The Festival of All Saints
Posted by stpauls on November 7, 2010 under Sermons |
The festival of All Saints is one of the oldest celebrations in the calendar of the church. The Christian East first introduced a festival to celebrate the saints some sixteen hundred years ago. According to the Greek Orthodox calendar the first Sunday after Pentecost is still called “The Sunday of the Saints.”
In the Christian West, the first recognition of saints was a commemoration of the martyrs on May 13th, emphasizing earlier traditions of remembering those who had died for the faith and who therefore were alive in God and close to God’s heart.
The celebration of a feast for all Saints on or around November 1st came to Western Europe from the Celtic Church in the 8th century. The content was thoroughly Christian, but the date had actually been “stolen” from pre-Christian Celtic traditions. On or around November 1st, the Celtic people of the British Isles celebrated “Samhain.” Samhain was initially and primarily a harvest thanksgiving. But Samhain also included some aspect of commemorating the dead. The Celts believed that the border between our world and the world of the dead became “thin” on Samhain. Fall was a time of death for many animals and plants and as these deceased animal- and plant-spirits penetrated the gate between life and death, the gate opened wider allowing for the greater numbers, but allowing also for the dead to reach back into our world.
We might smile at this kind of spirituality and maybe consider it even underdeveloped. But not so fast…
The Celts were a people with a culture that was deeply rooted in what the earth provided. And they had great observation skills. They were trying to make sense of what they saw and experienced. And maybe these early people observed something that is part of God’s creation, but to which we no longer have access in our busy and often times disconnected world… After all, if we really believe that God is the Creator of all, is omnipotent and omnipresent, then God was very much part of the lives of the Celts, too, even if they did not understand God’s profound presence in their lives.
This does not at all mean we have to embrace pantheism, panentheism, or even paganism. There is only one God, who created the heavens and the earth. There is only one God, who is the source and the end of all being. There is only one God and it is the one God, who is fully and uniquely revealed in Jesus Christ.
But God desires profoundly to be known by His creation. God in fact yearns to be known by us. God wants for us to encounter Her, so that we might be fully embraced by the Divine whoever we are, whatever we are, and wherever we find ourselves on the journey. We really cannot set limits to the way God seeks to be present and reveal Himself in our lives and in the lives of others. It is God’s business. And God sometimes chooses voices from the outside to remind us of a truth we might have forgotten. God sometimes uses surprising people, in surprising places to make God’s will known to us.
This does not mean that everything goes. There are perceptions that don’t help us move forward deeper into the mystery of our triune God. But, we must be open for God’s voice to speak to us in surprising ways. This is why the discernment by the community of faith in light of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason is so essential.
As we consider the insights of the Celtic people in their celebration of Simhain, we must remember this: Those who have died cannot reach back into our lives on their own account. The biblical revelation of God’s reality assures us that the dead are in the arms of God. They are not wandering, aimless spirits, separated from empty bodies that roam the earth or an underworld looking to communicate with us. But at death the soul, i.e. one’s complete identity, enters into the loving embrace of God. The dead are secure and safe. They are at rest. They are at peace, immersed fully in God – until that day when all shall rise again to life and when the children of God are resurrected to inhabit a new earth where there will be no more pain or death, but where justice and peace will penetrate every fibre of our being, and where God’s love will reign for us to enjoy forever.
This does not mean we are cut off completely in this life from those who have gone before us. We can witness to the immortal bond of love that binds us together as we commend the dead to God’s care in prayer. In the celebration of baptism and other sacraments, we are united intimately and viscerally with the church of all ages. And of course, the lives of those who have died still impact us in our own lives today.
Maybe this is what Celts experienced when the days got shorter and the sky grew grey: The echoes of those who had gone before grew stronger and the memories of the deceased moved closer to the conscious. And maybe God in Her infinite wisdom appointed this time of the year not for the dead to be able to reach back into our world or for us to be able to reach into the reality of the dead. But maybe this is the appointed time for us to experience glimpses of that peace, which surrounds those who rest in the arms of God. Maybe November is indeed a thin time, not unlike thin places where God’s love seems palpable in sensual ways.
I wish we would reclaim some of the ancient Celtic insights for us. Not because, we should all become pagans again. Far from it. This is no call for a problematic and dangerous syncretism. But as I learned about the traditions of Simhain, I wondered whether the ancient Celts actually have something to teach us in our days when too often the questions about death and dying and about those who have gone before us remain unanswered or are answered in rather unsatisfactory ways.
As I said, the Celtic festival of Simhain was celebrated at the end of the gathering of the harvest. Samhain was a Thanksgiving. And isn’t this what All Saints’ is all about? It is a Thanksgiving. We give thanks for the harvest of the saints, the rich, diverse, life-giving, and profound harvest of the saints, who have gone before us. Maybe November is the time for us to look at the saints, to listen to the echo that they have left behind, and to commemorate the lives that they have lived. This celebration might even involve more than our minds and memory, but also our senses and everything connected to the earthly lives of the saints. If God touched a human being, do we really think this amazing encounter didn’t have an impact on the cosmos and didn’t leave behind traces of the encounter for us to discover? The echoes of the lives of the saints can be heard, felt, tasted, seen, smelled, and spoken of, even today.
I believe that this kind of veneration is “meek and right,” because in the end, it really isn’t about the saints. It is about God, who revealed himself, not in a vacuum, but in and through the lives of individuals: individuals who lived millennia ago, individuals who live in our own day and age, and individuals whose birth is yet to come. These individuals are channels of God’s grace. Like candles, God lit these saints with the flame of the Holy Spirit, whose light pierces any darkness and can never be overcome, not even by death. If the veneration of the saints helps us to discover this very light, then let’s do it.
If this form of veneration, however, becomes more about the candle than about the flame, more about the saint than about the Spirit of God, then we no longer give thanks in an appropriate way.
And we also no longer celebrate the saints in an appropriate way, if our veneration is limited to the lives of those identified by the church in a special way.
This is why today’s reading from Luke is so important.
Unlike Matthew, Luke sets Jesus’ Beatitudes not on a mountain, but on a field, among the people. God’s people don’t have to climb high to find God, but God in Jesus Christ comes the other way, comes among them, comes among us, whoever we are, and wherever we find ourselves on the journey. And God affirms that the love of God is not just for special people. God embraces all people, especially the poor, the hungry, those who weep, and those who are hated, excluded, reviled, and defamed on behalf of the Son of Man. The saints are a diverse multitude, loved by God, embraced by God, and never forgotten by God. And they are not perfect. They are like you and me, they are you and me, stumbling along, but rejoicing in God’s gift of life and trusting in God’s promise of love.
Today we celebrate the saints. Today we celebrate those, who in baptism have started their journey with Christ, who will let God’s life-giving Spirit penetrate every fibre of their being, and who trust that they will be embraced by God’s love in intimate ways, even beyond death. Today, we celebrate the saints, both those whose faith is a public witness to God’s love, and those whose faith is known to God alone.
[The Reverend Markus Duenzkofer delivered this sermon on November 7, 2010.]