“A Blessed Assurance”
3 November 2019
Solemnity of All Saints (tr)
Homily as prepared for 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
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 of the birth into eternal
life (the death) of this or that hoy one.
Originally, the Feast of All Saints was a commemoration of the early
martyrs of the Church whose names had gone 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, holy ones or saints,
because Christ’s saving work was 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 stand
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 there is a great overlap between those from whom we ask
prayers 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. I have growing confidence that perhaps, just
perhaps, all the departed will one day be faithful
departed since the faithfulness at issue is God’s,
not ours. The case has been made recently
very persuasively by eastern orthodox scholar and translator of the New
Testament, David Bentley Hart in his book: That all May be Saved.
In the Apostles’ Creed, we say we
believe in the Communion of Saints. The
blessed departed, who prayed in life and continue to do so, 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 Christians 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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