Standing With the Saints

Sermon for Nov. 5, 2023, All Saints' Sunday
Revelation 7:9-17; Matthew 5:1-12

I want to tell you a story for All Saints’ Sunday.  I can see where I was sitting, in my Sunday school classroom at Christ Episcopal Church in Springfield, the morning when being a Christian actually meant something to me.  I was 9 years old.  Now, my family went to church every week, but I had no idea why, other than my mother told me to.  I didn’t mind it, and I enjoyed singing in the choir.  But I couldn’t have told you why I was there.

Well, when I was 9 years old, I’d had a rough fall and winter.  My grandfather had died in late October, and my grandmother had died three months later, to the day.  Both deaths were sudden and unexpected; both times, I went to school one morning and came home to learn they were gone.  I’d been close to both of them; and, of course, I didn’t get to say good-bye.

But that morning in Sunday school, as the goodhearted teacher was laboring to share celestial wonders with a bunch of squirmy kids, I heard something I’d somehow missed before – eternal life.  Wait, what?  Heaven means my grandma and grandpa are still around somehow?  And it means I get to see them again?

It turns out, little John Spicer needed to know that.  Even at 9 years old, it made a world of difference that these people I loved weren’t unreachable.  At some point, they and I would be able to pick back up where we’d left off.  I couldn’t explain how it was going to work, but that didn’t matter.  What I knew was that they were still accessible to me – and that, at some point, I’d get to be with them again.  

As you know, we’re in the third week of this sermon series asking, “Is It Well With My Soul?”  And the question for this week is, “Am I on my own?”  If you’ve lost someone dear to you, you’ve probably asked that question.  If you love someone whose health is dicey, you’ve probably asked that question.  If you’ve stood in a crowd and wondered what you had in common with any of these people, you’ve probably asked that question.  If you’ve longed for a connection with God, looking for answers or looking for help that always seems just out of reach, you’ve probably asked that question: Am I on my own in this?

Today, on All Saints’ Sunday, we’re remembering not just those we’ve loved and lost but a much deeper mystery – that they’re not lost after all, and neither are we.  Our faith joins us together in what we call the company of saints – “the intercommunion of the living and the dead in the body of Christ.”¹  Now, that may sound like a dubious proposition to our postmodern minds, but it’s more straightforward than it seems.  When someone starts following Jesus, like the kids being baptized here this morning, that person becomes more than who they’d been, being grafted in as a component part of the Body of Christ.  That’s how we act as the hands and feet and heart of Jesus in the world today:  He loves and serves as we love and serve.  Well, if it’s true that Christians are no longer living for themselves alone but together comprise the Body of Christ, then we don’t become separated from that spiritual body just because our physical bodies die.  We continue in praise and service across all time, until Jesus comes again to judge the living and the dead and we experience “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting,” as the Apostles’ Creed puts it.

So, once we die, what happens while we’re waiting for Jesus to return?  Well, the theologians call it “paradise,” and I think we will, too.  Paradise isn’t just a resort for Christian all-stars, which is who we tend to think of when we hear the word “saint.”  We’ve been making that mistake for centuries, actually – seeing “saints” as just the heroes, those who die a martyr’s death or proclaim Jesus in everything they do.  Those people certainly are in paradise, but so are regular Christian folk.  As the theologian N.T. Wright says, there’s no reason to think the apostles and martyrs are “more advanced … than those Christians … who have died quietly in their beds. …  [A]ll Christians, living and departed, are to be thought of as saints.”² The difference is that the saints who’ve departed, like the thief who died next to Jesus – they’re already with him “in paradise” (Luke 23:43), while we’re still making our way.

Now, how can we believe that?  We’re people who need evidence to believe something, not just ancient stories.  And if something can’t be proven scientifically, at least we need to experience it ourselves if we’re going to say it’s true.  Well, I can’t point to a clinical study to document our connection with the company of saints or with Jesus himself, and there’s a good reason why.  Science lives in the three-dimensional world – and that’s a good thing, because science seeks to understand and predict what our three-dimensional world will do.  Asking science to document our relationship with God, or our connection with the company of saints, is like asking someone in a two-dimensional universe to investigate “up” – you can’t explore “up” if all you know is length and width, not height.³  

So, for a dimension beyond what we know day by day, we Flatlanders (as C.S. Lewis put it)⁴ have to turn to experience rather than science.  And to find that experience, one of the best locations is … well, where we are right now.

Why do we come to worship?  What do we find when we come here?  You probably know the ancient Celts talked about “thin places” between heaven and earth, holy sites where their three-dimensional universe intersected with something beyond it.  Well, that’s what worship is – a thin place between the faithful in this time and space and the “angels and archangels and … all the company of heaven” (BCP 362) with whom we gather each week.  

I think that’s what our readings today point toward.  In Revelation’s vision of the redeemed in heaven, those who’ve been “sealed” (which is an ancient word for baptism) – they’re doing what we’re doing, just experiencing the One we worship more intimately.  As we stand before the altar, they’re standing before the throne of God and the resurrected Christ, offering their praise and worship and thanksgiving.  That’s what we come here to do, too – offer our praise and worship and thanksgiving to God primarily through this service of Eucharist, which in Greek means “thanksgiving.”

So, the writer asks, who are these worshipers “robed in white, and where have they come from?” (Rev 7:13).  And his guide explains, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal” (Rev 7:14).  They’re the martyrs, which at its root means “witness.”  But a martyr isn’t just someone who gets eaten by lions in the Colosseum.  A martyr is someone whose life bears witness to the all-powerful, all-giving love of God – those who deny themselves, and take up their cross, and follow Jesus (Matt 16:24); those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, and practice mercy, and make peace, and walk the path of the pure in heart (Matt 5:6-9).  They’ve come through the waters of baptism and emerged as saints of God – just folks like us who decided they want to be one, too.

We saints can find thin places all around us; the church doesn’t have a unique claim to God’s kingdom.  But it’s also true that worship is a doorway to heaven that’s always unlocked, always standing open, always inviting you to step through for a moment of life’s fullness before God’s throne.  Open your eyes, and see heavenly beauty.  Close your eyes, and hear the voices of the angels.  Open your ears, and hear God whispering the Word to directly to you.  Come to the altar, and extend your hands into God’s sanctuary, and receive the Body and Blood of Christ empowering you to be his body in the world, healing others as you yourself have been healed.

Worshiping God is the fundamental work of God’s people, now and forever.  And, as you’ve heard before, it’s the people’s work, not the clergy’s.  The word “liturgy” doesn’t mean the work of the religious professionals; it means the work of the folks.

And just here in this thin place at the corner of Meyer and Wornall, so many of you take on specific work to make liturgy happen.  On a typical, run-of-the-mill, miraculous Sunday, if you combine the 8 and 10:15 services, we have about 55 people each week involved in leading worship “before the throne and before the Lamb” (Rev 7:9) – Altar Guild sacristans, ushers, greeters, musicians, Eucharistic ministers, Tech Guild members, clergy, acolytes, lectors.  And then there’s the most important group, the congregation of the saints – the hundreds here on a Sunday morning, and the hundreds and thousands and millions down the streets and across the world, the company of saints across time and space, the “great multitude that no one can count” (Rev 7:9). 

So, why?  What is it we’re here to do?  To praise and thank God for the promise that both is and is to come, glimpsed now and then gained fully – the assurance that we “will hunger no more and thirst no more; the sun will not strike [us] nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be [our] shepherd, and he will guide [us] to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes” (Rev 7:16-17).

In this thin place between earth and heaven, straddling “is” and “is to come,” you are part of something vastly greater than yourself.  You stand with God and the Lamb and the company of saints, past, present, and future.  And alongside that great company, you never stand alone.

1.     Lesser Feasts and Fasts 2022. New York: Church Publishing, 2022. 488.

2.     Wright, N.T. Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church.  New York: HarperCollins, 2007. 170.

3.     Inspired by Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott (1884). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland.

4.     Lewis, C.S. Miracles. Available at: http://www.basicincome.com/bp/files/Miracles-C_S_Lewis.pdf.