The Society of Saints: A Sermon for All Saints' Sunday

I really don't have a whole lot to say as the lead up to this sermon. It was All Saints Sunday. Our Gospel was the unbinding of Lazarus. See what you think of where my feverish brain...with God working on me... went with this sermon. 

Text: John 11: 32-44

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We’re all familiar with the famous saints.

We know the name Saint Peter…the rock of the church.

Saint Phillip who baptized the Ethiopian eunuch.

Saint Stephen…the first chosen to be a deacon in the church and who suffered a brutal death that would lead to Saul’s conversion to be Saint Paul…one of the most influential writers of our early church.

And naturally…Saint Barnabas… our namesake and the Son of Encouragement.

We remember all those saints.

But there are plenty of names that also land in this saint category…and over time…we’ve added many names to roll call of saints on the church calendar.

For example…today is November third…which…if it weren’t All Saints Sunday…would be the date that the Episcopal Church remembers Richard Hooker…an English  priest of the late 16^th century…who is best known for his defense of the English Reformation under Queen Elizabeth the First.

That reformation gave us the Church of England of today and the First Book of Common Prayer.

Hooker was both a parish priest and a distinguished scholar.

He described the church as not being just an assembly…but a society.

For Hooker…an assembly was a gathering of people who would do acts of public worship together.

But a society went beyond the time gathered in worship.

A society of people not only took in the words of scriptural revelation…the ancient traditions…applying reason and experience to all of it…

And would take those good things back into the community…bringing their experience out…because they had been gathered in the name of Christ.

This idea of commemorating the saints and then—by extension all the faithful departed—dates back to the early Middle Ages…during the times of Christian martyrs. The feast day as we’ve come to know it in the Episcopal Church seems connected to festivals held in Ireland and then made more general to all of Europe under Pope Gregory the Fourth.

And while saints were generally thought of as people of faith who did amazing and heroic things in the name of Christ…the truth is that many of the people we remember in the church were ordinary people...who responded to circumstances in their life and times out faith and conviction to do what is right.

Think about our diocesan saint Anna Alexander.

She wasn’t someone who wrote heady tomes or did amazing works of bravery.

But what she did do is build a school and a church in a coastal Georgia community and… despite the obstacles put in her way due to racism and prejudice…she persisted.

And her faith kept her going…kept her pursuing the goal to educate the children in Pennick and give them a pathway to greater possibilities.

She did all of that as a deaconess in the church at a time when the diocese of Georgia had sidelined their black church members.

Or consider Jonathan Myrick Daniels…remembered as one of the martyrs of the civil rights movement in Alabama.

Daniels was a seminarian and was known to be a bit of a hot head.

He graduated from Virginia Military Institute…but he struggled to figure out the direction for his life.

It was at an Easter service in 1962 at Church of the Advent in Boston that he felt called to the ordained priesthood. 

While in seminary…and listening to the Magnificat being sung at Evening Prayer…Jonathan Daniels knew he needed to respond to Dr. Martin Luther King’s call to join the struggle for racial equality in Alabama.

He marched… he lived with and tutored black children…and brought their families into the segregated Episcopal Churches of Alabama.

He died…tragically…getting shot while defending a young black teenager named Ruby Sales from a white gun man.

She survived that day…but the experience left her mute for about six months.

But because she saw the love of a white man cut down by the hate of another white man…Ruby Sales earned a Master’s in Divinity and now teaches and lectures on the need for redemptive healing and deliverance from a culture that is centered on whiteness.

Not white people: but the whiteness that keeps us so divided and deluded and refusing to do the work that will set us all free.

Like Jesus calling Lazarus out of the tomb and saying, “Unbind him,” we need to be free to tell all the stories of our people…and not just the ones we want to hear.

I imagine there will be a time when Ruby Sales passes on to the next realm that we might see her memory honored along with Jonathan Daniels.

These are the ordinary people who rose and are still rising to meet these times that we are living in today and walking faithfully with God as they do the work that needs to be done.

There are hundreds of other stories…people who will never have their names written up in a history book… who are doing that work Richard Hooker to be the society of the church.

Their names and their stories…the memory of who they were and what they did to make a difference in the lives of others…still lives on through us who knew them.

When we think about the way their lives intersected with ours… it recalls for us their relationship…as a friend or family member…and how they showed us something or taught us something that helped give us a glimpse of making earth a little more like our vision of heaven.

In a few minutes…we will be saying aloud the names of those who have died and gone on to take their place in the great cloud of witnesses that surrounds us.

I’m going to ask that we do something a little different than what we’ve done in the past.

There’s a custom I have seen when I have attended Jewish services.

As they read the roll of those who have died or are marking the anniversary of death…the family members or friends who have an attachment to that name stand up so that the congregation can bear witness to their grief.

It also is a visual reminder that we don’t do this life alone when we see the others who are standing with us.

So today…I’m going to ask that as you hear the name of your loved one…your friend…that person you enjoyed being with but see no more…as you hear that name…please stand and remain standing until the prayer is finished.

Mother Teresa once said, “God did not call me to be successful; God called me to be faithful.”

As we each strive to walk with God as a society of believers…and not just an assembly…may we look to those good lessons we’ve learned from the saints to do our work of making a better world here on earth.

In the name of our one Holy and Undivided Trinity.