Tag: All Saints

Earth’s Crammed with Heaven | All Saints

Posted in sermonTagged , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Today is All Saints’ Day, a day that draws us into the mystery of Christ’s body and reminds us that we are eternally bound to all members of the church across time, space, and even death.

Today’s theme feels like a fitting day for poetry. So, I’d like to share some poetic verse with you, written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1856:

“…Natural things
And spiritual,—who separates those two
In art, in morals, or the social drift,
Tears up the bond of nature and brings death,
Paints futile pictures, writes unreal verse,
Leads vulgar days, deals ignorantly with men,
Is wrong, in short, at all points…

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God.
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes—
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries,
And daub their natural faces unaware.”

We’ll talk more about the poem’s meaning later. But first, a bit about the poet…

Browning grew up in England and was baptized and raised in the Church of England, which is the tradition that we Episcopalians stem from. She was a scholar: she learned and translated Hebrew, and many of her writings were influenced by Christian writings like Dante’s Inferno.

She was also a lifelong activist. Though she came from a slave-holding family, Browning advocated for abolition, even when this put her at odds with her father. But, she is best known as a poet that rivaled her male colleagues in a time when it was hard for women-writers to break through.

Because of all this, you might think that Browning would show up in our commemoration calendar for the saints, but she doesn’t. Though she’s not formally acknowledged by the church, she is undoubtedly a spiritual ancestor to the many people who benefited from her faithfulness, moral courage, and artistry.

In fact, we’re benefiting from her today. Because, in the section of Aurora Leigh that I shared, Browning describes the theological core of All Saints’ Day. She starts out by saying that there is a common misunderstanding that the “spiritual” and “natural” are separate realities that don’t influence one another. We tend to operate as if God and the saints are up in heaven singing. And, meanwhile, we poor creatures are down below, struggling through life without any help.

In Browning’s day, this wasn’t simply a theological belief. It was used as a convenient excuse for unjust behavior. The industrial revolution suppressed wages for the poor. Slavery was still legal. And global expansion gave England political and economic safety, while the communities that they pillaged suffered.

People like Browning’s own father would have suggested that this was just the way the world works. God had nothing to say about it. And people had no reason to do anything about it. But, at least if you got right with God, you could go to heaven when you died.

But Browning disagreed with the entire premise. In her poem, she says that “earth’s crammed with heaven.” God is interrupting the status quo with the signs of his kingdom. And any suggestion that our “real lives” are somehow separate from the life of God is a lie.

She says, God is always acting on the world, turning ugliness into beauty and darkness into light. Our world is enchanted with the inbreaking of Heaven. We just have to notice it. And this is why we celebrate All Saints’ Day: because it makes us pay attention to the heaven-enchanted world we actually live in.

This is what we know to be true: The saints of God, in heaven and on earth, are united in the Body of Christ and participate in that same body, even across the boundary of death. Heaven is imposing itself on our mortal lives, calling us to the work and worship of the Kingdom of God. And we are never separate from the love and presence of God, who gives us the courage to hope for better amid so much brokenness.

Earth is full of signs of heaven. And our faith, even earth-side, draws us into heaven’s choir, where we join our voices in the eternal song of God. We are never alone, in this great jostling crowd of the faithful.

Lest you think I’m being metaphorical, I want to share a story with you about a time that the saints of God in heaven “crammed” themselves into my little, earthly life. Maybe you’ll think I’m crazy; maybe you’ll say, “me too.” In any case, I hope you’ll receive it with an open mind…

When I was in seminary, I did my internship at a little country church in Cheshire, Connecticut. By the time I started my internship, we were many months into the pandemic lockdown, and so we couldn’t worship inside the church building. The good news was that the church had already voted to renovate the sanctuary. And the pandemic gave them the perfect excuse to go ahead with construction while we worshiped in a field next to the parking lot.

For the first year or so of my internship, I only caught glimpses of the sanctuary when I went to the sacristy to prepare the symbolic elements of our “spiritual communion.” But in the winter of 2021, the lockdown was starting to lift, and sanctuary renovations were complete. When the time came to invite the congregation back into the sanctuary, a liturgy was carefully crafted to re-dedicate the space as a place of worship.

Now, Saint Peter’s was one of the oldest Episcopal churches in Connecticut. The original worshiping community started before the Revolutionary War, as evidenced by headstones in the cemetery that surrounded the church. Because of this, the congregation was pretty comfortable with the idea that the ancestors in the faith might still have some presence with us today.

On the day of the dedication service, I was sitting in the choir loft and my supervisor, the rector, was preaching. As she spoke about the centuries of faithful parishioners who had made that congregation their home, I felt a sudden heaviness in the air, almost like smoke, or a barometric pressure drop before a rainstorm. It was overwhelming and strange, and I couldn’t explain it. So I kept it to myself.

But, after the service, a widow who had been sitting near the front of the room told the rector that, during the sermon she had felt a hand softly rest on her shoulder, Without a second thought, she knew it was the invisible hand of her dead husband.

When the rector told me that, I fessed up and told her about the heaviness in the air. When we compared notes, we realized that both events had happened at the same time in the service… The time, coincidentally, that the rector’s cell phone had gone off, showing the caller ID of a parishioner who had just died.

Over the following days, others told similar stories of presence, of wonder, and a feeling that time had stood still as the rector regaled us with stories of those old saints. It seemed that all the saints of that place – both living and dead – were together again; and our prayers were rising and intermingling in the air, floating like smoke past the high vaulted ceilings of that little country church, as they had been for hundreds of years.

We were all Moses at the burning bush, on the mountain of God where time stands still. We all were singers in the heavenly choir, worshipping around the throne of God. That experience convinced me that our theology of All Saints is really real. That nothing is lost or forgotten, that our prayers leave a lasting impression on this earth, and that God – and the saints – will never leave us alone.

As Elizabeth Barrett Browning said, “Earth’s crammed with heaven.” And nowhere is that more apparent than when we join together in worship here, or at any altar of the church. In our worship and communion, the veil is thin between life and death; between heaven and earth; between the God who created us and God’s beloved creation; between Christ who was one of us, and us, who are part of him.

And our experience here compels us to believe that the love we share continues after we walk out these doors. And it continues across the boundary between life and death.

What if we really believed that? What if we lived our lives knowing that the millions who have gone before us are with us, that they are not just examples to us, but friends to us in our time of need? That even in death, they can sustain us in hope?

What if we really believed that we could be saints to others? What if we lived our lives as exemplars of prayer and worship, of kindness and mercy? And we let our actions, whether simple or grand, be a sign of heaven interrupting the sorrow and suffering of our mortal lives?

“Earth’s crammed with heaven.” Our lives are a testament to the Kingdom of God come near. This is a powerful call, and it is a great responsibility. Joined with all the saints in the Body of Christ, we can no longer live only for ourselves. We must live for the wellbeing of all of God’s children, knowing that the saints are always praying for us and guiding us along the path that leads to eternal life.

Amen.

Yet all are one in Thee | All Saints’ Sermon

Posted in sermonTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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.

The Saints of God are Just Folk Like Me

Posted in sermonTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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.”