The Rev. Dr. Austin Leininger
Sermon of All Saints’ Day
1 November 2017
Readings:
Revelation 7:9-17
Psalm 34:1-10, 22
1 John 3:1-3
Matthew 5:1-12
The turn from Halloween on October 31st, to All Saints Day on November 1st is a dramatic contrast. Over two thousand years ago, superstitions about the roaming spirits of the departed gave rise to Celtic traditions such as the Jack of the Lantern where a turnip or large Beet would be carved out and a candle placed inside so as to scare off the wandering spirits of imps and other wily spirits sent to antagonize and otherwise torture the living. In addition, on the night before the Celtic New Year, when the boundary between the physical world and the spirit world was at its thinnest, the spirits of departed loved ones trying to find their way back to the lit lantern on the threshold of the family homestead could be appeased by placing food outside the door (as well as kept outside by that scary Jack o’ Lantern). One never knew whether the spirit at the door on Halloween night would be a trick or a treat. Many stayed inside the safety of their homes that particular night, but those who dared to venture out would dress up as ghosts and ghouls so as to trick wandering spirits into thinking that he or she was just another of the walking dead.
The transition from Samhain, the eve of the Celtic New Year, to All Saints Day is one example of Imperial Christianity in the Roman Empire co-opting local traditions and attaching Christian meaning to them as a means of easing local customs and beliefs into Christianity. These and other non-Christian Celtic superstitions and practices surrounding the first new-moon after the harvest moon were normalized in the calendar year by the early church in the 9th century under the umbrella of All Saints Day, when we celebrate our communion with and continuing connection to the followers of Christ who have gone before us.
The Celtic Samhain celebration of the dead, which has some notably overlapping themes with the Mexican tradition of Dia De Los Muertos, which we remember and honor with the ofrenda in our narthex, was replaced with All Hallows Eve, as the night before All Saints Day, and the new custom of feeding the poor, who would go door to door seeking food in the form of what were called “soul cakes.”
While the ancient customs of ghoulish costumes, jack o’ lanterns, and leaving food out for ancestral spirits is alive and well in today’s secular Halloween traditions, they also connect to that deeper religious significance of remembering our connection to Christians both past and present in what the Apostle’s Creed calls the “Communion of Saints,” who have been and continue to be a part of us, and who, for better or worse, have formed us in our faith and contributed to who we are today.
Today, All Saints Day, is an annual opportunity to reclaim the ancient spiritual roots, and specifically our more recent Christian roots, of our secular celebrations of Halloween, not only to remember those who have gone before us, but also to honor the hope we have, as Christians, in the promises of accompaniment, care, and eternal home in God’s embrace.
Today’s reading from the Revelation to John is a glimpse of the final realization of the promise given in Isaiah 25:6-9:
6On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines,
of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear.
7 And he will destroy on this mountain
the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
the sheet that is spread over all nations;
8 he will swallow up death for ever.
Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces,
and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth,
for the Lord has spoken.
9 It will be said on that day,
Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us.
This is the Lord for whom we have waited;
let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.
It is a glimpse into the hope we carry both in our encounters with losing loved ones, and as we face the reality of our own mortality as human creatures. It is the foretaste of God’s promise to gather every tribe and language and people and nation together in God’s presence, providence, and love.
Echoed in our Psalm, and echoed in our Eucharistic celebrations, “Taste and See that the Lord is Good,” is our invitation into a relationship of spiritual nourishment that sustains us in times of hardship and draws us back into God’s desire and promise for our wellbeing and wholeness. In John’s words, draws us back into an awareness that we are God’s children, that we are loved, and that, no matter what trials we may face, we are never truly alone.
Christ’s words in today’s Gospel—the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount—reiterate this teaching for an occupied and downtrodden people, for whom these were not familiar teachings, but shocking and counter-cultural proclamations by a messianic figure who overturned expectations and challenged even the system of religion itself as an institution in need of repair.
In a present-tense recognition of the state suffered by many of his hearers, Christ proclaims as blessed those who are humbled, impoverished, wounded, downtrodden, in need of justice, reviled and persecuted, as well as those who are merciful, pure in heart, and making peace. With each, he pairs a future-tense promise of being a part of God’s reign, comfort, inheritance, and mercy; of being filled and being called children of God. Here is another appearance of our unexpected Messiah—our Trickster Christ—who intentionally transgressed boundaries and social traditions as a means of turning people’s deep held beliefs on their heads and challenging the structures and powers that formed and governed civilized society. It was as much up to Christ’s listeners two-thousand years ago to figure out wherein lay the truths of his statements as it is up to us today. And I very much believe that Christ intended to challenge his listeners with his statements.
There is deep truth in his statements, though we have to dig for a meaning that may be different for each of us. For my own part, Christ’s words today force me to really look at the times in my own life when I have experienced each of these states of being.
As a starving student in seminary I was often forced to rely on God’s providence. Jane and I were very newly married. We had rent to pay, undergraduate loans to pay, food to buy so that we could eat, seminary tuition to pay, and books to buy, but financial aid only for one. Jane was herself just recently graduated from college and had relocated from Arcata, new to the professional world, new to being a wife, new to seminary, and was dealing with the terribly new loss of her father just two months after our wedding (about a month into seminary).
For the three years we were in seminary, we lived on an average income of about seven thousand dollars per year over and above my financial aid. At the lowest, our first year, we only made five thousand dollars that wasn’t financial aid, prompting one member of the seminary grant committee in the Diocese of California to clarify whether that might be our monthly rather than our annual income.
There were whole months at the end of semesters where we weren’t sure how we were going to feed ourselves. Yet these years were some of the most blessed we have spent. We experienced community the likes of which we will likely never experience again. We, without fail, experienced God’s providence in the form of gifts from various unexpected sources that came just when we thought we had nowhere else to turn. Though we sometimes scraped by on Top Ramen and Peanut Butter, we never actually went hungry, and we truly felt that blessing of God that Christ, today, pronounces for the poor.
I look at similar experiences in the roller coaster of life and realize that those times when I have been at the lowest ebbs: hungry, excluded, reviled, defamed, or desperately distressed to my emotional core, the experience of relief from any and all of these has been an experience of blessing, an experience of elation, an experience of the profound truth in Christ’s statement from today’s gospel of the joy and lifting up of my spirit in God.
For any of us who has lived to experience both the highs and the lows, Christ’s words, in all their truth, are cyclic, yet I believe the point of them, beyond their profound truth, is also to challenge our perceptions, to teach us to look at life in a way that turns social convention on its head to reexamine who is kept outside of our care and our understanding of equity and God’s love.
On this day of All Saints, we are reminded by Christ of those who have come before us, who have lived their lives as a holy example of what it means to seek and serve Christ in all others, to love our neighbors as ourselves, to strive for justice and peace, and to respect the dignity of every living thing—of what it means to carry out our baptismal covenants as living members of Christ’s body. We are called into that communion of Saints that, led by our trickster Christ, defies the rules and structures in this world that tear down and alienate us from God’s kingdom and the Good News in Christ that we are each precious and loved by a God who will never stop seeking for us, and who will never stop reaching out to us as God’s own precious children. All Saints Day, as a day characterized by both the now and the not yet of God’s reign, challenges us to reach out beyond ourselves on the path that helps both us and all those around us realize and experience the blessings of relief, of community, of healing, and of love beyond the states of suffering that may characterize our current struggles. In the great now-and-not-yet of our historical and ongoing work as Saints serving as Christ’s hands and heart in the world, we join in good company on the road Christ himself trod and walks with us as we seek to do the same.
In the example of beloved saints such as Alice, Kurt, Luke, Marian, my stepdad, Matt, Jane’s dad, Jim, and each of the saints of Calvary whose names we’ll repeat this night, we remember the amazing cloud of witnesses who have gone before us and who continue to teach us the truth of Christ’s promises that we help to bring into fruition in our continuing journey of faith.
May this night be a night of blessing, a night of remembrance that draws us into communion with the saints who have gone before us, and a night of encouragement as we seek spiritual nourishment to continue to be a blessing to those in our own lives and world who suffer. Happy All Saints Day.
Amen