Feast of All Souls

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

All Saints, Year C

The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector

Sometimes, I think that when we hear the word “saint” our first impulse is to think of the spiritual superstars of our tradition—the Mother Teresa, Francis, Benedict, John of the Cross, and most recently John Henry Newman. Saints seem to present a rather extraordinary example of holiness that none of us regular folks can live up to. Saints can seem otherworldly to the extreme as they glide a few inches above the earth existing solely on manna from heaven and tiny sips of holy water.

When we’re stuck with that kind of picture of saintliness, when that picture “holds us captive” as St. Ludwig Wittgenstein would say, we miss, I think, an important aspect of what it means to be a saint, and that is their very ordinary humanness. This time of year, if you come into the Church early in the morning you’ll see the sun’s early rays lighting up the Resurrection window. And on the opposite wall of the knave is a kind of splash of reds, blues, yellows, greens that slowly journeys up the plaster. If human beings are like windows, then saints are those people who let the light of God shine through them. They are not lights unto to themselves, they are ordinary folks who’ve been opened up by God to the light and are just crazy enough to let that light shine through them.

So saints aren’t so much the spiritual superheroes who have taken heaven by storm by their feats of ascetism, but those who have let the light shine through them as one unique, unrepeatable instance of what the love of God looks like when it shines through the lineaments of a life, this particular life. And like any window, there will be things that smudge up the glass, that get in the way of the shining of the lights. But that doesn’t diminish the light that does shine through in any way. There’s no checklist for saints, as if if irritability, depression, or extra-marital affairs in the case of Martin Luther King are present they are automatic disqualifiers for sainthood.

No, saints are saints precisely because they are sinners. Saints are saints because in embracing their fragile human nature in all its foibled humanness, they open themselves up be places, instances, where the light shines through, where God happens. You could say that saints are people who stand where Jesus stands and breathe the air He breathes. Jesus, of course, is the one who is utterly transparent to the light of God coming through his life. And saints are the ones who make the half-mad gamble of letting Jesus’ utter transparency to the Father find a home in their hearts. Saints are those people who let God get at them, who prop open the door with their “yes” consenting to God’s presence and action in their lives that God can slip in like a thief in the night and take up residence, living God’s life in and through lineaments of that person’s circumstances.

Rowan Williams in discussing the great nineteenth-century prelate Cardinal Manning remarks on how one commentator objected to Cardinal Manning being referred to as “saintly”; surely he was a manipulative, ambitious, even unscrupulous figure. But Williams points out that the miracle wasn’t that a saint could be manipulative, ambitious etc., but that a man with a temperament like that could still in some sense be a saint. The undeniable fact is that he let God’s light through for countless people, especially in his selfless work for the poorest workers in Victorian London. That certainly makes his less attractive temperamental qualities very evident by contrast. But what matters is that at some level of his being he was knocked off balance by the reality of God’s love and justice, and that reality was simply there in his life, never mind the intrigues and the rivalries of the church politics he was involved in.

That’s why, in the wake of the Reformation, we speak of the priesthood of all believers, or on this day, the sainthood of all believers. You’ll sometimes hear grumbling in some circles that all Martin Luther did was lower the bar when he proclaimed the priesthood, or the sainthood of all believers, as if he opened the floodgates to a kind of bland mediocrity where the high standards of the Tradition were thrown out and now everyone is a saint. And I suppose, if that is what you understand Luther to be saying there is a risk. But I’m not certain that’s what Luther was really getting at. Luther was trying to remind us of the profound destiny of every human being as created in the image and likeness of God. Call it putting on the mind of Christ, call it union and communion with God, call it theosis or divinization… he was trying to recapture for the Church the great adventure of the life of Christian discipleship, the breath-taking drama of the spiritual journey in which we are made, day by day, a little more like the one we follow after down the way of love and call “Lord.”

In the Letter to the Ephesians, Paul’s way of putting this is that we “may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance.” Paul is trying to remind the Ephesians of the grand sweep of what it means to be a Christian, of the promise of glory, of the immeasurable greatness of a life made a little more transparent to the light of God. Through turning to God as the source of all beauty, truth and goodness, through learning about who God is particularly as revealed in the person of Jesus in the Gospels, through daily encounter with God in prayer, through weekly worship in community, through crossing human-erected boundaries and proclaiming the belovedness of all of creatures, through taking time to waste time gracefully with God—we stand where Jesus stands, we breathe the air he breathes, we make ourselves a little more transparent to that light that is always shining that no darkness can overcome.

I’ve used this metaphor before, but I remember when our middle daughter was born with jaundice and the recommended treatment was to simply make sure she got some directly sunlight for a certain amount of time each day. We’d unswaddle her, move her to the swath of sun that traced its way across the apartment’s hardwood floor and the light would do all the work of healing, getting those toxins out of her system. That, I think, is what Church is. It’s a kind of light therapy where we open ourselves to the light of Christ that those things that hinder the light from coming through, that hinder God from coming through might be healed. Prayer, reading the scriptures, weekly worship, serving others, giving of our time, talent, and treasure—all the various things that Church patterns in us are ways of finding that little patch of sun as it tracks across the floor.

One of the really beautiful things about All Saints Day is that it’s one of the four official times each year we baptize people into the Body of Christ. And even when there’s no squawking baby, we recite the Baptismal Covenant as a faith community, to remind ourselves of what all this grand talk of becoming transmitters of the light looks like in real life. The Baptismal Covenant gives us, in broad strokes, both a glimpse of the path to saintliness and the end towards which that path points. The Baptismal Covenant gives a picture of what saints do, of what Jesus’ life when it’s lived out through our ordinary lives of carpooling, cribbage, and changing catheters looks like.

And what is that life? It’s continuing in the apostles’ teaching and meeting regularly for worship, reception of the sacraments, and persisting in the life of prayer. It’s recognizing when we mess up and admitting our mistakes, and asking God to forgive us. It’s being bearers of light for others—proclaiming belovedness by word and example to all those who have been declared unfit, unclean, unhinged, or unsavory. It’s doing the work of seeing past labels and stereotypes and seeking Christ in people we’ve written off, and doing everything we can to water those Christ seeds in the soil of their hearts. It’s about seeing every person—no matter their sexual orientation, their country of origin, the color of their skin, their creed, their class, their gender—as inherently dignified, as worthy of our attention, our love, our efforts to strive for a more just and peaceful world.

How each of us lives that out will, of course look different. I think of four parishioners whom we’ve recently lost—Liz Keller, Ron Allison, Meredith Simmons, and Lily Verschoor. You couldn’t find a more diverse cast of Christians! And yet, each one in her or his own way was an instance of a place where God came through. Each one in her or his own way can rightly be called a saint, a ray of infinite love that illuminated a particular place in a particular time and showed us who and whose we are, and who we are called to be.