Ordinary Saints
If you want to know the person more than any other who is responsible for the way that we Episcopalians worship today, it is Thomas Cranmer. He wrote our first prayer book and thus shaped not only the pattern of our liturgy--the order and structure of our Eucharist service--but its words as well. He wrote the collect, the beautiful prayer that Fr. Matt prayed a few minutes ago at the beginning of our service about God knitting together the elect in one communion, and many of the other prayers we still use today are modernized versions of his original words.
If anyone might seem to qualify as a saint in the Episcopal Church, it is Thomas Cranmer. He even died a dramatic martyr’s death. Caught up in the politics of the Protestant Reformation, he was forced to give up his beloved prayer book under the Catholic reign of Queen Mary. He was placed in prison. After spending several years there, he told the queen that he was ready to recant his beliefs and thus save his own life. As he was brought to trial to read a statement that was supposedly submissive to the queen and her Catholicism, he shocked the entire crowd by recanting his recantation, and embracing the whole of his life’s work and teaching, including the theology and prayers that form our life and worship as Episcopalians today. He was immediately seized and burned at the stake. He died with integrity, full of hope, asking the Lord Jesus to receive his spirit.
Perhaps when you think of the saints, something like this picture comes to mind. It is rather impressive, and I think we owe a lot to Thomas Cranmer, not just as Episcopalians, but as Christians. And so it is easy, on a Feast Day like All Saints, to look up, to imagine these extraordinary acts of holiness that the lives of the saints give us. But that’s not really what this holiday is all about. It’s about looking around, and looking inside.
One writer gives us three helpful ways of thinking about this most important Feast Day. First, All Saints’ was created as a commemoration for all the “other” saints not already given a feast day on the Christian calendar. Early Christians marked the day of one’s death as their annual feast day, especially because so many of the women and men that the early church commemorated had been martyred for the faith. So it made sense to mark their death day as holy, as the time when their sacrifices for the spread of Christianity were consummated and they enjoyed the nearer presence of God.
But as time went on, the Church realized two things--first of all, that it couldn’t possibly commemorate every saint, every person who had demonstrated great holiness and dedication to the faith. And second, that there were plenty of “unknown” saints, people who had lived quiet lives of service and dedication to God and their fellow humans without any fanfare, without any grand miracles or huge crowds taking pilgrimages to their shrines. In other words, people very much like you and me. People very much like those who are commemorated here in this building and just outside in the columbarium. And so the Feast of All Saints, in one sense, commemorates all the “other” saints. We may as well call it All the “Other” Saints Day!
A second way this writer suggests that we think of All Saints Day is as the architects of the Reformation did. Those church leaders emphasized what our passage from Ephesians points out so beautifully--that everyone who is marked as Christ’s own in baptism and sealed by the Holy Spirit is already a saint, a living saint of God. Over time, the phrase “the communion of saints” in the Apostle’s Creed became interpreted in this way--that we are connected to those who have gone before us in faith. That our bond to them may seem severed, for a time--but that it is certainly not broken.
Thomas Cranmer’s collect for today puts this idea rather poetically--that, like a fabric, we are woven together into the life of the saints, intricately connected with one another and with all the baptized through time.
In the quilt of the saints, we each claim a square, woven next to our grandmothers and grandfathers, either our literal ancestors or our ancestors in the faith. I love the final story in my favorite children’s bible. It talks about the Bible stories as a huge quilt in which we see God’s love through time, each square giving us a different example of God’s story in different circumstances. I like to imagine the communion of saints the same way.
When we think of ourselves as saints, we can also imagine what stories of our own lives will stand out, which ones we would put on this quilt into which we are all being stitched, even now. And the thing that should give us the most relief is that saints aren’t perfect. We think of King David’s infidelity, or Saint Peter’s insecurities, or Saint Paul’s struggles with the thorn in his flesh. Or modern saints, too many to number, who are nevertheless flawed and real human beings at their core.
No, none of the saints are perfect, including you and me, but they are perfectly loved by God.
As the reading from Ephesians puts it, we have obtained an inheritance in Christ. At our baptism we were given the down payment on that inheritance, the mark of the Holy Spirit. . . . . And then the writer calls us “saints.” The word literally means “holy ones.”
What does it really mean to be holy? We probably have a pretty skewed idea of what this word means. After all, we might call someone “holier-than-thou” if we think they are being sanctimonious or judgmental. Or we might imagine that all this stuff is the “holy” stuff, and that the rest of our lives aren’t holy.
But the word “holy” simply means set apart for a particular use, set apart for the use of God. When we are baptized, we are set apart for God’s use. It doesn’t mean that all of us will become priests. It doesn’t mean that all of us will become martyrs. It doesn’t mean that we will work miracles. Those who are holy are holy not because of their own self-righteousness, but because Christ has made them holy. Our holiness, our sainthood, is a gift, given to us graciously by God in Christ.
The greatest gift of this passage in Ephesians is God’s power, the power that works in us to accomplish God’s purposes, the power of sanctity or holiness. This power, in fact, is the same power that raised Jesus from the dead! And through baptism we are given this power, the power of God. Even the words in Greek that the writer uses to communicate God’s power sound powerful--hyperballon, megethos, dynameos, energeian. They may sound like God’s Pokemon, but these words in their English counterparts--hyperbolic, mega, dynamic, energy--communicate God’s power in terms that today we might call electric.
God’s electricity runs through us and has the power to make us all ordinary saints.
As one nineteenth-century priest, Fr. Fredrick Faber, put it, while it seems as though we are not easily equal to the saints, “the ways in which the saints loved God and served the interests of Jesus . . . are easily in our power, if we choose to adopt them.”
This passage from Ephesians communicates power, but it also communicates comfort. God has already enthroned Christ as the ruler of Creation. Our job is to plug in to that power source and allow it to flow through us, giving us the power and energy to serve the love of God and the interests of Jesus in our lives.
And then finally, the third way in which we see the saints on this All Saints’ Day is as the blessed ones of God. Here, we imagine in particular that the saints of God are those who have received God’s blessing, God’s favor, God’s regard.
Whom does God notice? Jesus warns his listeners in the Gospel of Luke of two things: one, that the ones God pays special attention to are not the ones the world seems to pay special attention to. Rather than the poor, the hungry, the sorrowful, and the persecuted, we tend to pay attention to the rich, the full, the joyous, and the popular.
The word “blessed” can be translated many ways. One is “fortunate” or even “lucky.” Why would Jesus say that the poor, the hungry, the sorrowful, and the persecuted are “lucky”? As one writer puts it, the poor are lucky because they understand how deeply dependent on God they are, while the rich are comfortable and self-sufficient. The “hungry” are lucky because they long for God’s good news, while the “full” are already satisfied. The “sorrowful” are lucky because they have loved deeply enough to have lost, while the “joyous” are safe in their isolation from others. And the “persecuted” are lucky because, unlike the popular, they know that only God provides them with the constant love that they can always rely on, that isn’t fickle and changeable, that will truly never let them down.
The saints of God, the holy ones, in other words, are radically dependent on God, not themselves.
Jesus always seems to manage to boil the whole thing down to its essence. The essence of sainthood is acknowledging our dependence. It is growing into the truest version of our selves.
Another Thomas, Thomas Merton, lived a very different type of life from Thomas Cranmer. While Cranmer grew more and more involved in the religious politics of his day, either from his own desire or because he simply couldn’t avoid it, Thomas Merton made a very different choice. He was a talented man, an intellectual, with the possibility of a career in a university or in the publishing world. But he chose to enter the Trappist order and ended up in a monastery in Gethsemani, Kentucky. While Merton continued to write and publish books, he also renounced the wealth and security of the kinds of careers he might have had for the simplicity and peace of monastic life.
Merton once said that “For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.”
The path of holiness, of being set apart for God’s use; the path of sainthood, of living into our calling as the people of God--these things will look different for each of us. Each of us is called to be woven into the quilt of the saints, but each of those patches looks very different. For some of us, sainthood may be as simple as paying better attention to the people God has given us in our lives. For others, sometimes the most holy thing we can do is get out of bed in the morning and face another day.
Kathleen Norris, in a book creatively titled The Quotidian Mysteries: Liturgy, Laundry, and ‘Women’s Work,’ says that “God loves us so much that the divine presence is revealed even in the meaningless workings of daily life . . . we are meant to accept daily life gratefully, as a reality that humbles us even as it gives us cause for praise.” Sometimes even folding the laundry, gratefully, and with a prayerful heart, is a holy act as well. Saint Therese of Liseaux may have died at 24, but she is considered to be one of the most important modern saints. She lived and embodied the Gospel passage for today in her notion of the “little way” to sainthood--that, as she put it, great deeds were impossible for her. All she could do with her life was to scatter the flowers of love everywhere she went. She wrote that “it is enough to recognize one’s nothingness and to abandon oneself, like a child, into God’s arms.” She was lucky, blessed, she believed, to be poor, and hungry, and unpopular, for she had nowhere to go but into the loving arms of God.
The poet Thomas Gray wrote his “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” in 1750. In this poem, as the speaker walks through the churchyard, he realizes that many, if not all, of the people buried there have been forgotten. He thinks about their ordinary lives, and meditates on the meaning and purpose of death and how we remember the dead. The Beatles’ song “Eleanor Rigby” does much the same thing, asking about all the lonely people like Eleanor Rigby who come and go through life without being remembered. Neither the poem or the song is particularly hopeful; both are rather melancholy.
But All Saints Day reminds us that God holds the souls of the righteous in God’s hands. It reminds us that God knows each one by name. It reminds us that God remembers each one, and each one is precious to God. God’s memory is long, and God’s love is enduring. Our beloved ones, just like we will be one day, are safe in the merciful hands of God. We remember them in their ordinary lives, in all the little ways that they showed their sanctity, and we know that God honors their ordinary sainthood. We know, too, that they enjoy the “ineffable joys” prepared by God for them, and, one day, for us. May God bless them, as we remember them, and may God bless us all, all of us ordinary saints. AMEN.