SAINTS ASPIRANT

 

“Holy! Holy! Holy! All the saints adore thee: as we celebrate All Saints Day, all the saints are us, we ARE the saints, faithful Christians baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection and, bound by covenant, living a promised godly life because of the holy life of Jesus.

If saints of God, we are disciples, disciples of Jesus. A disciple is not simply to follow the master, but to become what the master is; becoming Christ. So, how are you doing, Saint Christian? Are you becoming Christ? You will never “become” but at baptism you covenant to the “becoming”. No one can answer but yourself: how are you doing? Are you walking the Way of the Cross as you promise in your Baptismal Covenant? Are you “becoming” Christ, Saint Christian?

For all the trivializing Christians do about "who is a saint," we like to say everyone is a saint, but the Way of the Cross is the way of life. 

In the Episcopal Church, we have a register of saints: holy apostles and others canonized by the church over the ages, largely brought over from our Roman Catholic heritage. You can see the list in the prayerbook calendar. 

The Catholic Church has a process for “creating” saints, canonizing people whose lives are remembered as singularly holy and exemplary. Pope Francis canonized 12 new saints this year, including two last month. The Episcopal Church does not have a process for naming people “saints”. The closest we have is General Convention authorizing people to be added to the Church Calendar, to be commemorated on a certain day, usually the day of their death. 

One is Jonathan Myrick Daniels, an Episcopal seminary student who, in a 1965 civil rights protest in Selma, Alabama, stepped in front of a Black child to prevent her being shot by a White lawman, and took the gunblast himself.

On the church calendar of holy days, Daniels’ commemoration is August 14: blood Red hangings are authorized for him, just as for Saints Peter, Andrew, James, John, and Paul. Same as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Jonathan Daniels has his own Collect or Prayer for the Day, and in the Eucharist on his day, the Preface for a Saint is offered. Unlike the Catholic Church, we are shy and unsure about naming saints, that’s our way to honor such holiness and selflessness.

Jonathan Daniels: a little girl’s savior, died  protesting oppressive, institutionalized evil - - a saint - - not just somebody who gets up and goes to church Sunday morning, but someone to remember forever and say “Oh my God!!”

Who is a saint? 

Who lives the Baptismal Covenant of love and sacrifice - - unhesitatingly for others, including when life is on the line.

There are saints, and there are the rest of us - - “saints-aspirant” - - it’s hazy, iffy, ambiguous.

What about us? What do we believe as Christians? 

We believe in God: Father, Son, & Holy Spirit.

We believe that at death, life does not end but changes; that we, and those we have known and loved, go on to a different reality of Being in the love of God. We are not definitive and specific about that, because it’s faith and hope beyond human knowing, and humans are foolish about leading ourselves into Certainty! Over the ages, different Christians and others have believed different things about afterlife, and what Christians and others believe changes over Time. It’s not “dogma”, there’s nothing that we as Episcopalians are required to believe about the unknown, we are free to seek truth as we wish, or we may leave it alone as unknowable, or we may hope it's as beautiful and loving and glorious and welcoming as we imagine, or we may take comfort and assurance in what the Church prays. As in our (Rite One) liturgy for Burial of the Dead:

O God, whose mercies cannot be numbered: Accept our prayers on behalf of thy servant and grant him an entrance into the land of light and joy, in the fellowship of thy saints;

Give courage and faith to those who are bereaved, that they may have strength to meet the days ahead in the comfort of a reasonable and holy hope, in the joyful expectation of eternal life with those they love. 

Help us, we pray, in the midst of things we cannot understand, to believe and trust in the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, and the resurrection to life everlasting.

Grant us grace to entrust our loved one to thy never-failing love; receive him into the arms of thy mercy,

Grant that, increasing in knowledge and love of thee, he may go from strength to strength in the life of perfect service in thy heavenly kingdom.

Into thy hands, O merciful Savior, we commend thy servant. Acknowledge, we pray, a sheep of thine own fold, a lamb of thine own flock, a sinner of thine own redeeming. Receive him into the arms of thy mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light.

+++++++

You can tell our theology, our FAITH, what we believe, including about saints, by examining what we pray. And if you are still not sure, you are in good company, because FAITH is not certainty, not knowledge, faith is Hope. Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for, assurance about what we do not see. … By faith, we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command.”

From the prayerbook Catechism, which means “teaching”

 

Q.	What do we mean by heaven and hell?
A.	By heaven, we mean eternal life in our enjoyment of God; by hell, we mean eternal death in our rejection of God.
Q.	Why do we pray for the dead?
A	We pray for them, because we still hold them in our love, and because we trust that in God's presence those who have chosen to serve him will grow in his love, until they see him as he is.
Q.	What do we mean by the last judgment?
A.	We believe that Christ will come in glory and judge the living and the dead.
Q.	What do we mean by the resurrection of the body?
A.	We mean that God will raise us from death in the fullness of our being, that we may live with Christ in the communion of the saints.
Q.	What is the communion of saints?
A.	The communion of saints is the whole family of God, the living and the dead, those whom we love and those whom we hurt, bound together in Christ by sacrament, prayer, and praise.
Q.	What do we mean by everlasting life?
A.	By everlasting life, we mean a new existence, in which we are united with all the people of God, in the joy of fully  knowing and loving God and each other.
Q.	What, then, is our assurance as Christians?
A.	Our assurance as Christians is that nothing, not even death, shall separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

In our closing hymn about saints, we do not say “And I’m one too” - - we say “And I MEAN TO BE one too.” So on All Saints let us pray:

O God, together with those we love and honor who have gone on before us, make us saints of your kingdom now and for ever. Amen.

++++++++++++++++++

Sermon/homiletic endeavor by the Rev Tom Weller in Holy Nativity Episcopal Church, Panama City, Florida on All Saints Sunday, 6 November 2022. 

With apologies that material lifted from The Online Book of Common Prayer does not all always, when published, line up in accordance with my font-size specification. TW

images: saints of God now and in ages past, there are hundreds of thousands!