All Saints’ Sunday
The Rev. Dena Cleaver-Bartholomew
Today we gather as a community of God’s people to celebrate All Saints’ Day. For many people in our culture All Saints’ Day is quite unknown, even though it is the foundation for that widely celebrated event known as All Hallows’ Eve, or Halloween. If you have noticed, the successful marketing of Halloween has grown tremendously over the past several years, much to the delight of the retailers who sell candy, costumes, greeting cards and even lawn decorations. I am not one to begrudge children the opportunity to dress up and engage in make believe about being a distinctive character, creature, or person; to participate in parades and parties; to go trick or treating from one house in the neighborhood to another. There is something wonderful about using our imaginations in a playful way and allowing our children to have fun. There is even something helpful about the safe and sometimes humorous exploration of the dark side of All Hallows’ Eve. We cannot begin to realize that the saints are real until we acknowledge that evil is too.
All
Hallows’ Eve is excellent preparation for All Saints’ Day because it allows us
to engage fully in playful illusion, while All Saint’s Day is about letting go
of our illusions and dealing fully with reality. While one centers on temporarily changing our
appearance, the other is about eternal transformation. The famous saints are famous precisely
because they were able, with the grace of God, to let go of the illusions of
this life and to be filled ever more fully with the presence of God so that
others recognized God at work in them.
All we have to do is look at the Halloween parade to gain a glimpse of some
of our illusions: power, fame, beauty, talent,
brilliance, popularity, athletic ability, magic, fearsomeness. Becoming a saint is based upon the
intentional choice to turn away from the life of illusion and engage in the
process of being filled with God instead.
Sainthood begins at baptism, with an affirmative answer to the probing
questions of our willingness to renounce Satan, the “evil powers of this world,” and “all sinful desires that draw you
from the love of God.” The
illusion is that life is to be found in a source other than God. We cannot simultaneously hold on to our
illusions and live out our vows to accept Jesus Christ as our Savior and put
our “whole trust in his grace and love.” We are continually making choices about
whether and how to live out our baptism, about pursuing our illusions or
seeking, as Vaclav Havel has said, to “live
within the truth.”
In today’s Gospel reading Jesus gives us a glimpse of what it would look like to live lives centered in the truth. The values embodied in these teachings, called the Beatitudes, base their meaning in being in right relationship with God. That is why they should be our attitudes. The first Beatitude sets the tone for the rest: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” To be poor in spirit is to recognize our own poverty in spiritual terms. What have we apart from God? Nothing. All that we are and all that we have, including our very lives, is a gift from God. Those who are literally poor are keenly aware of being in need. Those of us who are not poor can engage in the illusion of not being in need. The more we recognize our need of God the more we can begin with a foundation in the truth. The other Beatitudes point to human openness, vulnerability, and passion for right relationships as opportunities for God to fill us, to be at work in and through us. This is the material of sainthood, a foundation of placing our whole trust in God whom we have come to know in Jesus. It is only from this foundation that we can have the confidence to let go of all those things that would pull us away from God and lead us to place our trust in someone or something else. Baptism is the beginning; living our faith is a step by step process. We need to be anchored in our relationship with God and that is only possible when we are a part of the Body of Christ, the community of all the baptized. That is why we need a whole community of faith that professes a thunderous “We will!” when asked if they will support us in our life in Christ.
When I was in college I took a course in land navigation and orienteering. One thing I learned, as a person who was not given the gift of an inherent sense of direction, is that finding my way was utterly dependent upon having an accurate compass. No matter how good or poor my map might be, I had no hope of locating myself or my destination accurately upon it without a working compass. Without a true North, there was no way to orient myself to reach the desired goal.
What saints have found throughout time, be they famous saints or God bearers known only to those around them, is that we too are utterly dependent upon having an accurate compass. That compass is Jesus, who always points beyond himself to God the Father. The Beatitudes are one of the many ways Jesus gives us to navigate the terrain of this world so that we are oriented based on God and God’s call to us. The time honored practice of repentance, which literally means to turn, is simply the way in which we adjust our direction to lead once again to God when we have gone astray. Jesus seeks to instill this compass within us, as we let go of those things which lead us off of the path to God, and are filled more and more with the presence of God’s Spirit.
What or whom we use as our compass, our guiding principle, is up to us. Pedro Arrupe captures the centrality of this choice beautifully:
Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in
a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you will do with your evenings, how you will spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love and it will decide everything.
We are the saints, we and those who have gone before us as members of the Body of Christ. By virtue of our baptism we are engaged on a journey with and toward God. Those who have fallen in love with God, who have made the choice to live their lives as a reflection of that love, those are the famous saints. Saint Paul, who was indefatigable in spreading the Gospel; Saint Theresa, who was a bright and capable woman dedicated to refocusing God’s people on both the internal awareness of God’s presence and the doing of God’s work in the world; Saint Jerome, a well known grouch who dedicated his life to producing an accurate translation of the Bible into the common language of the time: these are some of the names we know. There are also many names you and I might know, those of people who have shown us the light and love of Jesus Christ by touching our lives. Today we remember both these kinds of saints, and we remember that we are invited to keep company with them, for as surely as we are baptized, we are called both to know God’s love and to be transformed by that love.
Amen