Once and for All

Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, November 3, 2024
Hebrews 9:11-14

    As many of you know, Rich finally graduated with his PhD in psychology from Adelphi University in May.  The commencement speaker spoke directly to the families of the PhD candidates that day, affirming that it is a long and sometimes difficult journey to get this degree, thanking parents, spouses and children of the students for our love, patience, and support, and then he said, “They are done now.”  We all laughed.  Because actually, Rich still needs to practice for one year under a provisional permit to accumulate so many supervised hours and pass one final exam before officially becoming a Psychologist in the State of New York.  Due to timing of his internship, he didn’t receive his degree in the mail until about three weeks ago!  We may have initially envisioned his graduation as this one-day awesome culmination of a long five-year journey to receiving his doctorate, but in reality, it’s been more a process than a once-and-for-all event.
    That’s what life is like often, isn’t it?  When it comes to our faith, we have stories of mountain-top powerful conversion experiences, these once-and-for-all moments, and we also have the daily confession and forgiveness, the starting over and over again, the desire to journey with Jesus in striving to better love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves that is never-ending.  Between our baptism and when we die or when Christ comes again, we are journeying with Jesus on a long road of discovering what it means, over and over again, to be simultaneously a sinner and a saint in the eyes of God.
    As we continue reading through chapter 9 of Hebrews as our second reading for today, the author uniquely describes the death and resurrection of Christ as a new, life-changing, once and for all sacrifice which is done for us and is good for all time.  You may be aware that offering burnt offerings with animals was a common practice in several religions including in Judaism while the temple was still standing in Jerusalem.  The book of Hebrews was written after the second destruction of the temple in 70 AD , which made these sacrifices no longer possible.  But apart from the impossibility of temple sacrifice, Hebrews notes that Jesus’ arrival as the Messiah changes everything.  Christ became the one true sacrifice needed to atone for our sins on the cross. “He entered once for all into the Holy Place, not with the blood of goats and calves, but with his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption,” Hebrews tells us.  Christ dies for us once and for all.  We do not need to re-sacrifice Christ on the altar when we celebrate Holy Communion.  We do not need to rebaptize ourselves every time we think we’ve gone too far from God or sinned too greatly.  Christ’s death on the cross and resurrection from the dead has us covered, we are saved by grace through our faith in Christ, end of story.  How difficult it is, though, to trust in this once-and-for-all work of Christ for us, that it is in fact enough.
    There are some events in our lives that we wish were once-and-for-all but are not.  A loved one’s or our own personal wrestling with mental illness or addiction. Cancer treatment or a recurrence of cancer, or another chronic illness or pain where we hoped we would find once-and-for-all relief but we still struggle.  Violence and war in our world where we have prayed now for years that it be over, in the Middle East and Ukraine and elsewhere.  That no one be hungry or die from thirst or treatable illness.  Many of us are hoping and praying for a fair and peaceful election process this Tuesday, regardless of who wins, for the restoration of our country.  We long for definitive answers, an end to pain or violence, for the final everlasting peace that Christ promises only he can bring.
    At the same time, we DO experience once-and-for-all moments, both good and bad, in our lives.   Perhaps it was YOUR graduation where you either felt, “Yay! I’m never going to school again!” or struggled to leave the joys of student life behind to being a responsible working adult.  For many of us, getting married and having children are once-and-for-all lifechanging events.  I can’t imagine what my life would be like not being a mother and a wife.  On this All Saints Sunday, we also encourage one another and support one another when life changes once-and-for-all because of a death – the loss of a spouse, a child, a parent, a sibling, a close friend.  Difficult once-and-for-all life events like death also remind us that there is much in this world that is far from the vision of God’s eternal kingdom.  In other words, there are the endings that we are prepared for and welcome, even – marriage, children, graduations, retirements, the end of a war or economic relief.  And then there are the endings that we wish were not so surprisingly, devastatingly final.
    As people of faith, we cling to the finality of Christ’s death and resurrection with confidence and hope.  Hebrews tells us that Christ turns us from dead works to worship and serve the living God!  On this All Saints Sunday, in grieving our loved ones who have gone before us, we find immense hope and comfort in God’s promise that life in Christ, not death, has the last word.  We are God’s resurrection people.  Our daily unending practice while we live on this earth is to love God and our neighbor as ourselves as Jesus teaches us today.  This is not what makes us saints, however – the level at which we are good at doing what we know we are supposed to do.  It is our baptism into Christ that makes us living saints – anointed once and for all with the cross of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit we are able to then do what Jesus calls us to do. No one can ever take the eternal gifts of our baptism away from us.  Our death, then, our loved ones’ deaths, is not the end that it seems to be.  We are raised along with him so that eternal redemption is ours, once and for all!  Thanks be to God.  Amen.