Good morning. Today is All Saints’ Sunday, one of the most meaningful days in the church year--two days. We have All Saints’ Day today, and then All Souls’ tomorrow. And of course before these, All Saints’ (or All Hallows’) Eve -- Halloween, last night.
Most people with skeletons and fake gravestones in their yards this season probably have no idea that this originates as a Christian holiday, though to be fair, we got it from cultures before us: the Celts, the Romans, the Greeks, the Angles and Jutes, Vandals and Visigoths, all those pre-Christian tribes and groups. Remembering our dead, and our own mortality, is as ancient as our species. Thinking about death, strange, mysterious, ineffable, is what we do, even as we try not to do it--that’s as old as our species, too.
The Church has been celebrating All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days since almost the very beginning. The earliest Christians seemed unsure whether to expect death, but when a generation went by and indeed those first followers of Jesus did die, those remaining remembered them in their weekly gatherings. When, after this, Christians began to be persecuted for their faith, some martyred, killed, in often public and humiliating ways, their Christian sisters and brothers remembered especially their deaths, holding up their courage and conviction as examples for the rest of us.
Eventually an annual remembrance was set aside, two days: one for the Big-S Saints, whose lives and deaths exceeded most of ours in their commitment and courage; and one for the small-s saints who lived ordinary lives of faith. If we tend to blend them together in practice, I like to think that’s because even an ordinary life is extraordinary. Living in this world is hard. Getting through a life--with its struggles, disappointments, long stretches of nothing, its scattered and all-too-brief moments of purpose and joy--is heroic. So is every time we find the strength to look outside ourselves and do something for others, quite against the ego-driven impulse we seem to be born with--that’s heroic, too.
At announcements last Sunday father Daniel, in discussing his forum today on funeral planning, confessed that we clergy really like talking about funerals. Every single priest I know will tell you We far prefer doing funerals to weddings. We think nothing of having our kids acolyte at a funeral or accompany us, as one of my kids had to do two weeks ago, to a burial.
I think what we like is how, Around death, people are at their most real, and honest. Our priorities are sharpened. The unimportant stuff (the BS, if you will) falls away.
We’re also kinder to one another around death. You ever notice how eulogies tend to leave out the bad parts We should share eulogies before a person dies.
If we were only as kind to the living as we are to the dead.
If there’s one thing I think the dead might tell us if they could from wherever they are, it’d be to love and show more grace to each other while we have the chance.
I’d like to finish with something I’ve shared before, not on All Saints’ but on other days. It’s from a sermon that’s made a huge impression on my life and this particular excerpt, when I first read it, just stunned me.
The sermon is called “The Weight of Glory” by theologian C.S. Lewis. It was given in 1941. The phrase “weight of glory” comes from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians: “For our slight, momentary affliction [Paul wrote] is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure.”
Lewis interprets this as a summons to regard those around us in all their destined glory, regardless of how they may appear to us now. That’s how God sees them; that’s how we should, too. And treat them as such.
Here’s what Lewis wrote (or in its original form, preached):
It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter. It is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid on my back. A load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses. To remember that the dullest, the most uninteresting person you can talk to, may one day be a creature which, if you say it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship ... It is in the light of [this overwhelming possibility], it is the awe and the circumspection proper to [it], that we should conduct all our dealings with one another. Or friendships. Or loves. Or play. Or politics.
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, these are mortal and their life is to ours as the life of gnat. But it is immortals who we work with, joke with, marry, snub and exploit. Immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.
And these are his last words of the sermon:
Next to the blessed sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ, the glorifier and the glorified, glory himself, is truly hidden.
It’s often said that on All Saints the veil between earth and heaven is thin. So, too, may today the veil between who we are on earth, and what we’re destined to become, be thin. Because God loves us and has already prepared a place--a mansion! (Scripture says)--for us.
Today we celebrate those who’ve gone before, who’ve reached their destination. And we remember, too, the weight of glory that rests on each of us, and on our neighbor--in this life, and in the age to come.