“Blessed
Assurance”
6
November 2016
Solemnity
of All Saints
Homily
preached at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland,
Oregon
The
Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
8:00
a.m. spoken Mass, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
St. Bernard of Clairvaux was the great
reformer of medieval monasticism who preached against sterile scholasticism and
legalistic religion by urging a personal, intimate experience of God and, as
part of this, personal devotions to the Blessed Virgin. Almost alone among medieval clerics, he
preached against persecuting Jews, and for this he was named a “Righteous
Gentile” in that tradition (that’s why “Bernard” became a beloved Jewish name,
like Bernard Baruch). In a great sermon Bernard preached on All
Saints’ Day, he said,
“Why do we praise and glorify the saints and keep festival for them? Of what use to them are earthly honors when the heavenly Father honors them? What is the point of our praises? The saints do not need our honors and devotion. Evidently, then, our commemoration of them aids us, not them. For my part, I confess that I am inflamed with desire whenever I think of them.”
In church, we talk a lot about the
saints. Nearly every day of the year has
a name, or several, attached to it for commemoration. Originally, the Feast of All Saints was a
commemoration of the early martyrs of the Church whose names went
unrecorded. Their story was not known,
and as a result they could not be included for commemoration in the calendar,
since the day of their martyrdom too was unknown. All Saints was originally a catch-all to
commemorate the great models of faith, now departed, regardless of whether
their names and stories were known.
The Church originally called all the
baptized hagioi, or saints, because
Christ’s saving work was seen as effecting the sanctification of sinners. Then it began to reserve the term “saint” for
those among us whose lives showed the triumph of grace most clearly, and who
stood as models for us. Just as we ask
our family and friends to pray for us, we also began to address petitions to
these signal saints that they pray for us, even as we continue to pray for our
own beloved departed. That is why there
is a distinction between All Saints’ Day on November 1 and All Souls’ Day on
November 2.
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
read our litany of the beloved departed here at Trinity, an All Souls'
devotion, on All Saints’ Sunday. That
is because sometimes it is hard to distinguish between those whom we ask to
pray for us, and those for whom we pray.
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 Prayer Book teaches, “we pray [for the dead] because we still hold
them in our love, and because we trust that in God’s presence those who have
chosen to serve him will grow in his love, until they see him as he is” (p.
862). C.S. Lewis wrote,
“Of course, I pray for the dead. The action is so spontaneous, so all but inevitable, that only the most compulsive theological case against it would deter me. And I hardly know how the rest of my prayers would survive if those for the dead were forbidden. At our age the majority of those we love best are dead. What sort of intercourse with God could I have if what I love best with unmentionable to Him?” (Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer).
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.
In the Apostles’ Creed, we say we
believe in the Communion of Saints. The
blessed departed, who prayed in life and most certainly continue to pray in
death, remain 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, by their prayers and 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.
The Prayer Book’s Catechism teaches,
“The communion of saints is the whole family of God, the living and the dead, those whom we love and those whom we hurt, bound together in Christ by sacrament, prayer, and praise. … [E]verlasting life [means] a new existence, in which we are united with all the people of God, in the joy of fully knowing and loving God and each other. … Our assurance as Chstians is that nothing, not even death, shall separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ jesus, our Lord” (p. 862).
All Saints’
and All Souls remind us of the hope in Christ that is in us, of how we are all
called to be saints, and in some ways have already been made holy in
baptism. They remind us that indeed, God
is at work in the world about us, that “things which were
cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made
new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through
whom all things were made…” (BCP, p. 540). They remind us of our blessed
assurance that in the end, all will be well, and all manner of thing shall be
well.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
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