#1

All Saints Day is the Church's Memorial Day, a time to remember those who have died in the faith of Christ. It is traditionally celebrated on November 1, but may be observed on the first Sunday in November instead. For Protestants, for whom the observance of special days for saints may be problematic, we understand that in the strict sense of the word this is a festival day in honor of the grace of Christ. In the classical tradition the calendar was divided into two patterns, the dominical cycle and the sanctoral cycle. The dominical cycle included all Sundays and other days of the year which celebrated and recalled the major events in the life of our Lord (hence "dominical"). The sanctoral cycle emerged as the Church sought to remember the witness of particular saints, especially martyrs, on the day of their death (their heavenly birthday). Gradually, however, the popularity of saints days tended to crowd out the days of the dominical cycle as the number of saints to be remembered grew. By the time of the Reformation only the most major of the days in the dominical cycle were not displaced by one of the saints, and so the reaction was to get rid of saints days altogether. Four hundred years later there is a growing appreciation of the witness of the saints and the appropriateness of remembering them on certain days. Many denominational calendars have now restored saints to the list, including very recent ones such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Florence Nighting1ale. All Saints Day, however, is not a part of the sanctoral cycle.part of the dominical cycle (hence it can be transferred to the following Lord's Day), because in the last analysis it is not a celebration (or deification) of the saints but rather of the victory of the grace of Christ in the saints. We are celebrating what Christ has done in and through the witness of us, the saints, through the ages.

The color white is appropriate for today, as is the celebration of Holy Communion. This can also be an opportunity to explore in the sermon the meaning of the creedal term "the communion of saints" in relation to the words of the eucharistic preface, "with . . . all the company of heaven we praise your name. . . ." The names of those who have died since the previous All Saints service may be read and remembered as part of the service.

The administration of Holy Baptism is particularly appropriate for today, since in baptism we make new saints, in keeping with the New Testament's understanding of the word. As we remember those saints who have gone before, so we also rejoice in God's provision that the gospel will not be left without witness as others are added to the apostolic company.

See Hickman, et al., New Handbook of the Christian Year (1992) for expanded suggestions for a full service for this day.

#2

The Celebration of All Saints Day (A Catholic Perspective)

Nothing could be more incongruous than to place the mindless antics of Jason in Halloween IV next to the stunning life of Teresa of Avila, but we do this every year. Some are surprised to hear that the day after Halloween has a name: "The feast of All Hallows (Saints)." Maybe they find this feast an anachronism, or perhaps some still think it distracts from our proper worship of God. In any case Halloween gets all the headlines. What is this feast all about, anyway?

For centuries, November first had been the Celtic New Year, but now it honors billions of ordinary folk like ourselves who have known, loved and served God and now "are like Him since they see Him face to face" as St. John tells us. Because of their singular triumph in this life they deserve this homage. Moreover, since they are so much like us they serve as exemplars, inspiring and motivating us who are still making our way to God and eternal beatitude.

We find a paradigm of every conceivable virtue in some saint whose life has made that virtue appear not only attractive but within our reach as well.

Besides, there is no occupation that does not have a patron saint assigned to it. The fact that these heroes are not very different from us encourages us to emulate them, and with so many to choose from, it is easy to find one or more whose lives mirror our own. Far from living perfect lives, saints have faults and foibles like us so that we can identify with them. They are different because they excel in responding to God's grace. As in other ordinary human relations we unaccountably prefer certain saints to others.

Since these ordinary human folks are so close to God they are in a position to do something very human, something close to the heart of every politician - to use their influence in our behalf. This concept is very deep in Christian tradition and we profess it in the ninth item of our Apostles' Creed which outlines the beautiful doctrine of "the communion of saints."

Members of the church triumphant, from their vantage point close to God, help us who are still struggling. We in turn pray for members of the church suffering, the recently deceased (which we attend to on the following day, All Souls Day). It is no accident that one of the most popular modern saints is St. Therese of Lisieux (d. 1897) who was canonized only 28 years after her death because of the prodigious number of astonishing favors, cures and conversions showered on those who sought her intercession. But during her lifetime she had done so little that her Carmelite community could find nothing of interest to put in her obituary. Now there is movement to make her a Doctor of the Church.

No saint is omitted during this feast. We celebrate all these merry inhabitants of heaven whether or not they are on the Church's canonical list. This coming year, incidentally, marks the thousandth year of the Church's practice of declaring saints "canonized". Previously, lists of saints were quite tenuous. The formal canonization process started in the year 993 when Pope John XV declared Saint Ulrich of Augsburg a "Saint of the Universal Church."

The fact that throughout history saints have inspired men and women to face life with courage, hope and equanimity was not lost on Shakespeare as he composed that moving speech of Henry V on St. Crispin's day (Crispin was the patron of shoemakers). Reading lives of saints inspired St Ignatius Loyola to set out on his spiritual journey which resulted in the Jesuit Order. By the way, some think that the term "Jesuit saint" is an oxymoron, but actually there are 41 Jesuit saints and some 285 more on the way to sainthood. A cursory study of a map of the United States illustrates how compelling devotion to saints was to the early explorers. Most settlements and cities were named after some patron saint during the pioneer days of the Franciscan missions, and especially of the less affluent Jesuit missions.

As for saints being a distraction, God gives no indication that he feels threatened by our devotion to saints. On the contrary He uses them to show us the Way. For many who do not feel comfortable approaching an ineffable God, our saints demonstrate that reaching God is neither impossible nor even very difficult. Far from being an anachronism they might be called the user friendly way to reach God.

#3

1 Nov ~ All Saints Day

The Readings: Rev 7:2-4, 9-14; I Jn 3:1-3; Mt 5:1-12

On this feast, the Church offers us a chance to reflect upon and savor our baptismal gifts and commitments, with a look both at the past and at the future. It is located in the liturgical year at the transition point in the Sunday lectionary between the earlier part of the post-Pentecost season, with its emphasis on growth in grace, to the last Sundays of the church year, when the emphasis shifts to "the last things," the final consummation of history, culminating in the feast of Christ the King which we will celebrate on the 24th this year.

As liturgical scholar Reginald Fuller observes, "It is not entirely clear whom we are to include in this celebration. Originally it was a commemoration of martyrs in the early persecutions whose names were unrecorded, and who therefore were not, and could not be, included by name on the day of their martyrdom. They were not, in the language of the later West, 'canonized,' although they may have qualified if anything had been known about them. Yet, the New Testament calls all baptized Christians 'saints,' hagioi, holy ones. Even in writing to the Corinthians, whom he has to castigate for the worst possible moral offenses,

Paul can call them 'saints.' ... Their sanctity is not a moral achievement, not even the complete triumph of grace, but rests on their having been made objectively holy by baptism. Yet it was a natural development that the term saint should have come to be reserved for those in whom grace had its most signal triumph, for those who had achieved the Pauline imperative, "become what you are." Reginald Fuller, Preaching the Sunday Lectionary, p. 87

The beatitudes, so familiar to us, are not merely intended as a general statement of inversion of present condition and future reversal, an expression of poetic or even social justice. They seem to break into two groups, the first more passive, the second more active. They are addressed directly to the disciples, who have already left everything to follow Jesus. The first group of beatitudes describe the condition of the followers of God. Jesus himself is the exemplar of the Beatitudes. He is a have-not, the Man of Sorrows, thirsting for righteousness, who humbled himself to be a slave, in the words of the Letter to the Hebrews. The disciples are called to be poor -- in spirit. They are the ones who realize that they are spiritually the have-nots, who have no righteousness of their own, and therefore they hunger and thirst for God's righteousness which comes to them through Jesus. The second group of beatitudes have a more active cast to them, also modeled after the life of Jesus. It is the merciful, the pure in heart, and the peacemakers who are called blessed. Faith, if it is genuine, works through love. It is those who combine both the passive and the active sides of a true relation to God who are pronounced already here and now to be blessed, and promised future participation in the kingdom of God.

As the first reading from Revelation indicates, those who are to be saved are not few. This passage from the apocalyptic literature, written in time of great crisis and danger in order to fortify the hopes and courage of the people under great duress, should not be taken as an attempt to actually describe the heavenly condition, but to hold out an image, one among many, of the promised reward for fidelity to God in the midst of trial. Those who rejoice in the presence of the Lord are called "from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages." The Holy Spirit and the action of grace simply does not recognize human categories, boundaries or limitations. All the saved have taken on their strength not from their own resources, craft or wiles, but by "washing their robes in the blood of the Lamb." -- the realization of baptismal and Eucharistic life in the Church.

The communion of All the Saints, then, the "great cloud of witnesses," is the assembly of those in what St. Ignatius Loyola used to love to call "the heavenly court" and those who are gathered in this quite earthly assembly around the Lord's table. All one church, one ecclesia, gathered in praise, in thanksgiving and in hope. We look to our spiritual forbearers, the ones in whom God's grace worked the same transformation we hope for in ourselves. We look at ourselves here, in the present, and marvel, sometimes with a touch of irony, at how amazing is the grace that God gives us for our salvation. We look into the future for the coming of the kingdom where the fullness of grace abounds and all are swept up into the life, the love, and the glory of God. And we join them in their hosannas.