All Saints Sunday Sermon

Do you remember what you were doing on October 14, 1984? I was 12 years old and watching the Detroit Tigers on TV beat the San Diego Padres in the World Series, winning the series 4 games to 1. It was great to be a kid that night watching the Tigers win.

The manager of the 1984 Tigers was Sparky Anderson, he managed the Cincinnati Reds to two world series championships in the 1970s before coming to the Tigers. As one sports writer put it, “he was among the brightest, most well-liked and decent people ever to fill out a lineup card.” (Tim Kurkjian) He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2000, giving all the credit to his players.

Sparky died on November 4 at the age of 76 from complications from dementia. At his request, there would be no funeral nor memorial service. Which is too bad, I understand that he was a humble guy, but a funeral isn’t for the dead, its for the living. Its for us to remember and celebrate life and say our good-byes. And so many of his former players, staff and others want to celebrate his life and will in their own way.

The Christian faith is all about remembering. We read the stories from the Bible to remember, we celebrate the sacraments to remember. “Do this in remembrance of me,” Jesus says. It is a faith that is being passed on to us, to remember and live. That’s why at the end of our Baptismal rite, we are called to “confess the faith of Christ crucified, proclaim his resurrection, and share in his eternal priesthood.”

Our faith is connected to the past, in what happened to Jesus in his life through the crucifixion and resurrection, and by how we today through confession and proclamation speak of our faith and remind ourselves that we share in that priesthood of all believers. And there is no better way to think about how we live out our faith than by thinking about our connection to the saints.

Today is All Saints Sunday, a day when we remember the saints, not for their sake, but for ours. So that by God’s grace we may follow the saints in all “virtuous and godly living.” When we think of saints, too often we think of saints as sinless, perfectly pious and moral, who got everything right.

“How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints,” wrote CS Lewis.

The self-absorbed tyrants and proud conquerors are nothing compared to the saints, for they are gloriously different because they hear the voice of God in their lives and it changed them. Life was no longer just about them, Francis gave up the family wealth, the readymade job, glory in war & life of the upper class, and chose instead to heed the voice of God and rebuild God’s church. It lead Dietrich Bonhoeffer to abandon the safety of the US to actively work against Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Regime. Elizabeth, Princess of Hungary, gave away her great wealth to the poor of her land, setting up hospitals and caring for those in need, even as the elite in the court did not like her extravagant almsgiving.

What’s true of the saints, is they found joy by doing what God called them to do. To use the words of the late William Stringfellow,

“In truth, all human beings are called to be saints, but that just means called to be fully human, to be perfect—that is, whole, mature, fulfilled. The saints are simply those men and women who relish the event of life as a gift and who realize that the only way to honor such a gift is to give it away.”

Life is a gift and the saints found by listening to God, they would find fulfillment and happiness in what they did. “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” Jesus said.

For Sparky Anderson, his life besides his family, was baseball, the players and the team. He loved the game and it showed, and his players loved him for it. Life as gift and joy begins ritually in our rite of baptism, remembering the past, connecting with our life now and hoping for the future. As Verna Dozier put it,

“to be called to be saints means we are called to be members of the household of God. That's what a saint is.”

Today, David Daniel Stinson joins the household of God. And through the witness of parents, Godparents, family and friends, he will be baptized and will grow up and learn about the gift of life, a gift to be lived and enjoyed and given away.

Our challenge on this All Saints Day and always, is to remember the saints and listen to God like they did, for calls each one of us, to do unto others, by giving of ourselves (time, talent & treasure) and find that indeed life is a gift, it is joy, and it is meant to be given away. Amen.

All Hallows Eve Sermon

Happy Halloween! How often do you get to see your priest in rainbow hair?

Today is a day of fun, a day of merriment, when the child inside all of us is allowed to dress up and enjoy life, a day when we don’t take ourselves too seriously. Today reminds me of Fat Tuesday, when people celebrate life in mardi gras or carnival, eating the richest of foods, a day of revelry before the fast of Ash Wednesday begins and the time of Lent with its simplicity and introspection reigns until Easter.

But one big difference is that All Saints Day which we anticipate in our celebrations on Halloween is not a solemn fast like Ash Wednesday – it is a principal feast day – a celebration like Easter. In addition to All Saints Day, we have November 2 which is a lesser feast day called All Souls (or the Commemoration of all the faithful departed) . So in fact, we have three feast days, three celebrations that help us look to the past to connect with our present faith and guide us into our hopeful future. As one priest put it,

“All Saints' Day is the centerpiece of an autumn triduum. In the carnival celebrations of All Hallows' Eve our ancestors used the most powerful weapon in the human arsenal, the power of humor and ridicule, to confront the power of death. The following day, in the commemoration of All Saints, we gave witness to the victory of incarnate goodness embodied in the remarkable deeds and doers triumphing over the misanthropy of darkness and devils. And in the commemoration of All Souls we proclaim the hope of common mortality expressed in our aspirations and expectation of a shared eternity.” – (The Rev. Sam Portaro from “Brightest and Best”)

In other words… Halloween is a day of carnival celebrations when we use fun, humor even ridicule to live into our baptism and defy the power of death over our lives. As one Orthodox priest said,

“Halloween is the time of year when we see that Christ has so triumphed over Evil, that even little children can mock the Devil with impunity." – Fr. Victor

Halloween can be a moment when we give thanks and enjoy the gifts that God has given to us, even in the midst of the growing darkness around us and our sense of how close death really is. Which then leads into our All Saints Celebrations remembering those saints, as the great hymn puts it…

For all the saints, who from their labors rest,
who thee by faith before the world confessed,
thy Name, O Jesus, be forever blessed.

It is the saints who indeed lived their lives by faith, not worried about the power of death because Christ has triumphed, they lived lives as God had called them to be. We remember St. Francis, St. Peter our patron, St. Mary Magdalene, and the list goes on and on. I suspect we each might have our own saint that we treasure for their witness. For me, to coin a phrase from one of my favorite theologians, those saints “lived humanly in the midst of the powers of death.”

And the saints challenge me to do the same. To live by faith. To live as humanly as I can in the midst of darkness and death, knowing the light of Christ still shines. All Saints leads into All Souls, the day to remember the dead of my family, my friends, my parish, who now rest with the saints in heaven with God. Like Memorial Day, it is the Church’s witness to the resurrection and that new life given to all of us in Jesus Christ. But the days do grow short, like our lives and the darkness creeps closer.

Our ancestors near All Hallows Eve often built bonfires to ward off the spirits they believe came around this night. We no longer fear such spirits, if you go outside at night, its never truly pitch black with the glare of our cities, not like the deep darkness our ancestors had with the night. But it isn’t the spirits that lie in the darkness I fear but the life our culture says is the real life. That is the darkness around us today. As one professor put it as he reflected on the saints,

“Unlike the celebrity, and all who desire to be celebrities, the saint is the one who rejects such an identity and continually returns to the fact that they are who God says they are, no more and no less. The saint repeatedly turns from the identity others attempt to impose on him or her and only identifies himself or herself as God's beloved son or daughter. The saint sees the notoriety and prestige that the celebrity has (and the rest of us seek) as an illusion . . . The saint is different from the rest of us, not in being sinless but in the awareness of their sin and the need for repentance. Unlike the rest of us who try to cover or excuse our sin in order to appear sinless, the saint exposes his or her sin in order to become ever more aware of God's forgiveness and love. Likewise, unlike the rest of us who seek celebrity and wealth in order to make us bigger than we would otherwise be, the saint seeks littleness . . . When all else is stripped away, we are no more than God's creation - God's beloved sons and daughters . . . In contrast to the ladder of success our culture tells us we should climb, the saint's journey is downward. Indeed, we enter heaven as we descend into the littleness of the child who is aware of nothing but their father's love. This will be our heavenly state, but the saint, unlike the rest of us, desires to live as close as possible to that state now. [James Danaher, Professor of Philosophy at Nyack College, New York, in "The Saint," New Blackfriars, volume 90/issue 1027, May 2009.]

On this All Hallows Eve as we prepare in merriment to remember the saints and our faithful departed, may God help us to live lives that mirror the saints and help spread God’s light and love throughout the world. Let us pray.

Almighty Father, even though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we fear no evil, for Your Son our Lord Jesus Christ, has conquered evil and death, illuminating even the darkest valley. Therefore, we entreat you: Protect us from the enemy, Defend us from all evil, and give us the grace, to walk in the light of your Son, who lives and reigns, with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

Religious Persuasion

An interesting NY Times book review on "American Grace."

An excerpt from the review:

At first glance, the authors of “American Grace” would seem to suffer from very bad timing. Between the completion of their manuscript and its publication, the dispute over the Islamic center in Lower Manhattan erupted, followed by the ­Koran-burning controversy, and somewhere along the way a New York cabdriver was stabbed, apparently for being a Muslim. All this gives a quaint air to their declaration, in the book’s first chapter, that “America peacefully combines a high degree of religious devotion with tremendous religious diversity.” And it seems to render moot one of their main goals: to illuminate the source of this inter­faith ­tolerance.

Actually, though, the story told in this book, by the social scientists Robert D. Putnam of Harvard and David E. Campbell of Notre Dame, is urgently relevant to the recent surge in interfaith tension.

True, America’s tradition of peaceful religious coexistence is largely about harmony among Christian denominations, and so doesn’t speak directly to the question of Islam’s place in America. But it’s also true that there was a time when many American Protestants viewed Roman Catholics no more charitably than a certain Pentecostal preacher in Florida views Muslims. In the 19th century, a Massachusetts convent was destroyed by anti-Catholic rioters, and civil unrest in Philadelphia — set off by rumors that Catholics wanted to rid the public schools of Bibles — led to some two dozen deaths and the destruction of two churches.

The question of how this changed, how Protestants came to stress their commonality with Catholics, is, generically speaking, the question of the day: How do mutual fear, hostility and suspicion give way to amity, or at least tolerance? How do supposedly deep doctrinal chasms recede from view? The answers offered by Putnam and Campbell deserve the attention of everyone concerned about America’s future cohesion.

You can read all the review here.

AMERICAN GRACE: How Religion Divides and Unites Us
By Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell with the assistance of Shaylyn Romney Garrett

Read an excerpt: ‘American Grace’

A new Children's Bible

Desmond Tutu retells more than fifty of his most beloved stories, artfully highlighting God's desire for all people to love one another and to find peace and forgiveness in their hearts. Many of the finest artists from around the world have been selected to illustrate the stories. In an attempt to create the first truly global Bible for children, the artists have been invited to portray the stories with the style and richness of their own culture. Their stunning color illustrations allow readers to experience the Bible stories as if they were there---with Adam and Eve in the garden, with Noah on the ark, with Abraham in the desert, and with Jesus on the mountaintop. Every story shows how God works through history and ends with a short prayer, which personalizes the message for each reader's own life. Archbishop Tutu's wisdom, compassion, and sense of humor shine throughout, as he reminds us that 'We are all God's children.'

Target Ages 4-8

I haven't read this yet, but am very interested...

Election Day

Go Vote!

Almighty God, to whom we must account for all our powers and privileges: Guide the people of the United States and of this community in the election of officials and representatives; that, by faithful administration and wise laws, the rights of all may be protected and our nation be enabled to fulfill your purposes; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

All Souls Day

The Commemoration of All Faithful Departed:

O God, the Maker and Redeemer of all believers: Grant to the faithful departed the unsearchable benefits of the passion of your Son; that on the day of his appearing they may be manifested as your children; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

All Saints Day

All Saints Prayer:

Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord: Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

A wonderful All Saints Day message...

A message for All Saints (from 2008)

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori
Presiding Bishop and Primate
The Episcopal Church

What saints will you remember this year on their feast? It's an occasion to remember all the faithful, whether we know their names or not. The Good Shepherd knows them by name, even if we don't. This year I'd invite you to celebrate the ones whose names you know and the ones whose names you haven't yet learned.

In your neighborhood, who is the saint who picks up trash? Who looks out for school children on their way to and from school? Who looks after an elderly or frail neighbor, running errands or checking to be sure that person has what is needed?

In your community, what saints labor on behalf of the voiceless? I recently read about a prison law program in Michigan, about to be shut down for lack of funds, where one lawyer has worked for decades on behalf of those who have no other helper. Sandra Girard's work has helped to free many who were wrongly convicted, and to ease the circumstances of those who will spend most of the rest of their lives in jail. She points out that, "Most of the people I've helped in prison have also been victims. Long before they committed a crime themselves, they were victims of violence, poverty or something else." I met a member of the clergy in Missouri recently who also told of seeing many victims in prisons, but also that the penal system there is the most highly regarded in the U.S., for its focus on reparative and reconstructive justice. What saints are visiting the prisoners in your area? That is one of the ways Jesus urges us to bring good news and care for the least and forgotten among us (Matthew 25:37-40).

The saints are followers of Jesus, and fellow travelers on the journey toward the City of God. They come in all shapes, ages, colors, and theological stripes. Some of them, like Jerome and Jeremiah, can be difficult to live with. The children of the churches of the Convocation in Europe recently compiled a book of saints, complete with short accounts of their lives and illustrations by the children. Their list had some familiar names, like Joan of Arc and Hildegard, and some unexpected ones, like Anne Frank and Edith Cavell. Some, like Miss Edith, would not be known beyond the local congregation, but have had even more influence on their young charges' lives than any saint of an earlier age.

As you gather to celebrate on the feast of All Saints, take with you the name of a saint whose example you have seen in action, and one whose name you don't know, and give thanks. The appropriate companion prayer to one of thanks for the witness of other saints is that we, too, might be holy examples to those whom we meet.