Good morning! Happy Feast of All Saints. All Saints Day falls the evening after All Saints or All Hallows Eve (Halloween), so that would have been last Wednesday November 1. November 2 is what we call All Souls Day, when we honor all the faithful departed. Then we always set aside the Sunday following to celebrate both these occasions in church, together.
Today we welcome little Myles D’Armiento, who will be baptized after this sermon. All Saints Sunday is one of the four principal days of the church year for baptism, and it’s a joy to welcome into this great cloud of witnesses, past, present, and yet to come, another new Christian. Welcome to him, to his family, and godparents.
What is a saint? Well, in the Episcopal Church the answer to that question isn’t that easy. We have people we regard as saints, who are commemorated throughout the year on set days. At our weekday Eucharist on Wednesday we always honor the saint for that particular day. Two Wednesdays ago we honored Tabitha, an early Christian seamstress from the Biblical book of Acts. This week we’ll remember William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury during the Second World War. Our calendar of saints overlaps with the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox calendars. We all celebrate, for example, saints such as Augustine, St. Macrina, sister of two other saints we all share, St. Basil and Gregory, all of Cappadocia in modern day Turkey. Together with Roman Catholics we celebrate saints such as Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day, and of course Francis of Assisi.
We also have men and women on our calendar unique to our Anglican heritage: Margaret of Scotland, priest and poet John Donne, various Archbishops of Canterbury. Did you know that in our graveyard here, we have a saint honored by millions all over the world in the Anglican Communion? Julia Chester Emery. She was a member of St. James--our St. James--and founded with her sister the United Thank Offering to give relief to the poor. Her headstone is in the graveyard; see if you can find it after the service. And while I’m at it, let me just encourage you today to go out there and spend some time walking among the graves of our ancestors at St. James, saints known and unknown.
So saints are people who’ve lived exemplary lives--not perfect lives. The priest in Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair said (and I wrote this down years ago) "There's nothing bad that one could do that one of the saints hasn't done before you." Think about that. "There's nothing bad that one could do that one of the saints hasn't done before you." There’s always redemption.
Saints aren’t perfect. Or, to quote another writer Frederick Beuchner, "God makes his saints out of fools and sinners because there's nothing much else to make them of."
In other words, saints are as incredible for what they’ve managed to accomplish as for what God has managed to make of them. More for what God has managed to make of them.
In the Episcopal tradition we tend to emphasize the humanity of our saints, and lean more towards putting them on a level plane with us.
That means we all have a moral responsibility to be saints in this world. Repairing the world isn’t for others to do, extraordinary people with a unique calling that we didn’t get. Every Christian shares the serious obligation to heal the broken, to be the hands of Christ in this world. Additionally, every Christian--every human being--has within them great potential and contains a spark of the divine. And we need to remember that, too.
This week I revisited a collection of sermons by C.S. Lewis, an English author (and someone we commemorate in our calendar of saints, on the 22nd of this month, in fact). I shared this about five years ago in (I think it was) a summer sermon, so probably no one will remember. And if so, you should hear it again.
I absolutely love this passage. The gist of it is: imagine what the world could be if we saw each other as Eternal Beings, destined for glory. Each and every person you’ve ever encountered is on a path to something greater.
When I shared this in 2018 I don’t think the world was half as disastrous as it feels today. Lewis originally wrote it in 1941, dark days in Europe and the world. We need to hear these words about the glory of our neighbors, again.
Let me read it in Lewis’ words.
It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter. It is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid on my back. A load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses. To remember that the dullest, the most uninteresting person you can talk to, may one day be a creature which, if you say it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship ,or else a horror, a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.
It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another. Or friendships. Or loves. Or play. Or politics.
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, these are mortal and their life is to ours as the life of gnat. But it is immortals who we work with, joke with, marry, snub and exploit. Immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.
This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind, and it is in fact the merriest kind, which exists between people who at the outset have taken each other seriously. No flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.
These are his very last words, and I’ll close with this.
Next to the blessed sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ, the glorifier and the glorified, glory himself, is truly hidden.
So now let us gather in the back of the church, and welcome another saint-in-the-making into our Christian faith.