All Saints' Sunday

"Bringing Heaven Down to Earth"

The Rev. David Frazelle

“God calls all of us to be saints.” I have never heard an All Saints’ homily that did not contain this in its central message: “God calls all of us to be saints.” It is hard to disagree with this statement, and it sounds good to say it today, on All Saints’ Day, but what does it mean that God calls us all to sainthood? In my experience, most people in the Episcopal Church are confused about who and what a saint really is. Does God make saints, do we make ourselves saints, or does an official church committee in Rome or Canterbury make saints? Do I have to move elsewhere to be a saint? Do I have to be a celibate priest, monk or missionary who lives in abject poverty for the sake of disabled refugee orphans before being fed to wild beasts in a coliseum for the sake of my faith to be a saint? Do I have to be dead to be a saint? We have to sort through some of these questions in order to give flesh and meaning to the theme of most All Saints’ homilies: “God calls all of us to be saints.”

The influence of church politics accounts for a good deal of the confusion about sainthood. Beginning in the early middle ages, the system for publicly recognizing saints became more and more codified and centralized, until finally, by the 16th century, a small group of clergy decided whom to recommend to the Pope for canonization as a saint. That small group of celibate male clergy, called the Roman curia, has chosen – surprise! – mostly celibate, male, ordained, white, European saints. It is not that their choices were wrong; it is that together the choices reflect, almost inevitably, the cultural conditioning of those in authority to make the choices. For example, the few women saints on the list are virgins, martyrs, nuns, or all three. Saints of color, saints from poor backgrounds, and saints whose holiness grew through married life are completely missing from the official list. And because the Roman Catholic Church has venerated saints much more assiduously and continuously than any other church in the west, their choices have set the tone for the rest of us. The result is that the dominant list of saints can give the false impression that sainthood is out of reach for those of us who live in America, perhaps in families, perhaps even as females. If we are all called to be saints, we say to ourselves, then I might just screen that call and let the answering machine pick up.

The good news is that we have another model for understanding and recognizing sainthood. At the core, a saint is a holy person who manifests the holiness of God. According to the New Testament and early church writings, Jesus Christ is the source of holiness, and Jesus stands at the center of the communion of saints. By the gift of his Spirit he invites all people to be one with him in the holiness of God the Father. In this New Testament and Early Church vision, there are two characteristics of saints, and these characteristics are accessible to all believers. First, saints are united to Jesus Christ through baptism, holy eucharist, and faith in his death and resurrection. The second characteristic flows from the first – saints are people who give their lives for the sake of others and who show active concern for the poor and the oppressed. By giving their lives away in love and concern for others, saints bear witness to the truth of the death and risen life of Jesus. In shorthand, the two core meanings of sainthood are union with Christ through faith and sacrament, and service to others out of the love of the risen Christ living within them. Sainthood, then, is both a transformation that God works in us, and a transformation that requires our hard work in order to receive it. Perhaps most importantly for our purposes, this ancient model of sainthood is accessible to everyone, regardless of their situation or stage in life. There are an infinite number of creative ways to manifest God’s holiness in the love of Christ for all people. God calls all of us to be saints, right where we are, beginning with the relationships closest to us.

I want to end with an image from the early church that speaks of sainthood more clearly than words could do. In the early Christian era, people thought that heaven and earth were separated by a vast fault that ran between the moon and the earth. The lights of what we call the Milky Way were the steppingstones to heaven. When someone died, families would keep vigil at the gravesite, and they would use vigil lights to represent the milky way and to provide light to help the deceased on his or her journey to heaven. The early Christians also kept vigil with lights around the gravesites of saints, but with a very different understanding from that of the pagan world around them. In the Christian vision of sainthood, a saint did not leave the earth for a holy place above in the heavens. The gravesite of the saint was a itself a holy place, a place where the power of Jesus Christ through the saint was manifest. In other words, the saint did not journey to heaven so much as the saint brought heaven down to earth. This is perhaps the best definition of a saint – a person who brings heaven to earth – a person whose very memory makes real the powerful love of the risen Jesus.

On this Feast of All Saints, thanks be to God for the saints who are recognized and remembered throughout the church universal. Thanks be to God for the saints whom we have known and who live among us now. Thanks be to God for our vocation and our destiny to be holy, to be saints, to bring heaven down to earth.