The Feast of All Saints is one of my favorite feasts of the church’s year. But it also challenges me, every year, to know how to honor and preach the day. Because there’s just a lot going on. In the idiom of writing assignments, a Sunday morning is basically a three-page double-spaced reflection paper, and all the themes and meanings that are packed into this feast day seem like they demand at least an 80-page master’s thesis!… But I promise this will be fewer than 80 pages.

What does this feast ask of us? Well: It asks us to remember. To call to mind, and name together, those holy ones who have gone before us into God’s presence. People who shined the light of God in their time and place; who did justice, and loved mercy, and walked humbly with God; who followed the right, for Jesus’ sake, the whole of their good lives long. As our Old Testament reading, from Ecclesiasticus, points out, some of those are people whose names are known to the church, to the world – people whose witness and impact were such that they’re honored with feasts and icons and shrines. People like our patron saint Dunstan, who’s a pretty obscure saint, yet here we are, still bearing his name and telling his story, ten centuries after his death.

But then, Ecclesiasticus goes on to say, there are those too who are forgotten, or all but forgotten. They may have lived humble lives, but they lived them well. They may have touched few lives, but they touched them for good. We all have some of those names that we hold in our hearts. And a lot of our practices around this feast invite us to honor those people. We light candles for them, and speak their names with love. We bring in photos and mementos for our Remembrance Table – where you can see some of the saints we’ve commended to God from this household of faith in the past year or so: Sybil, Frances, Jerry, Bill, Art. We remember those whose ashes have become part of the soil of our grounds, here, or who have a tree or bush planted in their memory, with the new Memory Tree Plaque in our Gathering Area, and by sending the kids out after church to take flowers to those grandmothers and grandfathers of our church family. In all these ways we practice abiding: honoring the past, telling our family stories, recalling where we came from.

And it’s important to remind ourselves that this is something more mysterious and joyful than remembering the dead. Our beloved dead are alive with God, alive in God. The Communion of Saints, our church teaches us, is the whole family of God, the living and the dead, bound together in Christ by sacrament, prayer, and praise. When we remember the dead we re-member, we put back together something that has been separated: we remind ourselves that we are still and always one body, one family, with those who have gone before.

So, the Feast of All Saints calls us to re-member. And it also calls us to re-commit – to our own call to sainthood. Our text from the letter to the church in Ephesus uses the word “saints” as it’s generally used in the New Testament: to mean all those who strive to follow Jesus, the whole fellowship of believers. Those who have been baptized, and those on the road towards baptism, all of us who have been promised redemption as God’s own people, and called to live as ambassadors of reconciliation.

The beloved hymn “I Sing of the Saints of God” actually captures this really well – with its charming catalog of saints and martyrs: one was a doctor, and one was a priest, and one was slain by a fierce wild beast – and its recurring refrain: And I mean to be one too! We know that our sainthood is given by God’s grace, not ours to achieve through our merit – thanks be to God! And at the same time, the gift of grace and the call of the Gospel pull on us, an invisible magnetic field that draws our hearts and lives to point towards mercy and justice.

I mean to be one too! “I mean,” as in, It’s my intention, my desire, my aspiration, to live like the saints we remember and honor: to be patient and brave and true, to love my God so dear, so dear, and let God’s love make me strong. We renew our baptismal vows on All Saints Day – and, some years, we baptize new believers – to hold before ourselves the call of faithful living: praying and worshipping, resisting and repenting, proclaiming, seeking, serving, loving, striving.

On the Feast of All Saints, then, we remember the saints who have gone before us, acknowledge our kinship with them, and affirm our intention to be one too. That is a lot to pack into one Sunday. And yet I don’t feel like any of it can be left out, or even that we could alternate which note we play, each year. Because it runs together – recalling the saints who’ve gone before, and claiming our sainthood. When we get real about what sainthood is, what it’s looked like in the lives of the uncounted millions who’ve walked that road before us, it comforts and encourages, challenges and inspires us.

It’s too easy to think of the saints, the capital-S famous ones or even our family saints, as if they were stained-glass figures, one-dimensional, frozen, idealized, captured in their best, most significant moment. But the saints aren’t, weren’t, otherworldly or perfect. They didn’t live in simpler times. They were a lot like us, which is why we can aspire to be a lot like them. Tobit, an example of faithfulness from before the time of Jesus, shared meals with the poor even when his own family was on the brink of starvation, buried those murdered in the streets, at great personal risk; and his difficulties wore him down so much that on one particularly bad day, he accused his wife of stealing a goat. Saint Theresa of Avila, the famous 16th century nun and theologian, could say lovely inspiring things like, “Let nothing trouble you, let nothing frighten you; all things are passing; God never changes.” And she is also remembered, one day when her horse threw her into a river, to have said to God, “Dear Lord, if this is how You treat Your friends, it’s no wonder You have so few!” One of the saints we remember here at St. Dunstan’s is Jonathan Daniels, a martyr of the Civil Rights movement. I love reading his diaries, in which he second-guesses his own motives and struggles with whether what he’s doing really matters.

For me there is very real comfort in looking at these lives, and so many others. I read an article a couple of weeks ago about the role of family stories in building resilience. There’s this body of research that suggests that the children of homes who tell and re-tell their family stories are more emotionally resilient, better able to cope with struggle and change. And in particular, stories that recall that the family, over its generations, has come through both hard times and good times – those stories correlate with the greatest resilience for the current generation. The stories of the saints – alongside the stories of Scripture – are those family stories for the church. They assure us that God’s people have dealt with crankiness and weariness and self-doubt, while managing somehow to stay faithful in times of need and struggle, and grateful in times of plenty and peace, for thousands of years. Their witness can help us have the resilience to do the same, in our time and place.

The resilience or the balance – that’s what the songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen called it, when he wrote about what makes a saint, back in the ‘60s. He wrote, “Contact with [the energy of love] results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence… I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a [person] setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is [a saint’s] glory… Far from flying with the angels, [a saint] traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. [She] can love the shapes of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such [people], such balancing monsters of love.” – Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers (1966)

I think that kind of resilience or balance is what Jesus is talking about in the first part of today’s Gospel. I’ve read this passage many times, but this year it jumped out at me that Jesus is talking *to his disciples.* In pictures of the Sermon on the Mount, of which this is part, there’s usually a huge crowd. But right here, the text says, He looked up at his disciples. He’s talking to his followers, his friends – people whose stories and struggles he knows. Maybe he’s looking at their faces as he speaks, thinking about how his words might land in each of their hearts. To those in bad times, in poverty, in grief, he speaks assurance and hope. Know that you are in God’s hands, blessed, beloved, and that better is coming, one way or another. And to those in good times, blessed by wealth and ease, he says, Hey, remember that’s just what it is; it doesn’t mean you’re God’s favorite or better than anyone else. Keep yourself grounded in what’s true and real and lasting, because hard times come around for everyone.

To all of his friends gathered around, he says, Our circumstances don’t define us. They influence us, of course. But they don’t get the last word. With God’s help, through the energy of love, you can keep your balance. With God’s help, by the immeasurable greatness of divine power working in and for us, you are resilient enough to withstand the risks of both easy and difficult seasons.

I woke up Wednesday morning this past week feeling like my own resilience and balance were stretched thin. The news just kept being awful, and I was running low on my inner resources. I came to church and lit candles and incense on the little altar. I sat there in the candlelight and prayed through a couple dozen of our Prayer Book collects. I chanted a few psalms. Then I just sat there in the dark for a few moments. And in the dark I heard the voice of Sybil in my memory – Sybil, our beloved deacon, who passed away this spring. I heard Sybil saying, Hopeful.

And then I started thinking about all the saints of this church who have gone on before us in the past year and more, and the witness of their lives for those of us left behind. I need Sybil’s weary and courageous hopefulness. I need Frances’ instant, genuine courtesy to every person I meet. I need Jerry’s determination to find the good in any misfortune. I need Bill’s strategic eye and capacity to see the big picture. I need Art’s gentle and total conviction that turning towards the needs of others is always the best escape from our own anxious preoccupations.

And there’s the witness of the capital-S Saints too – the witness of blessed Dunstan who knew that kings may come and go, but the work of God’s Kingdom always continues. the witness of blessed Francis who believed peace was always possible, even in the depths of division. the witness of blessed Mary, the Mother of God, who disbelieved in her own smallness, youth, powerlessness; who had the audacity to say Yes and become an agent of God’s purposes on earth. These are the saints of years past, whose light still shines to light our way forward. These are the family stories that shape us for resilience. These are the balanced monsters of love who teach us to look for grace even in chaos. And I mean to be one too.

Jesus was a guest in the home of a Pharisee, a member of a movement among the Jews to re-commit to the practice of their ancient laws of piety and purity. And while he was there, somehow, a woman of the city – a sinner – managed to get into the house and approach him, as he reclined at the dinner table. And she began to wash his feet – an intimate and inappropriate act. And look, she’s not even using water – she’s using her tears! And rubbing his feet with this pungent ointment, and kissing them!? His host the Pharisee – and probably many others present too – was thinking, Isn’t this Jesus supposed to be a prophet, who sees the truth of people? Can’t he see what kind of woman this is? How shameful and unclean she is? How can he allow her to touch him?

And Jesus, who was a prophet, who could see the truth of people, said, I have a story to tell. There were two men who owed money to a third man. One owed fifty thousand dollars, and one owed five thousand dollars. Now, the third man decided to forgive those debts and set those men free from their obligations. After that act of mercy, which of the two men whose debts were wiped out would love him more?

One hundred and twenty-three years ago tomorrow, a baby girl was born was born to a respectable English family. More than respectable, really – Papa was the chaplain of Christ Church Cathedral at the great and ancient university of Oxford. A clergyman and a scholar. He and his wife named their only child Dorothy. Dorothy Leigh Sayers. She spent her childhood immersed in the life of the church and the university. At the age of 19, Dorothy won a scholarship to Somerville College, a women’s college at Oxford. There she studied modern languages and medieval literature, finishing with first-class honors. Women could not be awarded degrees in 1915, but that rule changed a few years later and Sayers was awarded a Master of Arts degree in 1920.

Sayers’ vocation was as a writer. Her first poetry collection was published in 1916, and she began work on her first mystery novel in 1920. Her great academic work was a poetic translation of Dante. She also spent a decade working as an advertising copywriter, and is responsible for some of those clever slogans you see on vintage Guinness posters.

If you know Sayers’ name, the odds are that it’s because of her mystery novels – or perhaps the BBC mystery shows based on the books. I first read Sayers because my grandmother pressed the books upon me in my teens, and I’m so glad she did. They are delightful reading, with nuanced and lovable characters, and written with both humor and deep insight into many areas of human life, including the lasting impact of war, the education of women, ethics in advertising, and traditional English bell-ringing!

Sometime in the late 1930s, Sayers, a successful and acclaimed mystery writer, was invited to write a series of plays about the life of Christ to be performed at Canterbury Cathedral. She took up this work and fell in love with it. The plays were very well received, and were published as The Man Born to be King in 1943. Sayers became an important lay theologian and interpreter and advocate for Christian faith, in a jaded and secularizing age. Like her contemporary C.S. Lewis, who was a friend, she was driven by her own faith to use her skill as a writer to try to make Christianity relevant and understandable for modern people. She wrote this about G. K. Chesterton’s work but it applies to her own writing as well: she was a voice that claimed “that Christianity was not a dull thing but a [joyful] thing; not a stick-in-the-mud thing but an adventurous thing; not an unintelligent thing but a wise thing, indeed a shrewd thing.” She went on to write many public essays and several theological books, including The Mind of the Maker, a wonderful work on Trinitarian theology and the holiness of creative work.

She was also an outspoken feminist and integrated those convictions with her Christian faith. In one essay she writes, “Perhaps it is no wonder that the women [in the Gospels] were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man [Jesus] – and there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as ‘The women, God help us!’ or ‘The ladies, God bless them!’; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; …. who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend…. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything ‘funny’ about women’s nature.” (From Unpopular Opinions)

Sayers’ name was on a list of holy women and holy men to be commended to the church for commemoration that was passed at General Convention last summer. I was glad to see her name there, and resolved to add her to the cycle of saints whom we particularly remember and honor here at St. Dunstan’s. Not just because she is a personal favorite of mine, though she is; but because the work she was about is the work we are about: speaking the drama and hope, the joy and struggle, and, yes, the intellectual respectability of our faith, into a world that believes Christians to be dull, reactionary, and stupid. Sayers’ proposed feast day is the day of her birth, June 13. And when I looked at the Gospel for this Sunday, I knew this was the right day.

What I’ve told you so far is the public face of Sayers’ life, and her successes. Here, briefly, is the private face of her life, and her failures. In the 1920s Sayers fell in with the counter-cultural Bohemian artistic crowd in London. Writers, artists, performers; late nights, alcohol, drugs and… flexibility in personal relationships. Sayers went through several unhappy and ill-fated love affairs. In 1929, as the world was crumbling with the dawn of the Great Depression, Sayers’ world was crumbling too. Still unmarried, she had become pregnant. Remember: she’s a clergyman’s daughter. A scholar’s daughter and a scholar herself. A well-known and successful female author. One of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford. A feminist who knew that if her situation became known, it would seem to bear out fears that educating and liberating women would lead to promiscuity and the collapse of family life. This was a great and weighty shame for her. She retreated and bore her child in private – a boy who was left in the care of her cousin, and claimed as her nephew. It wasn’t revealed that he was her son until her death in 1957. Though she married a few years later, she never had another child.

Sayers didn’t write or speak publicly about any of this during her life. But I believe this Gospel story might have had special meaning to her. It’s one of those stories in which Jesus is handed an opportunity to be disgusted by a woman – her emotions, her body, her past, her weaknesses – and instead, Jesus treats her as a human being, and honors both her pain and her devotion. Sayers gave birth under a cloud of shame and secrecy and gave up the chance to be a mother to her only son so that she could continue her public life as a successful writer. And Sayers – instead of blaming God for the judgmentalism of humans, instead of abandoning God for seeming to abandon her – Sayers found hope and healing in the heart of the Gospel. Transformation. Redemption. Metanoia, turning – a change of heart and mind that bears fruit in a changed life. In the wake of that great shame, that great loss, she devoted her life to serving and proclaiming the Jesus who did not spurn or shame her, but welcomed her and loved her.

And she tells this Gospel story in her play, The Man Born to be King. She makes this nameless woman into Mary, Jesus’ friend, who in her younger life was seduced by the pleasures of the world. I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that in putting these words in Mary’s mouth, she was telling her own story: “I loved the wrong things in the wrong way… yet it was love of a sort… until I found a better kind of love. [There was a time when] I wept and was ashamed, seeing myself such a thing of trash and tawdry. But when you spoke to me, I felt the flame of the sun in my heart. I came alive for the first time. And I love life all the more since I have learnt its meaning.” (p. 180)

Today the Church celebrates the Feast of Pentecost. The lesson from the Acts of the Apostles, which we read together earlier, is the story of this holy feast: it’s the day when Jesus’ first disciples, his friends and followers, received the Holy Spirit of God in a new way, inspiring and empowering them to preach the good news of God in Christ. On Pentecost we share that Scripture and we reflect on the ways the Holy Spirit is at work in us, in our church, in the world around us.

Our church teaches the doctrine of the Trinity, the understanding that our God is one, yet also somehow three: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer; the One who Creates, the One who Befriends, the One who Inspires. That understanding took shape in the first decades of the Church’s life – but there are Scriptures in the Old Testament that talk about the Spirit of God as a sort of going-forth of God’s power, with its own nature and being. Starting in Genesis 1, when the Spirit of God moves over the face of the waters before Creation, right up to the Spirit’s appearance at Jesus’ baptism, immediately after which the Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness to fast for forty days. So it’s not that the Holy Spirit suddenly appears in the story of God’s people, in the second chapter of Acts. It’s more that the newborn Church is called to recognize, receive, and call on her, as a gift and tool for the work before them.

Our portion of John’s Gospel today names some of the ways the Spirit acts within and among the believers: teaching them; reminding them of what they’ve already been taught – I know I often need such reminders! – and bringing peace and calm, Christ’s peace blessing us through the power and presence of the Spirit.

The Greek word that John uses here is interesting: Parakletos, translated Advocate or sometimes Comforter, or sometimes left as the odd word Paraclete. It literally means one who is called to the side of another person. And in New Testament Greek it had legal overtones, as “advocate” can in English: one who stands with and speaks for a person accused or in trouble. There’s rich ground for theological reflection in that word, Paraclete. There’s also, of course, a fair share of parakeet jokes.

The parakeet, however, is not the bird we usually see used to represent the Holy Spirit. What bird do you usually see?…. The dove, right? It’s an image used by the first Gospel writer, Mark, who says that the Spirit “descended upon Jesus like a dove” as he rose from the water, having been baptized by John. Matthew and John follow Mark’s wording; Luke does too though he gets a little more concrete, saying that the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus “in bodily form like a dove.” Not just a metaphor but a manifestation.

So the Church adopted the dove as one symbol of the Spirit, and has read that in various ways – as a sign of peace, gentleness, purity, innocence. But… wait a minute. Let’s turn for just one moment to the Gospel of Luke, chapter 2, verse 24. Jesus’ parents are bringing an offering to Temple to celebrate the birth of their firstborn son. And they bring “a pair of turtledoves and two young pigeons.” Just about every translation says it that way, back to the King James Version. Only the word translated here as “pigeons” – peristeron – is the same word used at Jesus’ baptism. In fact, it’s the same word used EVERYWHERE it says “dove” in the New Testament. Why translate it as “pigeon” in one place and “dove” elsewhere? It’s almost like it’s totally arbitrary. It’s almost like there’s no difference between pigeons and doves. But of course there is! Doves are pretty and pure and sweet. Pigeons are gross and ugly and obnoxious. Right? ….

I heard something a couple of weeks ago that really tickled my imagination about that familiar image of the Holy Spirit as dove. And in honor of baby M’s mother, who is a wildlife biologist, I thought I’d go ahead and follow that thread today.  The thing I heard was an episode of a wonderful podcast called 99% Invisible. It’s a podcast about the interesting stories of things we rarely notice or think about. And this episode was an interview with Nathanael Johnson, author of a new book called Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness.

Johnson shares the history of the pigeon. Keeping and breeding pigeons used to be, not something your quirky uncle does in his free time, but a hobby of the aristocracy. The pigeon – or dove; they’re basically the same bird – was first domesticated in the Middle East, then spread around the ancient world by the Romans. Johnson points out that “a common element of a traditional Tuscan Villa was a… lookout tower and pigeon house.” Kings and nobles, governors and dignitaries would keep and breed pigeons in their fine homes, and exchange them as gifts and tokens of honor. In the 1600s pigeons were brought to North America, and their fall from grace came as they became feral and propagated themselves in this new environment, becoming, well, common, in every sense of the word.

Johnson says that for many centuries, in English, the words “pigeon” and “dove” were essentially synonyms and were used interchangeably. “But over time,” he says, “the two diverged – dove was increasingly associated with positive things and pigeon became associated with the negative.” Consider, Johnson suggests, Pigeon soap beauty bars. Silky smooth Pigeon Chocolate. Or… the Holy Spirit descending in the form of a pigeon.

Then Johnson goes on to share some fun pigeon facts. So, just as the Church has taken liberties with the dove image, and read in ideas about peace and purity, I’m going to offer some thoughts about what imagining the Holy Spirit as a pigeon might do for us.

First, pigeons are everywhere. Madison isn’t hugely overrun, but we’ve experienced or seen images of the hordes of pigeons that reside in our great cities. And that tends to gross us out. We see them as dirty, diseased vermin. We ignore or resent them. We call them flying rats. (I also have a lot respect for rats, but that’s another sermon…!) Buildings are equipped with spikes and nets to try and keep pigeons from calling them home. But pigeons, undeterred, just fly on to the next building. We disdain pigeons because they are so common, but maybe we should respect them for the same reason. Pigeons are a very successful species, and co-exist well with human beings, in the in-between spaces we leave, in our cities and our lives.

Reflecting on the Holy Spirit as pigeon, I ask: Where is the Holy Spirit lurking around the edge of your life, hanging out on a windowsill while you brush your teeth, perching on a statue you walk past every day, even dropping a little gift on you on your way to work? Ignored or even kicked away, when there’s something here that really deserves our attention?

Second, pigeons are nurturing. We know that most birds care for their young and bring them food, but everybody knows that only mammals give milk and actually feed their young from their own bodies. But everybody knows wrong. Pigeon parents – female and male alike – actually produce a milky substance to feed their young. It’s secreted in a pouch inside their throats, and baby pigeons get the milk by sticking their beaks down their parents’ throats. So pigeons, like ourselves, give of their own bodies to nurture their young.

Reflecting on the Holy Spirit as pigeon, I ask: Where might there be something unexpected that wants to feed and nurture you? That’s offering you what you need to grow and flourish, in a place you’ve never thought to look?

Third, pigeons are beautiful. Seriously. Try, try to wipe your mind clean of all the associations and assumptions you carry, and do a Google image search, or go to your favorite pigeon-y location and just look. They have the same graceful shape as the dove, their more popular cousin, with that lovely fanned tail in flight. Their colors range from soft grays to warm taupes to pinks, with that sheen of iridescent green on the breast, and striking bars of black and gray on their wings. They have finely-traced eyes and delicate beaks. They are beautiful birds, rendered ugly only by overfamiliarity and inattention.

Johnson, the author of Unseen City, shared the story of how he stumbled into this project. He would walk his infant daughter to daycare every day – and there were all those elements of the urban landscape that he had long ago learned to ignore, but that she was very interested in. What’s that? Tree. What’s that? Tree. In fact, the same tree. Faced with a choice between saying “tree” a hundred times, or refusing to answer and earning her frustrated screams, he decided to make a shared game of noticing. Tree; bark; twig; leaf; flower; petal; stamen; seed pod… And the noticing went on to lead Johnson to discover, and share with us, a whole amazing world of plants and animals that live alongside us, even in, especially in, our densest human environments.

Reflecting on the Holy Spirit as pigeon, I ask: Where are we missing the beauty that the Holy Spirit has for us, because we’re not even looking? Because our preconceptions and preoccupations have closed our eyes to the wonder, the complexity, and, yes, the beauty of the world around us, and the ways that beauty might bless us?

Let us turn now to the baptismal liturgy, as we invite the Holy Spirit, the divine Pigeon, to descend among us and bless baby M as the newest member of God’s worldwide family of faith.