(The following material is copied from the Dedication of the Chancel Stained-Glass Windows at Abiding Presence Lutheran Church, November 3, 2002, All Saint's Sunday, adapted for use on this web site.)
Dedication of the
Chancel Stained-Glass Windows
By Him the rolling seasons in fruitful order move.
(LBW Hymn 412)
It seems that the commemoration of All Saints goes as far back as the mid-300's. For the encouragement of God's living saints, the church saw the need to lift up the example of those who had persevered in the faith despite violent opposition. For the ancient martyrs, faith became a fiery ordeal. It was important for the community of faith to proclaim loudly and clearly that the Lord's promise is that he will be with us in life and in death. Through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, graves have been turned into the doorway to eternal life.
But we may well admit today: faith is not such a fiery ordeal for us. We are not worshiping in fear like the Christians in Pakistan. We are not hovering around candlelight in a remote house-church in China. What is our ordeal? Our tribulation is the fork in the road to renounce or water down the faith. Our ordeal is to see faith as an option amid the cafeteria of consumerist choices. Sometimes the pressure is violent or grinding. Most times the pressure is subtle but persistent. And as honest ot God saints, we are not usually walking around with cloudy visions and cute halos. We are those folks baptized by water and the Work who are fazced with daily ordeals to lose the connections to faith, to lose the connections with God's faithful people, to lose the historic connections to the gritty witness of our forebears who walked the walk and talked the talk before us.
Thanks to two gifted artists, Geoffrey and Karen Caldwell, and to the vision and persistence of Carlota D. we have some important visual aids to fortify our faith connections. Many of the members of our church have contributed toward this project. We pray that these windows will color our connections to God and God's faithful people.
There are a few dominant features of these windows. They follow the four seasons of the year to remind us of the beautiful diversity of God's creation. This creation serves as the venue for the creative work of the saints in their daily lives. In each window, you will find locally recognizable plant and animal life, creatures great and small. Although it does not stop there, our experience of God and God's people is rooted in the locally recognizable places, people, and landscapes that become a part of the ebb and flow of daily life. Prominent in each window is the strong resilient presence of some sort of vine or stem. In a subtle way we are reminded of our dependence on God and God's providence through the created order. The vines themselves remind us of Christ's promise: I am the vine, you are the branches. Our own congregation's name follows in the next verse from John's Gospel: Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. What a vital and necessary connection! And how do we know we are connected to the vine? Grapes and wheat in various seasonal windows establish the connection between the common, earthly elements and all persons who gather around this table to partake of Holy Communion. What a splendid reminder that even as Christ becomes truly present in, with, and under common stuff like bread and wind, so God's kindom comes in, with, and under common saints like ourselves who gather around these rails.
Now we come to the most dominant feature of the windows. Superimposed at the top of the middle vertical windows are the characters of the first and last letters in the Greek alphabet - the Alpha and the Omega. Overriding the cyclical pattern of the seasons is the divine promise that everything in heaven and on earth originates from God and moves toward God. Life is not an endless cycle. Contrary to what our eyes see and minds comprehend, history is more than repeated events of tragedy and triumph with mostly tragedy. God's people live by hope, hope in a future that's in God's hands. Helmut Thielicke once put the promises of God in a nice way: "We are dealing with the very realistic promise that our little corner of life, our community of faith, as well as history as a whole and the world as a whole, has a theme around which everything revolves; that the story of the world - and us included - has been written by a hand sure of its goal." Christ says, I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.
Looking at these symbols today, brothers and sisters, I can visualize the witness of several saints who have touched my life. The little butterfly (symbol of the resurrection) reminds me of my Bishop Richard Bansemer in Virgina who once performed a graveside service in which a real butterfly landed on the front of his bald head. you have to know him to realize how important the proclamation of the resurrection to eternal life was to him. Bishop Bansemer's wife died suddenly just a few days after he had moved to his first parish out of seminary. He was left with a baby boy under a year old to care for. When I peer at the clusters of grapes, I am drawn back to when I was 5 year's old and shadowed my father over to Mrs. Sain's house on Saturday afternoons to pick up the communion wine for the next day. Mrs. Sain and her husband were salt of the earth folks who worked tirelessly on an apple farm. The stately cardinal over there in the window behind the choir reminds me of my great-grandpa Wike who drew sketches of the red bird all his life. Daniel Wike, after whom I am named, was not only known for his cardinals. The family knew him as the one who willingly sold much of his best farmland to another farmer in order to send his own children off to teacher's college. He lived with the financial sacrifice the rest of his life, but never regretted it.
You can make your own connections as you look at these lovely windows. Beloved, we are God's children now. We don't know what the future holds for us. But, we do know who holds the future. The Alpha and the Omega - God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit! Today, we lift our voices and hearts with saints of every time and every place, we lift them with the angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, we lift them with all God's creatures great and small, flora and fauna, visible and invisible. In the beauty of holiness, we pause amid whatever ordeals we face to give praise in the words from Revelation: Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen
B. Daniel Whitener, Jr.
Pastor
This is my Father's world;
The birds their carols raise;
The morning light, the lily white,
Declare their maker's praise.
LBW Hymn 554