All Saints' Day B, November 1, 2015
Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9 Psalm 24
Revelation 21:1-6a John 11:32-44
What is your own experience with All Saints' Day? People who have been raised in different Christian traditions have had various pieties regarding the saints. Churches which do not use the creed and confess a belief in the Communion of Saints tend to neglect the saints. They have been taught that devotion to the saints is an unnecessary distraction from devotion to Christ. Why would want to pray to a saint for an intercessory need, when one can go directly to God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit?
I suspect that the cult of saints and the subsequent writings of hagiographies or the written biographies and legends of the saints came about partly because of the effort to bring the Christian message of the Gospel to so called "pagan" cultures which had practices of ancestor veneration and worship. The cult of saints became more widespread as the church of the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages became essentially a church with a feudal like structure. In this structure, the clergy mediated religion on behalf of the lowly baptized lay people, the Christian serfs in feudal Christian societies. The clergy said the prayers in a foreign liturgical language, Latin while the lay people were spectators who were not educated enough for full participation in the liturgy. It developed that lay people only received communion once a year at Easter because Jesus had become such a perfect King of Heaven that he could only be approached and received on a regular basis by the completely patriarchal clergy. In this milieu one can understand how there would arise populist psychical correction in gaining of access to a sense of God's sublime care. The rise of devotion to the saints and to the Ever Blessed Mary became the popular practice. Saints were more culturally accessible in local areas; they served as totemic identities for local places almost like the professional football teams serve as local identities for cities and geographical regions today. The rise of the Virgin Mary to a place of being a co-Redemptrix as well as the veneration of female saints meant that there was a feminine balancing of a thoroughly patriarchal church hierarchy and society. At least in the heavenly realm saintly women had broken through the "glass ceiling" and so women and men could literally look up to holy women.
What happened in the Reformation was largely due to what was happening in Europe in what is called the Enlightenment. With the break down of the feudal structure, the assertion of national identities and the re-discovery of the individual who needed to experience individual salvation instead of just a passive assimilation into a group salvation situation, the exclusive mediation of Catholic Clergy on behalf of lay people was brought into question. There were also abuses because of the corruption of too much power residing in the hands of the clergy. The Reformation notion of individual salvation empowered individuals to pray in their own languages; it empowered them to go directly to God and bypass the clergy and also by pass the intercessions of their long regarded guardian saints. With the Reformation many Protestants threw out the saints as no longer being relevant to their everyday lives.
The Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox retained the practiced relevance of the saints within their daily lives, especially the relevance of the Ever Blessed Virgin Mary, for whom is expressed a veneration second to none.
I remember growing up as a completely "saint-deprived" Baptist. I was a bit jealous of my Roman Catholic friends. They got to ride in cars with those cool figurines of St. Mary, St. Joseph and St. Christopher on the dash boards of their cars. And back in the 1950's most boys did not wear necklaces; except Catholic boys could wear a necklace with a St. Christopher medal on it. Catholic moms wanted to make sure their children had the protective intercessions of St. Christopher. Too bad, that in post-Vatican II catholicism, St. Christopher was "decanonized" as he was not a real historical saint. Yet even today St. Christopher medals persist; so one cannot discount the placebo effect of even legendary saints.
Today, with this history of the saints, we attempt to appropriate some meanings for us for All Saints' Day as people who still confess a belief in the Communion of Saints.
A 19th century Hasidic rabbi said that "People are God's language." Long before the 19th century the writer of the Gospel of John wrote, "In the beginning was the Word.....and the Word became flesh and dwelled among."
All Saints' day is about how people have been God's language to us in the very best way. God as Word did not limit Word becoming flesh just in the life of Jesus. God as Word has continually become made flesh in the lives of people who have lived, spoke and wrote the example of how to live this life best.
The most poignant human experience is the deep love of people and then losing the people whom we love through death. We lose heroes who have had a wide reaching impact upon the well being of many people. We lose people who are known only to us and a small circle of people. We can fear that the loss of people will also mean the loss of the good which their lives perpetuated for us and for our world. There is a natural human reaction to fear the loss of the legacy of goodness and greatness. Just as in sports and in every area of life there is a human tendency to vote people into halls of fame, the communion of saints is a hall of fame that perhaps has been the proto-type of all halls of fame. The reason that there are halls of fame is because we want to preserve the record of the highest standards.
The first persons to enter the Christian Hall of fame after Jesus were the early martyrs. Deacon St. Stephen and James, the Just of Jerusalem and brother of the Lord. The martyrs became saints through the witness of their lives when they chose identity with Jesus rather than denying him in public. The first New Testament writing was the first letter of Paul to a church in Thessalonica. In this age the Christians felt so threatened that they really believed that the end of world could happen at anytime. Paul wrote to the members of the church who worried about their loved ones who had died before the return of the Lord.
In the history of the church, as it became clear that the world was not ending, Christians had to accept that they would be around and that they needed view their mission as no longer being preparation for the end the world as they knew it; they had to prepare to settle in for the very long run. The mission had to become institutions for the perpetuation of the message of the Gospel. The Hall of Fame of Christian saints represents the success of the institutionalization of the Gospel. The Christian Hall of Fame grew because Time did not end and the number of Christians grew and the number of heroic Christians grew. The Communion of Saints is like long term banking account; the more members who have entered it the more the benefits have accrued. The Communion of Saints is like a standing Endowment Fund for all Christian of the future. The witness of their lives are gifts to us which keep on giving. Their lives are worthy to remember because we as human beings only advance in excellence when we follow our highest insights. The saints are those who have given us examples in their lives of highest ideals.
One of the things which happened in Christian practice is what I might call a pride of eternal life and a resurrection pride resulting in a discounting of the grief that occurs because of the experience of death. It's almost as if someone mourns too long or too profoundly that one is viewed as one who does not have the appropriate amount of faith in the resurrection and in eternal life. Christians have often regarded themselves as being superior to those in other cultures who they saw to be practicing ancestor worship and even treating their ancestors as those who still lingered upon this earth.
I would suggest that both the resurrection of Christ and the veneration of the saints is related to the human experience of grief. I believe that the post-resurrection appearances of Christ to certain disciples were connected to the profound grief and loss which his friends experienced at his death. I do not believe his disciples were prepared for his death; I think that what they had experienced of Jesus made them believe that he was deathless. So when Jesus died, it caught them off guard. They lived in shocked disbelief about his death. With the death of Jesus would the values of the life of Jesus also die? The death of Jesus was so profound that the deep grief was answered with the power of God to give Jesus an afterlife in the life of his friends. And Jesus reappeared to his disciples to teach this world about the fact that death was a transition to another kind of life.
The Risen Christ was born into the lives of many people in many times and places. Jesus instantiated the life of God for humanity in first century Palestine. But the Risen Christ has been made available in the lives of people throughout the world. The life of Christ has been lived very well in the lives of the saints and so the life of Christ became more accessible to people who have lived after Jesus in different times. With the life of the saints we celebrate the fact that the life of the Risen Christ has become more diverse than just the life of Jesus of Nazareth in his thirty plus years upon earth.
I think it is wrong to divide the family of Christ in thinking that the saints would promote themselves over Christ, or to think that Jesus would be jealous of how people relate to the good lives of the saints. It is very logical to believe that because the church has remained for such a long time that saintliness is one of the reason for the staying power of the church. The church has remained for so long because the Risen Christ has significantly inspired people to live saintly lives.
It is very natural for us to celebrate saintly lives for several reasons. First, it allows us to acknowledge that significance of their lives. It allow us to be honest about our grief at the loss of the lives of people who have touched our lives with the very best witness. It is correct and necessary for us to celebrate the lives of saints as a way to practice the faith of the resurrection. You are alive here and now, and I feel completely confident in asking you to pray for me early and often. If we believe in the continuing life of the saints and the significant departed souls of our own lives, why would we treat them as dead and insignificant by avoiding to ask them to pray for us. The saints and the holy dear people are not people who compete with our devotion to Christ; they are gifts of God to us to help us in our love and devotion of God.
But finally, we cannot let all holiness and godliness remain contained in Jesus and the saints; the reason that we have the cloud of witnesses of the saints is so that we ourselves might progress in being saintly as well. Sainthood, or holiness is not something Jesus kept to himself. It is not something that is limited to the official saints of the Church; holiness is how you and I respond to the life of God in our lives. And no one can be a saint like you can. Only you can be the saint given the uniqueness of your life circumstances. And there are people who need us to be saints for them in making the life of Risen Christ known again in our world.
Today, let us be thankful that the Most High Saint Jesus, shared saintliness with all people through the gift of the Holy Spirit. Let us be thankful for the saints who have taken the gift of holiness of Jesus and made it evident in their lives as a blessed witness to us. And finally, let us receive the gift of holiness in our lives as we endeavor to allow the Risen Christ to be known in and through us by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9 Psalm 24
Revelation 21:1-6a John 11:32-44
What is your own experience with All Saints' Day? People who have been raised in different Christian traditions have had various pieties regarding the saints. Churches which do not use the creed and confess a belief in the Communion of Saints tend to neglect the saints. They have been taught that devotion to the saints is an unnecessary distraction from devotion to Christ. Why would want to pray to a saint for an intercessory need, when one can go directly to God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit?
I suspect that the cult of saints and the subsequent writings of hagiographies or the written biographies and legends of the saints came about partly because of the effort to bring the Christian message of the Gospel to so called "pagan" cultures which had practices of ancestor veneration and worship. The cult of saints became more widespread as the church of the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages became essentially a church with a feudal like structure. In this structure, the clergy mediated religion on behalf of the lowly baptized lay people, the Christian serfs in feudal Christian societies. The clergy said the prayers in a foreign liturgical language, Latin while the lay people were spectators who were not educated enough for full participation in the liturgy. It developed that lay people only received communion once a year at Easter because Jesus had become such a perfect King of Heaven that he could only be approached and received on a regular basis by the completely patriarchal clergy. In this milieu one can understand how there would arise populist psychical correction in gaining of access to a sense of God's sublime care. The rise of devotion to the saints and to the Ever Blessed Mary became the popular practice. Saints were more culturally accessible in local areas; they served as totemic identities for local places almost like the professional football teams serve as local identities for cities and geographical regions today. The rise of the Virgin Mary to a place of being a co-Redemptrix as well as the veneration of female saints meant that there was a feminine balancing of a thoroughly patriarchal church hierarchy and society. At least in the heavenly realm saintly women had broken through the "glass ceiling" and so women and men could literally look up to holy women.
What happened in the Reformation was largely due to what was happening in Europe in what is called the Enlightenment. With the break down of the feudal structure, the assertion of national identities and the re-discovery of the individual who needed to experience individual salvation instead of just a passive assimilation into a group salvation situation, the exclusive mediation of Catholic Clergy on behalf of lay people was brought into question. There were also abuses because of the corruption of too much power residing in the hands of the clergy. The Reformation notion of individual salvation empowered individuals to pray in their own languages; it empowered them to go directly to God and bypass the clergy and also by pass the intercessions of their long regarded guardian saints. With the Reformation many Protestants threw out the saints as no longer being relevant to their everyday lives.
The Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox retained the practiced relevance of the saints within their daily lives, especially the relevance of the Ever Blessed Virgin Mary, for whom is expressed a veneration second to none.
I remember growing up as a completely "saint-deprived" Baptist. I was a bit jealous of my Roman Catholic friends. They got to ride in cars with those cool figurines of St. Mary, St. Joseph and St. Christopher on the dash boards of their cars. And back in the 1950's most boys did not wear necklaces; except Catholic boys could wear a necklace with a St. Christopher medal on it. Catholic moms wanted to make sure their children had the protective intercessions of St. Christopher. Too bad, that in post-Vatican II catholicism, St. Christopher was "decanonized" as he was not a real historical saint. Yet even today St. Christopher medals persist; so one cannot discount the placebo effect of even legendary saints.
Today, with this history of the saints, we attempt to appropriate some meanings for us for All Saints' Day as people who still confess a belief in the Communion of Saints.
A 19th century Hasidic rabbi said that "People are God's language." Long before the 19th century the writer of the Gospel of John wrote, "In the beginning was the Word.....and the Word became flesh and dwelled among."
All Saints' day is about how people have been God's language to us in the very best way. God as Word did not limit Word becoming flesh just in the life of Jesus. God as Word has continually become made flesh in the lives of people who have lived, spoke and wrote the example of how to live this life best.
The most poignant human experience is the deep love of people and then losing the people whom we love through death. We lose heroes who have had a wide reaching impact upon the well being of many people. We lose people who are known only to us and a small circle of people. We can fear that the loss of people will also mean the loss of the good which their lives perpetuated for us and for our world. There is a natural human reaction to fear the loss of the legacy of goodness and greatness. Just as in sports and in every area of life there is a human tendency to vote people into halls of fame, the communion of saints is a hall of fame that perhaps has been the proto-type of all halls of fame. The reason that there are halls of fame is because we want to preserve the record of the highest standards.
The first persons to enter the Christian Hall of fame after Jesus were the early martyrs. Deacon St. Stephen and James, the Just of Jerusalem and brother of the Lord. The martyrs became saints through the witness of their lives when they chose identity with Jesus rather than denying him in public. The first New Testament writing was the first letter of Paul to a church in Thessalonica. In this age the Christians felt so threatened that they really believed that the end of world could happen at anytime. Paul wrote to the members of the church who worried about their loved ones who had died before the return of the Lord.
In the history of the church, as it became clear that the world was not ending, Christians had to accept that they would be around and that they needed view their mission as no longer being preparation for the end the world as they knew it; they had to prepare to settle in for the very long run. The mission had to become institutions for the perpetuation of the message of the Gospel. The Hall of Fame of Christian saints represents the success of the institutionalization of the Gospel. The Christian Hall of Fame grew because Time did not end and the number of Christians grew and the number of heroic Christians grew. The Communion of Saints is like long term banking account; the more members who have entered it the more the benefits have accrued. The Communion of Saints is like a standing Endowment Fund for all Christian of the future. The witness of their lives are gifts to us which keep on giving. Their lives are worthy to remember because we as human beings only advance in excellence when we follow our highest insights. The saints are those who have given us examples in their lives of highest ideals.
One of the things which happened in Christian practice is what I might call a pride of eternal life and a resurrection pride resulting in a discounting of the grief that occurs because of the experience of death. It's almost as if someone mourns too long or too profoundly that one is viewed as one who does not have the appropriate amount of faith in the resurrection and in eternal life. Christians have often regarded themselves as being superior to those in other cultures who they saw to be practicing ancestor worship and even treating their ancestors as those who still lingered upon this earth.
I would suggest that both the resurrection of Christ and the veneration of the saints is related to the human experience of grief. I believe that the post-resurrection appearances of Christ to certain disciples were connected to the profound grief and loss which his friends experienced at his death. I do not believe his disciples were prepared for his death; I think that what they had experienced of Jesus made them believe that he was deathless. So when Jesus died, it caught them off guard. They lived in shocked disbelief about his death. With the death of Jesus would the values of the life of Jesus also die? The death of Jesus was so profound that the deep grief was answered with the power of God to give Jesus an afterlife in the life of his friends. And Jesus reappeared to his disciples to teach this world about the fact that death was a transition to another kind of life.
The Risen Christ was born into the lives of many people in many times and places. Jesus instantiated the life of God for humanity in first century Palestine. But the Risen Christ has been made available in the lives of people throughout the world. The life of Christ has been lived very well in the lives of the saints and so the life of Christ became more accessible to people who have lived after Jesus in different times. With the life of the saints we celebrate the fact that the life of the Risen Christ has become more diverse than just the life of Jesus of Nazareth in his thirty plus years upon earth.
I think it is wrong to divide the family of Christ in thinking that the saints would promote themselves over Christ, or to think that Jesus would be jealous of how people relate to the good lives of the saints. It is very logical to believe that because the church has remained for such a long time that saintliness is one of the reason for the staying power of the church. The church has remained for so long because the Risen Christ has significantly inspired people to live saintly lives.
It is very natural for us to celebrate saintly lives for several reasons. First, it allows us to acknowledge that significance of their lives. It allow us to be honest about our grief at the loss of the lives of people who have touched our lives with the very best witness. It is correct and necessary for us to celebrate the lives of saints as a way to practice the faith of the resurrection. You are alive here and now, and I feel completely confident in asking you to pray for me early and often. If we believe in the continuing life of the saints and the significant departed souls of our own lives, why would we treat them as dead and insignificant by avoiding to ask them to pray for us. The saints and the holy dear people are not people who compete with our devotion to Christ; they are gifts of God to us to help us in our love and devotion of God.
But finally, we cannot let all holiness and godliness remain contained in Jesus and the saints; the reason that we have the cloud of witnesses of the saints is so that we ourselves might progress in being saintly as well. Sainthood, or holiness is not something Jesus kept to himself. It is not something that is limited to the official saints of the Church; holiness is how you and I respond to the life of God in our lives. And no one can be a saint like you can. Only you can be the saint given the uniqueness of your life circumstances. And there are people who need us to be saints for them in making the life of Risen Christ known again in our world.
Today, let us be thankful that the Most High Saint Jesus, shared saintliness with all people through the gift of the Holy Spirit. Let us be thankful for the saints who have taken the gift of holiness of Jesus and made it evident in their lives as a blessed witness to us. And finally, let us receive the gift of holiness in our lives as we endeavor to allow the Risen Christ to be known in and through us by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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