A Sermon preached on November 6, 2022, at St. Augustine’s and St. Christoph
Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18, Ephesians 1.11-23, Luke 6:20-31
Today we are celebrating the feasts of All Saints and All Souls, transferred from Nov. 1st and 2nd. Although we Anglicans are also a church of the Reformation, we kept the feast of All Saints in our calendar, though not - until it returned to our prayer books in the 1970s - All Souls, with its focus on the faithful departed.
Who or what are the saints? A good resource to go to is Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. Now he’s not here personally, he is with the saints, but we have the Collect for All Saints that he composed for the 1549 Prayer Book. This is the original version:
“ALMIGHTY God, which hast knit together thy elect in one Communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of thy son Christ our Lord; grant us grace so to follow thy holy Saints in all virtues, and godly living, that we may come to those unspeakable joys, which thou hast prepared for all them that unfeignedly love thee; through Jesus Christ.”
Still very similar to today’s prayer: the holy saints have become blessed saints; the unspeakable joys are now ineffable joys – both words mean inexpressible; and unfeignedly love has turned into truly love. But what does it say about the Anglican theology of saints and sainthood?
First that the saints are the elect, the chosen, “knit together” in one Communion and fellowship, which is Christ’s “mystical Body.” That mystical body is the Church, as we heard in the Letter to the Ephesians: “And he (God) has put all things under his (Jesus’) feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.” (Ephesians 1:22-23) By church we don’t mean St. Augustine’s church, nor the Episcopal Church, nor even the Anglican Communion. We mean the whole universal Church, the one that transcends not only all our human, denominational boundaries, but also time itself. It is our gracious God who “knits us together” and we become the elect, we become saints when we are baptized into Christ, and “marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit.” (Ephesians 1:13) What sets us apart and makes us holy is Christ’s. And we remain saints by staying in communion and fellowship with one another, by sharing in Christ’s body and blood. That communion or fellowship is eternal, for it includes those gone before and yet to come.
But while we as Anglicans believe that everyone who is baptized and believes is a saint, we also recognize that there are those in whom the image and holiness of Christ is even more richly manifested. These we are the ones we label “St. so-and-so.” These are the ones that Cranmer wants us to follow as examples “in all virtues, and godly living.” To follow them means to follow their journey of becoming, by grace and with the help of the Holy Spirit, what God is by nature: holy and perfect. And so when we honour the saints, we honour the One – God - who makes them holy.
The sermon on the plain from Luke’s Gospels with its blessings and woes has some very challenging examples for virtues and godly living, but also things that many of the named saints have experienced: voluntary poverty, hunger through fasting and solidarity, sadness at the state of the world, and often hatred, ridicule and persecution. They did not resist arrest or fight against violence. St. Martin cut his cloak in two, to give half to a beggar clad only in rags in the depth of winter. They really did pray for those who abused them, even for those who killed them … as did Christ on the Cross.
We do not always have to go quite so far. There is some deliberate hyperbole in Jesus’ list. But still, if we truly want to follow him and the holy and blessed saints, we cannot keep all our riches, and we are relatively rich, to ourselves. We must share of our abundance. We cannot ignore the poor and the hungry and those who weep and those who are persecuted and attacked. We cannot say: Germany first or America first or Italy first or Britain first. There are no first or second class people for a Christian, only children of God and a special responsibility for those who are in need. And while Jesus’ teaching to turn the other cheek, to give to everyone who begs from you, and to not ask for your goods back again may sound illusory and naïve, at the core of that godly living is the recognition of the need to break the human cycles of violence and revenge, of envy and hatred, of greed and selfishness. They are destructive and dangerous and lead us away from the kingdom of God. “Do to others as you would have them do to you,” always remembering that Christ is in the other.
Finally, the saints – we - are those who are heirs to God’s promise of “those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you.” We heard about this in all three readings:
In Daniel (7:18) “… the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom for ever—for ever and ever."
In Ephesians (1:11): “In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined … so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory.”
And in Luke (6:20) simply “Yours is the kingdom of God,” which is not just a promise, but also a mandate. The Greek and Aramaic word translated as kingdom “refers to the activity of the king himself, and his exercise of sovereign power. The idea might better be conveyed in English by an expression such as kingship, rule, or sovereignty.”[1] Yours is the sovereignty of God – you are under God’s protection, now and forever, and you have God’s sovereignty to act as God would and as Jesus did.
The feast of All Saints reminds us of our own “sainthood” given to us in baptism, which we will recall in a moment when we renew our baptismal vows. The feast of All Saints calls to mind Christ’s work among all our siblings who have departed this life in holiness and yet are still bound to us in fellowship. And the feast of All Saints serves as an invitation to us as individuals and a as the church supposedly “filled with Christ” to go and do likewise!
Amen.
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