Sermon, All Saints 2012

Today we celebrate the Feast of All Saints.  This Feast celebrates and remembers those people who lived as part of the Church, as part of the Body of Christ, and who were changed in such a way as to give them new life.  But the world often killed them for their faith.  Burned, stoned, thrown from buildings or ground by the teeth of wild beasts, these people died in the hope of the resurrection.

The Church has a long history with the saints.  One underlying belief in saintly devotion is that they are close to God through their holiness and accessible to us because of their humanity.  As the Church grew and her members persecuted, people began to commemorate those who were martyred for their faith.  Those martyrs were declared saints by the living members of the Body of Christ.  The term “saint” was eventually expanded to include those who had lived lives of extreme holiness.  This opened the door for people like Antony, Athanasius, Chrysostom and, in our own time, Mother Teresa, to be honored as saints.

Sometime in the 10^th Century it became customary to set aside another day for the Church to remember and honor the vast body of faithful Christians.  This faithful body, unknown and unnumbered, often including family and friends, were remembered by those still living in this world.  This day came to be celebrated as the Feast of All Faithful Departed.

Today we celebrate both All Saints and All Faithful Departed.  We remember and uphold the blessed saints for their virtuous and godly living.  And we remember and uphold all faithful departed who, as the hymn says, were folk just like me.

The saints were also folk just like me because nobody is born holier than anyone else.  Nobody is born with a virtuous and godly living gene.  They and we have to work at it.  But we all have the same opportunity to live virtuous and godly lives.  Because of that, our theology tells us that, as members of the Church, we are all saints of God.  We are part of that great cloud of witnesses, the whole family of God, past, present and future.  The communion of saints is made up of those whom we love and those whom we hurt, bound together in Christ by sacrament, prayer and praise.

There are a couple of things I want to touch on.  The first is that the communion of saints is the whole family of God – those whom we love and those whom we hurt.  This is important for us to remember.  The family of God isn’t just made up of people we love, people of like minds, people we get along with.  The communion of saints is also made up of those people whom we hurt.

It would be easy to say, “those who hurt us.”  But what that would do, I think, is to give us extra justification for claiming we are innocent victims.  It would allow us to see ourselves as always righteous, always innocent, always right and always oppressed.

But the fact of the matter is that we all sin.  We all make mistakes.  We all hurt people, either intentionally or unintentionally.  Whether through our own sense of entitlement, telling racist jokes, treating people without respect, or simply through our thoughtlessness, we can and do hurt people.  And those people whom we hurt are part of the communion of saints.

How much better would things be if we realized that the person we were hurting was a saint of God?

The second thing is that we are bound together by sacrament, especially the sacrament of Holy Communion.  This celebration, this meal, is a foretaste of that heavenly banquet of which we look to partake in the blessed hope of the resurrection.  It is the time in the service when we are most visibly surround by the presence of God, angels and saints.

But even though Communion is a communal act, we often treat it as a solitary experience.  We come to the rail immersed in our own thoughts and prayers looking to have an individual experience of Christ through the reception of his body and blood.

But a banquet is not a solitary experience.  In this banquet we are surrounded by that great cloud of witnesses.  In this banquet we partake of that heavenly food in communion with saints, angels, all faithful departed, all faithful living, and all faithful yet to come.  And yet, at this great feast, where this place becomes a thin place and the physical and spiritual touch, we are so bold as to think this is an individual act?

In recognition of the Feast of All Saints, the Feast of All Faithful Departed, the sacrament of Holy Communion of which we are about to partake, and the bond we all have in the Body of Christ through our Baptism, I am going to make a suggestion.  I suggest that we attempt to make Holy Communion the communal act that it is through a simple act that moves us from a solitary act of reception to a place that binds us together.

Today (and just for today – we don’t have to continue if you choose not to) I would ask that you receive the Body of Christ in your right hand, and with your left hand reach over, break the chains of solitude and gently rest your left hand on the shoulder of your neighbor, creating a physical bond of communion.

I know . . . it’s not normal, it’s uncomfortable, and we’ve never done it that way before.  But, just for today, let’s experience Communion in a way that physically represents our bond together in the communion of saints, in the unity of Christ.

The saints of old gave their lives for the Church.  Some were fed to the beasts and some were killed by fierce wild priests.  The saints continue to live among us in the lives of those who exhibit godly and spiritual virtuousness.  The saints will continue to live on in the life of the Church long after we ourselves are gone.  And the lives of the everyday faithful and the Faithful Departed remind us that we are all bound together in the life, death and resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

May this Feast of All Saints open your eyes to the saints of God working in the world around us, and may you remember that we are all bound together in Christ – past, present and future.

Amen.