A Homily for All Saints
Some friends of mine, this morning, told me about going trick-or-treating as a family last night. Their son, seven years old, sweet boy, had seen something scary and said, “Dad, I think I’m done with Halloween.” Their family started talking about the meaning of Halloween, and its origins, and the parents realized pretty quickly that, having been raised in a tradition that didn’t celebrate Halloween or All Saints, or even talk about saints, they didn’t really know how to give a good pitch for what All Saints means as a holiday, or how to start thinking about relating to “the saints.”
I want to talk about saints today in four parts: Holy Things; Holy People; Loving the Saints; What Holy People Look Like
Holy Things
The term “saints” comes from the Latin sanctus, which simply means “holy” or “holy ones.”
In the Old Testament, the term “holy” just means “set apart” and it refers to normal things that have been set apart for liturgical use:
There are sheep, and then there are the sheep that you sacrifice. Those are holy sheep.
There is normal wine, and then there’s the wine that you pour out over an altar during the morning sacrifices; that’s holy wine.
You can eat bread whenever you want, but holy bread is set apart for liturgical use, and you shouldn’t always snack on it.
The Lord made the sons of Levi holy priests. When Israel settled Canaan, everyone was given land to own except for them. They were set apart, and they made their living through holy work.
Seen from one perspective, “holy things” are gifts, given out of faith and love. Faith, because we believe that we are not hurt by giving our good things to him. Everything we have comes from him anyway, and all that we need to live—food, shelter, beauty, employment, relationships—already belongs to him. We give to God knowing, or at least believing that God gives, and that he will always give us what we need at the right time.
Seen from another perspective, “holy things” are simply wasted.
When you burn the best part of a sheep on an altar, turning it into smoke that rises to heaven as an offering to God, no one actually gets to eat it. Imagine working as a line cook at a Brazilian steakhouse, grabbing a skirt steak to make churrasco, and the head chef snatches it from you and lights it on fire.
You could have made money on that cut.
You could have made a very nice meal out of it.
But it was wasted.
Matthew tells a story—in fact, all four evangelists tell the story of a woman named Mary who was just as wasteful.
Now when Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, a woman came up to him with an alabaster flask of very expensive ointment, and she poured it on his head as he reclined at table. And when the disciples saw it, they were indignant, saying, “Why this waste? For this could have been sold for a large sum and given to the poor.” But Jesus, aware of this, said to them, “Why do you trouble the woman? For she has done a beautiful thing to me. For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me. In pouring this ointment on my body, she has done it to prepare me for burial. Truly, I say to you, wherever this gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her.”
Then one of the twelve, whose name was Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, “What will you give me if I deliver him over to you?” And they paid him thirty pieces of silver. And from that moment he sought an opportunity to betray him.
“Holy things” are both: “gifts” and “wastes,” if “to waste” just means to use or spend something in such a way that doesn’t match its commonsense, social purposes. Everyone knows wine is for drinking, not for pouring out. All things are for God, but it’s weird pouring wine onto the ground.
Holy People
Holy people are different than holy things because people offer themselves. The Lord told Moses that he was forming, out of Egypt, a kingdom of priests—that is, a whole body of individual people who would give themselves to God as living sacrifices. Martin Luther, following St. Peter, calls this body, “the priesthood of all believers.” And it’s a mark of Protestant pride that each of us is authorized and expected to lift up our hearts as offerings to God.
St. Paul appeals to the Church in Rome, to set themselves aside for liturgical use: “I urge you… by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Rom. 12:2).
In today’s New Testament reading, he says that God has set us aside: “In [Christ] we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory” (Eph. 1:11-12).
If we had read the other readings appointed for the Feast of All Saints, we would have seen the vision St. John has of all the saints worshiping the Father and the Son. These are people who set themselves apart to praise God, and who have been set apart by God to praise him. This is the final picture:
After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”
The saints are Mary’s perfume—poured out like an offering, freely given, wasted upon the head of Jesus—who could have been used to make more money or to make the world a better place.
Paul uses this language, too: “I am being poured out like a drink offering.”
The form of our worship symbolizes and reenacts this self-offering of Jesus, which Paul made his own, and Christian tradition invites us to embody ourselves. When the priest takes the bread, we remember Jesus placing his body in the hands of his Father, and into the hands of his accusers. When the priest breaks the bread, we think about his body, broken and given out to nourish people. When we receive the body and blood of Jesus, we are called to place our bodies into the hands of the Father, and into the hands of others, ready to be broken and given as gifts to nourish a hungry world. We allow ourselves to be poured out like wine, as we pour out our breath in sung praise, invest ourselves in the lives of others, and cover, like Jesus’ blood, the stains and consequences of sin.
We are called to give up control of our lives, remain open to the Father, to feed and to forgive.
Holy people, saints, are those who have placed their lives in the hands of others and allowed themselves to become blessed food.
The saints are people like Mary, who wasted her perfume on Jesus instead of rebottling it and selling it on Etsy or Poshmark.
And like Zaccheus who, instead of taking his money and donating it to the Red Cross or even to the Church, faced the people he stole from, apologized, and gave it back with interest.
And like Joseph of Arimathea, who, looking after the widow, Mary, took his money and bought the rights to Jesus’ body and then paid to have him buried.
Notice how often money comes up.
Holy people are often wasteful, that is, generous, with their money and their opportunities. It’s a mark of holy people, that they don’t appear to know how they’re supposed to be spending their money.
Loving the Saints
I don’t think the world actually hates saints; it’s just that people don’t usually take them very seriously.
I’m guilty of that.
When I was twenty, going to college, I had the opportunity to get dinner with a missionary who was coming to a missions conference our school was hosting. I was at a cafeteria table with a friend, and the open chair had a sign on it that said, “Reserved for missionary.” We were excited, wondering who was going to sit there, and what kind of inspiring conversation we were going to have.
It turns out she was pretty weird.
Every time we asked her a question, she would start talking about how the Psalms were all about spiritual warfare. Then, she told a story about how she was serving in a homeless ministry, felt unable to relate to the people she was serving, and decided, as in response to that feeling, to sell her house, donate the money, and live among her homeless friends as a witness to Jesus.
She wasn’t asked to speak at the conference. I can’t imagine her offering five practical steps to more effective ministry.
Not all saints are weird, but a lot of saints are weird.
The last thing I want to share today is an insight from Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians that ties a lot of this together. The prayer we read today is one of Paul’s big ones:
That God may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation;
That God might enlighten the eyes of your heart;
That God might cause you to know the hope and the riches for which he has set you aside;
That God might cause you to know the power that raised Jesus from the dead.
Why does he pray all of these things?
“For this reason,” he says: “because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints.”
The things is, there are people in the world who we naturally love:
People who can hold interesting or deep conversation, or at least tell funny stories;
People whose friendship opens new opportunities, expands our safety net, or helps us navigate job stuff, kid stuff, parent stuff, marriage stuff, money stuff, all the stressful life stuff.
Paul will pour himself out like a drink offering—blood, sweat, and tears—for a community of people whose heart is in the right place because they have chosen to love the saints.
His point isn’t that the Ephesians celebrate the Feast of St. Francis on October 4th, or that they would pray to St. Christopher when they needed traveling mercies, or that they would name their children John Paul, Francis, and Benedict.
His point is that there are holy people, that the Ephesians love them, and that this gives him a reason to pray really big things for them.
We are what we love, and if we love holy people, we’ll become holy ourselves. God said, “You must be holy, as I am holy.”
What Holy People Look Like
We’re given the Beatitudes as our gospel reading for the day because this is a template for what a holy person looks like:
Holy people are not arrogant or defensive, either self-important or self-abasing; they’ve actually reached poverty of spirit;
Holy people mourn their own sins with tender and teachable hearts, instead of blaming their problems on the sins of others;
Holy people hunger and thirst for true righteousness instead of using their mouths to bite and devour other people with snipes and verbal attacks; and they fast for justice—they don’t habituate gluttony;
Holy people choose to show mercy and are eager to maintain unity, peace, and tender-hearted affection; they don’t foster resentment, avoid their problems, or -withhold forgiveness—when they feel resentment, they know to cry out to God with their complaint, they trust they will be heard by him, and they strive for peace;
Holy people strive for purity and simplicity of heart, without which, Hebrews says, no one will see the Lord.
We keep All Saints to affirm that, yes, there are holy people holier than we are, who see God better than we do. And that while we may not be called to sell our houses, we are all called to lose our lives in order to find them hidden in the broken and poured out life of Christ.