All
Saints Day 2016
Rev.
Adam T. Trambley
November
6, 2016, St. John’s Sharon
Today is
All Saints Day. At least, today is the
day we celebrate All Saints Day together in church. All Saints Day was actually the day after
Halloween, and Halloween is on all of our calendars, so we know when that is. Of
course, really, that is a bit backwards.
Halloween is really the day before All Saints Day. Or All Hallow’s Eve is the night before the
day we celebrate All Hallows – All the Holy ones – All the Saints.
At one
point, the church celebrated a three-day festival around the feast of All
Saints.
The core
was celebrating the saints of the church who had made choices for God in clear
and intentional ways that won them the crown of eternal glory. Some of these saints we can name – they are
the apostles and martyrs and evangelists whom we also celebrate with their own
feast days. But some of the saints are
people from all walks of life who chose to live their lives in their particular
circumstances for the glory and praise of Jesus. Most of their names and what they did are
unknown to us. Their legacy of love and
obedience and prayer, however, is not lost to us or to the Body of Christ. Traditionally on All Saints Day we celebrated
these saints.
The day
before All Saints Day, All Hallow’s Eve, was a different sort of celebration
where people dressed up to mock death.
While there was a pagan festival during that time, the Christians, like
they always have, took the excuse to party but changed the focus. Recognizing that the saints of God triumphed
through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Christians dressed up and thumbed
their noses at death. This focus of
dressing up like death with laughter to show that we aren’t afraid is not the
same as today’s focus on things that make us afraid. Christians know we don’t need to be afraid,
because Jesus has overcome anything that could trouble us, even death. As our Ephesians reading says this morning, God
seated Jesus at his right hand in
the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion,
and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to
come. And he has put all things under his feet.
The third day of this traditional commemoration
is November 2, known as the feast of All Souls. The focus of All Souls day has
been for those people who weren’t necessarily successful saints in their
lifetime, but who are part of God’s people.
What do I mean by people who weren’t necessarily successful saints? Well, let’s face it. A lot of us and a lot of our loved ones
really haven’t lived our lives for God all of the time. People get afraid. People get distracted. People get greedy, or proud, or envious, or
lazy or any number of other things that draw our wills away from doing God’s
will in our lives. The great witness of
the church is that weak people who make all sorts of mistakes and fall short
again and again are still part of the great people of God. They are destined for an eternal inheritance
and rise in glory at the last day. But
the church in its wisdom also said there is a difference between everyday
saints whose lives on earth already shone forth with the love and glory of God
and all the souls that are longing for that glory and falling short. In the Roman Catholic Church, which was THE
Church until the 1500’s, there was a doctrine of purgatory where these not
quite successful saints who died had to wait until they had worked off the punishment
of their sins. People on earth could pray for them on All Souls and other days
to help them along. The Episcopal Church
doesn’t believe in purgatory or praying away people’s punishment after death.
But we do recognize that there is a place for all of us between our deaths and
our eventual resurrection on the last day.
Scripture calls this place paradise, and we believe it to be a place of
blessed rest with our loved ones and our Lord Jesus. Then, at the last day, we rise to new bodies
and new life. So Halloween, All Saints
and All Souls were the traditional church holidays.
In the Episcopal Church today, how we celebrate
is a bit different. American Halloween
has taken on a life of its own that is not quite traditional church Halloween. Although a passing resemblance remains, dressing
in hyper-sexualized costumes while gorging on candy and watching slasher films
is not really the same as dressing as ghost, making obscene gestures at death
and devil, and singing songs of praise to the risen Lord Jesus. All Saints and All Souls have been merged
into our one Sunday service where we celebrate the great saints and the
everyday saints, while also remembering our loved ones who may have been
celebrated on either All Saints Day or on All Souls Day in the past.
Our goal in our celebration, however, remains
very much the same. We are here to
celebrate our part in this great communion of saints, living and deceased, and to
move all of us closer to that great heavenly kingdom of our risen Lord. We do that both for ourselves and for others.
We help ourselves move more fully into the
fullness of the great communion of saints in a couple of ways. First, our very praise lifts us up into a
different kind of spiritual space. We
might say we move into a different head space, but it is more than just a
change in attitude. In a very real way,
our praises can give us a change in altitude.
Instead of being overwhelmed by the daily grind, we are lifting our
hearts and minds to God’s heavenly throne room where the saints and angels sing
their songs of joy, where billows of incense fill the sanctuary and nobody has
to cough, where heavenly voices thunder and we are moved so powerfully that
even when we come back down we are still half there. Our praises lift us up to God so that when we
come down we bring that bit of heaven with us like an earworm that just keeps
repeating in our heads. When we finish
today with For All the Saints, I know I’m going to be there, and that
hymn will be playing in my head all week, helping me stay more aware of being
part of God’s kingdom than I otherwise would.
Specifically, on All Saints, our praises are
focused on lifting us to God’s heavenly throne room in a way that makes us
aware of all our brothers and sisters around us. So often we can feel isolated or alone when
we try to do the right thing. Or maybe
we feel so constrained by the needs and opinions of those around us that we get
all turned around. But All Saints Day
lets us know that there are many men and women of deep faith and courage who
have been where we have been and persevered.
That even when we feel alone, others are walking with us and supporting
us along the way. That we can trust God
to make a way for us because we see that he has already made a way for
others.
These saints are people we can learn about and
emulate. Some saints are around us in
the reredos or the stained glass windows.
But most of us aren’t Jewish rabbis like Paul who end up in a Roman
prison while evangelizing. There are,
however, saints who were teachers and nurses and students and parents and business
people, and whatever we are. Whether we
look in books of saints or on google or on sites like Lent Madness, we can find
saints who speak to our situations and we can learn from their examples.
We also help others on All Saints, because we are
part of the great communion of saints ourselves. We read what can seem like a very long list
of names of our deceased loved ones today as one way to pray for them. We don’t believe that they are suffering
somewhere, but lifting them before God can only be helpful to them as they prepare
with us for the final day of resurrection.
We also help our brothers and sisters who are
struggling alongside us in this life, too.
Celebrating All Saints Day together with them offers them all the
benefits we seek for ourselves on a day like this. They get to join in praise with us and lift
themselves to God. They get to be
encouraged by us as they go through their own walk of faith and to feel the
reality of the Communion of Saints by our presence. Our celebration and focus on the saints, as
well as the resources of our church community, offers them opportunities to
learn about the various saints of the past that they can model their own lives
upon.
But neither those around us nor we ourselves nor
those who have already passed on are able to do this by ourselves. We call this feast ALL Saints for a
reason. We all are a part of it, and our
participation lifts up others just as their past, present and future participation
will lift us up. We have all been new to
faith at one time and just beginning to enter into this great household of
God. Someday, we will all be names on
the All Saints Prayer list to others, including probably to others who don’t even
know who we were, but they will pray for us anyway.
Through it all, this great communion of all the
saints that we are a part of is the Body of Christ, and we look to Jesus as our
head. He is the one who has risen from
the dead and won new life for us. He is
the one who gave us his Holy Spirit as a pledge of our inheritance into eternal
life as the sons and daughters of God.
He is the one to whom all the saints sing “Alleluia, Alleluia!” He is the one that makes us part of his great
communion of All Saints, and this is the day to celebrate.
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