All Saints' Sunday
The Rev. Nigel Taber-Hamilton, Rector
So - stained glass window folk? "Saints", I mean. Peter, and Paul, James and John.
Well, yes - people like that are a "gimme" when it comes to identifying saints. But do we stop there? Are there more people who you'd call saints who haven't had churches named after them?!
We remember lots of folk during the year on Wednesdays who might fall into that category: We could add Thomas Cranmer or Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
And, for that matter, we have some contemporary candidates for sainthood. I think of Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a seminarian who entered the Episcopal Theological School in the fall of 1963, expecting to graduate in the spring of 1966.
In March of 1965 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, asked students and others to join him in Selma, Alabama, for a march to the state capital in Montgomery demonstrating support for his civil rights program, and Jonathan decided to go. He wasn't alone - many others joined with him.
They struggled through the confrontations in Selma and he worked with many folk - from Selma and all across the country, black and white.
After returning to ETS in May to take his exams he returned in July to Alabama and, on Friday August 13 Jon and others went to the town of Fort Deposit to join in picketing three local businesses. On Saturday they were arrested and held in the county jail in Hayneville for six days until they were bailed out.
After their release on Friday August 20, four of them went to a local shop to buy some food, and were met at the door by a man with a shotgun who told them to leave or be shot. After a brief confrontation, he aimed the gun at a young black girl in the party, and Jon pushed her out of the way and took the blast of the shotgun himself. He was killed instantly.
We often remember people like Jonathan Myrick Daniels, it seems to me, not just because of the way they lived but also because of the way they died.
That's no advertisement for seeking to live a "saintly life", is it?!! Encouraging anyone to imitate the saints I've mention would seem to require 'soft peddling' the ultimate consequences of the way they chose to live their lives.
I think we need to remember them differently - it isn't the fact of their deaths that made them saints - saintly people - it's the way they chose to live - a way in which their deaths were simply exclamation points on their lives.
Think about their lives:
- None of them - not one! - ever sought to act alone - they always acted out of the context of community, and in particular, the community of faith.
- There's no sense of self-aggrandizement in their actions - they were selfless.
- They were moved by a vision of what might be - the possibilities of the future rather than the trials of the present, or even the baggage of the past.
- They were much less concerned - or perhaps totally unconcerned - about the 'things' of living...about possessing, owning, accumulating - and much more focused on people and how they could help them, be in relationship with them, share living with them.
- And, perhaps most importantly, they were concerned with being with those who were suffering or oppressed in some way.
We're remembering "Saints" for the wrong reasons - and we're forgetting the many others who live like this who are blessed with dying quietly in their own beds.
It's the lives we're called to remember - and imitate - not the deaths - it's all these characteristics I outlined that are really what's important.
All of these things - but especially this last point - are underscored in the readings.
Revelation promises hope for a people who faced hopelessness. It's addressed to a community that's suffering from the oppression of those who insisted that these devout Christians abandon their faith and worship the Emperors - and were using violence to prosecute their demands. Part of the power of Revelation is that it seeks to address the mystery of and the difficulties of holding fast to a vision of a nonviolent God willing to carry that nonviolence all the way to death in the face of all those who believed in a god of superior violence. The violence of Caesar - or the non-violence of Jesus? We are still faced with that choice today.
And that, in the end, is the reality of the beatitudes also. These aren't spoken to those who are on top of the world! These are spoken to the lost and the broken, the down-trodden, those who are ground under the heal of the Roman boot, those who, as later, were always faced with the choice to hold fast their faith in God or to abandon it for faith in Caesar.
They promise light in darkness, joy out of sorrow, celebration out of pain - and, always, invite the most important choice: God or Caesar?
And, today, there's another way to cast that choice, that brings us back to this All Saints' Day: because those readings are addressed to us, and, in many ways, we are like the early readers and hearers: living amid hopelessness, the sterile vacuousness of our contemporary world, the continual challenge to chose what is not God.
Do we choose people or things? Do we choose community, or individualism - me first and always? Will we embrace a common future or a self-centered present?
What does it mean to realize that every one of us is, as St. Paul says to the Corinthians (a group who could hardly be described - at that moment - as "saintly" in the way we usually mean it!) People who are "called to be saints"? What does it mean to be one of the Saints of God?
And these are the questions that - this fall - we are being invited to ask ourselves as we look to our future: the secular world of Caesar, or the holy world of God? Community of self?
I suggest to you that the answers to these questions will tell the tale of our lives, and I leave them with you to meditate on as we work toward a future we all hope will be bright with the light of God's love and hope. Amen.
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