In the early church – among the first Christians – the word “saints” meant everybody in the church. All who believed in and sought to follow Jesus. For example: the Apostle Paul begins his letters, preserved in the New Testament, with greetings to the saints in Ephesus, or Rome, or Corinth. Meaning, the members of the churches there. 

Over the next couple of centuries of church life, Christians started to name and honor particular saints, and draw distinctions between ordinary Christians and capital-S Saints. Those who lived remarkable lives – or in many cases died remarkable deaths – showing forth their faith. 

Eventually there became enough of those special saints that the Church chose to honor, that the calendar started to get a little crowded, and there grew up a custom of having a day to honor all the extra saints who might not have their own special day. 

So All Saints Day became a tradition. 

But: people also wanted to remember their own beloved dead. People who might not have lived lives that attracted the Church’s official notice, but who nonetheless showed forth goodness and grace, and who were loved and missed. 

And so All Souls Day became a tradition – on the day after All Saints. 

(Incidentally, Halloween as we know it has lots of sources, but it’s not a coincidence that it’s the evening before All Saints Day. The word Halloween comes from All Hallows’ Eve, an old way of saying All Saints’ Eve. It’s a time when the dead feel close at hand…) 

Our practice of All Saints’ Day here at St. Dunstan’s reunites All Saints Day and All Souls Day, in the spirit of the early church’s conviction that we are all set apart to live holy lives. We gladly honor and remember the church’s capital-S Saints… and we remember our beloved dead, whether they went on ahead recently or long ago. 

People new to the Episcopal Church sometimes ask me: Does the Episcopal Church do saints? The answer is, Well, kinda.

It depends on the particular parish how much you hear about saints. We’re somewhat saint-y, here. We’ve got all those holy images, icons, of some of the faithful whom we particularly honor here, keeping watch over the baptismal font. In an Orthodox church we’d call that an iconostasis. 

And we have a growing practice of having something about some saint or another at our prayer candle station, many weeks. 

The most formal expression of how the Episcopal Church handles saints is the book Lesser Feasts and Fasts, a liturgical resource that contains information about people to commemorate, for most days of the calendar year. If you’d like to take a look at it, I can send you the link for where it lives online! 

The preface to that book says, “Christians have since ancient times honored people whose lives represent heroic commitment to Christ and who have borne witness to their faith, [sometimes] even at the cost of their lives. Such witnesses, by the grace of God, live in every age… What we celebrate in the lives of the saints is the presence of Christ expressing itself in and through particular lives lived in the midst of specific historical circumstances. In the saints we are not dealing with absolutes of perfection but human lives, in all their diversity, open to the movement of the Holy Spirit.” 

It’s hard to find a copy of Lesser Feasts and Fasts as a book because we – the Church – revise it a lot, often every three years. 

There’s been a lot of hard work over past couple of decades to make sure that our calendar includes people of many races, genders, times and places, to correct for the biases of earlier decades that tended to spot holiness more easily in some kinds of folks than in others. 

I have twice served on the churchwide legislative committee on liturgy and music, thereby getting a front row seat to some deliberations about who to add to the calendar – and rarely, whom to remove. In adding someone to our calendar of commemorations in the Episcopal Church, we are not looking for people who are somehow ontologically different from the rest of us. No post-humous miracles are required or expected. 

Fundamentally, what we are doing is more formational: who will it help today’s church to remember and honor? What lives meaningfully illuminate what it looks like to live out one’s faith in a broken world, in a way that may bless and guide us in the living of these days? 

So, yes, we Episcopalians do saints. But possibly not in the way you’ve encountered in other traditions. 

There are a lot of meanings woven into All Saints Day. The Scriptures for this Sunday in our three-year cycle of readings point to some of them. Our call to righteousness and holiness of life. The promise of an inheritance with God, after life in this world. And – remembering the faithful departed. 

This year’s assigned readings really invite us to dwell tenderly with the memories of our beloved dead, and the reality of death. 

They are all readings that can be – and often are – used at funerals. 

That first reading, from the Wisdom of Solomon, takes the experience of losing a loved one – which can feel like disaster and destruction – and offers the mysterious but hopeful promise that that person has passed through suffering and is now at peace in God’s hands. We used this reading at John Bloodgood’s funeral. And Jerry Bever’s, and Frances Verhoeve’s. 

The second reading, from Revelation, describes the culmination of human history. The Day of Judgment that sounds so terrifying when many people speak about it, and oddly beautiful and hopeful, here. Heaven and Earth renewed, restored! God among us; Death and suffering abolished; God tenderly wiping every tear from our eyes, and proclaiming: Behold! I make all things new! 

The text enfolds the reality of human suffering within the expansive promise of God’s redemption and renewal. 

We used this one for Mike and Terri Vaughan’s funeral services.

I wouldn’t mind having it read at mine. 

The third reading is from John’s Gospel. We read this one for Kaaren Woods, and Sybil Robinson. It’s a story of resurrection, of death miraculously reversed, of grief annulled. But first: It really dwells with the reality of grief. Lazarus’s sisters are devastated by his loss. The community is grieving – and angry, which can happen! Jesus himself is moved to tears. The fact that, this time, a family had their loved one restored to them, doesn’t mean that those feelings and thoughts and experiences didn’t matter. Don’t matter. We commend our loved ones to God – and we miss the heck out of them, too. 

With all these readings, and all these people, in mind, I want to say here what I often say at funerals about our church’s teaching about resurrection. 

Jesus and the other voices of the New Testament are super super clear that when we die, we don’t end. 

What that means or looks like is mysterious, and muddied by millennia of people dreaming up pearly gates and cloud landscapes and magnificent wings. 

And even without all those bells and whistles, it’s a hard idea to grasp and hold. Even if we really want to believe that our loved ones aren’t simply gone – and we do – we may find it difficult. 

Nonetheless we are invited – by the Church, the saints, by Christ himself – to trust and know that there is an After. There is a More. 

That when we leave this place, we are received into Love. 

And that those whom we miss are already there. 

The readings for All Saints this year invite us to honor the dead.

But here we all are, living. 

I can’t let this sermon, and this day, go by without observing that we are at a point of peak anxiety for most Americans. 

I saw an article that said 70% of Americans reported feeling very or extremely anxious about this election – and that was back in August. Now, it’s three days away. 

People casting their votes, no matter the candidate, feel that this is an election with incalculably huge consequences for our nation’s future and our human and planetary wellbeing. 

And here we are on All Saints Day.

I was talking to my husband Phil early this week about trying to preach this Sunday, and mentioned that it’s All Saints Day, and he said, Good. We need them. 

What does remembering our beloved dead mean for us in this moment? On November 3 of the year of our Lord 2024? 

If you grew up in the Episcopal Church, you may have grown up, as I did, singing “For all the saints” on All Saints Day. 

All eight verses. We only sang four today!…

But even those four contain some language that probably challenges some of us, doesn’t sit well. 

“Thou, Lord, their captain in the well-fought fight… O may Thy soldiers, faithful, true, and bold, fight as the saints who boldly fought of old…”  And in the verses we didn’t sing: “And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long, steals on the ear the distant triumph song, and hearts are brave again, and arms are strong…” This hymn uses militaristic language to lay out an extended metaphor of Christian life as a battle. In so doing, it’s exploring the concept of the church militant and the church triumphant, an idea from Christian thought and theology. 

The “Church Militant” consists of Christians alive today, who are engaged in the struggle against – well, all the things we say we’re against in the baptismal rite: the spiritual forces of wickedness, the evil powers of this world that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God, the sinful desires that draw us from the love of God. 

And the “Church Triumphant” consists of believers who have died, and are now in God’s presence, having come through their own seasons of struggle in this world. 

This hymn, For All the Saints, is about how the Church Triumphant can encourage and support those of us who are still on the battlefield as the Church Militant. 

I remember learning about the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant when I was in my teens, and thinking it was really cool! I liked – I still like – the idea that we are all one church together, the living and the dead, and that they’re looking out for us and cheering us on and maybe even helping us in subtle and mysterious ways, now and then. 

But! I absolutely understand discomfort with those militaristic images. There are good reasons for us to be wary of such language. We are painfully aware of other Christians who frame the battle between good and evil in our times very differently than we do. We know that Christianity has often been used to justify violence. We would far rather describe ourselves as disciples of the Prince of Peace.

I share that discomfort and wariness. I absolutely believe that the core work of the church is the reconciliation of all peoples and creation with God. Restoration, not conquest or domination. 

And yet: there are moments when this fierce metaphorical language offers me something I need. The military images in this and other hymns may not be the metaphors we’d choose, but they are the work of poets seeking language for the very real struggle involved in being people of justice, mercy, and love, in a broken world. 

As the letter to the Ephesians says: “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the cosmic powers of this present darkness.”

Who’s watched the West Wing? The long-running show about a fictional President of the United States? … I have not. But this week I saw a video of Martin Sheen, who prays President Bartlet, telling this story: “A man arrives at the gates of Heaven and asks to be let in. St Peter says, Of course! Just show us your scars! The man says, I have no scars! St. Peter says, What a pity! Was there nothing worth fighting for?…” 

Has anybody ever heard the expression, “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living”? Anybody know who said it? … 

Mother Jones was an Irish-born American labor organizer and activist. Her husband and four young children died in an epidemic in 1867, when she was thirty; four years later, her dress shop was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire. Her work helping the city rebuild led to her joining a group called the Knights of Labor, and she later became an organizer for the United Mine Workers. “In 1902, she was called “the most dangerous woman in America” for her success in organizing miners and their families against the mine owners.” 

One of her favorite tactics was to organize the wives and children of workers to demonstrate, protest, on their behalf – to make the point that the working men deserved a fair wage and safe living conditions so they could provide for their families. 

“In 1903, to protest the lax enforcement of the child labor laws in the Pennsylvania mines and silk mills, she organized a children’s march from Philadelphia to the [summer] home of President Theodore Roosevelt in New York.” The children marched with banners demanding “We want to go to school and not the mines!” and held rallies each night in a new town on the way with music, skits, and speeches, to build support for their movement.  (Source for all this: Wikipedia, some paraphrased, some directly quoted.) 

There’s a lot more to Mother Jones’s story. But I think that’s enough to give context to her most famous saying. 

For Mother Jones, to fight like hell for the living didn’t mean taking up weapons. It meant showing up where people were suffering, and seeking to understand the causes of that suffering. It meant an utter refusal to accept that some people are doomed to grinding poverty. It meant forcing those with economic and political power to face the impact of their decisions on human lives. It meant organizing kids and teens to walk across two states and annoy the president on his summer vacation. 

Mother Jones was a Christian – Roman Catholic. And she is absolutely up there, out there, right now, with the Church Triumphant, along with all the folks we named earlier in our service, and all the folks we’ll name in a few moments. 

Think of your own beloved dead. What wisdom, what hope, what consolation, counsel or courage do they offer you, for the living of these days? 

Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living, beloveds. And when the strife gets fierce, listen – listen for the faint echos of the Church Triumphant singing us onward. 

Amen. 

A few months ago I stumbled on a book called “A Church Year-Book of Social Justice,” for the year 1919 to 1920. It was compiled by the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, a spiritual community of lay and ordained women in the Episcopal Church. 

The book has a short reading for each day of the church year, exploring Christian thinking over the centuries and how it relates to “the great principles of social justice which preoccupy our own time.” 

As an Advent practice this year, I started posting the readings for each day on Facebook. That drew me into pondering what our siblings in faith were thinking and talking about, just over a century ago. 

1919 was a tough year. 

World War I had just ended – a shocking, brutal disruption. 

A deadly influenza pandemic closely followed the war, killing many children, healthy young adults and elders.

And then there were the ongoing struggles of poverty and unregulated industrial development. 

Upton Sinclair published his expose of the meat industry, The Jungle, in 1906.  

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which killed 146 garment workers, was in 1911. 

The West Virginia Mine Wars, a series of violent clashes as mine workers struggled to organize for safer working conditions, began in 1912. 

There were big reasons that social justice was on the hearts and minds of people of faith and conscience in 1919. 

As I’ve posted readings from the Yearbook day by day for the past month, I’ve noticed that some don’t resonate – don’t “hold up.” But other passages have given me a vivid sense of standing with these siblings in faith a century ago. 

W. E. Orchard wrote: “In the anguish of the hour, when kingdoms are rocking to their base, the social structure of modern civilization is strained to the breaking point, and all hearts are full of fear…”

Who’s felt like that at some moment in the past few years?… 

In this era of climate change and the overwhelm of capitalism’s excesses, I feel like this text may be MORE relevant to us than it was when John Ruskin first wrote it in 1917: 

“Think you that judgment waits till the doors of the grave are opened? … The insects that we crush are our judges, the moments we fret away are our judges, the elements that feed us judge as they minister, and the pleasures that deceive us judge as they indulge.”

And then there’s this, from the great preacher Phillips Brooks: 

“The real question everywhere is whether the world, distracted and confused as everybody sees that it is, is going to be patched up and restored to what it used to be – or whether it is going forward into a quite new and different kind of life, whose exact nature nobody can pretend to foretell, but which is to be distinctly new, unlike the life of any age which the world has seen already… It is impossible that the old conditions, so shaken and broken, can ever be repaired and stand just as they stood before. The time has come when something more than mere repair and restoration of the old is necessary. The old must die and a new must come forth out of its tomb.”

I resonate with every word of that passage. 

One day, when I posted some particularly salient snippet to Facebook, I asked: Is it comforting or disconcerting to know that people living a century ago also felt like civilization was strained to the breaking point? 

And some wise soul replied: Both. 

It’s comforting not to be alone with these feelings, to have the bold and hopeful and urgent words of these siblings in faith to encourage us. 

It’s comforting to know that humanity survived another century despite it all, and that some of the great challenges they faced are actually better now, thanks in part to the efforts of bold reformers who worked and fought for change. 

But it’s also disconcerting, the resonance of these texts with our present moment. 

The 20th century is hardly a consoling tale.

We know some of the costs and struggles to come. 

The Depression. Another world war, atomic weapons, the Holocaust. 

The bitter social strife, as well as the important legislative strides, of the 1960s. 

The recognition of environmental degradation in the 1970s. 

The rapid increase in economic inequality and incarceration in the 1980s and 1990s.

Knowing that companions in faith a century ago also felt like their whole way of life was coming apart at the seams is no reassurance that our way of life is not coming apart at the seams. 

Dwelling with the 1919 Yearbook has made me think about time. 

We tend to think of time as a line that we’re moving along, in one direction. 

For example, we would draw the events I just named as tick marks along an arrow from 1900 towards 2000 and beyond. 

The Church brings another way of thinking about time alongside linear, historical time. 

Church time is all circles and cycles. Turning and returning. 

In the church’s time, it isn’t Christmas again; it’s just Christmas.

This Feast of the Incarnation is every Feast of the Incarnation.

[The Eucharist we will celebrate tonight is every Eucharist.]

We’re not recreating or re-enacting something.

We’re returning to something that has always been waiting for us. 

These are moments when we step into holy time, and meet the Divine present in our world in immediate and tangible ways. 

Thinking about the Yearbook from that perspective: It’s not just that people 100 years ago felt and thought similar things to what we might be feeling and thinking.

It’s that we’re all living Advent together. 

Brooks and Ruskin and the others are not just forebears but companions in this season of holy anticipation. 

Let me take this one step further. 

There’s everyday historical linear time and there’s the church’s cyclical time that returns and returns again. 

And then there’s God’s time.

Jesus, the baby we welcome tonight, when he grows up, will talk a lot about time. 

He will talk about two Ages, or Aeons, or Epochs, or Dispensations, or whatever fancy word you want to use for something we aren’t really equipped to comprehend. 

There’s the present Age, this messy ordinary world with all its problems; and then there’s the Age to Come, the Age of the Kingdom of God. 

The Age to Come is mysterious, distant, not yet fulfilled; and yet it’s not so far away that it’s irrelevant. 

It is, somehow, already dawning, already unfolding, within reach in small shimmering moments, in hopeful possibilities, in the thin places where grace breaks through. 

This kind of time isn’t linear time and it isn’t cyclical time. 

It’s more like, I don’t know, the before and after of a really good dream home makeover show: The way things are and the way things could be, transformed towards beauty and joy and wholeness.

In terms of the Present Age and the Age to Come, we are in the exact same Before situation not only as our early 20th century siblings from the Yearbook, but as Jesus’ first followers. 

We’re all watching and waiting and working for the coming of the Kingdom of God.

We’re all yearning for God’s great intervention in the confusion, struggle and suffering of our times.

Advent – the four-week church season that ended when the Feast of the Incarnation began at sunset this evening – Advent is a season of double anticipation. 

We anticipate Christmas; but we also anticipate the fulfillment of God’s purposes for the world. 

That holy After when Christ will return to earth and that new Age we have been taught to hope for will come to fruition. 

The theologian Fleming Rutledge writes, “In Advent, we don’t [just] pretend, as I once thought, that we are in the darkness before the birth of Christ. Rather, we take a good hard look at the darkness we are in now, facing and defining it honestly, so that we will understand with utmost clarity that our great and only hope is in Jesus’s final victorious coming.”

In Advent we pray, again and again, for the dawning of that new Age. It’s woven through our liturgies and hymns: our longing for God’s rescue, restoration, renewal. 

When we cry Come, Lord Jesus! in Advent we’re not just talking about the baby in the manger, although he is very nice indeed. 

We are praying for the end of the world, friends. 

At least, the end of the world as it is, and the beginning, in Brooks’ words, of a “quite new and different kind of life.” 

For something more than mere repair and restoration; 

For the old to die, and the new to rise up from the tomb. 

And yet when we arrive at Christmas – when we enter holy time to gather in wonder around the manger, gazing at that surprising, ordinary, luminescent child – when Christmas comes, we tend to let that second layer of our anticipation drop away. 

We act like what we were waiting for, has arrived.

And then – even if we have a really good, lovely Christmas – there will be a moment, tomorrow or Tuesday or next week, when we think, “Well, Christmas came, but we still have all the same problems. I guess all that praying and hoping and expecting didn’t really amount to anything.” 

Instead of faithful, joyful and triumphant, we may feel uncertain, weary and discouraged.

What I need from Christmas this year, and therefore what I’m offering you – because preachers are always preaching first to themselves, beloveds – is the reminder that God coming among us in love and mercy and fury is not a once-long-ago thing, friends.

It is always and it is already and it is not yet.

It is still and it is someday and it is surrounding us right now. 

We live in the world’s time, the relentless onward march of history, dates and events, wars and elections and pandemics, birthdays and graduations and deaths. 

We live in the church’s time, holy rhythms that circle and cycle and always bring us back to sacred moments and pivot points.

And we live in God’s time, as people of expectation, who know that things are not as they are meant to be. 

As people whose hopes and imaginations reach beyond the satisfactions and struggles of our present moment. 

People who believe that another world is not just possible, she is on her way. (Arundhati Roy)

And that our purposeful acts of mercy, courage, justice and generosity can help pave the path for her arrival. 

And sometimes our biggest fight is with the powers and principalities of the world as it is, and sometimes our biggest fight is within ourselves: with our own inner resignation to the broken reality around us, our honest skepticism that better is possible. 

What I want from Christmas this year as its gift to all of us is a profound sense of sacred incompleteness. 

The knowledge that what we’ve been waiting and yearning for is not here yet, and that it’s safe to say that out loud, to name that a lot of stuff still seems real bad, even on Christmas Eve.

And the knowledge, planted deep in our hearts, that the gulf between this Age and the Age to Come, between our long Before and God’s After, is itself a holy space, a space of promise. 

A space of darkness and unknowing and possibility. 

A space of birth. 

May it be so.

Amen.