All Saints Day

Luke 6:20-31

Good morning!  It’s All Saints Day, the day that marks a definite change in the tone of the Church year. We are coming to the end of what we call the Sundays after Pentecost, or Ordinary Time – we have only November left to go before the end of the Church year itself. All our liturgically green Sundays up till now have been about Jesus’ life on earth, His ministry among us, but today the focus shifts. Today, before the year ends gloriously on Christ the King Sunday, we turn our attention to the solemn remembrance of death, looking toward the end times. This isn’t a morbid time, but a time to remember and pray for the souls of the departed, known and unknown, and to take a firm look at our own lives.

“I sing a song of the saints of God, patient and brave and true.  Who toiled and fought and lived and died for the Lord they loved and knew.”

Thus begins the children’s hymn.  What does the title “saint” mean to us?  It seems we have two ways of thinking about the saints, neither of which is very helpful.  We think of “Saints” with a capital “S”: St. Paul, St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, St. Francis of Assisi, the named heroes of the faith, who made their mark in the world and left a legacy of holiness that outlasted their lifetimes. And then we think of “saints” with a lowercase “s”, and here we usually mean someone of heroically long-suffering, patience, or rigidly upright moral conduct. You know, when we speak of someone and say that he or she is a “saint”.

But it’s likely none of us fit into either of those categories, so what is a saint?

Historically, saints are people who became extremely popular in the Middle Ages, during that time when for most people there was little joy in life.  Except for the nobility, and by modern standards even their lives were rather shabby, the average person had little to do but toil from dawn to dusk. The high point of any season, of any day, would be a church festival, a Holy Day, and since there was no mass media, no television, or movies, the celebrities of those times long gone were - the saints.  A peasant might not know the names of the members of the ruling class, but every peasant knew the names and stories of the saints, and might even be able to glimpse an image of a saint, embodied in a statue in the church or cathedral.  That’s why those statues are there – to give the faithful a glimpse of what the saints looked.

I’m not sure about today, but certainly in my youth, youngsters would rip bits and pieces of clothing off their rock star idols. In yesteryear, holy relics were the sought after item, and saints were the superstars of those times.

But time has moved on, and slowly, so has society. After the Middle Ages we eventually reached what we call the Age of Reason, a time when such “superstitious nonsense” as church teachings, saints, and the like, were relegated to the back burner, and the wonderful “mind of man” became the determining factor in all areas, including some of which had been formerly left entirely in the hands of the Church.  Suddenly it was society which chose and named the “heroes” of the people, and these tended to be, not the pious, nor the holy men and women, but, rather, the free thinkers, the scientists, and the revolutionaries.

Ask someone today “who are the saints?”, and watch them struggle for an answer.  Then, follow that question with, “who are your personal heroes?”  You’ll most likely find that the two answers do not match.  Certainly, if you ask “who are your favourite superstars?” you can forget entirely about the saints.  Our values have changed since the Middle Ages, and though we may not realize it, so influenced is our thinking by the Age of Reason, our ability to see saintliness, and to define it, has been subtly coloured and changed.  Our lives are so very different from our ancestors, and our aspirations are no longer toward pious godliness, but rather toward fame, fortune, and success. I sing a song of the saints of God . . . Who are the saints? 

We don’t really know, do we?, unless the Church has designated a person as such. We see saints as these very holy people, and we feel like we certainly can’t live like them, the people who bravely faced the lions in the coliseum and went down to glorious martyrdom, or even our “saintly” neighbor down the block who never misses Sunday worship (or an opportunity to remind us that they never miss Sunday worship).  We don’t feel like we can live like these people, and if we are honest, we don’t really want to live like these people.  Dying violently or living joylessly seem to be the two dominant models for sainthood in our society, and neither fulfills Jesus’ hope for us that we might have life and have it abundantly.

We sigh with relief when we realize sainthood is “out of reach” for us. Having put the concept of sainthood on an elevated moral pedestal absolves us of the responsibility of being in any way saintly.  Saints, we tell ourselves, are out of touch with what our real lives are like.  What does Saint Anselm know about paying the mortgage on time? What does St. John of the Cross’s lofty poetry do for us when we get a flat tire or go through a divorce or are diagnosed with cancer? The saints don’t know what real life is like. And so we don’t have to listen to the prophetic messages that their lives speak, we don’t have to concern ourselves with being the saints of God.

This is what we tell ourselves to keep us safely distant from sainthood.  But the original use of the term saints, particularly by Paul, was meant to indicate all the faithful gathered to worship God. All Saints Day is not just about heroes of the faith, and it’s not even just about our own beloved departed who have gone before us. This is not “Some Saints Day.”  This is “All Saints Day,” and that includes us all.  Mother Teresa summed it up well when she said, “Saints are only sinners who keep trying.” What saints have is an unshakeable commitment to follow Jesus, no matter where it takes them.  

In our Gospel lesson today we have an incredibly vivid portrait of where following Jesus will take us.  Consider the very first sentence we read: “Jesus looked up at his disciples.”  What does that imply?  Our first thought might be that Jesus could have had His head bowed in prayer, but that seems unlikely.  There’s a crowd waiting to hear Him speak, and we are often told that Jesus always went away to a silent place to pray.  Why would Jesus look up?

In order for Jesus to look up at His disciples, He must have been at a level below them.  Since Sunday school days, we’ve always seen paintings of Jesus standing on a hill to speak to the crowd, but we need to change that image. We need to picture Jesus down on the ground as He taught this most central of His messages.  It is far more reasonable to picture Him crouching or kneeling in the dirt as He healed someone prostrate with pain and illness.

Picture being a disciple standing around in a circle as Jesus gently and carefully lays hands on a pain-wracked man or woman, the entire focus of His love trained on this beloved child of God, ready to pour out His healing grace.  And, hands on the dirty, bad-smelling, sore-laden body of some hopeful soul, He looks up at his disciples and says, “Blessed are you who are poor. Blessed are you who are hungry, who weep, who are excluded and reviled and persecuted. You are blessed, and you are beloved, and you are mine.”

How does sainthood look today? First, don’t waste time looking for saintliness in yourself. Live for Jesus, do what you have been called to do. For yourself, pray for holiness, but mostly pray for others, work for others and their needs. Only God can judge the depth of your love for Him and how deeply you manifest that love to Him in others. How does sainthood look? Instead of thinking of yourself, look around you. You will be really heartened and encouraged by the saints you find – even sitting next to you this morning.

Many years ago, when I was considerably younger, I covered services at a parish that had a substantial group of elderly parishioners. Now I am among the elderly, and they have gone home to God. But back then, one of them, a lovely woman, with a great sense of humour and many years to her credit, decided she liked me, and struck up a friendship with me that both surprised me and warmed my heart.

I got to see a lot of this dear lady and got to know her friends.  But time moved on, and soon she was in her nineties.  We all knew that no one lives forever, and one night she took a terrible fall and ended up in hospital.  She’d fallen before, but somehow this time it was different.

JC and I visited her in her hospital room, to say all the prayers, and then for all of us to visit.  As we were leaving, I said to her, “I love you.”  Now, that’s the sort of thing we often say to folks we love, and the answer is almost always the same, “I love you too”.  We don’t give it a second thought.  But this time, with my friend, it was different.  She was a person who always thought of others, about their life situations, about their feelings.  She looked up at me from her hospital bed and said, “I know you do”.

Instead of the pat answer, she gave me a reassurance that will stay with me forever. She knew she was leaving, and she wanted me to know that she was aware of how I felt, that my love was apparent to her. I would never have to wonder if she knew how much I really cared.  What a blessing!  And, of course, there was no need for her to say, “I love you too,” because I knew she did, and what she chose to say did more than affirm that. 

Surely at that time her thoughts were on her life and herself and on what was to come. But, despite all that, when someone said, “I love you”, she didn’t speak about herself, she spoke about the other, the one who was being left behind, the one who would grieve.  She did not need to speak of love, she gave it.  That is what makes saints, the sharing and giving of love and valuing it above all else in the world.

Let us pray – in the words of the hymn:

Lord God, Thou pervadest all things; let Thy radiant beauty light mine eyes to see my duty; as the tender flowers eagerly unfold them, to the sunlight calmly hold them, so let me, quietly In Thy rays imbue me, let Thy light shine through me. In Jesus Name. Amen.