Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, New York
Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC
Some of you may be aware that the website of Holy Cross Monastery has an extensive archive of sermons going back a quarter of a century. As of this week there are 1014 sermons available there, most in both text and audio formats. And of these, there are eighteen sermons preached for the feast of All Saints which we are observing today. After perusing these eighteen sermons, including one of mine, I got to wondering what more could be said. What's at the core of today’s feast? What is this communion of Saints that we speak of in our creeds? And how does that impact us by challenging us, encouraging us, and assisting us?
After a while you can see certain themes or emphases emerging in these and other sermons and writings about the saints. One of the central themes concerns what precisely is a saint. Most of us when we hear the term think of a super Christian whose life is marked by fidelity and courage and other-directedness and love and patience and so on. It's almost as if we were talking about some category of celebrity Christian, but celebrities who instead of drawing attention to themselves point beyond themselves to Jesus and his saving mercy and transforming love. There are of course the great names of those mentioned in the New Testament—Saint Peter, Saint Paul, Saint Stephen, Saint Mary Magdalen, and of course Saint Mary the Virgin, mother of our Lord. And there are others that we know popularly in our culture-- Saint Patrick, Saint Valentine, St. Nicholas and St. Francis being among the all-stars. But they constitute only a minuscule part of what Scripture calls “a great cloud of witnesses” that surrounds us on all sides, supporting us by their fellowship and offering us their lives and struggles as models of holiness and expressions of hope in the face of tough and broken lives. Which is to say, all our lives.
The Christian community has always recognized that there are countless such saints, far more than can be named or numbered. Sainthood is not limited to some process by which a particular church canonizes or includes in a calendar of commemorations one or another Christian. So it is that we see in many of those eighteen sermons a reminder that before it was a title for the well-known Chrisitan, the word “saint” applied to all the faithful who struggled in good faith to be holy, that is to be restored to wholeness and integrity and blessedness often in and through the most hidden and ordinary of circumstances. The saints are you and me, at least potentially, at least partially. And we need to be reminded that God is not finished with us, that we are works in progress. The great saints, the lesser-known ones, and the mostly invisible ones who are part of our lives, however unrecognized, are tokens and assurances that there is a journey which leads us home… home to the very heart of God. And that we are not journeying alone.
A second theme in several of our eighteen sermons from the online archive is a more recent observation that today we're smack in the middle of a sacred three days which has been termed the ‘autumn triduum’…three days which reflect the same dynamic as the three days that lead up to Easter. These are, of course, Halloween, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day or the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed. Someone once described them as scared, sacred and scarred. And who of us does not know all three of these, sometimes all at once? Today we are invited to enter this thin space, if you will, where the days become shorter, the clocks are set back (hopefully for the last time) and we are made exquisitely aware of the transitoriness and the beauty of life.
But I don't want to stop here quite yet. I want to remind us that in our recent monastic observance and in some Anglican church calendars there is also a feast called the Saints of the Old Testament. Saints aren't just Christians who knew Jesus. The saints are also those who longed for and
worked toward the coming of Jesus Christ. Churches in both the East and the West have for centuries commemorated and celebrated the lives of our ancestors in the Old Covenant. In its compendium of saints, the Anglican Church of Canada says the following:
“Our faith did not begin with the birth of Christ in Bethlehem, but with Abraham and Sarah, with Moses and Miriam and Aaron, with Deborah and Samuel, with holy kings like David and Hezekiah, and with prophets like Elijah and Jeremiah. We give thanks for the testimony of their lives and celebrate their faith, because they were the true forebears of Christ, who has made us partners and fellow heirs with them in the covenant of salvation.”
And we must remember that the covenant made with Abraham and his descendants is irrevocable, and that God honors and works through that covenant to this day.
But let's not stop there. Yes, there are saints in the Christian tradition. And yes, there were saints of the Old Covenant. But there are also saints in other religious traditions as well as among those who subscribe to no particular faith. These are the ones whose quality of life and obedience to their conscience in what our tradition has often called the natural law or the inner moral law hold up, even for Christians, models of holy living. The early Christians often looked at the noble lives of “virtuous pagans”, people such as Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and the emperor Trajan and the poet Virgil as in some way anticipating and participating in the saving and transformative work of our Lord. And today we might well name others who were not or are not explicitly Christian, but who embody, in ways that we can't quite explain, the very best of a Christian moral outlook and a humanity and a humility that is beyond beautiful. Today we might name people like the current Dalai Lama
or Thich Nhat Hanh or Abraham Issac Heschel or Mahatma Ghandi or Sufi poets such as Rumi or Hafez and other Islamic wali or “Friends of God”, or the Indian devotional mystic Kabir along with countless people of goodwill throughout the world who work for the welfare of others through their own vocations and careers and often at great personal cost, be it in medicine or law or rescue work or in simple faithful support of self and others. These too are saints! The late Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner called them “anonymous Christians”. This was not without some criticism… who wants to be called an anonymous anything? But it is a way for Christians to appreciate that the work of Christ is universal and reaches everyone everywhere inviting them to live lives of integrity and compassion…what our opening prayer today calls “virtuous and godly living.” That’s not the end of the story, of course, and it’s certainly not an explanation, but it is a reminder that God’s mercy and love is not the sole possession of any single religious tradition or teaching.
The Protestant writer and theologian Frederic Buechner once wrote:
“…the feet of saints are as much of clay as everybody else's, and their sainthood consists less of what they have done than of what God has for some reason chosen to do through them. When you consider that Saint Mary Magdalene was possessed by seven devils, that Saint
Augustine prayed, “Give me chastity and continence, but not now,” that Saint Francis started out as a high living young dude in downtown Assisi, and that Saint Simon Stylites spent years on top of a sixty-foot pillar, you
figure that maybe there's nobody God can't use as a means of grace, including even ourselves.
Buechner adds:
“The Holy Spirit has been called “the Lord, the giver of life” and, drawing their power from that source, saints are essentially life givers. To be with them is to become more alive.”
Beloved, for whatever reason, God has chosen to do something through each of us. That is the fountain of our dignity, our holiness, our healing, and our personhood. May we be blessed to dwell among the saints, among those who are life givers. For to be with them is to become more fully alive. And the more fully alive we become, the more we ourselves become life-givers.
Called to be saints—you and me and (dare I say it?) everybody. “Therefore, lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet….” (Hebrews 12:12). And come, let us walk together in that great company spanning the ages toward fullness of light and life and peace.
Happy All Saints Day, my friends. Amen.