In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.
Perhaps more than any other message, the Church needs to celebrate and proclaim All Saints. Many of us have already voted in the upcoming election and if you haven’t, please plan to do so on Tuesday. In this election season, not only is our nation divided, but the Church has been ripped apart by partisanship. If we speak about “red churches and blue churches” we all know what that means. And that is a travesty – that the Church can so easily and neatly fit into partisan labels.
One Stanford researcher found that Americans’ most deeply held identity is our political affiliation; not race, ethnicity, or religion. Researchers refer to this as “partyism,” and when it comes to faith in Jesus Christ, it must be denounced as heresy. As Jesus said, “No one can serve two masters. Either we will hate the one and love the other, or we will be devoted to one and despise the other.” This is why we need to outwardly proclaim and inwardly digest the reality of the Communion of Saints which we celebrate on the Feast of All Saints.
The simplest way to define what we mean by the “Communion of Saints” is that we are a part of the Body of Christ. As St. Paul writes in First Corinthians, “You are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” And this phrase “Body of Christ” means at least two very important things.
The first is the body. Simply put, All Saints reminds us that it isn’t about me and it’s not about you. It’s about us. Because we speak English, we miss this when we read and hear Scripture, but it’s all in the plural. Throughout Scripture, the verbs are almost always the plural “you” and not the singular. Individualism is antithetical to the Gospel. It’s why the language of liturgy is “we” and not “me.” Yes, faith is always personal, but it’s never individual. It’s about communal and collective.
Unity, therefore, ought not be a goal, rather it is to be our foundation. The fact that unity is something that we have to pursue and prioritize tells us just how far we’ve gotten off track. Unity between Christians should be something that we take for granted. It’s a sad commentary that division is more characteristic of the wider Church than harmony.
The Communion of Saints calls us back to this vocation and vision for how we relate to one another. There is one Communion of Saints. The saints we will remember in the Litany are as diverse as they come – ancient and modern; conservative and liberal; male and female; Protestant and Roman Catholic; wealthy and poor; black, brown, and white. We heard in Revelation that the new Jerusalem will come down from heaven and the home of God will be among humanity. Well, there’s only one new heaven and new earth. We don’t get one, and they get another one.
That’s how CS Lewis describes hell in a novel called The Great Divorce – hell is a place where people live almost infinitely distanced from each other because they can’t stand being close to anyone else. The Communion of Saints is the opposite – we are all a part of the one body of Christ.
In African theology, this idea is called “ubuntu,” which Desmond Tutu spoke about as meaning “there can be no me without you.” Ubuntu is the opposite of what we are taught about the world. The French philosopher René Descartes famously said “I think, therefore I am.” That logic locates our being in ourselves. Ubuntu puts our meaning not in ourselves, but in others. Sometimes the idea is translated as “I am because we are.” This is a radically different way of viewing ourselves, not as islands unto ourselves, but as a part of something.
And so many of the social ills that we face are grounded in an inflated sense of the self. Jealously, entitlement, arrogance, greed, being easily offended – these things all come because we put the “me” before the “we.” When we evaluate whether something is good or bad not through our lens but through the perspective of the wider community, we grow in charity, deference, and humility. Individually, we are not the lead actor, we are not the star of the show, we are not the main character, we are not the center of the world.
But this isn’t what our world teaches us. We are taught that we are precisely those things. We are encouraged to find our place in the world, and if that place doesn’t exist, just blow things up and make your own story. Forge your own path. Define yourself on your own terms. While this might sound liberating, it’s actually quite oppressive and overwhelming to tell people that it is their purpose and task to discover and create the meaning of their lives. At best, we get 100 years on this planet – and somehow we’re supposed to figure it all out and implement a meaningful life in that span? Instead of liberation, that is something more like the punishment given to Sisyphus – a relentless pursuit of something that we can never grasp.
But there is such grace in the doctrine of the Communion of Saints. Sainthood reminds us that we are part of a story that began long ago and we are inheritors of a meaning that is bigger than us. All Saints proclaims that we are not strangers, we are not enemies, competitors, or adversaries, rather we are neighbors and fellow parts of the Body of Christ.
That unitive message is the first major part of what the Body of Christ means. The second part is to focus on the “Christ.” What this means is that it isn’t up to us. We don’t have to fashion ourselves into a body, we are already a part of one. This is the message of grace. We are incorporated into Christ not on account of anything we do, earn, purchase, or deserve, but our belonging is given to us as a pure gift from the abundant, infinite, and unconditional love of God.
One theologian put it this way, “A saint is not thirsty for decency, not for cleanliness, not for the absence of sin, but for unity with God.” We become a part of Christ by the grace of God, not by our deserving. Our belonging is in Christ because, for us and for our salvation, Christ took on our flesh, died, and rose from the grave, raising all of Creation with him into Resurrection life. Being in the body is about belonging, not striving.
What brings us into the body of Christ is precisely Christ, not our actions. The Church is not something that we decide to join as we might join a civic organization or a club. Yes, many people think of the Church in those terms, but that’s not quite right. We don’t join the Church, we are brought into the body of Christ by Christ. The initiative always comes towards us, not from us. As Will Willimon is fond of saying, “Our being a Christian was God’s idea long before it was ours.”
What this means is that this whole operation belongs to Christ. There has been a lot of hand-wringing over the past few years about church budgets and attendance. Yes, we are stewards of the Church and we need to pay attention to those things. But we must also remember that the Church is the Body of Christ – meaning it doesn’t belong to us. We are a part of it, but the body is Christ’s. It belongs to God, and so we can be boldly confident that all shall be well. We can be audacious in action, welcome, and love because there is no risk that the Body of Christ will ever fail.
Understanding that our belonging is in the Body of Christ is so important to grasp because this is the trajectory of Scripture. Exodus 29:45 – I will dwell among them and be their God. Leviticus 26:12 – And I will walk among you, and will be your God, and you shall be my people. Ezekiel 37:27 – My dwelling-place shall be with them; and I will be their God and they will be my people. Zechariah 2:11 – Many nations shall join themselves to the LORD on that day and shall be my people; and I will dwell in your midst. Matthew 1:23 – Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him ‘Emmanuel,’ which means ‘God is with us.’ John 1:14 – And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Culminating in Revelation 21:3 – See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples; and God himself will be with them. The point is clear: God intends to be with us.
This is the throughline and the plot of all of Scripture – a God who created us for companionship and love and who stops at nothing to be with us. It’s important to realize how Revelation portrays the conclusion of all things. A lot of people wrongly think that Revelation tells a story about an event that will happen at the end of time. But Revelation tells us that the conclusion isn’t an event, it’s a person. The culmination of creation is the Body of Christ, the Communion of Saints, the fulfillment of the promise of Emmanuel – of God with us.
This is why there is wedding language in this chapter of Revelation. We heard, “And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” At weddings, we often hear, “What God has joined together, let no one put asunder.” God is joining heaven to earth, the living to the dead, the Godhead to humanity. The dream of beloved community is realized in the Body of Christ when there is no distinction or separation between us and one another or between God from us. And no one and nothing can tear apart what God has joined. Through the broken and Resurrected body of Christ, we have been joined by Grace to one another and to the God who stops at nothing to be for us and with us. Tonight, we celebrate and proclaim that the Body of Christ will never be put asunder.
