“All Things New”
1
November 2015
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
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.
This is different from New Testament usage. It calls all baptized Christians “saints,” hagioi, or “holy ones,” because we are
made holy in Christ. The idea is not
that they were perfect. St. Paul, for
all his criticisms of the moral failings of the Christians in Corinth, in his
letter still calls them “saints” (1 Cor 1:2).
The idea is that God’s grace in Jesus transforms us.
The Church 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 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. 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.
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.”
In our sacristy, there is a beautiful
antique carving of Jesus on the cross.
The cross it was on is long lost, as are its arms. Dave Strother gave it to Trinity in memory of
his wife Kay Atwood. Kay had found the
piece years ago in Italy. We use the
image during our Contemplative Eucharist.
The symbolism of using an image of Christ with missing arms is
intentional. 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 to unbind each other.
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).
In the name of Christ, Amen.
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