An empty life.
Empty.
We try to fill it with distractions, sometimes oblivion, sometimes violence.
An empty life.
Then we meet somebody.
Somebody who carries fullness, a fullness that spills over into our lives, the fullness that is love, the fullness that is God.
And that empty life starts to fill up.
We meet somebody, a Saint of God, and the faith catches hold, takes root and grows in us.
A saint of God.
By right of our baptism, by the power of the blood of Christ we are all Saints of God.
Today we celebrate all Saint’s Day and that means several things.
It means we remember and give thanks for all those who have gone on before us, those who have passed, those who have died. The dead.
It means we celebrate the life that has entered into our emptiness, passed to us and through us to others, making the great procession of the Saints.
It means that today we also especially remember and give thanks for the Saints with a big S, the heroes of the faith, known and unknown, sung and unsung, who were different, who were graced and chosen to reveal God in a way that is, I suppose that best word would be “startling” or perhaps “disturbing”.
The Saints have rarely been very popular or understood. At best they are usually tolerated, or held off at a distance, or ignored, or even turned into celebrities. At worst they are scorned, mocked, defamed, assassinated.
They always bring change, not just any change, but a change that brings life to a withering and dieing community. And those who profit from the death of a community never like to have their prosperity, their livelihood threatened (short sighted and short lived as it may be).
When the status quo is death and emptiness, a withering slow decay, the saints bring life, fullness, healing, preservation.
The slaves of death always resist the saints of God, and they usually win, to be honest, but only in the short term.
The saints bring a balance, a corrective, to a world that is off center, off kilter, going stagnant, decaying. They air things out. They bring the ecosystem back to life, and some times that means shocking the system.
The slaves of death, and the saints of God have one really big thing in common. They are both very aware of the emptiness of life, very aware of the broken communion with what brings flourishing, the broken relationship with God.
The slaves of death furiously try to fill, or run from that emptiness, the Saints accept it and offer it up to God.
That is why the greatest saints make the greatest sinners, and the greatest sinners make the greatest saints, the highest angel makes the lowest demon. Both are very aware of how frail and empty life is. The difference is what they do with that awareness.
Rarely are the Saints the folks who are just full and happy with God. The great Saints are usually those who wrestle with that emptiness, who wrestle with that demon, and somehow still trust and love God, even when God seems so far and absent.
Saints live with the deep pain of the world, they are very aware of that pain, that wound that all creation suffers from, and God fills these people with a grace that brings life where before there was death.
Teresa of Avilla once said to God, “God if this is how you treat your friends, it is no wonder you have so few!”
Sainthood has sometimes been compared to an affliction or a curse, because it is not about the specialness of the saint, it is about the saint becoming the means of God’s grace. To be chosen, to be gifted, to be graced is to share that gift, to be a blessing to the world, to be a servant.
And that can be difficult, and the saints often speak very plainly to God about this, like Teresa’s comment to God about not having many friends.
The saints are also notorious for being difficult people to get along with or to be around. They are living reminders of how broken we all are, of how in need of God we all are, of how life can be so much more, that we have it all wrong. They remind us of things that we would rather forget or not face.
Because of this the saints are often ostracized, excluded, constitutional amendments are written to keep them out.
The Saints. They aren’t who we think they are. They are the ones who bring life and graciousness to the dieing and the violent, they show as the flourishing of God’s kingdom, they show us our own fallenness. They aren’t necessarily the virtuous. They are the ones who wake us up.
It’s a hard job. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. But if the call comes, I imagine it is hard to resist. God is rather insistent that the resurrection take root and that the dead shall live.
We now remember our own dead with the Necrology, the reading of the dead, those who in this parish have died since last All Saint’s.
All stand.
Virginia Mae Rudder Banner
Martha Plexico Attaway
Ruth Irene Pearson Buck
Elizabeth Smith
Anne Durris Cleveland
Elizabeth Reynolds Thompson
Alleluia, the Lord is Glorious in his Saints, Come let us adore him, Alleluia!