ALL SAINTS’ DAY
SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, NORWAY, MAINE
THE REV. ANNE G. STANLEY
1 NOVEMBER 2009
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Isaiah 25:6-9; Psalm 24; Revelation 21:1-6a; John11:32-44
You might think that I’d be preaching about the elections coming up on Tuesday the 3rd, the day after tomorrow, and some of the hugely critical issues we are being called to vote on. But I’ve already done that talking. Aside from reminding you TO vote because these things are terribly important, if you haven’t voted already, that’s all I’m going to say today about the elections. Ask me any questions you’d like after the service or later today or tomorrow, but in this sermon time today I want to talk about hope.
We’re smack in the middle of a 3-day annual event this morning. The three holy days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter--that’s the Easter Triduum. The autumn Triduum celebrates another three days: All Hallows’ Eve, All Saints’ Day and All Souls Day. We’re right in the middle today on All Saints’.
Halloween, All Hallows’ Eve, gets things started. We know it as the day of candy, cute costumes—Cinderella, dancers, favorite football players. And gory, horrible, spooky costumes—pirates, mummies (hello Lazarus!), ghouls, skeletons. Whether the Trick or Treaters know it or not, it’s actually the spooky costumes that are closer to the real meaning of All Hallows’ Eve. Because this is the night when we look at the spooks of our lives, the bad stuff, even death itself, we look it right in the eye. And we laugh defiantly. We mock death. We ridicule it on Halloween. We laugh at it because we have hope. The hope that not even death itself can separate us from the love of God.
I grumble and gripe at having to buy candy and answer the door over a four hour period to 300 kids on Halloween. It takes constant self-prodding to remind myself what’s behind it all. That what’s behind it all is the affirmation of life, even beyond the grave. I don’t say that to the adorable little princess standing on our front porch. But that’s what I’m thinking, or trying to.
Then, on All Saints’ and All Souls’, the second two days, we remember the lives of the children of God. The remarkable lives today, on All Saints’, the lesser known lives on All Souls’ Day. Because we don’t observe All Souls’ nowadays, we combine the two holidays, remembering in one glorious celebration everyone who has died.
Saints, of course, are those people who somehow allow God to shine through them. Christian saints are those who we say allow the light of Christ to shine through them. They’re like the figures in stained glass windows in churches which have such windows, because the light comes through them. And we get a glimpse of God in what the person does or says. Have you known people like that? Do you know some now? Everyone, absolutely everyone, is a saint or a potential saint. I believe that with all my being. Being a saint doesn’t mean the sickly sweet, saccharine goodness we so often think is the way of saints. Some saints are no rosebuds, but somehow they have lived God’s justice and mercy in ways we can remember—or in ways we can see right before our eyes.
As the hymn says, “There’s not any reason, no not the least, why I shouldn’t be one, too!”
There’s tremendous hope in that. Hope that new life is possible for us even now, on this side of the grave. Hope in God’s call to us, hope in the gift of God’s nearness now, hope that since the gift of new life in God, in Christ, is all around us, if we let it fill us, God’s own self can shine through us in spite of ourselves, whether we know it or not! It’s not It’s not our own initiative that is so worthy of praise, of course, it’s God’s initiative and what we allow God to do through us, stained glass window people that we are, when we let God have God’s way with us, when we don’t stand in the way of the light of Christ.
Lazarus died and his people mourned. Death was real, as death always is. Death is a part of life.
But as Robert Capon famously observed, Jesus never met a corpse he didn’t raise (Jairus’ daughter, the son of the widow of Nain, Lazarus). And it can happen to us! We have to die first, though, our self-righteousness, our pride, our “I can do it without God’s help sort of rugged individualism. We have to let our very selves die so we can be raised to new life. Jesus raised Lazarus to new life, right then and there, before the astonished eyes of those who were weeping, those who had lost hope. Jesus’ swaddling clothes had become Lazarus’ shroud. And that shroud was peeled off, strip by strip, to reveal at last the new life which Jesus brought forth. We need not wait for new life in the dim future. That God is with us right here, even now, with saints all over the place to show us the way.
“God will wipe away the tears from all faces,” sings the prophet Isaiah. And the last book of the Bible, Revelation, leaves us with a reminder of the dream of God, the dream that is not some future event in some far away place, the dim bye and bye, but is the dream that says: “’the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more, crying and pain will be no more….”
That is our hope. The hope of saints past, hope for saints yet unborn. And for saints present, all of us, now.
“O blest communion, fellowship divine!
We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
yet all are one in thee, for all are thine,
Alleluia, alleluia!”