Text: Revelation 7: 9 – 17; Matthew 5: 1 – 12
All Saints Sunday is fast becoming one of my favorite days in the church year. If for no other reason, All Saints serves as an important marker in time for all of us in the church. Time past, yes…as we remember all the blessed Saints who have gone before us, that ‘Great Cloud of Witnesses’ who show up at every family reunion. But also time present, as we are reminded that in order to be a saint…one doesn’t have to be deceased. We’ll come back to that one in a minute. First, I want to focus on the past.
I
once heard it said, that to remember the past is
always in some measure to encounter ourselves…in other people at other
times. The last time Pastor Jim and I
were in
What was so memorable to me, aside from the sheer size and incredible mastery of the techniques used to create the images…was the vast array of humanity displayed. People from all walks of life…different nationalities, ages, occupations, vocations…both from the past as well as from the present…were all there for the viewing. Some I recognized right away…Peter and Paul… Joseph…Joan of Arc…Mary Magdalene…Saint Francis…Mother Teresa (next to the children, she was among the shortest!). Yet others, I didn’t have a clue. I later learned that twelve of the 136 figures were included by the artist as ‘anonymous and future saints’…many of whom were depicted as children.
The
thing about each saint was, well…they looked so normal. As if they could
have walked right off of the streets here in
Every
single person, it appeared to me, was being drawn to the light in such a way
that there was no mistaking their love for Jesus. Every saint radiated with the love of
Christ…which brings me to a really good question for us today: ‘how does
one become a Saint?’
According
to Roman Catholic tradition, there are two things necessary for sainthood:
1)
proof of a
good and pious life;
2) confirmed by evidence of at
least 3 miracles after the person’s death.
Then,
there are the Beatitudes. It is no
mistake that they are read every year on All Saints’ Day: blessed are the poor in spirit, those
who mourn, those who are meek, peacemakers
who are persecuted for righteousness sake…for theirs is the Kingdom of
heaven. Now I ask you, who could
compose a list of more ‘saintly’ virtues, or a list of more impossible
ones? Like the ten
commandments, the beatitudes confront us with an ideal vision…God’s
vision…of who we can be. Most of us read them like paragraphs of a
job description and decide that it is even futile to apply.
The
truth is, many of us tend to believe that ‘sainthood’
is something we can achieve if we do
the Ten Commandments, or if we do the
Beatitudes. The reality is quite
different. The reality is that all
of us who have been baptized are already saints…because all it takes to “be
a saint” is to belong to God. It is
not a matter of being or doing good or even working three miracles that can be
documented by the
As
I stood there in that magnificent cathedral…it began to dawn on me what the
artist was trying to say through The Communion of Saints tapestries. Generally speaking, those whom we call
‘saints’…were just ordinary people like you and me. They had their good days and they had their
bad…but by in large, what distinguished them as saints among us was not their
goodness. What distinguished them was
their undeniable, extravagant, all-encompassing love of God. Everything about them radiated…with the love
of Christ. Which
means, by the way, that none of us can ever shrug our shoulders and
say…sainthood is beyond our reach.
The
truth is, some of the most saintly people I have ever met, were not those who
lives mirrored the rich and the famous.
On the contrary, they were people…who lives often took a turn for the
worse but whose trust in God never once wavered. People like Clay Clark, Elaine Murphy, and
Pastor Lois Wooden (all members of the Resurrection family who passed into life
eternal this year)…all saints by virtue of their baptism into Christ…yet,
remembered by the love that they showered on each one of us who knew them.
On
All Saints’ Day, we in the church make the bold claim that all of these saints
are our relatives. We have the same
blood coursing through our veins…Christ’s blood…and the same light we see
shining in them…shines in us, too.
All
Saint’s Day serves then to remind us that once a person is baptized, they do
indeed belong to God. And all that
remains to be seen…is what they will do about it. Just remember that one does not have to be
famous, or perfect, or deceased to be a saint.
You just have to be you…the one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-repeated human
being that God created you to be…to love
as you are loved, to throw your arms
around the world, to shine like the
son.
And
the most amazing part about all of this is the realization that we do not have
to do this all by ourselves. We have
all this company…the saints we can see sitting here today…and those whom we
can’t…all cheering us on and shouting themselves hoarse with encouragement. Because they know all too well…that we are a part of them…and they are a part of us…all knit together in
the one communion of saints. Bound together…by the love of God. Amen