November 4, 2012 - All Saints' Day B

Almighty God, who hast knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of thy Son Christ our Lord: Grant, we beseech thee, to thy whole Church in paradise and on earth, thy light and thy peace. Amen.

            Today, we celebrate the Feast of All Saints’ Day. As you know, All Saints’ Day falls on November 1, but we move its celebration to the following Sunday so that we can fully commemorate this day. All Saints’ Day is one of the major feasts of the Church year, but it is often forgotten. Right there with Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, All Saints’ is one of the four holiest of holy days. It brings to mind questions about sainthood and what that means for our lives. November 2 is another feast day in the Church, and is All Souls’ Day. It is a day to remember and give thanks for the cloud of faithful witness who have preceded us in life and faith. With this feast, we consider the topic of death. So on this morning, let us consider the topics that these feasts days bring up: sainthood, fellowship, and death.

            We’ll start with sainthood. Each week, in the Creed, we affirm that “we believe in the communion of saints.” What does it mean to be a saint? There are several different ways to answer that question. In the Roman Catholic tradition, to be a saint means you are part of the small handful of saints to ever walk this earth. To be canonized you must have three confirmed miracles in your life. That’s a bit out of my reach. We might then understand sainthood as being one of the heroes of the faith- perhaps CS Lewis or Martin Luther King. But again, though most of us aspire to be remembered for our great acts of faith and courage, our legacies will probably be more humble than theirs.

            Perhaps sainthood is about virtuous living, such as keeping the commandments. But virtues are not things to accomplish. None of us are perfect, and if sainthood is about perfection, then I’m afraid not many of us will be remembered as saints. Instead, the view that I’d like to lift up this morning is the traditional Anglican view of sainthood. And in that understanding, we are all saints of the Church. You are a saint. The prayer book defines the communion of saints as “the whole family of God, the living and the dead, those whom we love and those whom we hurt, bound together in Christ by sacrament, prayer and praise.”

There is a book we use called Lesser Feasts and Fasts that outlines many of these saints who have days on which we remember their life and ministry. These are people like the martyr Perpetua, William Tyndale, and Charles Wesley. They also include a lot of people that live fairly ordinary lives that are made extraordinary by living for the Gospel. As one of our hymns today proclaims, “Saints lived not only in ages past; there are hundreds of thousands still. The world is bright with the joyous saints who love to do Jesus' will. Why shouldn’t we be one too?”

So if sainthood is understood as something that we all can take part in, who exactly is a saint? I think it’s important to realize that saints are people, not attributes. Unwavering faith and martyrdom are not saints, but rather people are saints. People are not perfect. The Church has lifted up as all kinds of people as saints- saints who were disciples of Jesus, saints who were single, saints who were divorced, saints who were poor, saints who were rich, and saints who did evil and then changed their life. Being a saint is about living a life that is open to the Holy Spirit. In Scripture, the word used for saint simply means set apart or holy. In our baptisms, we all have been set apart. When you were baptized, you were given a halo. When I look out at you all, I can see halos above your heads, because you are the saints of the Church.

This is a very important message- that sainthood is not just for a few; but rather sainthood is for the many. Some people wonder if we should baptize infants or practice “believers baptism.” Baptizing babies is a great reminder that we don’t earn our halos, they are given to us. We don’t have to earn our sainthood, we are saints. The question isn’t “do I deserve to be called a saint?” but rather “do I believe that I’m a saint?” Don’t strive for sainthood, you already have it, but how will you live your life as a saint? It isn’t a question of whether or not you have a halo, but how you wear it. When you look in the mirror, do you see a saint of the Church wearing a halo? Can you see the halos above the heads of your friends and neighbors, and even your enemies? We can treat people poorly and diminish their sainthood, or we can strive to build it up. We’re all in this together, that’s why we pray for the communion of saints.

So we now focus on the “communion” part of the communion of saints. We are reminded that sainthood is not something we do alone, but is part of a fellowship. There is a theological term known as “realized eschatology” that we would do well to consider here. Eschatology is a word that means “the end of the things,” so if it is realized, then it has already happened in some sense. This differs from those who practice a sort of anticipated eschatology, where they look forward to some apocalyptic event. Realized eschatology reads our passage from Revelation today not as talking about the end of the world, but rather as a reflection of what Jesus has accomplished and how we follow him.

In our reading from Revelation, the one sitting on the throne says “It is finished!” in the perfect tense, meaning that the action has already been accomplished; it has been realized. This vision of the new Jerusalem is not some promise for the future, but it is already a present reality. We enact it when we pray “thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.”

Wearing a halo means that we work together in this reality of the realized eschatology. The metaphor of this passage reinforces this idea of fellowship. The passage says that “And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” The metaphor used for the new Jerusalem is marriage, a relationship. The new Jerusalem, the hope towards which we strive as saints, isn’t some place, but it is a fellowship. The text says “God will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.” It is about fellowship.

We don’t strive to escape this world, but we work to transform it. It is worth pointing out that the text clearly says that the new Jerusalem comes down from Heaven, not that the world is destroyed and raptured up to Heaven. God comes to us, making all things new. The saints are those who do this work of transformation in the face of the persecution and death. The saints are those who are “convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

One of the questions of theology that I am asked most often is “why do we pray for the dead, aren’t they all set in Heaven with Jesus?” It’s a good question. With this fuller and deeper understanding of the fellowship of all the saints, we realize that our journeys in faith don’t end once we die. We do not go to Heaven to sit around as a mindless drone that simply worships God around the throne. We go instead to participate more fully in the love and grace of God. We continue to do our works as the saints of the Church, building up the Kingdom. And so we pray for all the saints, the living and the dead. We pray for them because we love them, regardless which side of the grave they are on.

We also pray for them because their work is not finished. Think about Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Consider Peter and Paul. These are saints of the Church, but their work, which is the completion of the prayer “thy Kingdom come on earth as it is in Heaven” is not completed. They depend on us to finish their work. Without us, they are incomplete. Without future generations, we are incomplete. We need each other.

The best way I know how to describe this comes from an experience I had earlier this year in Israel. We were at a museum which had a very detailed model of ancient Jerusalem; it was about the size of our nave. Our instructor was showing us various building that Jesus would have known. At one point he used his laser pointer and pointed to some walls and a section of Jerusalem and said “ignore that wall and those buildings, those weren’t there during Jesus’ time.” It hit me, as we were looking at this model of Jerusalem, that this might be a way to understand the communion of saints.

We all live in the city of Jerusalem. We only know sections of it, and it changes throughout time. The people that lived in those sections that we were supposed to ignore were still citizens of the city. We all dwell in this mystical city of God, there are some walls that our current vision can’t see past, but all the saints dwell together. There is a wonderful quote about death that says “death is a horizon, and a horizon is nothing save the limits of our sight.” So we pray for the dead, and all of the saints, because we trust that we are citizens of the realized new Jerusalem, even if we aren’t able to peer through the walls and see them.

And this brings us to the final consideration this All Saints’ Day- death. Our culture has a very unhealthy and uncomfortable view of death. We fear death as some unknown force, we fear fading into oblivion, we see death as being unnatural. But as I’ve just mentioned, death is simply moving from one part of the new Jerusalem to another. Jesus’ interaction with Lazarus is helpful.

It reminds us of the proper place of grief when we encounter death. Jesus wept and “was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” Jesus experienced a tough loss, and he was grieved. Even if he knew that Lazarus simply had moved to a new zip code in the new Jerusalem, it meant that the nature of their relationship had changed. But he didn’t wallow in his grief. He didn’t let the death of his beloved friend define him.

Today is a day for us to remember those listed in our bulletins, our friends, family, and parishioners who have died in the last year. Today we remember those who have their names inscribed in our hearts. We grieve the loss of our physical relationship with them. We acknowledge the pain of loss, but we are invited to know that Jesus unbinds us and resurrects us, just as he did for Lazaurs.

One theologian suggests that, using the metaphor of childbirth, that faith is not an epidural, though people too often to try to use it as one. Phrases such as “this was part of God’s plan,” or “it’s wrong to be sad at death because it is joyous that they are with God,” or “the pain will go away with time” are not only wrong, but they are unhelpful. Faith is not an epidural, nor should it be. Faith instead is more similar to a midwife, who helps with the birthing of new life. There should be pain, and there should be Resurrection in our faith. Faith helps us to see that rich feast that is mentioned in our Isaiah passage.

As I’ve said before, what God gives us is maximum support with minimum protection. We will not be spared from death and grief in our lives, but we will be upheld by God and the fellowship of all the saints. We will be strengthened to have death bring about new life to us, as it happened to Lazarus. Jesus comes to Lazarus and says “Lazarus, come out!” God will come to us upon our deaths and call us by name, and will say to us, “come out!” Come out of the chains of death and grief, come dwell with me in the new Jerusalem that has been prepared for you. Come live with all the saints, past, present, and future.

Death is a tough subject, because it hurts to have loss. But we trust that though death hurts, it can be redeemed. Our funeral office begins “I am Resurrection and I am Life, says the Lord. Whoever has faith in me shall have life, even though he die.” So today as we remember our loved ones who have died, we grieve their loss, while still knowing that death will not have the final say; trusting that they dwell with God, just as we do.

May God bless us this All Saints’ Day, helping us to faithfully wear our halos and see the sainthood of all those whom we encounter. May God strengthen the bonds of our fellowship, that we might continue in the work of those saints who have come before us and leave a solid foundation for those who will seek to further build God’s Kingdom after us. And may God be the midwife in our deaths, helping us to bear the pain of grief and death so that new life might emerge in us. You are the saints of the Church. May God bless us as we live the words “For the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too.” Amen.