A SERMON ON THE SAINTS

November has always felt to me like the home-stretch of the year. The holidays come, and with them an acceleration of activities that makes the time feel like a crescendo of gatherings and gifts. The holidays are a kind of prize at the end of the slog of the year, a dessert after eating the vegetables of May through October. Thanksgiving leads to Christmas, and Christmas gives way to New Year’s Eve. But since childhood, New Year’s Day has always come with a sense of disappointment. I’ve never been sure what, exactly, we were supposed to be celebrating. The number would change on the calendar, which would make it difficult for awhile when dating homework assignments or signing checks. Another round of the familiar things would come. I would get marginally older. But where was the meaning? To what end, what conclusion, were we keeping careful track of the stacking up of year on year? Why, after so much festivity did I suddenly feel cut off, disappointed, resigned to start trudging through another year?

It took a long time to learn that I was asking a question the calendar couldn’t answer. Because the truth was that the turning over of the year from December to January wasn’t couched in anything significant. There was no power and no purpose in that time. But it got more difficult. The older I got, the more I started having to say goodbye to people along the way as they passed from this life into the next. Death became more and more real with each passing year. 

It was then that the counting of the calendar seemed more ironic and a little tragic. We were counting upwards year to year, and that gave us a sense of progress. Yet the experience of time was showing itself more and more to be a countdown to the days I would witness the final moments of loved ones and then, one day, face my own last hour as well. It felt like a joke: time was progressing yet leaving me with less and less. Sure, there was the hope of heaven, in my mind kind of like the holidays--a prize at the end of living--the world that would start when this world finally breathed out its last.

But then a new kind of time was revealed in life of the Church. I remember the first time I saw an Ordo Calendar. I was overwhelmed by how many holidays there were. I thought it was almost silly that by far the majority of the year was taken up by celebrations, commemorations, fasts, and observances. Almost no days seemed “normal.” But through slow familiarity, the truth behind that sense of time became clearer. Time began in Christ its creator, so why shouldn’t the year begin with the announcement of His birth? Time was redeemed by Christ its savior, so why shouldn’t  the years be the years of our Lord, illuminated by the Incarnation and Epiphany? Time awaits its resurrection like all things, so why shouldn’t it also experience the death of Lent and Good Friday, and rejoice with all Creation at Easter? Time, like me, is counting down to experience death. But time, like me, is through the real presence of the risen Lord, is starting to experience its Resurrection as eternity. Christ is Lord of time. But the time of the Church His Body moves out beyond the sacred events of His life into celebrations of the lives of those who entered into life through Him. Holidays were established by God to remember the mighty deeds He had done. But for Christians that means celebrating the life of our Lord Himself and the life of the Church through whom He continues to do His mighty works.

So today we celebrate the Feast of All Saints. It is the holy day of the calendar during which we rejoice in the lives of those who became by the grace of God living icons of the Kingdom. From the Scriptures we come to know that God enjoys playing with a team, that He is constantly building a people for Himself, that His glory is not threatened by elevating above the angels even the humble creature that is humanity. The saints are those who are given the grace of God to embody the Resurrection in a striking and particular way, who inspire us to holiness and faithfulness, and who communicate to us objective signs of the grace of God that is at work in the world through His Church. 

The saints are those about whom our Lord speaks in His Sermon on the Mount when He speaks of those who are blessed. Jesus declares a blessing on the poor in spirit, on those that mourn, and the meek. He blesses those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, and those who are the merciful. Blessed are the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake. This is the character of those who testify in word and deed to the Kingdom of God that is forever. They are blessed, and all those who attain to the Kingdom receive  this blessing from Christ. For some, the Church names as saints--they are those in whom God has given us reason to trust for an example to follow into His Kingdom.

But the saints, in this way, teach us that there is no Christian notion of glory that is not at the same time a Christian confession of the Cross. Christ the victorious is Christ the crucified--and the same goes for all of His holy ones. The making of the saint is in the taking up of our crosses to follow Christ. The mournful, the meek, the hunger for righteousness, the purity of heart, the maker of peace--these are facets of the life that dies to satisfaction with the dying world and looks for a home beneath it, above it, and beyond it. And the saints teach us that the vocation to holiness comes to all regardless of their status or the conditions of their birth or place of origin. Saints have been made out of kings and the poorest of the poor. Saints have been teachers and doctors, and even of the Roman centurions who were enemies of Christ.

It is significant in our time to remember the saints because we live in a culture that has adopted the habit of segregating the generations. When this happens, we are cut off from our history as told by the people who lived it, and are left with a diminished sense of the meaning of past events. We do this as a way of escaping our obligation to the past, of having to be responsible to those who have gone before us. We also do this as a way of evading the sense that like those who have gone before us we too will one day have to hand everything over to the next generation, and thus have a responsibility to steward and create with integrity. 

But there is no such thing as a people without an obligation to those before and after us. God is revealed through His people. And so in the life of the church, the testimony of the saints to the presence of God and His Kingdom in this world, their wisdom gained through hard experience, is of the utmost value to us and the wealth of theology and liturgy we have and enjoy now we have received as the gift of God through His saints.

The Scriptures attest to the common calling of all to become saints. To the extent that we have surrendered to the grace of God by dying to sin and to self and have put on the new man that is Christ, we have begun to live the blessed life of the saint and we have begun to experience heaven. We pray today that God would be glorified in His saints, and that we would be given grace to follow them into the Kingdom. We pray for the grace to follow them even as they follow Christ. They show us that the call to take up our cross is serious, and seriously to be obeyed. But they show us that the life of taking up the cross is one that can be lived, one that is possible if, like them we will say yes to Christ. And they are the witnesses who have gone before us and who now surround us and join to commune here with us this night in the Eucharist. They are what we are called to become: the ones who live in the eternal time of the Kingdom. As a teacher once encouraged me: “be a saint, what else is there?”