That We All May Be One

 Bloomingdale. Good afternoon! My name is Christopher Epting and, thanks to Bishop Lee’s kind invitation, I am now serving as Assisting Bishop here in the Diocese of Chicago. I am the retired Bishop of Iowa and still live in that great state just to the west of you, but it’s a particular pleasure for me to be here with you today because, from 2001 until 2009, I served as the Presiding Bishop’s Deputy for Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations, working out of our Episcopal Church Center inNew York.

And last evening I represented the Diocese of Chicago at the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity service at the Focolare Center in Hyde Park. It felt like putting on an old pair of comfortable shoes as I knew a number of the participants from my days as ecumenical officer. It was a great event!

 My responsibility, during those years, was to coordinate and oversee the relationship of The Episcopal Church to other Christian communions and to other faith traditions. I made several visits to thePhilippinesand was privileged to meet with Obispo Maximo Alberto Ramento (now venerated as a martyr of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente) as well as his two successors, Tomas Millemena and Godofredo David. I worked also with Bishop Raul Tobias in this country, making it possible for him to attend our last General Convention inAnaheim.

 Although never privileged to visit India, I once celebrated the Eucharist in a MarThomaChurchon Staten Islandand served on the Inter Anglican Standing Commission on Ecumenical Relations with Bishop John Gladstone of the Churchof South India. I have always believed that that Church and the Church of North India were models for the ecumenical movement that I wish we had followed more closely in this country when we were part of a similar association in something called the Consultation on Church Union, or COCU. I believe we had a failure of nerve and missed our opportunity to enter into a similar united church.

 I say all that by way of background just to let you know how exciting I think this shared mission and ministry is and how, in many ways, I believe that you could be a model for such experimental, risk-taking cooperative mission work in the future. In today’s Gospel, we are told that “Jesus came toGalilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘the time is fulfilled, and thekingdomofGodhas come near; repent and believe in the good news.’” (Mark 1:14b-15).

 That text reminds us that Jesus’ primary message was the same as John the Baptist. It was that the Kingdom…the king-ship…the Reign…the Sovereignty of God was at hand! People didn’t have to wait for it to come some time in the future. The Kingdom is now! We are rediscovering today that Jesus did not come to found a Church. Jesus came to inaugurate the Reign of God in this world!

 This Kingdom had been looked forward to by prophets like Jonah in our First Lesson today, by poets like today’s Psalmist who wrote that God “alone is my rock and my salvation, my stronghold, so that I shall not be shaken. (Psalm 62:7). This Kingdom continued to be proclaimed bySt. Paulwho wrote in today’s Epistle that “the appointed time has grown short…for the present form of this world is passing away!” (I Corinthians7:29passim)

 We might also want to add, in our time, that the present form of the Church is passing away!

A couple of weeks ago, the Diocese of Chicago and Seabury seminary sponsored something called “The Great Awakening” featuring Bishop Lee along with two very popular religious authors and visionaries of today’s Church, Brian McClaren and Diana Butler Bass.

 And their messages were basically the same. The institutional Church is in big trouble today. All denominations and Christian communions are facing crises in authority, economic challenges, and from declining numbers and aging congregations. The Episcopal Church is not alone in these challenges – it’s happening all over! And so we have two choices – we can either turn inward and focus on survival or we can use this as a new opportunity to re-envision what the Church is all about!

 I believe the Church of the future will be less concerned about institutional maintenance and more concerned about God’s mission in the world. An old friend of mine used to say that the important thing is not that God’s Church has a mission, but that God’s mission has a Church!

God’s mission is about the reconciliation of the world – and everyone in it – to God.  Jesus says it clearly to Simon and Andrew in today’s Gospel when he said, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people!” (Mark1:17)

 And Mark tells us that ‘immediately they left their nets and followed him.” (Mark1:18). They followed Jesus not into the comfortable confines of a church building, but into the highways and byways ofGalileewhere they engaged with the real lives of real people with real problems and – along with their rabbi, Jesus, made a real difference in this world.

 I believe the Church of the future will also need to “travel light” as those early disciples did. So I think that will mean more “tent maker” or “bi-vocational” clergy. I think it will require ecumenical cooperation when we will learn that we are not in competition with Lutherans or Methodists or Roman Catholics or Baptists, but in league with them.  Our “competitors” are not fellow Christians; our competitors are the principalities and powers of this world which – as the Prayer Book says – “corrupt and destroy the creature of God.”

 The Diocese of Chicago has a great, and easy to remember, motto or mission statement – Grow the Church…Form the Faithful…Change the World. And Bishop Lee gave three very simple ways to carry out that mission statement in his Diocesan Convention sermon a couple of months ago. He suggested that “to grow the Church” each of us have at least one meaningful conversation with another person about God and about our lives this year. That’s all evangelism is really – sharing our lives and our relationship with God with other people.

 To “form the faithful” Bishop Lee encouraged us all to read at least one verse, or one chapter of the Bible every day. Use the Forward Day by Day booklet, or the Prayer Book lectionary, or some other scheme. But engage the Bible this year…and watch your Christian formation begin to happen.  Finally, he suggested that we each commit to one cause or one effort at social change in our community or our world. Not just to write a check, but to become personally involved in some effort to “change the world,” to make this present world look a little more like the Kingdom of God Jesus came to inaugurate.

 “The time is fulfilled, and thekingdomofGodhas come near,” Jesus says. Do you believe that?

Well, if you do, then the time is short! Don’t wait any longer! Do something this week to “Grow the Church”…to “Form the Faithful” (beginning with yourself!)…and to “Change the World.” For “the appointed time has grown short…and the present form of this world is passing away!”

 The journey to the river had been long and hard and the young man was tired. Seeing it now, after so long, was something of a disappointment to him. It was sluggish and muddy.  The banks, sloping upward so sharply that there was no easy access…or approach for that matter. The copper-colored water seemed curiously lifeless, and even the foliage which sprouted right from the water’s edge was dull green. Unhealthy, somehow.

 The man he’d come to meet was there at least. No sluggishness or lifelessness in him! This man was vibrant, filled with energy. Filled with anger too, yet somehow with hope.

He had seemingly appeared out of nowhere. Challenging people to go in a new direction, change their ways, and marking that by a purification ceremony in that dirty water. Crowds had come out for this!

But the roughly dressed man didn’t seem interested in signing up a bunch of followers. He kept saying “one more powerful than I is coming. I’m not worthy even to loosen his sandels.”

 And now that One stood before him. Just one more face…in the middle of the crowd. The baptizer turned toward the river, pushing his way through the brush and raising clouds of dust before reaching the narrow bank.  He waded into the still water with the pilgrim close behind him.  Their bare feet sank into the soft river bed, and churned up more mud and the smell of decay.

 But even this dirty water felt cool and refreshing as it bathed his body.  And the pilgrim’s thoughts raced back through the history of his faith…and back…back to a time when all was water, until the words, “Let there be.” And there was.

 He closed his eyes and the image changed. Again, everywhere water! And no life. Except for those few faithful, the ones who were said to have trusted God

“In the cup of whose hands sailed in ark,

Rudderless, without mast…

Who was to make of the aimless wandering of theArk

A new beginning for the world…” *

 Yet a third time, and the pilgrim recalled a redeeming of life from a watery death. This time in theRed Sea, a sea of reeds. There was a pathway for some. A tragic death for others. But life and freedom on the other side!

 And there was water from the rock…streams in the desert…water for the purification of a thousand priests. And now… this…

As he came up from the water, he felt at one with all of it!  He knew that he was an inheritor of that Universe which had been prepared for him and for all others. And, he knew that he was God’s Child!

 He heard a voice…‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’”

 Well, that may have been something like what happened to Jesus of Nazareth on the day of his Baptism in theJordan Riverby John.  He knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that he was God’s Son!

 That would be an event worth celebrating, I guess, even if it didn’t have anything much to do with us. But it does.  Because you and I share the Baptism of Christ!  And our Catechism says that “Holy Baptism is the sacrament by which God adopts us as…  children and makes us members of Christ’s Body, the Church, and inheritors of thekingdomofGod.” (BCP858)

 When you and I were baptized, God said to us, “You are my beloved son or daughter, and with you I am well pleased!” And when women and men renew the vows of their baptism in confirmation or reception or reaffirmation, God says the same thing to us, “You are my beloved sons and daughters, and with you I am well pleased.”

 Oh, not in everything we do is God pleased. We make mistakes. We consciously sin!  But in you, in the essence of you that really is “You,” God is well pleased.  God loves you as a daughter or a son and, because you share the life of his Incarnate Son, God will never let you go!

 As Bishop Lee said in his Diocesan Convention sermon on Baptism, “Living Under Water:” Water is both life-giving and dangerous. The waves can and do overwhelm us sometimes. We do find ourselves lost in the wilderness and there we can be struck down. But the promise of God, the promise of that cloudy pillar and fiery beacon never ceases. Through the waves and the wilderness God is with us. Even when we are struck down, God is with us. Not even death can separate us from such a love – and no one is outside its reach!”

That is Good News, beloved!  That is the Baptismal Covenant God has made with us and with all the baptized…a sign of hope for the world.

 Hope we find from a Baby in a manger…from the visit of some Persian astronomers…and from a Jordan River Baptism!

 “Epiphany” – the shining forth of God’s love! To you…and to me.

______________________________________________

*Alan Jones, “Journey into Christ”, page 37

“I am bringing you good news of a great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”(Luke 2:11)

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness on them has light shined.” (Isaiah 9:2)

“Oh the majesty and magnificence of his presence! Oh, the power and the splendor of his sanctuary.” (Psalm 96:6)

“…the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all.” (Titus 2:11)

“Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them…” (Luke 2:9)

Light shining…magnificence and splendor…grace appearing….glory all around.

All of our Lessons from Holy Scripture tonight seem to emphasize Light! And it’s easy to see why anciently the Eastern Orthodox Church celebrated Christmas on January 6 – or what we call the Feast of the Epiphany. Because the word “epiphany” means a “shining forth” and surely the birth of Christ was a “shining forth,” an epiphany of God’s purposes in ways the world had never seen before!

Even in evening celebrations of the Christ Mass, like this one, there is an emphasis on candlelight and “candle light services”. We’ll sing Silent Night by candlelight at the end of this service. And our homes are filled with Christmas lights of all kinds. Why all this emphasis on “light” at Christmas? Well, what does light do? It “reveals”, doesn’t it? It makes things known that would otherwise be hidden. And that is exactly what the birth of Jesus Christ did for the world. It revealed, made known, manifested, something of what God is really like.

You might think that would have been unnecessary for the people of Israel who had worshipped God for nearly 2,000 years before Jesus was born. But there were still differences of opinion about what God was like. There was a Priestly understanding of a God who approved of cult and temple and sacrifice. There was a Prophetic understanding of a God who desired justice and righteousness above all else…and was quite suspicious of the sacrificial system.

There were those who saw God as vengeful and capable of destroying entire nations if they opposed the Divine Will. And others who saw God as tender and compassionate, One who brooded over this world like a mother over her children.

To this day, people have all kinds of ideas about God. Some believe in a God who sanctions violence of the most extremist kind. On the other hand, some Eastern religions have a very peaceful, tolerant view of the Divine, but don’t say much more than that about God. Seems to be a more of a Force, or a Divine Mind, rather than a Personal Being for them.

But our claim as Christians is that we know a bit more than that about what this God is like. Without wanting to say that we know everything there is to know about the Creator of the Universe (we certainly do not!) we do believe that something of the very nature of God has been revealed to us in the Person of Jesus Christ. We have been “enlightened” to some degree about that very Nature.

For example, we know that God is not callous or cruel. God does not willingly afflict or grieve human beings. We know that God is not distant from us or from the affairs of this world. For all God’s power and majesty, there is a certain vulnerability and even the possibility of being “hurt” – like a baby in a manger, our God can be vulnerable…and even wounded.

We know that God is not static and predictable by our rules and regulations, but is perfectly capable of surprising us, like the twelve year old boy in the Temple once surprised his parents by being about his Father’s business instead of being where they thought he ought to be. God “shows up” in unexpected places!

We know that God cares very deeply about what happens to us and so reaches out with a Word of wisdom and with healing, like that itinerant rabbi who once went about preaching Good News and backing up his words with actions like the healing of a paralytic, and the restoring of sight to one who had been born blind.

We know that God is capable of being betrayed by us, and delivered into the hands of sinners, for even less than the thirty pieces of silver Judas once got for betraying his friend.

But, in all this, indeed because of all this, God reigns! With all the vulnerability and unpredictability and deep compassion, God remains the creator and sustainer of the Universe, the ultimate source of all life and all that is. And this God is able and willing to bring good out of evil, and life out of death at every turn. Just as he once split open the grave and won the victory over death and hell on Easter morning.

How can we say all this? How can we believe all this with such passion? Because we believe in the essence of the Christmas story… because we believe in the “good news of great joy for all the people (for to us) is born this day in the City of David, a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”

We know something of what God is like because we believe that the meaning of the Christmas story is what St. Luke said it was, “Glory to God in the highest, and peace to his people on earth.”

We believe that Jesus Christ is “the grace of God…bringing salvation to all…” And his name will be called, “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

Light shining…magnificence and splendor…grace appearing…glory all around.  That’s what we celebrate here tonight, dear friends. I’m so glad you’re here! Merry Christmas!

Advent 4B.  This is “Mary’s Sunday.” The 4^th Sunday of the Advent season when we pause to reflect on the enormous role played by a teen-aged, Jewish peasant girl in God’s ultimate plan for history and for this world.  With what Anglicans sometimes perceive as Roman Catholic over-emphasis and Protestant under-emphasis on the Mother of Jesus, we sometimes fail to say much about her at all!

Yet, the Gospel accounts are full of Mary in the Christmas story, she is referred to a number of times in the subsequent accounts of Jesus’ life, she is there at the foot of the cross and again in the Upper Room at Pentecost. The Prayer Book has four major holy days specifically celebrating Mary’s life – The Annunciation (which we also had as our Gospel story today), the Visitation of Mary to Elizabeth when both were carrying their first-born sons, the Presentation of the young Jesus in the Temple when the days of Mary’s Purification after childbirth was complete, and the Feast St. Mary the Virgin on August 15^th when Roman Catholics believe she was taken back into heaven in a special way.

Mary’s story begins, in a sense, with our Old Testament Reading today from the Second Book of Samuel. While the Hebrew people believed that their awesome God could never be seen face to face and that God did not live in a house made with hands, yet they had sensed the Divine Presence in the pillars of fire and cloud and on Mt. Sinai. They had preserved the tablets of the 10 Commandments in a “tent” called “the Ark of the Covenant” and carried it with them wherever they went, even sometimes into battle.

There was a great debate about whether eventually a Temple should be built where the Ark could find a permanent home and where the people of Israel could come to offer sacrifice and to worship and to pray and to sense the almost-physical presence of  their God whenever they wished and could get there. The great King David, quite understandably, began to believe that he was the one to build God’s great House, his great Temple.

Especially when David himself was living in very comfortable surroundings – he said, “See now, I am living in a house of cedar, but the ark of God stays in a tent.” But the prophet, Nathan, like most of the prophets down through the ages, was a bit suspicious of this heavenly building program. He, and the other prophets, were concerned that a beautiful Temple could become an idol for the Jewish people; that something even though built to point beyond itself to the God of heaven and earth, could almost become an object of worship in and of itself.

It’s something we Christians have to be concerned about as well. Our great Cathedrals and Gothic churches can, and do, provide the space and the context for the worship of God. I cannot walk into places like this without sensing the beauty and majesty of God, that peace of God which passes all understanding. But, if we are not careful, we can find ourselves worshipping a building rather than the God the building was erected to glorify. That is now, and was then, idolatry!

So, Nathan heard God saying, “Go and tell my servant David…are you the one to build me a house to live in? I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day…Thus says the Lord of hosts: I took YOU from the pasture…to be prince over my people…Moreover the Lord declares to you and the Lord will make YOU a house…your throne shall be established forever.” (2 Samuel 7 passim)

In other words, God was not interested in dwelling in a house made with hands. God was interested in dwelling in the midst of a people – the house of David was not to be a Temple. The house of David was to be a family….an inheritance…a people!

That story would have been well known to a young, Jewish girl in first century Palestine. She would have heard it read in the synagogue and would doubtless have sung these words from today’s Psalm countless times in her growing up, “I have made a covenant with my chosen one; I have sworn an oath to David my servant: I will establish your line for ever, and preserve your throne for all generations” (Psalm 126).

Those texts must have come crashing down upon her when she heard these words spoken to her as in the voice of an angel: “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David.” (Luke 1)

The throne of his ancestor David! David’s descendent! The Anointed One! The Messiah! And she was to bring him into the world! Truly, she was the “favored one.” Surely “the Lord was with her.” Yet it would not be so easy.

“How can this be, since I am a virgin?” Mary was not concerned here with having Gabriel explain a Doctrine called the Virgin Birth. Mary was concerned about being laughed at, scorned, cast out, perhaps even stoned as an unwed mother from a strict Jewish family and community. For them, there could be no other explanation but that, at the very least, she had become pregnant before her marriage vows to Joseph. And, at the worst, the father was someone other than Joseph.

“How can this be?” she asked. “How can I do this?” The only answer that came? God will be with you. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.”  How many of us would have said “Yes,” considering the cost, on that vaguest of promises? Yet Mary did. “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

No, dear friends, the Lord God does not dwell in a temple made with hands. Even so beautiful a temple as the one we are privileged to worship in here today. The Lord dwells in a midst of a people. A people who trace their history to a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire. A people who trace their history to rugged tablets of stone carried through the desert in a rustic tent. But,for us, a people who have discovered the true dwelling place of God.

In the womb of a pregnant teenager. In a wooden manger and on a wooden cross. And, finally, in the hearts of his faithful people. Greetings, favored ones. The Lord is with YOU!

The season of Advent is, perhaps above all else, a season of hope and expectation. On the simplest level, of course, we look forward to the celebration of Christ’s First Coming at the Christ-Mass (Christmas). We also have the hope and the expectation that this same Christ will come into our lives daily (in Word and Prayer and Sacrament) and in all the ways he shows up in our lives on an everyday basis. And finally we hope for, and expect, one day his Final Coming at the End of time to set things right again once and for all – that his Kingdom truly will “come on earth as it is in heaven!”

These themes are seen all the way through our Lessons from Holy Scripture this morning. Isaiah looks forward to God’s Reign finally being established when he cries, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence.” (Isaiah 64:1). And the prophet’s yearning for this future action is not some kind of “Pollyanna optimism” but is firmly based on the fact that God has acted in Israel’s past. He writes, “When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.” (64:3).

The people of Israel had seen God’s mighty acts before – not least in their liberation from slavery in Egypt centuries earlier and his manifestation on Mount Sinai in the giving of the Law. So, even though they are facing Exile once again at the hand of the Babylonians and the people are worried, Isaiah wants to give them the hope and the expectation that they have not been deserted.

“There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity. Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand…Now consider, we are all your people.” (64:7-9)

The Psalmist sings the same message in today’s Psalm 80: “Restore us, O God of hosts; show us the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.”  They are suffering now, but because their God is the same God who “led Joseph like a flock” (1) in the past, they can have hope for the future: “And so will we never turn away from you; give us life, that we may call upon your Name.” (17)

Our Lord Jesus Christ preached that same message of hope and expectation hundreds of years after Isaiah and the Psalmist. The people of Israel had indeed been restored to their land after the Exile by then, but had fallen on hard times once again. Now, they are being oppressed by Rome and their land occupied once again by foreign troops, but Jesus says,

“From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. So also when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” (Mark 13:28-31)

They had certainly not passed away by the time St. Paul wrote his first letter to the  Christians in Corinth 25 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, “I give thanks to my God always for your because…you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (I Corinthians 1:4-8 passim)

How could all these prophets and mystics and apostles have had such hope and expectation and confidence in God’s coming Kingdom even in the midst of adversity and suffering? Because they had experienced God’s sovereignty in their history, and in their own lives. Isaiah not only knew the history of his people and how God had rescued them, been their hope and strength in the past, he had had a deep encounter with that God in his own personal life – a “vision” of the very throne-room of God where he heard God say, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And Isaiah had said, “Here I am, send me!”

King David, who was likely the author of some of the Psalms if not all of them, knew what it was like to be rescued and redeemed, not only in wartime and battle but from his own personal sins and shortcomings as well. He was a deeply flawed servant of God, but a servant nonetheless! Jesus had encountered his heavenly Father in the waters of the Jordan River at his Baptism, on the Mount of Transfiguration, and in countless other ways during his brief, three-year public ministry. And Paul had been knocked off his horse on the road to Damascus, discovering how wrong he had been in persecuting the followers of the Messiah whose faithful servant he would soon become!

Beloved, we live in frustrating and confusing times as well. The world is changing so fast we can scarcely keep up with it. Many of the things we have always thought and believed are being brought into question or are at least up for discussion. In these tough economic times, the “American dream” we used to rely on – that we would do better than our parents and our children do better than us – seems questionable at best. We despair of leaders – in the Arab world, in our own country or even in our church – who can converse with one another civilly, put their own agendas aside, and come together and find consensus for the common good. Reading the newspaper these days can be an exercise in frustration!

But, especially in days like these, it is absolutely essential that we grasp and hold on to that “theology of hope” held out to us by our forebears in the Faith. The reason we want you to learn the history of your Faith through Bible study and theological refection, the reason we want you to seek encounters with the Living God through worship and prayer; the reason we want you to look around you and find signs of God’s activity and presence in the world about you is precisely so that you can be hopeful people! Not just “optimistic” people who think things should get “better and better every day in every way,” but truly people of hope.

We want you to hope in the God who has surely acted in the past. Hope in the God who is mightily at work in the present if we only have eyes to see. And, most of all, hope in the God of the future. Which is why we say every day in Morning Prayer, “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be for ever. Amen.”

God has been with us in the past. God is with us today. And God has promised to be with us always — even to the end of the ages!

All Saints’ Sunday, 2011.Last Tuesday, November 1^st, the Church celebrated All Saints’ Day. This is the day in the church calendar when we remember the outstanding heroes and heroines of our Christian faith – the Blessed Virgin Mary, the apostles and martyrs and saints right down through the ages like Francis and Clare, Benedict and Julian of Norwich, Teresa and Augustine, and all those who made lasting contributions to our history and development, and to the spread of the Gospel throughout the world.

On Wednesday, Nov. 2, we celebrated All Souls’ Day. This is the day when the Church commemorates those so–called “lesser saints.” Perhaps our ancestors and forebears who may not have made a name for themselves worthy of Church history books, but who nonetheless made their own contributions.  I think of my grandfather who read Psalm 91 every day my father was overseas in WW II, piloting his B-24 on bombing runs over Germany and flying gasoline to Field Marshall Montgomery in Northern Africa. I think of the Sunday school teachers and youth group leaders and clergy of my youth who made such lasting impressions, and who formed me in my Christian faith.

Today, on what we call All Saints Sunday, we gather all that up and remember that, in the New Testament, the word “saint,” (hagios in the Greek) refers to “all the baptized,” Christians just like you and me. When St. Paul writes to the “saints” in Rome and Corinth and Philippi he’s not writing to necessarily holy people (as the texts of those Epistles make clear!). He’s writing to people like you and me, baptized members of the Body of Christ, who are striving to be faithful, but all of whom had the same struggles, successes and failures and fears as we do.

Just last year The Episcopal Church – through our Church Publishing Company – provided a new resource to expand our knowledge and remembrance of some of these manifold saints of God. Entitled “Holy Women, Holy Men: Celebrating the Saints,” its Preface contains the following words. “ (This book) marks a further stage in the recovery within the Episcopal Church of the liturgical commemoration of the saints.”

“The first English Book of Common Prayer (1549) retained a small number of the many feasts contained in the calendar of the (Roman Catholic)…Missal. All but one of these were major Holy Days directly related to the New Testament; no post-Biblical saints were included. The 1662 Prayer Book, which Anglicans living in the American colonies used in the decades preceding independence, listed the names of sixty-seven saints in its Calendar, but made no provision for their liturgical commemoration.”

“The first American Book of Common Prayer (1789) listed no minor Holy Days…in its
Calendar and this continued to be the case in the 1892 and 1928 Prayer Books. Only in 1964 did things change. In that year General Convention approved the inclusion in the Calendar of more than a hundred saints’ days with liturgical (Prayers and Readings) to facilitate their commemoration in the Church’s worship.” (“HW, HM” pages ix-x). This resource was published under the name “Lesser Feasts and Fasts.”

“In 2003 General Convention called for a wide-ranging revision of (that resource)…”to reflect our increasing awareness of the ministry of all the people of God and of the cultural diversity of the Episcopal Church, of the wider Anglican Communion, of our ecumenical partners, and of our lively experiences of sainthood in local communities. Several years of extensive study and consultation led to the submission (and subsequent publication of) “Holy Women, Holy Men”… (page x)

We use that new resource here at Trinity Cathedral for our midweek services and on special occasions and I have found it to be very helpful. Previous commemorations of saints in our English Prayer Books have been overwhelmingly white, male, clergy and monastics, and – in fact – heavily weighted toward commemorating bishops (who we all know are seldom so saintly!) This new book includes such persons, of course, as well as the giants we know from the New Testament and early Church history.

But we also find in these pages prophetic witnesses like Frederick Douglass from the African Methodist Episcopal Church and Amelia Jenks Bloomer who started her work for women’s equality right here in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The Lutheran Johann Sebastian Bach is found within the pages of this book as is Florence Li Tim-Oi, the first woman priest in the Anglican Communion and Roman Catholic luminaries like Pope John XXIII.

So, why is all this important? I believe it is to hold up before us, on a regular basis, specific examples of what our Lessons from Holy Scripture are describing today. The vision in Revelation of “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne of God, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands.” (Revelation 7:9)

The reminder from the Psalmist that “the angel of the Lord encompasses those who fear him, and he will deliver them.” (Psalm 34:7).  John’s challenge in the Epistle to “see what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.” (I John 3:1). And Jesus’ compassionate reminder in the Beatitudes that the real saints are not always heroes and heroines, but those who are “poor in spirit…those who mourn…the meek…those who hunger and thirst for righteousness….the merciful…the pure in heart…the peacemakers…those who are persecuted.” (Matthew 5)

In other words – YOU! You are the saints of God, dear friends. And if you read the biographies of some of these names in “Holy Women, Holy Men,” you’ll find that their lives were not so different from yours in many ways. They weren’t all plaster saints! They toiled and sweated and failed sometimes…just like we do. They didn’t spend all their time in church and, in fact, most of what they are remembered for took place, in the world…outside the doors of their churches.

It is no accident that each Eucharist ends with a dismissal sentence and why we no longer linger to watch the candles being put out! You and I are on a mission. We can’t wait to rise from our knees and get back out into our families and jobs and neighborhoods to share our faith in Jesus Christ and to make a difference for him in this world! We’re on a mission…and we can’t wait!

On All Saints’ Sunday, we celebrate Holy Women and Holy Men! On All Saints Sunday, we celebrate YOU!