"Dancing Saints" ceiling icon by the Rev Dcn Mark Dukes; St Gregory of Nyssa, San Francisco
“Blessed Assurance”
3 November 2024
All Saints Sunday
Homily preached at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
Grants Pass, Oregon
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
9:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9; Psalm 24; Revelation 21:1-6a; John 11:32-44
God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen
When I lived in Washington DC, I would go on retreat once a year to a place called Priestfield, a Roman Catholic spiritual direction center in West Virginia. It had lovely chapels, shrines, and trails marked with the stations of the cross. On a side trail, there was a lone grave marked with a cross and an inscription “the unknown stranger.” The person buried there was a vagrant who over a hundred years ago happened upon the pristine stand of forest, fell asleep at evening sheltering beneath the trees, and never woke up. No clue to his identify was ever found. The priests there gave him rites and buried him, but without ever knowing his name. The grave now serves as a place where people with unnamed grief can come, or those who mourn loved ones whom they can never bury nor whose graves they cannot visit can come, and pray in a beautiful place focused on our need for intimacy in a sometimes anonymous and brutal world. Like the tomb of the unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery, the grave honors those whom we know need to be honored but who, due to the messiness of life and war, remain unavailable or unknown.
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. In later Church parlance, they were saints, but had not been canonized. All Saints was originally a catch-all to commemorate all the faithful departed regardless of whether their names and stories were known.
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.”
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 the traditional church calendar makes a distinction between All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day.
This last week, we saw the autumn Triduum (three day festival): All Hallows’ Eve (Oct. 31), All Hallows or All Saints’ Day (Nov. 1), and All Souls’ Day (Nov. 2). It mirrors the Spring Triduum (Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday). Where spring reminds us of life and new beginnings, the fall reminds of death and the endings that must precede new things.
All Hallows’ Eve on October 31 reminds us not to be afraid in the face of death, asking God to preserve us from, as the old Celtic Prayer says, “ghosties and ghoulies, and things that go bump in the night.”
All Saints’ or All Hallows on November 1celebrates 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 on November 2 remembers the larger
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 St. Luke’s, an All Souls' devotion, on this 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, not just Christians who have died, 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. … Everlasting 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).
Beloved: we must not fear death, we must not regret death. As the Prayer Book says, it is not an end, but a change. The fall Triduum reminds us of the hope in Christ that is in us, of how we are all called to be saints, and in some way have already been made holy in baptism. It reminds us of our union with all our fellow creatures, dead or alive, already holy or not yet so. It reminds us that indeed, God is at work in the world about us, and 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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