What a strange question! Saints are
really, really, holy people, right? Only special people, who meet strict
criteria get to be called saints, right? You need a committee of really smart
people, theologians and church historians, to see if a person qualifies to be a
saint… and those applicants have to have answered prayers where their
intercession was specifically invoked and where miraculous things happened as a
result. We pray to Saints… well, more accurately we pray through the
Saints, joining our intercession with theirs in our shared service to God in
Christ. We name churches and sometimes cities, or colleges or hospitals for
saints. We sit in churches surrounded by idealized painted, sculpted, or stained-glass
images of saints.
Whew! Sainthood! It’s a pretty
high bar!
The Episcopal Church has a
calendar of saints. Saints like Catherine of Alexandria, who out-debated 50
pagan philosophers (more about her next week!); or St Francis and his sister
St. Clair of Assisi; and, of course, the apostles like Saints Andrew, Peter,
John and all of the rest. More recently, we’ve added saints to our calendar: modern
martyrs like Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Jonathan Daniels, as
well as Christian witnesses like Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker
Movement.
We commemorate many saints
alongside our Roman Catholic and Orthodox siblings, but some are unique to us
as Anglicans: like George Herbert, the English priest and poet; Julia Chester
Emery, an American Episcopalian who founded the United Thank Offering, and
another Episcopal lay-woman, Frances Perkins, a pioneering social worker who,
among other things, created Social Security and the Department of Labor.
But in the Christian scriptures, the use of the word “saint” is used much more broadly. The word “saint” appears 62 times in New Testament and the Apostle Paul used the term 44 times-- and not one of these times does he refers to a person for whom a hospital, college, parish, or parochial school might be named. In the New Testament, every follower of Jesus is a Saint, or in Greek "hagios", one of the holy ones.
Yes, that’s right. You are a holy one. You are one of God's saints. Now how can that be? Being a person who believes in Jesus and says so out loud makes you a saint. A person who follows Jesus and through baptism is initiated into the Body of Christ and becomes part of the Christian community is a saint.
One of my very favorite images that illustrates this is found in the Episcopal Church of St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco. There, the artist Mark Dukes led the congregation in painting the image of a band of saints dancing together above the sanctuary. (Learn more here.) I've not seen it in person (yet!) but I love the image!
Imagine dancing with all the saints! The image brings to life what we heard this morning in John the Divine’s heavenly vision in Revelation, where it
says,
Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, "Who
are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?" I said to him,
"Sir, you are the one that knows." Then he said to me, "These
are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes
and made them white in the blood of the Lamb."
We are called “saints” because
of God's continuing incarnate presence among his people; it is God who is
intimately and fully holy, it is God who came in the flesh in the person of
Jesus who not only lived and walked among us but through God the Holy Spirit still
dwells in the midst of His people. That presence permeates the entire community
of faith.
Way back before the dawn of time, when I had been ordained about eight years and thought I knew everything, I read a novel which has stayed with me ever since because it illustrates the power of God to change hearts and the power of a changed heart. The book was Lazarus by Morris West, the third of his so-called ‘Papal Trilogy’ following The Shoes of the Fisherman and The Clowns of God.
In this story, published in 1990, an old-fashioned, rigid and legalistic, but fictional Pope Leo XIV (not to be confused with the current American-born Pope who happens to have chosen the same name!) has a heart attack and, while in recovery from surgery, experiences a conversion. He is converted from seeing his faith as a rulebook and his job as enforcing rules and maintaining institutional authority and tradition, to the realization that the Gospel of Christ is communicated by and transforms lives through love. The drama of the novel is to watch his change of heart and see how the structures that he helped build resist the implications of his insight. In one scene, he looks out the window of the room (located in a hostel that is also a community for disabled children) where he is recuperating. What he sees is a vineyard at harvest-time being worked by both adults and children:
Suddenly here he was, on a hillside in Castelli, watching the grape pickers moving up and down the vine-rows, tossing the fruit into baskets, emptying the baskets into the cart hitched to the yellow tractor that would haul them to the crushing vats…. The scene was so lively, so full of human detail, that the Pontiff stood for a long while contemplating the simple wonder of it—and the bleak futility of much of his own existence. This was where the people of God were to be found. This was how they were to be found, doing everyday things to rhythms of a workaday world. [1]
In the novel, the character of
the Pope stands in for the whole Church. Whenever we are distracted into
thinking that our evangelism is only about improving attendance; when our outreach
is designed to make us feel better rather than allow us to be changed by the
poor and those we meet; when we use our resources and time to look inward
rather than allow us to see the face of Christ in the people God gives us, and
whenever we refrain from using the tools of our time, talent, treasure, and
relationships to represent Christ in the world, then we have made the mistake
of thinking that our job as Christians is simply to survive and preserve the
Church in the world. And when we do this, we are nothing more than empty jars.
It’s not our behavior, which is
often less than perfect, that makes us saints but our living identity as Jesus’
people that makes us saints.
But let’s be careful here: in
recognizing that we have already joined the glorious company of the saints in
light by virtue of our faith and baptism, doesn’t mean that God has merely
blessed our built-in biases and our life-long habits. As we hear in the
Revelation of John today, God's voice thunders from heaven, "See, I am
making all things new." We saints are being made new every day!
I remember a story that made me
re-think and refine an understanding of sainthood that I carried around for
years. It is the story of an encounter between a priest and Dorothy Day, the
founder of the Catholic Worker movement, who died in 1980 at 83 years old. She
was a champion for the poor and the working person and a bold activist for
peace. During the 1970s, some priests were experimenting with the liturgy—trying
to make it more accessible to ordinary people. One afternoon, a priest came
into the soup kitchen where Dorothy Day was working. He wanted to offer a
liturgy for the homeless, so he went into the kitchen and grabbed a mug from
the pantry to use as a chalice.
Day prayed throughout that mass and
after the liturgy ended, she quietly got up and started to cleanse the vessels.
Then, she walked outside with the mug carrying a shovel.
A man followed her and asked her
what she was doing. It is said she kissed the mug and then buried it. She told
him that it was no longer a mug, but a chalice. It was no longer suited for
coffee because it had held the Blood of Christ. She didn’t want anyone to
mistake it for a mug again because once something holds the Body of Christ, it
is no longer what it was. When the mug held the Blood of Christ, it changed its
vocation forever. It could no longer hold anything less than Christ again.
Well, I love Dorothy Day and she
is one of my great spiritual heroes, and I see where she was going and understand
her sentiment but, in the end, I think I disagree. I think I would have put the mug back in the pantry, even knowing that it once held the blessed Sacrament. Allow me to explain.
Ever been to an antique store?
My wife and I love to go around to find good antique stores. And when I hear
this passage, I have this image of a variety of things that not only look cool
and are fun to hold but also have stories and memories and history that are
both unknown and tangible.
And sometimes you’ll find fine
china next to mug collections with the eighth mug missing a handle. There might
be playful cookie jars that look like cats sitting next to fine crystal. You
get the idea. Here we have the power and light of God that spoke the world into
being and changes hearts…carried around in the most amazing variety of
containers, some gorgeous works of art and some of them cartoon jelly jars.
Our epistle today compares us to
children, precious yes, but also rambunctious, insatiably curious, with a
propensity for skinned knees, runny noses, and squabbling with siblings.
Elsewhere, the Apostle Paul likens saints to earthen vessels that contain the
holiness of God. He says that God chooses to communicate the salvation of the
world and the healing of creation through everyday clay jars likes us.
Containers that are easily chipped and easily soiled. Cups that, sorry Dorothy,
might contain both coffee and sacramental wine.
This is completely consistent
with what God does in Jesus Christ, isn’t it? In Jesus we see the fullness of
God and the fullness of humanity brought together in one glorious, ordinary,
life-changing, and everyday package!
So, if God knows that God’s
glory and light will reside in such ordinary packages like you and me, then how
does God expect revealing light, transforming power and healing grace to reach
the rest of humanity? I mean, if we don’t look perfect and grand and have it
together all the time, then how will God’s saving power possibly become
known? How could we ever be called “saints?”
Well, it requires a change of
heart, and practice, and patience to allow God’s transforming grace to make us
new one step at a time. That is the everyday work of everyday saints like you
and me.
I remember a children’s sermon I heard as a kid, and which I’ve repeated a few times over the years. You and me and all the saints are just like the stained-glass windows I grew up with. We are people through whom the light hines. We are dancing with the saints! God is making all things new, and we, who have taken on Christ in baptism are now holy vessels—chalices—who communicate Christ every day.
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[1] Morris West, Lazarus (1990, St. Martin’s Press, New York) p. 161-162
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This are the Bulletins for Worship for All Saint's Day: November 1, 2026 at St. Catherine of Alexandria, Temple Terrace, Florida. (For the 8 a.m. Liturgy) (For the 10 a.m. Liturgy)
Here are the Scripture Lessons for All Saints Day: Sunday, November 1, 2026.
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