... four weeks worth of prayers, hymns, and sermon prompts. Kate had long had a vision of this season beginning on Indigenous People’s Weekend and allowing the Church a whole month to explore narratives in the Bible that have historically been used to justify violence and conquest.

I loved this idea and I thought starting the Sunday before Indigenous People’s Day was genius. But I have to admit, I was a little less sure about the idea of the season culminating on All Saints Day, as this is such a tender day for us here in the church.

After all, today is a day to remember, to celebrate, and to mourn the people we have loved and lost. Piling the work of decolonization on top of our grief felt like too heavy a load for one Sunday to bear.

Not only that, there was also the hope that we would be able to use the lectionary readings already assigned for each Sunday, and I knew the readings that were chosen hundreds of years ago for All Saints were chosen with an eye toward comforting us on this holy day. I wasn’t sure if the readings would be in any way relevant to the work of this new season, especially this year because I knew we would read from the Book of Revelation today.

I remembered that we would hear these beautiful words of promise to the saints robed in white who stand in the throne room of God:

They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes..

What I didn’t remember as clearly was where all of these saints had actually come from.

Now if you’d asked me before this week, I would have been pretty sure that this multitude robed in white were martyrs who had survived the Tribulation. You see, I was raised in a church that took these verses as literally as one can take anything in the book of Revelation and my people had spun them into a story of the end times still to come. Which is not to say that there was agreement on what any of this meant. There was still plenty of discussion.

I grew up with pre-tribulation Christians who believed that if we accepted Jesus as our savior now we would get raptured before things went south. And I grew up amongst plenty of post-tribulation Christians who believed that we were destined to become a persecuted minority in this world and suffer at the hands of some all powerful empire that would force us to choose between following God or taking the mark of the beast.

Those who refused the mark would most likely be martyred but, on the bright side, at least they’d end up here in chapter 7 with Jesus wiping their tears away. Back in the 90’s there was a whole cottage industry of Christians applying these ideas to historical and current events to try and divine when and where the end times would take place. It was pretty intense.

But then I went to divinity school and learned that John was writing during a time when Christians were already a persecuted minority who were martyred for their faith by the Roman empire, and that this book wasn’t a prophecy of things to come so much as a summation of how things were already going while he was writing.

In either case, though, at least in my mind, the saints we read about today were all Christians who had been martyred for their faith.

But now…now I’m not so sure. Having spent 4 weeks thinking about all of this through this new lens of the Season of Origins - questioning how we have read the Bible and confronting how we as Christians have used it to justify so much harm - I’m starting to wonder if maybe the people robed in white are not Christians who were persecuted for their faith, but people of other faiths who we persecuted because of ours.

What if this is a vision of God saving the world from us?

After all, this great multitude that no one can count is not in any way limited to Christians. From what John can see, they come from every nation, tribe, and people. They speak many languages as they stand before the throne and before the Lamb. And I think it is worth noting that as they wave their palm branches they are crying out that salvation belongs, not to us Christians or any one people, religion, sect, or country, but to God and to God alone.

All we really know for sure is that this multitude has come through a great ordeal, and I can think of no better word to describe what we as Christians have put so many races and tribes of people through in our quest to dominate the world.

You know last week we talked about how the impact of colonialism is not ancient history, but effecting people right now. Last week I told you that the last residential school for indigenous children closed - does anyone remember? - in 1997. Yeah, that date is seared in my brain now too.

Well this week I learned that the Doctrine of Discovery - you all know what that is? - the doctrine that took shape in the 1400’s that gave people like Christopher Columbus and all the conquistadors and settlers who followed after him the authority to conquer and claim these lands for God and empire and wipe out any of the indigenous people who got in their way -  the Doctrine of Discovery was repudiated by the Vatican in the year…..anyone want to take a guess…?1

2023. Yeah.

I learned that in the year of our Lord, 2022, Pope Francis went to Canada to apologize for the Catholic Church’s role in the residential school system that forcibly removed and assimilated indigenous children. It turns out that a few years prior, a delegation of Indigenous Catholics had gone to the Vatican to share their stories and ask the Pope to formally disavow the doctrine. Before they left, they gave him a tiny little pair of moccasins to hold as he contemplated what he would do next.

Pope Francis took their visit to heart and he held those same little moccasins in his hands on the day he made a confession that was broadcast all over Canada. He confessed the sins of the church against the people of the First Nations and concluded with these words:

“On this first step of my journey, I have wanted to make space for memory,” he said. “Here, today, I am with you to recall the past, to grieve with you, to bow our heads together in silence and to pray before the graves. … In the face of evil, we pray to the Lord of goodness; in the face of death, we pray to the God of life.

Our Lord Jesus Christ took a grave, which seemed the burial place of every hope and dream, leaving behind only sorrow, pain and resignation, and made it a place of rebirth and resurrection, the beginning of a history of new life and universal reconciliation.

Our own efforts are not enough to achieve healing and reconciliation: we need God’s grace. We need the quiet and powerful wisdom of the Spirit, the tender love of the Comforter. May he bring to fulfillment the deepest expectations of our hearts. May he take us by the hand and enable us to advance together on our journey.”2

Francis listened to the Indigenous people as he toured what remained of the residential schools. And then he returned to Rome and soon after issued a formal disavowal of the very doctrine that has been used by Christians to dehumanize millions of people all over the world for 530 years.3

2023.

It breaks your heart to think it took that long. It breaks your heart to think about it at all. And friends, I realize that’s a lot to lay upon you on this day when our hearts are already broken.

But here is the thing - I don’t know that the Pope would have apologized if his heart had not been broken…broken as he held those little moccasins in his hands… broken by the reality of the all the harm that was done in the name of Jesus.

I don’t think anything can change until we confront the sins of our past, allow our hearts to break for the damage we have caused, and then commit ourselves to doing better. That’s what repentance is, and without it there can be no better future.

There is something holy about allowing our hearts to break and our tears to flow, which bring me back to this passage in Revelation.

I know some people read these verses and conclude that there will be no more tears in heaven, but that’s not how I read them. I think there are tears - tears that flow when harm has been done to us and tears that flow when harm has been done by us - tears that God sees and wipes away.

I think there is grief in heaven too: grief for what we have done to others and grief for what we have endured.

But I also believe there is an even greater comfort, because at the heart of heaven is a God who is not willing to leave any one of us behind, a God who is not willing to let our brokenness go un-mended, a God who refuses to let our sin, our wounds, or even our death have the last word.

And when I think of the saints we lost this year from our congregation - Mj, Marti, Craig, Jeff, and Ted - I believe they are now part of that great cloud of witnesses who surround us in our grief and in our hope.

They were all such good people: people who deeply cared about their neighbors, about doing what was right, about supporting the least of these, the marginalized, the immigrant and the refugee. If any one of them were here with us worshipping and learning during this Season of Origins I have no doubt that they would be allowing their hearts to break right along with ours. Perhaps in heaven they are doing so even now.

Friends, I think we honor them with our tears and I think that maybe they are still honoring us with theirs.

Today is a day to let our hearts break because of how much we love them and today is a day to let our hearts break because of how much we love the world.

May we honor them in our heartbreak, in our confession, in our resolve to keep imagining and working toward a better future.  It is a holy thing to allow our hearts to break, for in that breaking God not only breaks through to us, but can break through us to help others.

So may God wipe away our tears even as we let them flow. May we weep together with the saints among us and the saint high above until all of God’s children are as safe here on earth as they are in heaven. Amen.

Footnotes:

1. Based on the Papal Bull, “Inter Caetera,” issued by Pope Alexander VI on May 4, 1493, the Doctrine of Discovery led people to believe that any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be "discovered," claimed, and exploited by Christian rulers and declared that "the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.” This doctrine… became the basis of all European claims in the Americas as well as the foundation for the United States’ western expansion. In the US Supreme Court in the 1823 case Johnson v. McIntosh, Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in the unanimous decision held "that the principle of discovery gave European nations an absolute right to New World lands.” https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/doctrine-discovery-1493

2. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2022/july/documents/20220725-popolazioniindigene-canada.pdf

3. In a statement,[5] the Vatican admitted that the papal bulls on which the doctrine is based "did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of indigenous peoples." The statement denied that the Doctrine of Discovery was a teaching of the Catholic Church and claimed that these documents had been "manipulated for political purposes" by colonial empires to justify their treatment of Indigenous people. The Vatican also acknowledged the importance of Indigenous voices in addressing the Doctrine of Discovery.The Vatican statement on the Doctrine of Discovery was generally received as a positive first step by some Indigenous groups and representatives. https://humanrights.ca/story/doctrine-discovery