A sermon on Luke 9:28-36
by Rev. Chris Bohnhoff

Friends, will you pray with me? Loving God, holder of all memory, on this All Saints Day we thank you for the bonds that stretch across generations, across geography, across the mystery that lies between life and death. Help us continue learning from our ancestors. Help us to be good ancestors to future generations rooted in your love and wisdom. Amen.

With this worship service in mind, the topic of ancestors has been on my mind a lot over the past week. You know how sometimes, you get something in your mind and it’s all that you can see? Three experiences come to mind.

Last week, I joined a group of clergy outside the Whipple Federal Court building near Fort Snelling. Inside, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem gave a press conference on the administration’s arrests of immigrants. Her purpose was to pressure local law enforcement to further cooperate with ICE. Outside, we clergy sang “This Little Light of Mine,” and “We Shall Not Be Moved,” and proclaimed that our faith compels us to care for, not terrorize and deport the stranger.

I stood next to Rev. Craig Loya, the current Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Minnesota, and held the bullhorn high so that the crowd could hear Bishop Loya talk about his spiritual ancestor. He reminded the crowd that the Whipple Building is named after Rev. Henry Whipple, the first Bishop of the MN diocese of the Episcopal church, from 1859-1901. Bishop Whipple was known as a staunch advocate for Indigenous groups and led his denomination’s service to the poor. Bishop Loya told the crowd how far removed the actions taking place within that building’s walls today are from the values of the man whose name is printed over the door – the working of our country’s immigration policy and its lack of mercy and recognition of humanity – and how aghast he would be to have his name associated with the trajectories immigrants are set on as they make their way through that building in our time. Ancestors.

Vignette number two: last weekend I assisted in coaching my son’s high school ultimate frisbee team for the first time. The team’s head coach and I played ultimate together in college 30 years ago. Now his son is one of the team’s leaders and mine is one of its budding leaders. And I find myself not just a person whose ancestors have gone before me; I’m an ancestor myself, a guide to those following a path that I walked.

One more vignette. This week I took a mini retreat in the woods of Wisconsin at a center founded and run by Catholic nuns. It’s a beautiful, thriving place, the kind of place where you breathe easier as soon as your tires hit the driveway. A woman in the center’s bookstore struck up a conversation with me as I browsed, and she told me some about the center’s history. She told me that the generation of nuns that created and ran the center for decades are now in their 90s or have passed away, including one with whom she had been very close. This person told me that, just weeks before the nun who had been her friend and mentor passed away this summer, she had been volunteering in the bookstore – it wasn’t the first time she had volunteered, but she was still unsure how to occupy the role, how much of herself and her opinions she should bring to the task. The nun replied, “Treat it like it’s your bookstore.” That one simple invitation opened a door for the woman, and she stepped through. Now she lives at the center and runs the bookstore. She has joined that lineage not as a mere visitor, not as a nun, but as one deeply invested in the retreat center’s community and mission.

Our scripture story begins with the detail that it occured eight days after “these sayings.” What happened eight days earlier, you might ask? The famous feeding of the 5,000, but maybe more relevant to our passage, it was also eight days after the alone time he took after that miraculous event. After his mini retreat, Jesus asked the disciples who people said Jesus was. They replied that some thought he was an ancient prophet – Moses or Elijah, for example. Then Jesus asked the disciples who they thought he was, and Peter replied that he thought Jesus was the Messiah. Jesus kind of flipped out at Peter’s answer and commanded them not to spread that thought. Then, maybe a bit defensively to my ear, he dared people to “take up their cross daily and follow” (9:23) him, that it wouldn’t be easy, that he himself must suffer rejection and death, and be raised on the third day. It had clearly been quite a prayer session, one that left Jesus in a heightened state.

Eight days later – the same length of time, by the way, between a male child’s birth and his circumcision in Jewish practice, the same time between a new creation and its imprint by God – Jesus and his inner circle go up the mountain to get closer to God themselves.

Into every life are sprinkled moments of heightened uncertainty. Plenty of these moments pop to mind from my own life. Times when a new piece of information makes us think about our lives in a completely different way, or times when a person or job or law or thing changes or evaporates and we come face to face with how little we actually control. It’s in these moments when our ancestors come.

In our scripture, we hear that into this space, as Jesus becomes increasingly aware of the profound danger and responsibility squarely on his path, that the ancestors who had also known this dangerous, heavy path appear to Jesus and his inner circle. Moses, whose spiritual path started when he killed an Egyptian who he witnessed beating a Jewish laborer and then went on the lam, who taught his people to find strength in a complete reliance on God’s grace as they traveled for 40 years through the wilderness, whose life ended before his people ever set foot in the land God had promised them; the reluctant leader whose strong faith and righteousness made him the father of the Jewish prophets.

And Elijah, who stood up to the leaders of his time to do better by the poor; who God directed to speak the prophetic words that drove him into exile by the leaders he called out and, as the story goes, was whisked into the clouds to return someday as a portent of the coming of the Messiah. Ancestors.

Peter’s instinct was to memorialize these three men, these travelers of God’s paths of faith and compassion and justice – to construct tents where they and all those on God’s paths of faith and compassion and justice could find respite from the danger and heaviness. Not quite knowing the words coming from his own mouth within the mountain fog, not quite, perhaps, understanding his own complicity and involvement in this sacred history, his own belonging and becoming into the community of ancestors.

The work God invites us all into – the work of healing our generational trauma in service to the creation of God’s commonwealth where all beings are seen, valued, and honored – it is hard work. So hard that we’re not meant accomplish it alone or in one lifetime. And so we give thanks today for the help of our ancestors. We pitch a small tent where we can recognize what those who traveled our paths before us continue to mean to us through their example and continued presence in our memory. We give thanks for the welcome they offer, the reassurance that we belong in this work, that we are enough, that we are supported in ways that we can’t see or understand.

And through this support, on this day set apart, we also claim our own place in the community of saints. Through our unique gifts, our own unique experiences, we recognize our own responsibility to contribute to the welfare of future generations. We claim our special, critical role in helping God’s creation and the community of saints to continue becoming more aligned with God’s love, wisdom, and peace.

To be in the chaos of the living, squarely between those who have gone before us and those who are yet to come, is gift and responsibility both. It is, somehow, where change happens, little by little, through our actions. May we use this time to receive the gifts of memory, reassurance, and belonging, so that we may return to the path God sets before us with humility and faith. Amen.