same thing to Lucy at some point as she sits by my bedside. The woman watching and the woman lying there know too well the complexity of one another. In the midst of the love and gratitude we feel, grief also brings us face-to-face with what we will never understand and what we cannot mend. Saintly sinners, sinful saints, that’s who we are. My grandmother, whose heart could be so narrow and unkind and then so effortlessly loving, is just the kind of person who needs the grace of Jesus Christ. She is sure to find it. He could not love this difficult woman less than my mother and I did. He would not leave unhealed what caused her to suffer and to cause suffering to others. 
     “Rest eternal grant her, O Lord; and let light perpetual shine upon her.” The saints are God’s handiwork, fractured vessels of earth made whole for eternity by the love and forgiveness of our Lord. Amen.