PAST SERMONS
Sermon of November 1, 2009 by The Rev. Rosalee Glass
St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church, Camden, Maine, November 1, 2009
All Saints Sunday
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Sermon by Rosalee T. Glass
Sermon, All Saints Sunday, November 1, 2009
St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church, Camden, Maine
The Rev. Rosalee T. Glass
“I Sing a Song of the Saints of God,” the hymn about saints we have sung today, says that the saints of God are just folk like me. I don’t know about you, but that line always makes me wonder. What first comes to mind when I think of saints are the dead, super-heroes of the faith: the Apostles, the evangelists, the martyrs. The stories of the lives of individual saints that are canonized by the Church sometimes depict them as so perfect that we can see little connection between them and ourselves. There are them… and, well, then there’s us.
But if we look at those who were called “saints” of God in the first churches, we find in most respects they were like us. They were the holy ones because of their faith and because they were consecrated by Baptism into the Body of Christ.
The word “Christian” did not exist yet; and in most of St. Paul’s letters to the young churches, he addresses the recipient believers collectively as “saints,” or as those “called to be saints.” A typical address is like the one at the beginning of Ephesians, where Paul says, “To the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus.”
What were those saints like and by what definition are they and present and future saints saintly? There is a popular definition you have probably heard supposedly first spoken by a child. When asked what a saint was after he had visited a church with stained glass windows of the Saints, he said, “A saint is somebody that God’s light shines through.”
“A saint is somebody that God’s light shines through.” If that definition is good for an individual, how about for a whole congregation? I think we could extend that thought to saints as a Body, which is the Church: Then we might say, “The church is a community that God’s light shines through.” For the early church and for us, God’s light shining through us is the light that Jesus Christ brought.
Shining forth from Jesus was the assurance of God’s love and long-awaited presence. What shone forth from Jesus was the truth spoken of in the words of all of our Scripture lessons today: that God loved us enough that he would dwell with us, would weep with us; would suffer and die for us; would give us water from the spring of life, would swallow up death forever, and would wipe the tears from all our faces and from every eye.
The light of Christ shone through the saints of the early church because they believed what Jesus said, and were faithful to what Jesus called them to be, though in worldly terms, they weren’t particularly special or famous.
Traveling apostles like St. Paul called the believers into communities of saints. They were of diverse ethnic, social, and economic classes. They were young and old, male and female, slave and free, Jew and Gentile, rich and poor. All were equal members of the body of Christ. Whoever they were, if they followed Jesus, they were called to be saints among saints. As part of Christ’s Body, all were called to love and care for each other and for those in need outside the community. No one was a Lone Ranger; everyone worked collaboratively together for the care of all.
In our churches today, we try for this way of being church; but we, like the early churches, aren’t perfect. We know they weren’t perfect, because we have evidence in St. Paul’s Letters that they often backslid, dividing into factions that mirrored the class divisions of the world at large.
For instance, in chapter 11 of his first letter to the Corinthian church, Paul scolds the church for coming together for a meal and not sharing equally among all who were present. They were apparently NOT doing a potluck supper the way we do one. They were each bringing and eating their own supper. That was fine for the affluent, but the poor didn’t have as much, were humiliated, and went hungry. But when church members seemed to be forming cliques and factions by class or ethnicity, the letters show that leaders like Paul called them back to faithfulness to Jesus’ words and teachings.
St. Paul would be proud of us at St. Thomas’ for the inclusiveness of our meal-sharing; but we need to be attentive so that we don’t miss Jesus’ mark in other ways. For instance, perhaps we could work intentionally and imaginatively to find new ways to welcome and incorporate into our community every economic, social, and ethnic group, and persons of every age and ability.
Maybe some people don’t come to God’s table here because they feel they don’t have adequate clothing; or maybe they lack understanding of the liturgical style and are afraid to embarrass themselves; or maybe they fear having to climb the steps to take Communion. We might stay open to ideas for further removal of physical and psychological barriers that could making coming here and worshiping here difficult or uncomfortable for some folks.
The removal of any kind of barrier lets light through, and the removal of any barrier to someone’s becoming part of our church community will let the light of Christ shine the more brightly through us as a caring community of joyous saints. There really isn’t any reason to wonder whether the saints of God are just folk like us. With all our flaws, individually and corporately, we are still the saints of God. If we believe in who Jesus was and the Truth he gave us, as the early church saints did, we too are God’s holy ones. And if we aren’t, then who is? AMEN