Feast of All Saints Sermon
The occasions for faith are always before us, and to some degree, choosing faith will usually come at a cost: to be generous of possessions or generous of spirit, or even generous of hope when all the world and all that is within you is bent in despair. For many of us, the cost of faith can be a cost to our sloth: laying down the cell phone with all its addictive allure; getting up from watching Netflix, and choosing instead such basic spirituality as listening to the rainfall or watching the afternoon sun filter through the yellowing maple leaves, and doing so with a mindful attentiveness to the God who is with us.
The cost of faith is one we perpetually resist. And so the call of faith is that of steady repentance, of pivoting again and again – away from laziness, away from fear, away from selfishness – and towards the hope of God with us and towards a deliberate participation in all those things we believe God values. And in so doing (dare we even say it), towards the hope that we may actually encounter the living God, and step-by-step, year-by-year, to begin to resemble that God in ways distinctly and beautifully true of us.
This is the process by which faith is nurtured within us. But there is also wisdom in doing what we’re doing today. And that is to pause and recognize that – beyond the disciplines of faith we perceive in our lives and our spheres – there have been people of faith throughout the centuries who have heard a call far more costly than anything we’ve ever considered doing, and in hearing that call, have said, “Yes.”
It is fitting each year for us to honor these people of faith who have done much in the name of Christ, who have made manifest the Kingdom of God – changing their worlds, saving lives, forging justice – and in so doing, proclaiming to this world that the way of Jesus is no pipe-dream, but rather, the true wisdom of God and the hope of our humanity; that the Beatitudes are no spineless idealism, but the force of God among us.
For when God’s kingdom is lifted from the safe confines of “precepts in a holy book,” to become instead: food for the hungry, forgiveness for the sinner, sacrifice for another’s survival, it also becomes hope for us that we belong to something extraordinary and noble and worthy of our whole lives.
Today is All Saints Day, when every saint in the church’s history is gathered together and lifted up to be honored, to be thanked, and to be given a fresh voice to speak to us today: “Come, and join us in this way of Christ, a way that will cost you much – everything in fact – and is utterly and gloriously worthy of the cost!”
The church has celebrated this day, in one form or another, from at least the year 270. That’s when it was first recorded. But it surely it took root earlier than that.
It began as a day to remember the martyrs. And for the early Christians, the martyrs were no picturesque memory; they were the heroes of the faith. They were the firemen who rushed up the stairs of the Twin Towers to their certain death. For the first five centuries of the church’s existence, martyrdom wasn’t continuous, but it was always a legitimate threat.
So, of course, the church developed All Saints Day. The need to remember the martyrs was like the urgency we feel to build monuments, to have something to gather around, a time and space set apart to tell the stories again, lest they be forgotten. But, even more than that, the re-telling of their faith was meant to edify since – who knows? – a new wave of persecution might be just around the corner.
And so we began our litany of saints by recalling Perpetua and Felicity who were martyred together in the Roman City of Carthage, North Africa on March 7, 202. Perpetua was a young noble woman and Felicity her slave. Both were Christians, and both had recently become mothers. They were rounded up during the Severan Persecution. Perpetua’s father begged her to renounce her faith, but she would not. In the days leading up to their death, Perpetua recorded her experiences – both physical and spiritual – and her writings are amongst the earliest documented Christian writings by a woman. Not only do Perpetua and Felicity represent women of great faith, their dying together is itself a defiant affirmation of the Kingdom of God, where noblewoman and slave are equals in faith. And so their “saintliness” has the ring of authority, embodying for us what otherwise seems so naively impossible in Christ’s Beatitudes:
Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy.
There were three other martyrs in our litany: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr, and Oscar Romero.
The story of Martin Luther King, Jr. you all know. But what stands out most remarkably to me is how his voice – his written and spoken words – continues to ring out with such true Christian authority and hope, the hallmarks of a true prophet. Everything about it resonates with the compelling and convicting timbre of the force of God’s redemptive justice.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor and theologian who rejected the pressure to endorse Nazi ideology. Though he could have found safe haven in Britain or the United States, he chose instead to return to Germany, knowing full well how dangerous it would be for him. And why did he return? Because he was German, and his perceived duty of faith required him to live out his faith in that culture in which he’d been born and raised. Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis shortly before the end of the war.
When Oscar Romero was elevated as archbishop of El Salvador in the 1970s, he had been something of a pet amongst the ruling oligarchy. They deemed him a safe, obedient churchman who would help maintain the status quo of El Salvador’s deeply unjust society – and to do so with blessing of the church. But no sooner had he been made Archbishop, then the Kingdom of God blossomed within him. The scriptures’ preferential option for the poor became his guiding light and he preached God’s justice with authority and courage and love, now vindicating Christ’s status quo: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of heaven.” And for his faith, gunmen burst into a church while he was celebrating the Holy Eucharist. As he lifted high the body and blood of Christ, they shot and killed him at the altar, his own blood now mingling with the sacrificial blood of Christ.
And through these and all martyrs we proclaim with Christ, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
We also named Dorothy Day in our litany. A former communist and social activist, she converted to Catholicism in the late 1920s, compelled by her encounter with the deep love and holiness of God. During the Great Depression she founded the Catholic Worker movement, a gospel-based advocacy for laborers and the poor. This led to the creation of Hospitality Houses where the destitute and unemployed could live in safe communities. Today over 100 such Hospitality Houses continue to flourish around the world, including Guadalupe House in Tacoma, where our own youth group has volunteered in recent years.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.”
Toyohiko Kagawa, in early 20th century Japan, was of the same ilk. He lived in the slums of Kobe as a missionary, social worker and sociologist, advocating for the destitute and vulnerable. As World War II was looming he organized the National Anti-War League and was regularly imprisoned for his attempts to find a path of peace between Japan and China and the United States. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature twice, and also twice for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1946 he dared to stand before Emperor Hirohito and quote Christ’s words, “’Whosoever will be great among you…shall be the servant of all.’ A ruler’s sovereignty, Your Majesty, is in the hearts of the people. Only by service to others can a man, or nation, be godlike.”
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”
Julian of Norwich was none of these things. She spent her entire adult life sequestered in a single convent cell in 15th century Norwich, England. And there she prayed and was soon forgotten by history, until late in the nineteenth century when her spiritual writings of mystical visions were rediscovered and, oh, what a spiritual giant she is. She perceives the substance of the mystery of Christ like few have done, before or since – a Christ both transcendent and immanent. On a personal note, I remember reading her once, and gasping audibly by what I was discovering of Christ through her.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”
The official saints of the church number in the thousands – those whose stories have been recorded and passed down from generation to generation. But for every “official saint” there are surely a thousand forgotten saints – those people of faith, in their time and place from whom a call of grace was asked of them, and they said, “yes,” by faith.
Last week I visited the grave of an ancestor of mine, the Rev. Isaac Stelle. I know little of his story, but that he was a pastor of a church during the Revolutionary War, whose church was burned down by the British because, in it, they were caring for wounded soldiers.
On the same trip, at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., I heard the story of a Jewish woman who – as a child with her mother – survived the war because a devout Catholic neighbor took them in and hid them. And not only did she hide them – as one devout woman honoring the orthodox faith of her neighbor – she learned what she needed to do to prepare only Kosher meals for them in her home.
“My mother never ate a non-Kosher meal in her entire life,” her daughter recalled. “And after the war, we went back to thank that woman, and she said, ‘Go – never come back here again; never write me. My neighbors would not understand.’” Her risk of faith remained a threat for the rest of her life.
The history of the church is a complex one. For all the good the church has done, for all the ways the institution of the church has preserved a structure and heritage for each successive generation to inherit, the church has also been highly compromised – guilty of much hypocrisy and collaboration with the worst of systemic human depravity.
But in each generation, a thousand times over, in churches faithful and churches sinful, saints have risen who have carried the gospel with integrity and love … and at great cost. They have brought healing and hope to a hopeless, war-torn world. And they have become for us, in this day and this world, beacons of the gospel we too must carry.