November 3, 2024 - All Saints Sunday
My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
Good morning, Epiphany. Happy All Saints Sunday! For those who might not have expected different colors up here this morning or who still aren’t sure what “All Saints” is all about, or who maybe have their focus more on Tuesday than Sunday this week, which is fully understandable, I’m going to dive into a little game for us right off the bat today, complete with candy, if my daughters can help me out here. There are seven principal feasts, big important Christian calendar days, observed in the Episcopal Church. Without checking page 15 of the little red book in front of you, I’m curious if people without collars in the room can name all seven. A piece of Halloween candy for each answer, so raise your hands. All Saints is one, there are six others? (Christmas, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, and Epiphany) Nice everyone, thank you for playing.
All Saints Sunday, then, is a full-on holiday for us, not unlike Independence Day or even New Year’s Eve in America. It’s one of those days we as Christians specifically celebrate and one we could structure our lives around, complete with fireworks, days off work, and backyard parties... but we don’t. See, unlike Christmas and Easter, this holiday gets little attention outside the traditional church. Even though I had grown up as a Christian, baptized and all, I had never heard about All Saints until joining the Episcopal Branch of the Jesus Movement, as former Presiding Bishop Curry often called us. You might think the day just needs better marketing, or a mascot like Santa or the Easter Bunny, or gobs of candy to connect with the kids. To be fair, the “All Saints Triduum,” with Halloween and All Souls, is starting to get that attention through wider connection with the Mexican celebration of the Dia de Muertos, the Day of the Dead. My kids might now connect it with the Disney/Pixar movie Coco, which features ofrendas and a trip to visit ancestors in the colorful Land of the Dead. This might all actually be growing in popularity.
But the Christian aspects of this holiday will likely always get little attention outside the church because it’s the day when the church really celebrates its long history of being the church. Not unlike Pentecost, when we celebrate the arrival of the Holy Spirit and our commission as the church to be God’s witness in the world, All Saints reminds us of our membership together with all those saints in the church who have gone before us. We believe as Christians that the world does not end with the finite, with what we can see and touch and feel and prove, but that there is a greater mystery here, that we (and all those who have gone before us still) we are a part of that mystery, and that our response to that mystery is to love, to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
This is what it means to be the church, to love God and to love our neighbor, and to do those things in loving community, with others (both living and dead) who help each other learn to love well. Unlike some world religions, Christianity is not a spirituality you just do on your own. Christianity must be lived together, and for thousands of years now, we live into the call to be the body of Christ in the church. For over 100 years, people have been living into that call together here on the corner of Erie and Kalamazoo. We are all a continuing part of that. Long may that work, that life here as the church continue.
Now I know that for many, myself included, the story of the church being the church is not all sunshine and rainbows. It can be hard to believe that we must be an active and contributing part of our local church body when that local church is full of humans... because sometimes, humans are terrible to each other. Some in this room have left churches that have made them feel unwelcome, unclean, unacceptable. I myself left a church that in part made me feel inadequate, that told me my life was too messy, that my brokenness was too broken. Some of you know that story, but it’s a story for another day. As I’ve said from the pulpit here before, all of us have some sort of scarring (Catholic, Evangelical, personal, relational, whatever) when it comes to church. We’ve seen this whole thing done really, really poorly, and for many, even some of our loved ones, it has led them to dismiss church, and Jesus, altogether.
Balancing out that Christian scarring for me are many things, obviously, or I wouldn’t be in front of you in fancy white robes today. I know by your presence here this morning that you too have found a balance or an answer to it, at least in part, and for that I am (and we are all) thankful. For me this morning though, on All Saints Sunday, there are two relevant reasons that I stick to the story of the church, to the life we live together here in this place. The first of those relevant reasons is the lives of saints themselves. The Episcopal Church celebrates 275 different saints with feast days – special observances throughout the year – ranging from the disciples of the first century to more recent names from the twentieth. I have several favorites from the bunch who inspire me, including St. Martin of Tours who split his cloak with his sword to care for a poor beggar and then realized in a dream that the beggar was Jesus. I’m also partial to Oscar Romero, Polycarp, Charles Wesley, Martin Luther King Jr., Barbara Harris, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Aelred of Rievaulx.
The stories of those Christians who have gone before us inspire me... they inspire us. Saints like these held to the faith in situations far more difficult than what I go through as a white, cis-gendered, straight male in America. They witnessed to self-sacrifice in heroic ways, and they embodied God’s abundant love in ways I aspire to today. Some may find heroes in sports figures or politicians or celebrities, I certainly have, but goodness, the lives of the saints of the church are so much more consequential, so much more inspiring.
Our saints are not limited to that list of 275 either. Epiphany itself has seen its fair share of Christians with lives that inspire. Back in August, we sang Hymn 335, I am the Bread of Life, here in service, and afterward, so many of you held up the memory of Bob DeHaven as one of those who inspired you. There are living saints in the pews right now, though I won’t embarrass any of you by calling you out by name, people who have already, in my short four months here, called me to live a more Christian life. One of them is in Ireland right now, I think, so I can call her out. If you take a minute right now to think about Epiphany saints throughout the years, I’m sure you can think of a few more.... Goodness, how our world needs more saints living out their faith today.
And what holds all those saints in common? I would argue this morning, along with about all of the biblical commentators that I read this week, that it is our lectionary texts of Isaiah, Revelation, and John that combine to sustain the saints, that help to provide me with the other relevant reason I cannot help but stick to the story of the church, Christian scarring and all. That reason can be summed up in one simple word: hope.
Revelation is a text that has been abused endlessly over the years, in part because the imagery used in this apocalyptic account from John of Patmos is just so fascinating. But today, we have the one Revelation text that good preachers especially love to preach on, so I won’t miss it. John here in chapter 21 sees the new heaven and the new earth, the new Jerusalem, the end goal for all of creation and existence. “Prepared as a bride adorned for her husband,” this is it, what we’ve been working toward, this is the encapsulation of the human project, the culmination of life as we know it, and what is it? It’s God with us, wiping the tears from our eyes, conquering death, and ending mourning, crying, and pain. These readings are so rich today. Revelation of course echoes the Isaiah text, where God wipes away our tears and makes for all peoples a feast of rich food and well-aged wines. Isaiah says God will swallow up death forever and will destroy the death shroud that is cast over all peoples... in John, Jesus conquers death and tells his friend Lazarus to come out of the grave, and then he instructs the gathered community, the faithful, to “unbind him,” to take off his death shroud, to let him go. Jesus accomplishes this “death shroud removal” mentioned in Isaiah by the hands of the gathered faithful. May we take that as a lesson for ourselves this morning.
The hope of the saints, the hope of us as Christians gathered here today, is found in this image of a new heaven and a new earth, where God wipes away our tears and where hurting and suffering for everyone are no more, where we all see that death has no hold over us and where we can all be with God in peace forever... and we play a part in the story too. This end goal for all of creation, what we are working and living toward, we are participants in it. For our part, as Christ commands us and as the saints understand so well, the way we get there is by loving God and loving neighbor.
That call, to abundant love, will not change on Wednesday morning no matter who is elected on Tuesday, though it may affect how you choose to vote. Thankfully though, our ultimate hope does not lie in a new political administration here in one section of the world in the twenty-first century, but in a new heaven and a new earth, in a new way of being in the world that we get to live into together. This is what is world-changing, this faith, this hope, this love. Thank God for the many saints throughout history, from all times and places and genders and ethnic backgrounds, who have shown us the way.
Church of the Epiphany, this morning I am grateful to be with you, to have been called to be your rector, to celebrate All Saints Day with you and all the saints who have gone before us in this place and in the church. I pray that you keep their lives and their witness in mind throughout this week and throughout this year, that they may inspire you and give you hope for the world. And ultimately, I pray that you may root your life in God, who is making all things new, in Christ, who loves us and shows us the way, and in the Spirit, who helps the saints and all of us to live lives of faith, dedication, worship, and of course, abundant love. Amen.
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