“Radiant Saints”
November 1, 2020
Solemnity of All Saints (Year A)
& Commemoration of All Souls
Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland, Oregon
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
8:00 a.m. Spoken Mass on the Labyrinth,
10:00 a.m. Sung Mass livestreamed from the Chancel
Revelation 7:9-17; Psalm 34:1-10, 22; 1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12
God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen
The Church’s calendar has two Triduum—three day—liturgies, one in the spring and one in the fall. The one in the Spring is the greatest feast of the Church, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and then Easter itself. 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.
All Hallows’ Eve is celebrated by the larger community as 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. This is a particularly welcomed message during the current time of division, fear, and dread. 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 and with us. That is why the Litany of the Saints is traditionally sung on this feast. All Souls’ or the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed remembers the larger group of the beloved 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).
Since it is impossible to know what is inside the human heart, in practice many on All Souls’ 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 beloved children’s song for All Saints, “I Sing A song of the Saints of God,” we read: the world is bright with the joyous saints. Like Wilbur the pig as described in the web of Charlotte the spider, they are radiant.
Death of those we know and love is hard, even when they spell the end of suffering and pain. Part is the pain of missing the beloved departed. Part is the pain of being reminded that each and every one of us will die, and that for all of us, today is one day closer to our death than yesterday.
Conscious beings that we are, we fear oblivion. And death, as mysterious as it looks, certainly has the semblance of oblivion. And so we think of it as sleep, even deep sleep, with some kind of dreaming or awakening. As Shakespeare in Hamlet says,
To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to dream; Aye, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. …
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of.
Some people say that the problem of evil—the random darkness, atrocity, and horror in life, summed up in sickness and death—is the reason they cannot believe in the existence of God. I think, however, that the very fact that evil horrifies us is a sign that there’s something or someone more out there than just what we see before us. The very fact we cannot conceive of oblivion, not really, is a hint that our consciousness is not merely an epiphenomenon from our brain functions. Though dread of horror and fear of death may make us doubt at times the proposition “there is a God,” such feelings actually trigger in us yearning and desire, the basis of giving our heart to, of “beloving” God.
The Beatitudes of Jesus we read today all find blessedness in some kind of horror: hunger, poverty, broken hearts. The Absent God is present in God’s apparent distance. He is found in the small hints of grace that we see once in a while in our life, in the goodness and love whose absence defines evil, and in our hope for a final saving act: an affirmed heart after prayer, a glimpse of glory in the Holy Meal shared by brothers and sisters, the luminous beauty of the service and love we share, in the example of the saints and the martyrs. There is another beatitude in scripture: blessed are those who die in God.
One of the glories of our faith is that we worship a God who became a human being in all respects, suffered the worst that life can give, even unjust torment and death, and then came back again. Death did not have the final word. Randomness and Meaninglessness lost the wager. That God invites us to follow, to embrace his way of self-denial and service, and opening ourselves to God redeeming all our pain. “Take up your cross, and follow me,” he says. He invites us all to be his witnesses, his martyrs, his saints. As the prayer book again puts it, may we, in walking the way of the cross, find it none other than the way of life and light. The world is radiant with the joyful saints who so followed our Lord.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
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