“All are Thine”
4 November 2012
Solemnity of All Saints & Commemoration of All Souls
(Transferred from Nov. 1 & 2)
Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland, Oregon
8:00 a.m. spoken Mass, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
[Preached in Mandarin the evening before at
the Chinese Language Eucharist 5:30 p.m.]
As Father Tom told us in his homily
at the Thursday Eucharist, the Church’s calendar has two Triduum—or three
day—liturgies, one in the spring and one in the fall. The Spring Triduum is the greatest feast of
the Church, celebration of the Passion and Resurrection of our Lord through a
series of services that go from Maundy Thursday, on through Good Friday, and
then to the Great Vigil of Easter and Easter Sunday. The fall Triduum—the celebration of All
Hallows’ Eve, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day—is much smaller, but seeks to
take the promise of the Easter Feast and make it personal to us all, in our
shared humanity and shared mortality.
Though All Hallows’ Eve has become trivialized somewhat by the popular
secular celebration of Halloween, its basic message is that though there are many
things in the world and in our hearts and imaginations that are truly
frightening, we need not fear because God is with us. All Saints’ celebrates the blessed departed
whose lives and witness to the faith were such that we look to them as
examples, believe that they are in the presence of God, and hope they are
praying for us. All
Souls’ or the Commemoration of the
Faithful Departed remembers the larger group of the dead for whom we hope and pray. As our Prayer Book puts it, “Remember all who died in the peace of
Christ, and those whose faith is known to
you alone; bring them into the place of eternal joy and light” (p. 375).
We
pray for the dead because it is a natural desire of the human heart, and since
ultimately death is such a mystery to us.
The early Protestants rejected prayers for the dead because they
believed that the dead are instantly judged by God and assigned to heaven or
hell and nothing we can pray for will change that. They also were rebelling against a corrupt
Church’s selling of such prayers and sacraments. But the fact is, there are examples of
prayers offered for the dead in the traditional Greek canon of the Christian
Bible. So we pray for the dead, and
hope.
Since it is so hard for us to know
what is inside the human heart, in practice many of us approach All Souls’ as an occasion to remember
and pray for all the dead, confident
that God wants to save all his creatures, and hopeful that, in the end, God’s
love will overcome all our human crankiness and resistance. Perhaps, just perhaps, all the departed will
one day be faithful departed since the
faithfulness at issue is God’s, not
ours.
The other evening, after the All
Hallows' Eve Liturgy, Elena and I went home to that beautiful Halloween night sky
with stars and bright puffy clouds scudding by, shining bright and backlit by
the nearly full moon. After all those prayers
and assurances in the liturgy for a peaceful and restful night, Elena had a terrible
nightmare that woke both of us up at 3 a.m.
When we were younger, I was the one with terrible nightmares, and she
was the one who by comforting and cuddling, helped me back to sleep. Now I play the role of a great warm teddy
bear helping her get back to
sleep.
When I am asked about All Saints’ and the doctrine of the
Communion of Saints, and the commemoration of All Souls’ and prayers for the
dead, I think of the role of comforting one’s bedmate to help her sleep. In night-time darkness when nightmares come,
we are there for each other. The blessed
departed, who prayed in life and most certainly continue to pray in death, are
there for us. They are not just a
“great cloud of witnesses” in the arena seating cheering us on. They actively work on our behalf, and give us
strength, if only by their examples. The
great multitude of the rest of the dead—well, we pray for them, and by our
prayers, hopefully help work God’s mercy in them.
We also are the hands and hearts of
the blessed departed here below.
In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus
shows his love and solidarity with Lazarus and his sisters several times. He weeps with them. He gets angry and indignant at how rotten a
thing death is. He takes time to talk
with Martha. But note that when he
raises Lazarus from the dead, he leaves the miracle unfinished. Lazarus comes forth, but Jesus tells us to
untie the funeral cloths, to “unbind him.”
St. Teresa of Avila wrote,
Christ
has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
No matter
what the saints above us may be praying for, here below, we are their hands and
feet here, their eyes, their ears, their heart. This, too, is part of the communion of
saints. Just as Christ bid the disciples
to unbind Lazarus, so he bids us.
As part
of your prayers this week, think about a dearly departed person, whether one of
the great saints of the Church, or a dear friend or family member. Pray for them, and ask to be prayed for by
them. Think of what they prayed for when
they were here, and what they are probably praying for now. And then find a way to start working for
that.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
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