The Wideness of God’s Mercy
October 31 sermon – All Saints Day by Jamie Howison on Isaiah 25:6-9 and John 11:32-44
Tonight we’re observing the Feast of All Saints, which on the calendar is actually tomorrow—November 1—but there is an old tradition that says once the sun goes down you rightly move into the next day on the church calendar. And so while much of the city is marking Halloween—All Hallows’ Eve, which is an old name for All Saints’ Eve—we’re already in gear with November 1.
The audio includes an extended reference to this book, which doesn’t appear in the written sermon!
All Saints’ is an ancient feast day on the Christian calendar, with the earliest mention of such a day coming in the 300s, and it landing in the Western Church on its current date going back to the early 700s. The day is meant to celebrate all of the Christian saints. That includes those big league, well known biblical figures like St Paul and St Peter, as well as some names that are not so familiar to us, but were well known in their day; people like Polycarp, Irenaeus, and Justin Martyr. On top of that, though, was a tradition of honouring and celebrating the unknown saints; those who had gone about their lives in faithful ways, perhaps quietly enduring the persecutions of the first three centuries, and simply living the faith. Oh, and rather imperfectly, I’d have to say, for which human person is ever close to perfection? Who doesn’t stumble, wrestle with doubts or dry spells, or sometimes default to self-centred thinking? Yet in Christ and through Christ, they can still be remembered as our saints, in all of their failings and foibles.
Our readings tonight for the Feast of All Saints’ both deal with matters of life and death, though in quite different ways. In the passage from Isaiah, we heard of a promised day when “God will swallow up death for ever,” and “wipe away the tears from all faces,” which is a proclamation that death and all the tears and grief and sorrow that accompanies it will not have the final word. And then we heard the story of the raising of Lazarus from the Gospel according to John, which stands as something of an enacted parable of death’s defeat. “Lazarus, come out!” cries Jesus. “The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’”
Yet even at that, the story from John isn’t without some notable textures. When the story first begins with Jesus receiving word that Lazarus is gravely ill, he delays things for a bit, saying that “This illness does not lead to death,” and that the man is ill in order “that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Yet when he arrives he gets news that Lazarus has in fact died, and he is confronted by some pretty profound unhappiness on the part of Mary and Martha. John even says that Jesus was “greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved,” and that he wept over the death of his friend, so in some sense it is hard to really know just what he was expecting. Yet as Robert Farrar Capon once quipped, “Jesus never met a corpse that didn't sit right up then and there,” and so dear old Lazarus is freed from death, at least for a time.
Interesting question, though, is why the lectionary takes us into this talk of death on this particular feast day? Well, it is because what All Saints’ Day really marks is what the Apostles’ Creed calls “the communion of saints.” We believe in the communion of saints, we will proclaim after the sermon, which is to say that we believe that this thing called the Body of Christ is bigger than the conventional dividing lines between life and death. We may no longer see those who have died—whether Lazarus or Peter or Polycarp or your favourite great uncle—but we live in a very real and spiritual union with them as members of Christ’s Body. As I’ve already tried to indicate, that includes not only the big league, stained glass, upper case “S” saints whose lives and witness are well known, but also all of those who you might call “ordinary saints”, including those whose names have long been forgotten. And in the strange economy of the communion of saints, the upper case and lower case shall all sit down, side-by-side, to feast at the same table. There’s a remarkable leveling of the playing field in this, which says that for all that St Paul or St Augustine or upper-case “S” saint whoever might have done, there is only one feasting table in the end, and your grandma is going to be cosily seated right between Paul and Augustine, happily chattering away to them about some of the things they maybe didn’t get entirely right!
Now, as St Paul uses the word, the “saints” are simply members of the church community. Most of the “saints” Paul writes of were still very much alive, though at least some had died. He uses the term “fallen asleep”, not as a way of denying death but as a way of saying that death will not have the final word. The Greek word we translate as “saint” is hagios, which means literally “holy one,” though anyone who has read Paul’s epistles will know that the “holiness” of the people in those churches was based pretty much entirely on their having been recipients of grace. On their own steam, those “holy ones” could still make rather a mess of things, and Paul himself was no exception. If you read the Book of Acts, you’ll come across this point where he and Barnabas have a pretty sharp disagreement about whether or not they should give young John Mark a second chance, and they end up parting ways. In that dispute Paul is the one who comes out as the harsher, less compromising man, with Barnabas clearly shown as more gracious. I actually rather like the fact that our biblical books don’t shy away from letting the reader see a less than idealized picture of the so-called “heroes” of the faith, because not one of us could ever live up to idealization. And yet Paul, Barnabas, and young John Mark are in fact numbered among the saints—the “holy ones”—in spite of the unholiness of some parts of their lives.
It is from these saints—the ones named “holy” despite their failings—that we have inherited this faith, this great and deep tradition. That word “tradition” sometimes gets a bad rap, as in something is “just a tradition.” And truthfully, sometimes people and churches do get trapped in their traditions. There’s an old joke about Anglicans that goes, “How many Anglicans does it take to change a light bulb? Five. One to change the bulb, and four to stand around talking about how much better they liked the old one.” Here I’m quite taken by the insight of the theologian Jaroslav Pelikan, who wrote that, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” I’m sure you can see the difference he’s pointing out. Pelikan then continues, “I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name,” and I think that is very true. It is a living faith that has been “tradition-ed” to us by the saints, both living and dead. To remember those who have gone before us is to remember those who have “traditioned” us.
And in the strange economy of God, we will surely be wonderfully surprised by who is seated round that banqueting table that is imaged in the closing chapters of the Book of Revelation. Oh sure, there will be the predictable saints, but there will be countless others as well, some of whom we will be frankly a bit shocked to see. You? I don’t think you went to church for the last thirty years of your life! And you? Weren’t you that guy who drank too much and then asked for change at the corner? Oh my goodness, you’re at the table for this feast? Didn’t you take off with the inheritance from dad before he’d even died, blow it all in the course of months, and then come back home looking for forgiveness? If dad takes you back and sits you at the table, I’m not sure I really want to be here…
Which is precisely the point, both of the famous parable of the Prodigal Son and of the wildness of God’s grace. I have no business looking down my nose at the returning prodigal son, and in the end I have no business trying to decide who will sit down at that heavenly banquet. What I need—what we all need—is a willingness to sit down, raise a glass, and drink to the wideness of God’s mercy. Full stop. Tonight, next week, next year, and in the fullness of time, that’s what this day of all the saints invites us to do. We raise a glass to the divine mercy, and leave the rest to God.
Amen!
