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.
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