For All the Saints

Today, you’ll hear us reading out the names of people close to this community who have died since our last All Saints’ Day, of 2008. All the names that came that people were sure to let the staff know. And the ones you add today.

And let me tell you something about putting together that list. I sat there and saw it as Cecilia was writing it up, and I looked at it with the other staff to try to make sure no name we’d known about was left off. And I looked over it in the draft of the bulletin before it went to print.

And somehow in that whole process, I don’t remember any point where we pulled out a checklist of moral and religious criteria to check off to make sure each person wasn’t just dead but was a saint. Because this is All Saints’ Day, right?

There was no checking on their religious affiliation, no checking on their life ledger of what deeds were on the “good” side and what were on the “bad” side, no church council or vestry vote, no checking of whether people had even been baptized churchgoers, before we could safely put them onto the list for All Saints’ Day.

Nope. Wasn’t there. And I don’t think it was that we were so overworked there was no time for it, which is a good reason for a lot of things these days. If we’d had days to sit with that list, somehow I just don’t think that religious checklist would have been part of it.

Which might seem like I’m making a joke, but I’m not.

This is All Saints’ Day. And while it’s had quite a wooly history throughout the church’s era of trying to get things right and usually getting them wrong, and while there was All Saints’ Day for the people that religious authorities decided were saints and there was All Souls Day for the people the religious authorities hadn’t even known, the usual thinking these days in Anglican theology is that All Saints is All Souls.

Not that there aren’t more famous saints whom we like to remember, like St. Francis, whom we had a lovely celebration for recently. These people were striking examples who lived in such a way as to throw a sharp light on the questions of our own lives, that’s why they are affecting for us, and some of them do seem to have had a more revealed understanding of what God is like. That’s really valuable in our spiritual journeys.

But the point is not that they’re saints because they were perfect in life and love and faith. The point is that they were real in wrestling with life and love and faith. There are plenty of hairy stories about most of the saints, and for every hairy story we know, there are probably dozens we don’t.

These famous saints were real, and powerful in certain ways, and they affected people. And it’s funny – those are the same reasons every single name is on the list we will read today. The names of real people who were real and affecting for this community or someone in this community.

But here’s the hitch. Today we name those who have died, because we’re human, and that separation is powerful and usually pretty painful for us, though not always. But I have to ask – why stop at that line? Why come up to the edge of life and point over it and say the saints are over there? It doesn’t make sense. The famous saints we remember, and the less famous ones we knew ourselves, did what they did when they were alive.

That’s what this gritty Gospel story is about – with Mary and Martha and Lazarus. And it is gritty – both emotionally and physically. But the point, in all its grittiness, isn’t an ending, the point is a beginning. It’s not about how anyone in the story dies, it’s about how they’re all living. And interestingly, how they live starts with feelings of anger and hopelessness – this story is a lot more about anger than we usually sanitize it: Mary angry at Jesus, and then Jesus just angry. We famously translate that brief phrase “Jesus wept” and give it a sentimentality, but the Greek there is quite clearly more about Jesus being angry, they’re angry tears, an angry compassion. Angry at what, I don’t know, maybe he was just plain angry at death and maybe even angry at God. But then, maybe because they go ahead and have that anger, the story is also about that reality of death not being what determines life. The stories of everyone in that scene continue to unfold.

Which suddenly shines the light right here on everyone in this room, and those people who are alive and affect us right now.

That’s not to take away from the power of the names we will read and those you might add. But along with that, it is to say that with saints and the souls, we’re all involved in the same kind of story of, not how we die, but how we live.

You’re part of the household of God, each and every person here. You’re in. Done. Being part of the household of God was the only qualifying criterion that the great saints had, really. They were God’s, and they were in the world. And then they looked those two things in the eye.

Which means the same “entry qualification” that applied to the famous saints of God applies to us. We’ve all got the same ticket; it looks no different from theirs. And it’s already been punched for all of us. It’s not “the holy ones” and us, “them and us.” It’s all of us. All trying to do the same things, wrestling with the challenges of life and faith and bodies and humanness, because it’s mostly on that level that God works things out. All of us getting it wrong sometimes and getting it right sometimes, and I’ll bet we don’t know exactly which is which.

So right now, that dividing line between life and death understandably seems insurmountable. But at the same time, step back, widen the lens, and look at all of us, those here now and those gone before, as if we’re all side by side right here in this church.

Because I think that’s a hint of what the reading from Revelation is about. Don’t get caught in the wild images of that book of the Bible – this was a kind of literature that was absolutely meant to be read symbolically. And too many people get off on trying to make it literal, and scary.

But if it’s not meant to be read literally, it is meant to be read. And when this passage, from near the very end of the whole book, talks about a whole new creation – a whole new heaven and earth – it comes after death has been defeated. You think heaven and earth is too much to get your brain around, well, this says God digs in and makes a whole new creation – where death is gone, for good. The one thing that does more for paralyzing us humans with fear and pain, is gone – it’s not even a word, let alone a possibility.

Whoa – that’s probably too much of a stretch for our good human brains right now. So let’s just come back to this earth. I’m not asking you to take false comfort that denies pain or anger or wistfulness or even peace that you feel about somebody today.

But I wonder if that reading from Revelation is the view of sainthood that’s a little more like what God sees in this room right now – those saints you remember today, and those you see all around you.