All Saints Day Sermon

Sermon by Jamie Howison on Ephesians 1:11-23 and Luke 6:20-31

Tonight we are observing the Feast of All Saints, which strictly speaking lands on Tuesday November 1st but can then be moved to either the Sunday before or the Sunday after that date. We have more than enough happening next weekend, what with our big Babel 2.0 conference taking place, so it just seemed right to move the feast day to this evening.

And of course we share this building with the parish of All Saints, and so are surrounded by some of the markers of this feast… all in stained glass, and therefore not visible at in the darkness of this time of the year! But come the spring they’ll begin to become visible again, so in anticipation of that—a long anticipation, I’d have to say—let me remind you of who is pictured up there.

The figures in the middle along both south and north sides of the church are the twelve apostles, with Judas being replaced by Matthias, as is told in the first chapter of the book of Acts. Those apostles are flanked by other saints; this being a church of the English tradition, on the south side they are figures from the British Isles. On the north side are pictured figures from the middle Eastern, northern African, and European church, and most come from the first few hundred years of the Christian story. Unless you’ve studied some early church history, chances are you won’t recognize a good many of the names. And notably, there are only very few women pictured in the windows.

Which actually opens a bit of a reflection. You see there are a good many formally recognized women saints in the long story of the church, and many of them come from precisely the period that is represented in those windows. Were this church being built today, I suspect that we’d be seeing a more equal balance between men and women pictured up there, as beginning with Jesus’ own mother and extending to people like Mary Magdalene, Mary and Martha, Priscilla, and Lydia the “merchant of purple cloth” among others, the New Testament texts contain a quite extraordinary number of women playing rather prominent roles. This is all the more striking when you recall that the writers of the New Testament books were all men, and men raised in a culture that gave to them a role of prominence. Yet there was no way that they could possibly overlook the crucial roles these women played in the unfolding Jesus movement, and frankly there were probably many, many others as well.

But here’s the other thing about those windows. The Feast Day of All Saints is meant to celebrate all the Christian saints, both known and unknown, and while it might have been tough for the designers of this church to figure out how to picture unknown people, I wish that they had at least tried! I don’t know, maybe just a figure on both the north and south sides, preferably one a man and the other a woman, plainly dressed with no title attached to them? That, at least, might have pressed people into thinking a bit more on what we mean when we use that word “saint”.

In his writings, Paul uses the word a fair bit. In the Greek of the New Testament the word is hagious or holy ones, but Paul doesn’t use the word to shine a light on some particularly holy or pious or upstanding people. No, he uses it as he addresses the fledgling church communities he has planted.

For instance, when he writes his first letter to the church in Corinth, Paul begins, “To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints,” (1 Cor 1:2), and then continues to use that word several more times in that letter. In his second epistle to that same community, he continues in that vein, and then ends by saying, “Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you,” (2 Cor. 13:12), by which he means the members of the other churches with which he is working. Similar phrases appear in Romans, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and both 1st and 2nd Thessalonians. “Saints” is one of his favoured terms for church folk, in other words, and sometimes those church folk don’t seem to be acting in what we might think of as being particularly “saintly” ways. They have fights and conflicts, some of them get badly off track, and some seem to have almost utterly missed the main points old Paul had tried to pound into their heads. And yet he can still use the word saints or hagious; holy ones.

And maybe that’s partly aspirational. Paul knows all too well that there have been a whole lot of hiccups in the lives of those communities, so perhaps by addressing them as saints he feels he might be nudging them back toward a more solid path. Or maybe he uses the term because he desperately needs to hold on to that vision for them; he’s poured his blood, sweat, and tears into proclaiming the gospel to them, living in their midst, and risking the rejection of those who oppose him. Even as they trip along, Paul needs to use this word for them as he believes so very deeply that this is meant to be for them a path of life and light.

But you know, it doesn’t always work out. That Corinthian church will ultimately collapse and disappear. A generation after Paul there is another letter written to the church in Corinth, this one from a leader named Clement. It is part of a collection of letters by people who came to be known as the Apostolic Fathers, and while not familiar in the way that the New Testament might be, these writings are easily available. And in that collection Clement’s letter faces down divisions and conflicts in Corinth which had become even more severe than in Paul’s time.

And sometimes that does happen in the world of the church. Unprecedented conflicts can set in, or a community just slowly ages out or becomes irrelevant to the world in which it exists, or perhaps the small town in which that church had once flourished has now essentially rolled up its sidewalks and shut down. I think Paul would address each and every one of those as being numbered with “the saints”, even as he acknowledged the places where they had fallen down or seen time and circumstance conspire against them.

It is meant to be a freeing word, a challenging word, an inspiring word. Not a word applied only to plaster figures and stained-glass windows, but in fact to real day-to-day people doing what they can to follow Jesus on the Way. It is not a word that we in the Canadian church much use in that way these days—you’d be a bit shocked if I routinely started calling you “saints”—but it is also a word that we do well to not relegate to glass windows of long dead figures.

My dad is one of the saints. He died almost twenty years ago, in the days in which saint ben’s was first getting off the ground. He died too young, at the age of just 72. He was a good man and a fair man, who also lived with some brokenness. That’s a saint.

Some of you will remember a fellow named Terry, who came into this community fairly early in our life together. Terry, with his love of people, of music, of the arts scene, and of his church, who battled a depression most of us never knew was there, and then succumbed to that depression one hard night in 2008, leaving so many reeling at the loss. He is one of our saints.

Helen, who sculpted pieces for us, and left us with our set of the Stations of the Cross and a glorious painting that will again appear in Advent. She had a grand sense of humour and an artist’s heart, yet a body that just couldn’t keep up with where here mind and heart wanted her to go. She’s one of our saints.

Or Gloria, who lived with a dementia that left her leaning hard on her beloved husband Don, yet somehow was always able to keep company with us right to the end when she succumbed to cancer. A saint.

Neil, who lived for so many years in the little apartment that once stood at the end of the old parish hall that has now been demolished. Neil, with a host of eccentricities and a kind of angular way of being in the world, we bid him farewell a decade ago after his tired body just gave out. He is a saint.

These and countless more. What unites them is that at some point along the way they all caught a glimpse of the vision that Jesus set out in this gospel reading for All Saints’ Day:

‘But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.

However imperfectly any of us could ever completely live into this vision, it stands as a defining challenge to all of us. To hear it and hold it and test it and try it is what it means to be someone whose life is shaped and celebrated this evening.

You are numbered among the saints, folks. You might not feel that, but you are. God’s “holy ones”, in spite of the sometimes unholy character of who we are. Named as such, and so called to be that.

I like the stories associated with many of these stained-glass figures, but I know you and I love to hear your stories, your struggles, and your aspirations. Because you have heard the challenges of the Gospel and you’re here, doing the best you can to be a Gospel people. Saints, all of us.