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.”
Leah Wise 