All Saints Day

Sunday, 1 November 2009
The Rev’d Lloyd Prator

New York City

The feast of All Saints is an ancient festival, having been added to the calendar back in the fourth century, making it one of the earliest of Christian feasts. Of course, that is not a surprise, that it should be an early festival of the Christian tradition. Christianity began in martyrdom; it began to spread by people giving up their lives for the faith. And so it is not unusual to want to recognize these famous men and women in some way.

It was probably an impulse like that, which moved the writer of Revelation, our second reading which helped us begin to remember the saints. Where are those we have loved and have died? The Lord will give them new life and a new place worshiping him around the throne in Heaven. Death and pain and suffering will be no more.

So, early Christians gained faith by considering that the saints had gone to take a place in heaven and to prepare a place for us there. And the faithful began to believe, as the reading puts it, that these words are trustworthy and true.

But there is another way of thinking about the saints. Yes, they are luminaries of the faith. But the saints are also you and I. At an early date, the term the blessed ones, or those who are happy in the Lord, the faithful, were referred to as the holy ones, the saints. Thus, everyone who participates in the life of Christ can be thought of as a saint.

If you look at the gospel, which is the story of the raising of Lazarus, an interesting and unusual choice for All Saints Day, you can begin to get a little hint of what it means to be a saint — of the everyday usual sort like you and me. The story of the Lazarus is the story of a man who participated in the resurrection to new life in an unusual, proleptic way. His family thought he had died, Jesus had another idea.. For him, death would not be the final word. And Jesus raised him.

Now we have every reason to believe that Lazarus did not live forever. In fact, some traditions have biographies of him and name him among the saint we celebrate today. But his experience with death was two fold — Jesus raises him, and the presumably, he participated in the resurrection in the same way that all Christians do. He just had a little preview of what it would be like.

Lazarus had an experience, in this life, of what the power of the resurrection would be life in the next life. Perhaps that is a good standard to help define what it means for you and me to be among the holy, among the saints. Perhaps those who are saints are those who understand the resurrection and apply it to this life.

Certainly some of the Christians we most admire have done just that. The missionaries of charity, in our own neighborhood here, became famous because of their foundress, Mother Theresa. And they became known locally because they took in men with AIDS and gave them a place to live and be cared for as they prepared for death. The power of the resurrection planted in this life. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s writings helped to expose the true horror of world communism, its gulags, its mass murders and its lies. A bit of the power of the resurrection planted in this life. Last month, we celebrated the feast of Constance and her Companions, Episcopal sisters who gave their lives ministering to those suffering from the yellow fever epidemic in Memphis, Tennessee, in the 1880s. When they could have closed up, packed their habits and headed back to New York, they stayed in the city, opened clinics and hospitals and helped save many lives and care for many others who had been abandoned by primitive medical care. The power of the resurrection, planted in this life.

In a sense, the saints are those who truly grasp the resurrection. They conform their lives to the power of that definitive event, and live their lives in its shadow and by its direction. Whether it is by standing for the sanctity of human life in some form, or working hard to ensure that people can live in freedom and prosperity around the world, or giving charitably so that more may enjoy our prosperity, they bring resurrection power into our life.

Lazarus grasped the power of the resurrection since he got a little sample of it in the midst of his life. May God grant that our lives may similarly be filled with landmarks of the power of the Son of God. He is the Lord of life, the Lord who gives and restores life, and who calls us to be living forces of life even in the midst of death. That’s the Christian job. May every saint in the room today be renewed in the search for life in the midst of the ordinary situations in which we find ourselves. In that way, may we all be called to the life of sanctity and blessing.