Revelation 14:1-3, 14;  Matthew 25: 30-41

“Oh when the saints go marching in…” It’s a great old song that gives voice to an even older Christian hope, that when the kingdom comes, we ourselves will be among the holy ones streaming through its pearly gates, dancing down its golden streets, cavorting in its heavenly fields, and sampling its thousand sacred sweets—speaking figuratively, of course. (Except for the sweets. The sweets had better be real!)

“Oh when the saints go marching in…” We sing it with  happy gusto, completely oblivious to the little bombshell tucked away in the third line of all the verses. Did you notice it? “Oh Lord,” the third line says, “I want to be in that number…“

Oh! There’s a number. When the roll is called up yonder, a number of saints will go marching in.

Now, when I sing, “I want to be in that number,” I really mean it. And despite recent reports of declining belief in heaven among liberal Protestants, I’m willing to bet that you want to be in that number too. But ‘number’ might mean that not all of us will be marching to Zion. ‘Number’ could imply a limit. Think ‘bouncer at the door with an official guest list,’ or ‘guy with a clicker standing under the maximum occupancy sign posted on the Pearly Gates.’

What if that’s the case? What if we’re not on that list? What if we dawdle and arrive to find heaven already at full capacity? What if we’re turned away? A cartoon shows a befuddled man standing before a desk in the clouds. St. Peter is behind the desk scowling at him, his quill pen hovering over the Ledger of Life. The man says to Peter, “Nobody told me I needed to bring my receipts.” What if we forget to bring our receipts?

“Lord, I want to be in that number…” How many are we talking about here? Just how big is ‘that number’? And will we be in it?

In the Middle Ages, the vast majority of Christians operated on the gloomy assumption that they were not going to be in that number. The church gave them lots of spiritual means for slogging their way through this earthly “vale of tears” towards the heavenly realm, but in the medieval way of believing, arriving was never a slam-dunk, no matter how often or well you made use of all those sacraments, indulgences, and intercessors.

It was widely believed that monks and nuns had a better chance at getting through heaven’s gates than the hoi-polloi did.  A monastic life removed you from all sorts of temptations—the relentless allure of the world, the flesh and the devil. In theory, anyway! But every day of their lives, ordinary Christians had to engage in tainted things like commerce, politics, and sex. And that meant they were always sinning. Thus, it was mostly those famous miracle-working, life-and-limb-losing, inimitably virtuous, perfectly perfect, officially-certified, canonized saints who got to be in that number. How many? Not many.

The idea that not everyone gets to be in that number did not pass away with the Middle Ages. Many Christians still expect the number to be limited. One newer American religious movement even teaches precisely what that number is going to be. It’s derived  from the Book of Revelation—one hundred forty-four thousand. One hundred forty-four thousand men and women “sealed for God,” which is to say, ‘marked as God’s own.’

(By the way, practically everybody in the Book of Revelation is marked in some way—whether you belong to God or Satan is something you can see.  Satan’s people are marked with the number 666. That was my telephone exchange when I lived in Somerville, MA. Some fundamentalist Christians in my neighborhood complained about it to the phone company, and so they offered everybody new numbers. I kept my old one. I loved it that people had to dial 666 to reach a minister. But I digress…)

These folks believe that when the trumpet sounds on the Last Day, one hundred forty-four thousand special believers from their community of faith will be ushered right into heaven, and there they will reign forever with God. Others in their movement will reside for all eternity on a new, paradise-like earth. So, according to a recent census of this group, if the world were to end today, the new earth’s population would be five million five hundred sixty thousand saints, minus one hundred forty-four thousand special saints in heaven. If you’re not a member of this group, you won’t be in either of those numbers. But you won’t suffer eternally in hell, either. There’s no hell in their theology. You’ll be annihilated, quickly and completely.

If you’re tempted to think those beliefs are funny or bizarre, beware. The wagging finger points right back at our own Congregationalist history. A lot of our Puritan forbears believed in double prelapsarian predestination. Now, most of us don’t know prelapsarian predestination from a potted plant, so let me sum it up this way—long before Adam and Eve even suspected that there might be such a thing as forbidden fruit, God chose who would be saved and who would not. Because God is gracious, however, God’s election is not stingy. God has chosen to save an “innumerable multitude” of saints. Yet no matter how many people God elects and saves, it’s still a number. Not everybody is going to be in it, they guessed. Some people are going to be counted in a number that’s headed south, where it’s a lot warmer.

Did you notice the “I” in our song? “Oh Lord, I want to be in that number.” Throughout Christian history, ‘I’ have always wanted to be in that number, but ‘I’ have rarely wanted you to be in that number alongside me. Fred Phelps didn’t expect to see any gay people when he got there (imagine his surprise!). Most fundamentalist and some evangelical Christians preach that unless you explicitly accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, you won’t be joining that number either. And it wasn’t all that long ago that nearly all Protestants believed Catholics wouldn’t go to heaven, nearly all Catholics believed Protestants wouldn’t go to heaven, and nearly all Christians believed that non-Christians wouldn’t go to heaven. (If everybody’s right, then nobody’s in heaven! And with all our violent squabbling over heavenly turf, I’m sure there are moments when God would prefer it that way.)

These days, thankfully, we’re a bit more inclusive. Well, a lot more inclusive! Catholics have done away with Limbo so that unbaptized people can now enter paradise instead of languishing forever in an in-between state, deprived eternally of the presence of God. Most Christian churches don’t consign suicides to hell anymore, in some cases owing to a deeper grasp of the complexities of depression as a form of mental illness. And in liberal Christian circles over the last generation or two, we’ve been steadily backing away from the traditional Christian conviction that there’s only one way to salvation, through the grace of Jesus Christ.

Indeed, in the UCC we break out in hives if someone even hints at excluding anybody from the procession of the heaven-bound. We expect God to elect absolutely everyone, no matter who they are, or where they are on the journey of faith. We don’t think you have to be a Christian to go marching in, let alone a particular flavor of Christian.

We also aren’t fond of the idea that Christian saints are exceptionally heroic and holy—the few, the fine, the famous, and the dead. With St. Paul, we say that to be a Christian saint, it’s enough to be baptized and to desire to live a new life in Christ—whether you’re living or dead, ordinary or extraordinary, you qualify. You’re a saint the minute the cat drags you in over the church’s threshold!  Especially if you sign up for a committee. Nothing canonizes you faster in our tradition than filling a vacancy on the Board of Christian Education.

These days, it seems that we mainline Protestants can’t think of anybody who’s not going to be in that number. Of course, it’s easy for us to say that. It’s easy for us to say anything we want about a total mystery we know nothing about. All the same, and speaking just for me, I’d rather be lax and rule everybody in, not strict and rule a bunch of people out. It seems to me that although lowering the bar as much as we do these days might have some moral downsides, it’s a far less violent way to go than its opposite.

Because ruling people in or out of heaven is not some quaint, innocuous theological game. It isn’t merely theoretical. It has consequences. If somebody thinks you’re unworthy of the next life, they probably think you’re unworthy of this one too. History is littered with the battered bodies of everybody’s excluded infidels and heathens. How we think about ‘that number’ really matters. And so it also matters what Jesus says about it. Let’s listen to him.

In the famous gospel passage about the sheep and the goats that we read today, you’ll notice that Jesus doesn’t say how many people will inherit the kingdom. What he does tell us is how to get there. And for that, the only number that counts is the number one. Listen! “Whenever you did it to one of these least, a member of my family, you did it to me.” One, fed. One, clothed. One, comforted—one is the number that counts.

I honestly don’t know if there’s a predetermined cap on how many of us will one day go marching in, but I do know that we have good warrant for setting the bar so low. Our brother Jesus was there before us, doing exactly the same thing. If you go by what he says in this passage, anybody can be in that number, because anybody can make one visit, cook one meal, throw one warm jacket over a pair of shoulders hunched-up against the cold.

I don’t know for sure if there’s a cap on that number, but I do know that Jesus isn’t trying to make it too tricky or too onerous for us to be in it. You don’t need special knowledge or heroic virtue. You don’t need to be a martyr or a monk. You don’t need to accumulate one hundred forty-four thousand good deeds or say one hundred forty-four thousand prayers to St. Jude the patron saint of lost causes. It’s one stranger welcomed, one wound healed, one thirst satisfied.

You don’t even have to do it for God! Maybe you don’t even have to know God! The sheep, after all, had no idea that they’d been lending a hand to Jesus. “Lord, when did we see you hungry, or thirsty, or naked, or homeless, or in prison, or sick?”   We know when. “When you did it to one…”

As I said, I don’t know if there’s a cap on that number, but if there is, in the course of our Christian lives, you and I have not been kept in the dark about the basis on which it will be decided. It’s no secret. It has to do with whether we hand ourselves over to each other in kindness, or whether we bring our hands down on the weak and unprotected. It has to do with whether we get our hands dirty with works of mercy, or wash them of responsibility for our neighbor. It has to do with whether we have our hands full of compassion, or remain an empty-handed people.

But even more, it has to do with the mercy of God, the one we know in Jesus, who opens the divine hand to us all and bestows largess beyond all telling, requiring so little of us in return for so much.

Praised be God by all God’s precious saints and by every creature under heaven, now and in the endless age to come.

“Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.”

I ran into an old friend the other day. She’s a Baptist’s Baptist who hails from deep in the Bible Belt. Soul freedom personified, and a fierce free-churcher, she is not someone you’d expect to inhabit the same zip code as a Book of Common Prayer. But there it was… she had it in her hand.

I must have raised an eyebrow, because she immediately launched into an explanatory rant about how loopy worship services at her home church had become.

‘We never know what we’re going to get,’ she said. ‘Every week it’s amateur hour!’ A few Sundays before, it seems that instead of the sermon there was a fully-costumed skit announcing the Strawberry Fair. And just last week there was special music to honor the King…of Pop.  And every Sunday, she endures the vague churchy blather (her words, not mine!) of a pastor who can never quite pull off a single, simple, clear declarative sentence—subject, verb, object. ‘And,’ she said, ‘when that man prays, bless his heart’—if you’re from the South, that’s a phrase that makes it okay to say something bad about somebody—‘when he prays, bless his heart, you’d think it was the weather report on the morning news!’

“Dear God, we thank you for the blue sky and bright sun on this perfect spring day with temperatures hovering around 70 dry, breezy degrees. And for this high pressure area that’s going to ensure pleasant weather well into the week…“

So… she’s started going to an Episcopal church. Hence that BCP. She attends Morning Prayer, Eucharist, Evening Prayer—whatever’s on offer. With the ‘Piskies she gets a fixed liturgy, time-tested language, no guesswork. She can relax. “And,” she said, “it makes me cry.”

Now, I got the part about a fixed liturgy being a relief. But I wasn’t expecting her say, “It makes me cry.” And to mean ‘that’s a good thing.’ She’s not exactly sentimental.

So I echoed her, in my best imitation of a therapist, “It makes you cry….”

“Yes. Well, no,” she said. “not everything makes me cry. It’s mostly evening prayer that makes me cry. “

“Evening prayer…”  I repeated.

“Yes. Well, no, not evening prayer as such.  One of the prayers in evening prayer, the collect, this one. It makes me cry.” And she opened the prayer book to read it to me. But I already knew which one it was going to be. Maybe you do too.

“Lord Jesus, stay with us, for evening is at hand and the day is past; be our companion in the way; kindle our hearts, and awaken hope, that we may know you as you are revealed in Scripture and the breaking of bread. Grant this for the sake of your love.  Amen.”

For years this prayer has been a devotional staple of mine for when I lay me down to sleep.  It makes me cry too… In part, I think, because my heart is easily smitten by a really great metaphor: Almost evening. Nightfall. The day passing away.

You know where this is going.

If you were to place this prayer on the lips of my 91-year-old father some Monday night, he wouldn’t be thinking, ‘Monday. Monday is almost over.’ He’d be thinking about how it’s all gone so fast. He’d make a stunning calculus of years behind and years ahead and wonder how it happened. He would say to himself, deep in that place in the soul where from time to time you dare to test out the truth, ‘It won’t be long. It’s almost evening. The day is far spent. Death is near.’

And, of course, he’s not the only one.

I occasionally spend time looking at photographs of myself as a child. Not so much because I’m vain, but because it’s bracing. It’s like the old monastic practice of keeping a skull in your cave. ‘Memento mori,’ says the wiry, sun-draped child sprawled like Huck Finn on a flat rock in the swift brook that empties into Stirrup Iron Pond on her grandfather’s farm.  She is so far away. She is impossible. I’m only 65, not 91, and yet I can’t reach her. I can’t really say in truth that I remember being her. She is a day drawing to a close. She is like an evening gone. She makes me cry.

Do you know what I mean?

Once upon a time, we had our whole lives ahead of us, and we imagined them a certain way as we hatched hopes and made plans for them. We cast ourselves as protagonists of beautiful unfolding stories: We’d have a loving, lasting marriage. We’d build a good career in a meaningful profession and stash enough money away for a comfortable retirement. And we would be fine people, people who do good and not harm. We’d eradicate world hunger by the time we were forty.

And then we wake up to find that we are forty and there is still world hunger, and that good intentions notwithstanding, we were more than occasionally mean or dishonest or selfish. Whatever we did or left undone, we managed to contribute our fair share of sin and stupidity to the vast reservoir of human pain and regret.

And then we wake up one day to find that we are fifty and our tattered marriage is no better now than it was when we were forty; or maybe we find that we don’t even have a marriage any more.

And then we turn around and we’re sixty, and we are have doubts about the meaning of our life’s work, and the money we thought we’d have is not as much as the money we actually have, and what we do have may not last until we die. And we are going to die. It wakes us up in the wee hours.

And I haven’t even mentioned what could happen at 70…

The day is far spent.  It is almost evening.

In the course of my teaching and preaching, I come across a lot of people who are really “into” spirituality. They also seem to know what it is, which I find fascinating, because I’ve been studying it for a good part of my life and I’m not sure I have any solid sense of it yet. But I have come to at least one conclusion about spirituality, not so much from study as from what happens in those wee hours when one is awakened by the sadness of things slipping away. I’ve learned it from the pathos that wells up and constricts your throat when you turn the soft black page of an old album and come face to face with a child who (they swear) is you, but you can’t exactly place her. I’ve learned it from the way tears come unbidden when at vespers we finally say out loud what we know is true, ‘It is almost night.’

I think if spirituality is about anything, it has ultimately to do with the immense grief that punctures the human heart, grief that stems from the knowledge that this one life is all we have, and that it is way too short, no matter when it ends, and that even if it is full of suffering, it is still too wonderful and precious to have to abandon, just like that, to the night that is fast approaching.

This grief is the subtext of every delight, the undertow of regret we feel even in the midst of ecstasy or quiet gratitude for the beauty and pleasure of this life, the smoldering rage we reflexively stoke up when we ponder the intractability of our fate, the fact that nothing can stay.

Spirituality must be about the kind of grief and fear that, left to its own devices, is capable of recasting our souls as one life-long, fatalistic shrug of the shoulders, rendering us indifferent to all kinds of intimate and global horror; or worse, making us cruel, able to take out our despair on the innocent.

If spirituality is about anything, I think it must have to do with this stunning human disappointment, the fact that we who love to live all die, that death is the one sure thing that is coming to us all.

The job of a devotional life, if I can put it that way, is to take us as we are—caught up in immense disappointment, traveling on a rough road to more of the same–and by grace, day by day, year after year, discipline us to know and embrace our heart’s anguish as the finite echo of another, infinite and encompassing reality: the fact that, although our deaths are sure, we were not made for death, but for a persevering love that cannot lose or leave us. When all is ended, love remains

The job of a spiritual practice is not to make us perfect people, holy people, or even better people, but simply to deposit us daily, routinely, in the way of this sustaining love; to accustom us to the familiar cadences of its voice, which we may not at first be able to place exactly, but which rings so true that it blazes; and to support these frail hearts as love makes mysterious, yet shining sense for us out of the grand story of the trustworthy ways of God; and shining, yet mysterious sense for us of our own stories in God.

And then, when we look up and register that it is almost evening, that the day is indeed ending and night is falling fast, we will know that our anxious prayer has already been answered, the prayer that goes, ‘Lord Jesus, stay with us.’ Our anxious prayer not to die, not to die forever, has already been answered and is never unanswered, no matter the strange disguise in which this answer may appear. Answered and never unanswered by the companionable One whose hands still bear the mark of nails and from whose open side we have all received grace after grace.

And after we have gone in with him and he has come in with us, after we have sat to eat with him, and after we have known him again and again together, there will be only one thing to do with the life he imparts: To get up and return to that rough and hopeless road to find some other pair, some other trudging hearts despondent over death, and say to them, “Love is living still!”