All Saints – Leah Wise

Readings here

O blest communion, fellowship divine!
We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
yet all are one in Thee, for all are Thine.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

Today we celebrate the Feast of All Saints, also called “All Hallow’s Day.” This is the holiday from which Halloween gets its name since Hallow’e’en, or Hallow’s-evening, is the night before All Hallow’s Day. Hallow just means “holy person,” or saint.

Historical records show that some form of All Saints’ Day has been celebrated among Christians since the fourth century. Originally, it was meant to commemorate the lives of the martyrs, those people who died in service of their faith.

As Christianity spread throughout Europe, All Saints’ celebrations eventually made their way to the British Isles. It was there that the feast was moved to November First. By the ninth century, the Pope declared it a universal holiday, intended to commemorate the growing list of official saints in the church calendar.

Even after the Protestant Reformation and America’s independence from England, the Episcopal Church managed to keep All Saints’ Day in our calendar. But its theology has changed a little bit since the early days. Though we acknowledge many of the saints of the Catholic Church, our tradition doesn’t have a canonization process. Instead, we can make recommendations to a committee that votes on who should be remembered in our calendar…it’s rather bureaucratic.

But part of the reason we do it this way is because we have a broader definition of the saints than the sanctoral calendar might suggest. To be understood as a saint in our tradition, you don’t have to have performed a miracle or died as a martyr, you just have to be a person who tried to follow Jesus the best you knew how. That persistent faithfulness serves as encouragement for others walking the same road, and it is why the church finds it meaningful to remember people in our calendar.

But, the beauty of the whole thing is that anyone can be a saint…to someone. Saints are all around us. Whether named or unnamed, known or unknown, they stretch out in all directions, holding us in our suffering, affirming us in our struggle, blessing us with words of hope, and helping us experience the love of God that knows no bounds.

Our faith teaches us that this “communion of saints” is not merely a nice thought, but a mystical reality. The Body of Christ acts like a tether – holding all the saints together across time and distance, and even death. We are never alone.

As a kid, I was friends with a Catholic girl from Louisiana who always did her Hail Mary prayers before bed, even when she was sleeping over at my house:

Hail, Mary, full of grace,
the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.

One time, when we were about 12 years old, I heard her whispering these prayers in the dark, and told her to stop. I earnestly believed, as my Protestant church had taught me, that you could only pray to Jesus. At best, praying to Mary was fruitless. At worst, it was idolatry.

Of course, I didn’t realize then that prayers like the Hail Mary are not prayed “to” the saints, but “with” them. They are prayers of intercession, not so different from the having an intercessor pray the Prayers of the People on our behalf. They are intended to invite the eternal and ever-present ancestors of our faith to advocate for us before Christ.

More than 20 years after that fateful sleepover, I found myself sitting alone in a hospital chapel in Slidell, Louisiana. I was out of tears, and out of words to pray.

I whispered, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us. Please…please.”

Only a few weeks earlier, I had accepted a two-year position at an Episcopal Church in Houston, Texas. I graduated from Yale Divinity School and went on a brief pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral. Then Daniel (my husband, not the Old Testament prophet!) and I – along with my mother-in-law – packed up our apartment and our two cats to make the 26-hour drive to Texas.

Daniel hadn’t been feeling well for several weeks, and on moving day, he could barely stand up. Two days into our three-day trip, we were staying the night in Slidell, Louisiana, when he woke up in the middle of the night doubled over in pain. My mother-in-law and I rushed him to the little regional hospital.

After hours of waiting, the weary nurse looked at Daniel and said, “You are very sick.”

The surgeon said he would have to have risky surgery with a long recovery time. We were terrified (much like the Old Testament prophet).

And there were other complications…Our Medicaid didn’t work in Louisiana. The hotel we were staying in was mildewed from Hurricane Ida. The cats were stir-crazy. And our past-due U-Haul was sitting in the parking lot.

Weary with many things, I started talking to Mary about three days into Daniel’s hospital stay: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us. Please, please.”

Meanwhile, friends from all over the country were praying, too. A former associate priest from my sending parish had already sent the local priest to Daniel’s bedside. People were sending cash to help us with expenses. A parishioner and his father-in-law drove ten hours roundtrip to pick up our U-Haul and take it Houston. The rector of my new church met the movers to unpack my stuff. The Diocese figured out insurance.

The saints of God, both living and dead, were praying with us and acting on those prayers. They were holding us steady in the love of God.

Daniel asked the surgeon if we could “wait and see” on surgery. And in that little regional hospital, with no one else to attend to, the surgeon shrugged, and said “sure.”

A few days later, Daniel was healing. And after a week in Slidell, Louisiana, we were back on the road on our way to Texas.

I wasn’t expecting a miracle. I couldn’t find the words to pray for one. I had nothing left to say to God.

But, thank God, the saints were praying: My friend Joe in Maryland; Reverend Elaine in New Jersey; my dad Gary in Florida; and my new parishioner Vyonne in Houston; Mary, the mother of God, of course. And even Misty, the Catholic girl from Louisiana, who taught me about the saints when I was busy telling her she was wrong.

All the saints were holding us in that patchwork without end or beginning, bound in the love of God.

I can’t imagine what life would be like without all those saints. In fact, I can only imagine hope at all, because I have seen it with my own eyes, living and breathing in all the saints, made real by each person who simply tries to follow Jesus the best they know how.

On All Saints, we remember that, in Christ, the veil is always thin between the living and the dead. Across time and distance – and even death – the saints are always praying, moving, acting, and loving hope into the world.

The air is thick with the saints. I pray that you will have the courage to count yourself among them.

Proper 26, All Saints’ Sunday 2024 – Readings here

I was 23 years old before I celebrated my first All Saints’ Day.

Growing up in an Evangelical denomination, we were allergic to the word, “saint.” We weren’t really into people and their stories. We were into doctrines and rules by which we could measure ourselves and others. We were determined to cast off the baggage of centuries of tradition in pursuit of a clearer, more consistent, more relevant Christianity.

This mindset was influenced by a few major ideological shifts: the anti-Catholic sentiment of the Protestant Reformation, which saw the saints and all their associated celebrations as superstition at best, and idolatry at worst; the optimism of expanding imperialism and the industrial revolution, which directed people in the Western world to leave behind the past, in order to forge ahead to a limitless age of progress; and the rugged individualism of American culture, which made religion a personal practice rather than a collective one, and measured each person by their ability to prove themselves worthy of God’s love.

The saints simply didn’t fit into the picture. They were funny, old relics of medieval Catholicism. Their stories and experiences, so often tied up with struggle, were quite frankly embarrassing to our self-sufficient, modern ears. They were messy and weird, hard to manage, and rarely fit within the norms of fundamentalism.

My faith story was one without a prologue, because it lacked the stories of the saints. As a result, faith was like a path that had never been trod before. It was dark and mysterious, an unknown venture that I had to endure on my own. No one, besides, perhaps, my parents and my pastor, could offer wisdom for the journey. It was often a lonely place.

But many years later, I found myself in an Episcopal Church on the occasion of All Saints.

Still wary of more “Catholic” traditions, I had nevertheless found hope and healing among the people in that big, neo-classical building across from University of Virginia’s campus. They had held me, watched me cry, and let me sit with my grief after leaving the Evangelicalism I was raised in.

I had left because it turned out that, in addition to saints, they were allergic to women in leadership. But this Episcopal Church hadn’t put pressure on me to contort myself into an “acceptable” version of a woman or a Christian. They didn’t seem to believe that Christianity was about proving myself worthy of God’s love.

And they didn’t act like the Christian journey was a thing I should do on my own. In fact, through the liturgy, they had carried me along in the faith when I was too spiritually weary to utter the words myself.

These ordinary, holy people had started to help me feel like Christianity was much bigger and more vibrant than what I had grown up with. Because it wasn’t about me, sitting in a dark room alone with an exacting God. It was about us, wherever we found ourselves, walking together toward the light of a loving God.

Still, on All Saints, I wondered what the long-dead saints, with their fantastical stories, could possibly teach me about the good news. And then, we sang a silly, little British song about the saints of God.

To my mind, today’s sequence hymn, “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God,” is perfectly composed. In the first two verses, we encounter abbreviated, and basically anonymous, tales of the formalized saints of our tradition:

Doctors, like St. Luke and St. Hildegaard

Queens, like St. Helena and St. Margaret of Scotland

Shepherdesses, like St. Bernadette of Lourdes

Soldiers, like St. Martin of Tours

And too many priests and martyrs to name.

There is something jarring about the juxtaposition of the sickly-sweet little children’s tune and the harrowing realities of these ordinary, holy people who walked with God, so often to their own death.

The jaunty little melody and the laundry list of unnamed saints work together to suggest that the saints, even while being worthy of veneration, are nothing to get worked up about. They’re everywhere, in every generation. There are so many, the song doesn’t even have time to name them.

And then, what is, at first, subtle in the song’s composition is made concrete in its closing words –

They lived not only in ages past;
there are hundreds of thousands still;
the world is bright with the joyous saints
who love to do Jesus’ will.
You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea,
in church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea;
for the saints of God are just folk like me,
and I mean to be one too.

For the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too.

When I was 23, red-eyed from crying, but surrounded by Christian love, I sang a song of the saints of God, and I finally understood the saints.

It’s right there in our church’s catechism:

“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.”

It turns out, the saints aren’t just long-dead people with nothing to offer. Both living and dead, they are exemplars of ordinary, everyday holiness, who shore up our faith in turbulent times and show us the way in the midst of life’s uncertainty.

The church can’t afford to ignore 2,000 years of saint stories because we think they’re old or weird, or mystical or uncool. Because the church is nothing without the saints: the named ones and the anonymous ones, the ones we find acceptable and the ones we find confounding, the ones who died in glory and the ones sitting here in this room.

All of them have something to teach us about the path of Christ. All of them, in their own time and place, lit up the world with a little bit of good news.

Our faith rests on the legacy of the saints.

Because of this, it finds its shape and meaning in a rich and never-ending web of relationships, spanning from ancient times to the far-future. These relationships reveal God’s unbroken chain of love in a broken world.

Through the example of the faithful in every generation, we understand who the Triune God is, in eternal relationship with Godself.

Through relationships with our fellow disciples, we learn what it means to live into the greatest commandment to love one another, without worrying about the outcome or the cost.

And these relationships inform our relationship with the world – with the downtrodden and alienated, displaced and forgotten, hated and misunderstood, immigrant and citizen, rich and poor.

In communion with the saints, we find that the Kingdom of God “is closer than we know” (1).

And the path of Christ is not ours to walk alone. We are not left without history, tradition, exemplar or teacher. The air is heavy with the prayers of the saints. The streets are crowded with them.

Like God, the saints are everywhere, always revealing God’s love in places where love has no right to exist. We are not alone.

So why not rise to the challenge?

Why not live like you and I could be saints, to someone?

Why not act like miracles can take place through the mechanism of our ordinary, holy lives?

Why not share our testimonies, so we can be reminded that love counts for something? That it changes hearts and moves the needle. That sometimes, it even makes enemies friends.

I have seen the saints at work, loving me back into faith, changing the course of someone’s life, standing up for the vulnerable, overcoming their fears, taking responsibility for the wellbeing of strangers, turning ravaged places into gardens.

It’s not so hard to find them when you start looking for them.

As we approach a stressful Election Day, my prayer for all of us is that we look for the saints at work. And that we rise to the challenge, determining to be saints to someone, not worrying whether the love we live out comes across as weird or old-fashioned or even foolish.

For the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one, too.

(1) On his deathbed, my Great Grandpa Camp told my mother: “Heaven is closer than we know.” In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus says “You are not far from the Kingdom of God.”

Tag: All Saints

Yet all are one in Thee | All Saints’ Sermon

The Saints of God are Just Folk Like Me