A sermon given on November 6, 2022 at St. Andrew's, Livonia
Readings:
| Daniel 7:1-3,15-18 Psalm 149 Ephesians 1:11-23 Luke 6:20-31 |
So today we're here to celebrate All Saints' Day.
It was really on Tuesday. And we had a tiny, tiny little celebration of it on Tuesday, but the big celebration of it is today. Now, Wednesday, for those of you who were here, you know, we were out in the garden and we celebrated all the faithful departed. On Wednesday, we celebrated the feast, commonly known as All Souls' Day, which is our time to remember and pray for those whom we love and we see no longer. That was our business on Wednesday. And people gathered and we had a beautiful liturgy. And we prayed by name for everyone buried in the memorial garden and for all the intentions of the people who were gathered with us. And we prayed not by name for the intentions of all the people of this parish who have people that they're praying for. But we didn't know the names, of course, of the people that are on your hearts and minds. But we prayed for all the loved ones that we love and see no longer. All Souls' Day is a beautiful occasion for that.
It often gets sort of blended with All Saints' Day, and I think that's a shame because All Saints' Day is another beautiful thing to do, and it often gets lost in our important commemoration of those who we love who are no longer with us in body. On All Saints' Day, we get to celebrate all the examples that God has given us of just how many different ways holiness can look. On All Saints' Day, we give thanks for the life of the Saints, and we give thanks that God has given us so, so many abundant examples of what sanctity can look like.
Now some of those examples might be our lost loved ones, the people who we knew and see no longer. Those might be examples of what the holy life looks like. But it's okay if there's people that we love whom we wouldn't necessarily hold up as this is the role model,
I want to live my faith that it's okay to remember them and pray for them and love them and care for them. And that's what All Souls' Day is for.
But on All Saints' Day, what we celebrate is that we do not have to reinvent the wheel ourselves every single time. God has given us – it's not multiple choice, but we have a whole bunch of writing prompts to start our own essay. God has given us so, so many examples of what it could look like to have what Jesus says: life and have it abundantly. God desperately wants us to live connected to God. Jesus came so that we may have life and have it abundantly. And this is what sanctity truly looks like: Living with joy in the close presence of God. That's what God created us for. That is who we are.
A beautiful image that I love to think about when we're looking at All Saints is you often would think of it as a Christmas carol. It's not a Christmas carol. It just happens to be set the day after Christmas. And so we see it often at Christmas time, not so often in church.
It was written by an Anglican priest, and it's a poem that became a song called Good King Wenceslaus. And you've probably heard of it:
Good King Wenceslaus looked out on the Feast of Stephen. (It's the day after Christmas)
And the snow lay round about deep and crisp and even
Brightly shown the moon hat night, though the frost was cruel
When a poor man came inside gathering winter fuel.
Right. And so the king says, I see this poor man out there. I want to help him. And so he calls his page and he says to his page, Where does that guy live? And the page says, Oh, I know where you lived is over by the forest fence, up against up near the mountain by this fountain at all times.It works really well. Fountain Mountain, you know. So so they figure out where he lives and he sends the page to get food and drink so they can take it to this poor man and bring him a meal where they can all celebrate together.
And then they go out walking through the snow. And the king takes big footsteps as he walks through the snow. And he doesn't have any problem walking through the snow, but the page is really struggling to make it through this deep snow. And he says, Sire, I don't know how much longer I can go on. It's really cold and the snow is really deep. I'm not making it through.
And the king says I'm making footsteps follow in the path that I have broken through the snow. And the page does that and finds that suddenly it's a whole lot easier to go on when he doesn't have to break the snow himself every single step of the way.
I paraphrase here, the real thing rhymes, but it also uses a whole bunch of “hithers” and “thithers” and other words that we don't usually use. So it might make more sense, as I'm telling it now. You lose the rhyme, but you get a whole lot more meaning out of it, perhaps.
Okay, so what's my point here? The world is a snowy field and it can be very difficult to get through sometimes. But we don't have to break our own path through the snow. We have the examples of the Saints who have gone before us, who have broken some of the way through the snow.
Now, the beautiful thing about this is if we've got this giant field, there's not just one person that we have to follow every single step of the way. Maybe somebody broke a few steps this way. That's helpful to us. And somebody else was walking that way. And we can follow in their footsteps for a little bit of the way and maybe some of the steps we do have to make on our own through the deep snow. But because we have the examples of the lives of the saints, we don't have to invent our own way to holiness. We don't have to invent our own way to the near presence of God. This has been done before, and we can take inspiration and hope from the people who have gone before us. And that is a really joyful thing.
Some of these saints are on our calendar, and we have feasts assigned to them and we might even celebrate their feasts. Some of these things have been acknowledged by the church, but we don't have a day set aside for them, but we can still look to their example. Some of these things are people that you and I have met in our lifetimes, or people that people we know have told us about. Some of these things are known just to God. But we have this abundant example that there is not just one template for how to live a wholly life. There is not just one way to do it.
And there are saints who started from every imaginable starting point and ended up at holy life. I personally have found that these saints are really important. The lives of the saints help us to imagine a future in which we are living a holy life. A life that has life and has it abundantly.
The Saints help us to imagine a future in which we thrive. That ability to imagine a future in which we truly have a place is absolutely essential as an antidote to despair and hopelessness.
So. I have been somewhat obsessed for the last few years with the lives of the Saints, and I have been looking to them and studying them closely and trying to find examples of people who've found a way to live authentically in union with God.
Once upon a time, I was born. And at the time that I was born, the doctors looked at me and they looked at the body parts that I had, and they said, It's a boy. And anatomically, they were correct.
But they couldn't see my spirit. They couldn't see my soul. And to be perfectly honest, the gender that I was assigned when I was born,
while it matches the body that I have, doesn't particularly fit with the identity that I know myself to have. It doesn't particularly fit with how I relate to other people. And it definitely doesn't doesn't fit with who I would identify with as my tribe or who I would want to relate to as my closest friends and associates and that sort of thing.
That's been the source of a great deal of struggle and despair in my life. And looking to the lives of the Saints has been absolutely a lifeline. To see so many different examples of people who've started from all sorts of things and found a way to live authentically as children of God. People who didn't let their starting station preclude them from doing what God had set out for them to do. And that is a sign of incredibly great hope to me. A sign of incredibly great hope to me.
Now, I've mostly tried to seek out settings in my life where people don't segregate and limit their opportunities on the basis of the gender that they're assigned. And that was a big reason why I couldn't continue to worship in the church that I was born into, because they were very big into assigning ministry on the basis of people's gender. And only these people can do this and only these people can do this, and God forbid you approach the altar if you were a woman, because that was just unheard of and that sort of thing.
And I was grateful to find the Episcopal Church in which we seemed to at least take steps toward recognizing that the gender that somebody is assigned doesn't define the ministry that God calls them to. But even in the Episcopal Church, I've seen a great deal of ministry segregated by gender assignment. This is the women's prayer group. This is the men's fellowship. This is the men's retreat and so on. And, you know, this is the Brotherhood of St Andrew and the Episcopal Church women and so on. And the altar guild is for women, and the ushers are for men, and that’s just how it is.
Truth be told, if there's people going on a retreat and praying with each other, I'd rather be praying with the women than the men as friends of who I identify with and who I care about, what they have to talk about and pray about and that sort of thing. But okay, church does what it does.
I don't dislike my body. God gave me a perfectly lovely body. I don't love how society has responded to my body. It seems to be the basis for sorting me out of groups that I feel like I would connect to and piece that I most decidedly do not. But the lives of the saints are a lifeline.
The lives of the Saints have been something to cling to and see that people from every station find a way to make themselves in tune,
to not to make themselves, but to follow God's invitation, to be right with God and authentic to who God created them to be.
No matter where we find ourselves starting from, the lives of the saints are an assurance that there is a path from wherever we start to authentic integral holiness, no matter how diminished we find life to be. The lives of the saints are an assurance to us that with God, all things are indeed possible and that we ourselves – each and every one of us – were created to have life and to have it abundantly.
Now, we had this reading today from the Book of Daniel. I've always been kind of partial to the book of Daniel. I think it has a kind of nice name to it. As for me, Daniel, my spirit is troubled within me, and the visions of my head terrify me.
See what I just did there? I just changed the verb tense because I'm not talking about Daniel, who Barbara read so beautifully earlier.
I'm talking about me, Daniel.
We've got this election coming up this week and I am terrified. I am absolutely terrified. We've got people running for school board in various communities who really want to purge from the schools all the books about people who don't conform to the dominant racial narratives and gender and sexual orientation norms that many in the community would follow. And I am absolutely scared of what that will do to children who are looking for that lifeline to imagine hope for what a world could look like that they fit into. To identify that they can be the hero of a story. To identify that there is room for them to thrive in the world. I am absolutely terrified what purging this sort of thing from the curriculum would do.
This is like the lives of the saints here. These are these lifelines that we can do to imagine a world that we belong in. That's what creates hope. That's what creates hope.
We've got candidates running for state offices where they're looking at people who voted for, including people of whose gender doesn't match their biological sex and various activities. And they've looked at that. They've described people voting for that as something worthy of mockery and derision. Now I can tell you, I participated in a lot of sports when I was growing up, and I love being on the team, but I didn't love being on a team with a whole bunch of guys. It was always a very aggressively masculine environment and I'm thinking back to it and saying, Oh my God, how wholesome would have been to be on a softball team with a bunch of women? Now, I understand the competitive difference. I understand these are complex issues. I understand that this is not simple, but also it's important and life giving and it's certainly worthy of serious conversation and not simply playing a clown car soundtrack and treating it as something to be mocked as some of our political candidates seem to be doing. This is absolutely terrifying to me.
The Daniel reading talks about these beasts that would rise up out of the deep and rule over the world and says how they represent the kings that are to come and rule unjustly over God's people. When the beast that would rule over us asserts that our existence is a joke,
that our aspirations for life and joy are absurd and worthy of being mocked, and when they would move to deny even our right to exist, All Saints’ Day says no to the beast. All Saints’ Day holds up a beacon of hope that what God has in store for us is not the annihilation that the beast would do to us. What God has in store to us is life and life abundant. God promises that that despite what the beast would do, the beast will indeed rule the world for a time, but the Holy Ones of God shall receive the Kingdom and possess the kingdom forever, forever and ever.
My brothers and sisters and siblings in Christ: cling to that hope that the accounts of the saints give us each and every one of us were created in the image and the likeness of God. God did not create you or me or anyone else for despair. God did not create you or me or anyone else to be ridiculed and mocked and cast into oblivion. God created us to follow in the paths that the saints have trod and to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. Forever and forever. Amen.
