All Saints’ Day

November 4, 2007

The Rev. Dena Cleaver-Bartholomew

Today we celebrate All Saints’ Day. All Saints’ is the occasion upon which we remember those faithful Christians who have gone before us. While All Saints’ Day, properly speaking, is when we acknowledge the great Saints with a capital S, it has also come to include remembrance of all the faithful departed. At times we are hard pressed to define a saint, knowing that saintliness is a quality that evades easy description but, like being tacky, we know it when we see it. There is an illuminating story of a preacher who once asked during a children’s sermon if anyone knew what a saint was. A little girl pointed to the people depicted in the church’s lovely stained glass windows and said, “A saint is a person the light shines through.”

The intriguing thing about sainthood is that there is no one model for how to be a saint. The call to sainthood is the same for us as it was for the Ephesians, for whom Paul gave thanks because of “your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints….” There are as many ways to be faithful as there are people. The challenge is to live into the unique way in which God wishes to shine through us to accomplish God’s work in the world.

There is a wonderful book called Lesser Feasts and Fasts which I like to use for weekday services. In this book is a calendar for the feast and fast days for a vast array of lesser known saints. The heartening thing about this book is that as I have made my way through the many and varied biographies I have found that people with well known quirks and foibles managed to be powerful vessels of God’s presence. That gives me hope. St. Jerome, who translated the Bible from its original Hebrew and Greek into Latin, the common language of the time, is described as having an “irascible disposition.” Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers, is said to have been “angry in controversy.” Of Catherine of Siena it is reported that “Opinion in Siena was sharply divided about whether she was a saint or a fanatic….” These saints, like many others, were fully themselves, yet filled with the light of Christ.

Like parables and metaphors, God seems fond of paradox. How is it that a person could be fully themselves and yet transparent enough to let the light shine through? Perhaps Thomas Merton puts it best when he says:

“…humility consists in being precisely the person you actually are before God, and since no two people are alike, if you have the humility to be yourself you will not be like anyone else in the whole universe.”

If we were to fail to be ourselves, our best selves as God leads us to be in Jesus Christ, then the world would be deprived of the particular way in which God wishes to be expressed through us. Like prisms, every person refracts the light of Christ. God, whom we know to be creative beyond imagining, invites us to participate in the ongoing process of creativity by being the people we are called to be. God desires to be at work in the world in and through us. To accept the invitation is to begin where we are and engage in following Jesus to become the people we are meant to be: God’s people.

Rabbi Zusya said, “In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’ “

This weekend at the 9:30 service in the Church we will have the joy of baptizing two new Christians. Those two little girls, Anastasia and Gracie, will be counted among the saints here on earth. Just like the Ephesians and all who are baptized, they will set their “hope on Christ…heard the word of truth…believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; this is the pledge of our…redemption as God’s own people….” Both of these little girls, just like each of us, is asked no more and no less than to dedicate themselves, just as they are, to serving God in the world. Like the pieces of a mosaic, each one of us contributes to the vision God has for us all.

In today’s Gospel reading Jesus makes clear that God’s perspective on blessedness, just like saintliness, is full of paradox. The state of being that Jesus holds up as blessed includes being poor, hungry, weeping, hated, excluded, reviled, and defamed. These are not metaphors, they are real experiences. Yet what metaphor could ever place us in the position of truly feeling our need of God as when we are stripped of those things in this world which enable us to feel safe, secure, happy, and valued? Jesus articulates a vision of divine reversal in which those who know their need of God will have that need filled, while those who settle for less than God will find themselves wanting.

The baptisms we celebrate this weekend are at once the occasion to welcome two new saints and a remembrance of our baptismal vows. They are a reminder of our own need for continual repentance, to remember always to adjust our perspective back to one that is God centered, just as we would check a compass as we hike, or tune an orchestra to the clarinet’s B flat. Our baptismal vows are the foundation for engaging in the process of emptying ourselves of all those things--even the good things--that draw us away from the love of God in Jesus Christ. The more we are able to be emptied of the non-essentials, the more we can be filled with the presence of God, who can shine ever more brightly through us into the world.

I would like to conclude with an invitation. I invite you to remember along with me the saints who have gone before us, the saints who surround us, and the saints we are invited to become. One way to remember this abundance of saints, along with the personal invitation to become one ourselves, is to join with me in singing the final verse of Hymn 293, I Sing a Song of the Saints of God:

They 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.

You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea,

In church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea,

For the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too.