Having what it takes

Do you think you are good enough to be one God’s saints? Do you think you have what it takes?

What a strange question! Saints are really holy people, right? Only special people, who meet strict criteria get to be called saints, right? We pray to Saints, we name churches for them. Sometimes cities, or colleges or hospitals. Right now, we are surrounded by idealized images of saints in the stained glass that adorn this church.

You know what? The word “saint” appears in the New Testament 62 times and that the Apostle Paul used the term 44 times and not one of them refers to a hospital or college? 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 one of God's saints.

So what makes a saint a saint? St. Paul says Baptism is the mark of sainthood. The writer of the Revelation to John has a heavenly vision. He wrote, "I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them;"

We are called “saints” because of God's continuing incarnate presence among his people through Jesus Christ and in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit; it is God who is intimately and fully holy, it is God who came in the flesh, who not only lived and walked among us and still dwells in the midst of His people. That presence permeates the entire community of faith.

As Presiding Bishop Michael Curry once reminded us when he said,

God came among us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth to change the world, to change it from the nightmare it often can be into the dream that God intends. He came to change the world, and we have been baptized into the Triune God and summoned to be disciples and followers of this Jesus and to participate in God’s work, God’s mission of changing and transforming this world. We are the Jesus Movement now….

…We are part of the Jesus Movement, and he has summoned us to make disciples and followers of all nations and transform this world by the power of the Good News, the gospel of Jesus.

What makes God's people holy is His presence in and with us. It’s not our behavior, which, we must admit, is often less than perfect, that makes us saints but it is our living identity as Jesus’ people that makes us saints. There are many examples of people transformed by the love of Jesus. One well known story is about the Rev. John Newton who former slave ship captain who became an ardent abolitionist and an Anglican priest. He wrote the famous hymn “Amazing Grace” in 1764, that describes the truth that it is God's gracious presence in the midst of His humanity that makes sainthood possible.

"Amazing grace! how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see."

With God's loving grace we can grow to be the people God made us to be…to live into the sainthood we have been adopted into!

In the second half of today’s reading from Revelation, God's voice thunders from heaven, "See, I am making all things new." God is making a promise to us. 

I think I’ve told you before about how, when I was in high school and college, I experienced two movements that was sweeping the churches: the Jesus Movement, and in particular the movement that swept through the Episcopal Church (and many other churches). People who were once part of a church known as “God’s Frozen Chosen” were experiencing the gifts of the Holy Spirit, including but not limited to speaking in tongues, and ecstatic prayer. Well, this was new to me and I loved going to those churches and prayer meetings and I learned so much from them. But the truth is that I made a rotten charismatic… and still do! I am just too tightly wound, I guess! The truth is that the only time I’ll ever pray with my hands up will probably be during a bank robbery.

I used to feel guilty about this, thinking that I wasn’t holy enough or that somehow I was closing out the Holy Spirit. But a wise woman reassured me that it was okay…that God was not finished with me yet.

We live in a world that often advertises promises of perfection, but the fact is that saintliness is much less about perfection and much more about transformation. We who are God's saints are saints both by grace and by choice. We followers, friends, and apprentices of Jesus are constantly learning how to follow Jesus as we do the work of God, as we allow the holy presence of God be a transforming influence in our life.

One of the things I have discovered over the years about how to learn and do the work of Jesus is to let go of our outsized expectations of perfection. Sure there are skills to learn: how to pray, how to read scripture, how to listen to others, and how to form holy habits. At the same time, we are also called to have an open and ready heart. And that comes from learning to improvise, punt, to live with limitations. All these teach us that sainthood is not about externals, piety, or looking good. Sainthood comes with baptism, and how we live it by learning and doing the work of Jesu

I remember a children’s sermon I heard as a kid, and I’ve repeated this image a few times in this parish. In the sermon, the priest pointed to all the wonderful stained glass windows that were in that church (here you have wonderful etched windows but the image still holds….). What was said in that children’s sermon is that we, you and me, are all like these windows: we are people through whom the light shines.

When I was in Seminary, I remember hearing Dr. James Fenhagen, the late Dean of General Seminary, speak about the Church in American culture. He said that modern Christians tended to have hard crusty exteriors but soft inner cores. The problem is God call us to have a solid core, grounded in Scripture, tradition, and reason, and a soft exterior, a heart for all God’s people. As baptized said, we build that solid core by being disciplines who engage in prayer, the study of Scripture, spiritual direction, and sacramental living, which shapes into who and what we are, deep in our souls. All this helps us to have a genuinely compassionate, welcoming, and embracing faith that expresses God’s love and care to the people God gives us every day.

Remember that famous old English hymn, "I Sing a Song of the Saints of God?" The last verse brings home the point

"They lived not only in ages past,

there are hundreds of thousands still,

the world is bright with the joyous saints

who love to do Jesus' will.

You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea,

in church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea,

for the saints of God are just folk like me,

and I mean to be one too."

I have to confess I am not there yet but, as that wise woman reminded me long ago, we are on the way. Being a saint is a being a person of hope… hope is faith that looks forward. And the saints of God who surround us in a fellowship of love and prayer tells us that we are not along in the journey. God isn't finished with us yet. And, yes, you do have what it takes! God is making all things new, even people like me and like you.

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Bulletin for Worship for the Sunday after All Saints, November 5, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for the Sunday after All Saints, November 5, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on November 5, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on November 5, 2023.

Welcome to the club!

If you were to draw up a list of Saints who would you include? Let’s name a few of our favorites: There is St. Nicholas, who is jolly and cuddly and Christmassy. There is St. Anthony, who specializes in helping us find things (and people) who get lost. There is St. Christopher, who protects us from harm. Have a lost cause? There’s a saint for that: St. Jude. And there is St. Valentine, the bearer of romance. Let's lift a pint to St. Patrick, missionary, Irishman (at least by adoption) and football mascot. And let’s not forget our own patron, St. John the Evangelist.

I hate to burst your bubble, but despite the over 12,700 references on Google, there is no “St. Arbucks,” patron Saint of Coffee (Think about it). Sorry.

Well today, I want to add a new name to your list of Saints: Saint Samuel, our candidate for holy baptism today.

You may laugh, but I am not kidding.

When we talk about saints, we might talk about what makes a saint, well, famous. What gets a college or city named after one? We could talk about their sacrifices, their perfection, their witness, and their selfless deeds. Last Friday, one of my spiritual heroes, Dorothy Day, got the newest Staten Island Ferry named after her. How cool is that?

Today we hold up the “rank and file” saints, the ones who don’t necessarily get a day set a aside for them. But like the more famous capital “S” saints they all communicated Jesus to others, often one relationship at a time. These saints exhibited Christ even when they didn’t feel like it, know it, nor even understand it. Most of these saints don’t have a name or a date, but I think you may know one or two.

Christianity is passed along by word of mouth, by example, and through relationship. No one ever comes to faith entirely by themselves. We are all brought to and sustained in our faith, because someone or some people, brought us and nurtured us. These people were and are God’s ambassadors of reconciliation—showing off Jesus—and inviting those around them to come along.

Which is why Episcopalians, like a lot of other Christians in other traditions, baptize babies like Samuel. We believe that Christian households can and do raise up Christian children into active, productive, friends and apprentices of Jesus Christ.

One of the things that Samuel will learn is that saints are by definition imperfect. They will have live breathing examples of that, and probably in about twelve to fourteen years from now they will let you know. But that’s okay. No one is totally pure and no one is above corruption in thought, word and deed. Not one has ever completely put aside any one or all of the seven deadly sins. If you talk to a person whom you or I might consider saintly, they would probably be startled and think you were making mountains out of molehills.

I’ve never met a firefighter who was a hero. Not one. When you tell them they are heroic, which is especially fashionable these days, they will deny it and tell you that they are only doing their job. Most saints are just the same way.

Remember, in the early Church, “saint” was the term used to describe all followers of Jesus. All of us who live attempting to imitate Christ get the title “saint.” The first step to sainthood is to decide to follow Jesus. The entry point is baptism.

At the same time, saints are made not just born(-again!). Ask Saint Paul about the saints with whom he dealt through his correspondences we call Epistles. The saints in Corinth were willful and quarrelsome and others were sexually irresponsible. There were saints in Philippi who used their position in church for purely selfish ends. Even big-shots like Peter and Barnabas could act like hypocrites. And Paul himself admitted to the saints in Rome that even he did not understand his own actions—he did things he did not want to do, the very things he hated.

Sainthood should not be confused with being “nice.” Even Mother Teresa was known not to be nice all the time. But that’s no surprise because if you’re focused on caring for the poorest of the poor you might end up ruffling a few feathers.

Living into our saintliness is not about niceness but about newness. I remember a lesson from a priest when I was a boy, who pointed to all the pictures of saints around my home parish rendered in brightly colored stained glass. I remember him saying that we are all like those saints because saints are people the Light shines through.

As we welcome young Samuel into the fellowship of the Church and into the company of saints, I won’t need to tell experienced parents like Kimberly and Garret that there will be days when your little saint will seem like an angel, and days when he will be… well… won't. And that’s okay, because you know that’s already true about yourselves and all the others of Jesus’ people in your life and in this parish community.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus describes what it means to be blessed before God. He is also talking about what it means to be a saint—to be a regular, ordinary, everyday follower, friend, and apprentice of Jesus.

“Blessed are you who are poor,” Jesus says, “for yours is the kingdom of God.”
“Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.”
“Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.”
“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven.”

Being blessed, Jesus says, comes from finding our focus just a bit more, day by day, on what God would have us be. And as we listen to God’s voice, and respond to God’s grace, we find that walking the way of Jesus touches lives in ways we can hardly imagine. The late pastor and writer Frederick Buechner wrote:

As we move around this world and as we act with kindness perhaps, or with indifference or with hostility toward the people we meet, we are setting the great spider web atremble. The life I touch for good or ill will touch and other life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what place my touch will be felt.

You are here, and you have brought Samuel and his siblings with you, because some place, somewhere, a saint touched you. Somewhere, sometime, you have touched another human being with grace. Somewhere someone cut you a break, told you the truth in love, or cared for you in a moment of crisis. Somewhere someone showed you what it was like to be touched by God. And, having been touched by the holy, you said “I want to do that, too” and that’s when you took another step towards your own saintliness. And now you want to communicate that ineffable quality and that eternal truth to your children and through them to your children’s children. God’s love touched you. You became a follower of Jesus. And you want that for your kids as well.

Saintliness is about newness--choosing to live this one day in one new way--choosing compassion over selfishness, mercy over revenge, kindness over disregard. Choosing just for this moment to serve God in the people God gives us and to look right now for Christ in the people we are given. 

As Saints go, you may think we have a way to go. When Samuel doesn’t pay attention to his feeding or sleeping schedule or as he touches things, and plays with Olivia’s and Hunter’s things, or he discovers new ways to go his own way, you may wonder about Samuel’s saintliness. But you have brought him here anyway.

Well, welcome to the Club, Samuel… the Communion of Saints, the fellowship of Christ’s body, the People of God. You will discover that we Jesus People are a strange lot. We may at times be quarrelsome, strident, short-sighted and at times ignorant or hypocritical, that’s for sure.

It’s true. We are not perfect, we saints; but we are everyday discovering newness. For all our foibles (and yours yet to be revealed) we are together learning and doing the work of Jesus, and just like all those other saints, we learning to let the light shine through.

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Here is a link to the bulletin for the Sunday after All Saints  at St. John's Episcopal Church, Clearwater

Here is a link to the Scripture readings.

Here is a link to a video of the sermon.

Here is a link to a video of the liturgy.

The Odd Three Days

If the period from Maundy Thursday through Good Friday to Holy Saturday ending with the Great Vigil of Easter (i.e. Easter Eve) can be called "The Great Three Days," then maybe the series of observances from All Hallows Eve (Halloween), October 31, All Saints Day (today, November 1), and All Soul's Day (or All Faithful Departed, November 2nd), might be called "The Odd Three Days."

Look at the arc of the story. It starts with ghosties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties and things that go ‘bump’ on your door asking for candy. Next come two feasts focused on the dead: All Saint's, remembering all those holy people who don't get their own holy day; and, All Soul's or All Faithful Departed, where (depending on where you land on the universalist spectrum) we remember all the faithful (baptized or not) who have died, even if they weren't all that saintly, or everyone who has died regardless of their fitness for the Kingdom.

At any rate, what we are doing is recalling those who have died while at the same time thumbing our noses at death itself.

There was a time when April Foole's Day, was not just a day for cheap pranks, but was a day for anyone to make fun of Kings, Queens, Bishops and other clergy, the wealthy and the famous, and anyone who think themselves important.

Yesterday, on Halloween, we made fun of devils, demons, ghosts, goblins, and monsters. We looked death in the face and laughed.

Halloween stores, horror movies, and parties aside, secular society does this very nervously. That's because most people don't get the joke.

The reason that we followers of Jesus can put on make-up and join the mockery is that by reason of Jesus' incarnation, death, and resurrection God has defeated and put to flight the ultimate power that sin, death, and the grave have over us. Our bodies may die, but the spiritual power of death no longer has any hold over us. And even physical death is punctuated by resurrection, starting with Christ’s own rise from the grave, and Christians live in the confident hope of joining him in our resurrected life starting with our baptisms.

We might be tempted to think that when are praying for our deceased loved ones that we are pleading that God might give them a break from the torments of purgatory or hell or get them into heaven faster. This kind of fear, combined with clever fund-raising, is one of the things that sparked the Reformation 505 years ago.

Instead, what we are doing is joining with every single one of those everyday saints and souls from all time and every place who, as we heard in today's reading from Revelation, have gathered around the throne of the Lamb. Together we all sing "Alleluia!"

During this Lesser Triduum, these Three Odd Days, we look at the expanse of the church year now winding down, gear ourselves up for how God will wrap up history and fill all things, reflect on the coming of winter, and remember all the ways that God has shown up in the lives of ordinary people--especially in the ones we love but see no longer-- and we discover once again that God in Christ has swallowed up death forever.

The saints and souls we pray for, those near and dear to us, and those known to us only in name and story, are--just like us-- going from strength to strength in the life of perfect service.

These "three odd days," this lesser triduum, may seem like we are whistling past the graveyard, but why settle for whistling when we can sing?

We are able to sing as the Apostle Paul did when he wrote to the Corinthians; "Where, O death, is your sting...? ...Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!"

We are, in fact, living in a new creation where the power of death, the power to separate us from God, each other, and creation, has been defeated forever in Christ's life, death, and resurrection.

So enjoy this Lesser Triduum… these days of festivity, frivolity, solemnity, and prayer… these odd and wonderful Three Days celebrating Christ’s victory over death—and ours!

Everyday Saintliness Made Real

Do you think you are good enough to be one God’s saints? How do you think you'd look dressed up in stained glass? How do you think you'd look as an icon with colors of egg tempra? What do you think? Do you think you have what it takes?

What a strange question! We tend to think of saints as really and obviously holy people; people who meet strict criteria get to be called saints, right? Our sisters and brothers in the Roman Catholic Church have a strict process that moves a person from Beatified to Sainthood, with a few miracles under their saintly belts.

Our process is a little different. To get into our own calendar of Saints is less stringent… no miracles are required but there is a vote in General Convention. We invoke saints in our prayers, we name churches for them, as well as cities, colleges, and hospitals.

Maybe you’ve done what more and more Episcopalians do every Lent? Vote for your favorites saint during Lent Madness… a thirty-two slot bracket (like the NCAA Basketball March Madness) where Episcopalians vote for their favorite saint in daily matchups from the first Thursday in Lent until Wednesday in Holy Week? Last year, Absolom Jones won the Golden Halo, joining others like George Herbert, CS Lewis, Mary Magdalene, Frances Perkins, Charles Wesley, Francis of Assisi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Florence Nightingale, Anna Alexander, Martha of Bethany, and Harriet Tubman… who all were winners of their annual contests. Who will win the Golden Halo next Lent? Stay tuned!

Would it surprise you if I told you that the word “saint” appears in the New Testament 62 times and that the Apostle Paul used the term 44 times? You see, in the New Testament, every follower of Jesus is a Saint, or in Greek "hagios", one of the holy ones.

You are one of God's saints. Yes, you!

So, what makes a saint a saint? The Apostle Paul says faith in Jesus and Baptism are the marks of sainthood. He’s not alone. The writer of the Revelation to John in his heavenly vision puts it another way- "I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them…’"

We are called saints because of God's continuing presence among his people; it is God who is intimately and fully holy, it is a God who came in the flesh in the person of Jesus, who still dwells with us, His people. That presence permeates the entire community of faith.

Presiding Bishop Michael Curry said:

God came among us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth to change the world, to change it from the nightmare it often can be into the dream that God intends. He came to change the world, and we have been baptized into the Triune God and summoned to be disciples and followers of this Jesus and to participate in God’s work, God’s mission of changing and transforming this world. We are the Jesus Movement now….

…We are part of the Jesus Movement, and he has summoned us to make disciples and followers of all nations and transform this world by the power of the Good News, the gospel of Jesus.

What makes God's people holy is His presence in and with us. It’s not our behavior which, truth be told, is often less than perfect, that makes us saints, but it is our living identity as Jesus’ people that makes us saints. It is how learn and do the works of Jesus as his friends and apprentices that makes us saints.

The former slave ship captain John Newton, who wrote the famous hymn "Amazing Grace," brought home in his beloved hymn the reality that it is God's gracious presence in the midst of His humanity that makes sainthood possible.

"Amazing grace! how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see."

Left to our own devices, we will eventually disappoint at least our own selves. But with God's loving grace we can grow to be the people God made us to be…to live into the sainthood we have been adopted into!

In today’s reading from the Revelation to John, God's voice thunders from heaven, "See, I am making all things new." God is making a promise to us. 

When I was in high school and college, the movement that was sweeping the Episcopal Church (and many other churches) was the charismatic movement. People were experiencing the gifts of the Holy Spirit, including but not limited to speaking in tongues, and ecstatic prayer. Well, I loved going to those churches and prayer meetings and I learned so much. I was energized and inspired by their worship. But, as I have said to some of you before, I made a rotten charismatic. I am just too tightly wound. The truth is that the only time I’ll ever pray with my hands up will probably be during a bank robbery!

I used to feel guilty about this. That maybe I wasn’t holy enough. But a wise woman reassured me that it was okay…that God was not finished with me yet.

We live in a world that often advertises promises of perfection. It turns out that saintliness is much less about perfection than it is about transformation. We who are God's saints on earth are called to allow the holy presence of God be a transforming influence in our life.

The Rev. Dr. James Fenhagen, who was then the Dean of General Seminary, spoke about the Church in American culture. He said that modern Christians tended to have hard crusty exteriors but soft inner cores. The problem is God call us to have a solid core and soft exterior! Historically Christianity has advocated focusing on forming the inner person, engaging in disciplines such as prayer, study of Scripture, spiritual direction, and sacramental living, that shapes who and what we are deep in our souls. This is how transformation happens; that is how we grow as God's saints on earth.

A few years ago, my wife and I joined about four dozen other Episcopalians on a pilgrimage across northern Spain called the Camino de Santiago. We walked this ancient pilgrim way following in the steps of countless Christians—not just on the Camino but in all kinds of ordinary living-- who seek to follow Jesus every day, and to turn this journey into a moving walking prayer. 

What I learned from that pilgrimage is that being a saint, a follower of Jesus, is to be “on the way every day,” learning and doing his work, seeing his face in the people we meet, and joining a countless band of other saints, living and dead, who are walking on the way in prayer, acts of service, and humble worship. So, yes, you have what it takes, because we are, all of us, by grace, saints of God!

Here is the link to the full liturgy at St. John's Clearwater, Florida

Here is the link to the sermon. 

Ordinary people communicating extraordinary grace

Do you think you are good enough to be one God’s saints? Do you think you have what it takes?

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. We pray to Saints, we name churches for them and sometimes cities, or colleges or hospitals. Even now, as we sit in this church we are surrounded by idealized images of saints in the stained glass that adorn this church. It’s a pretty high bar!

The Episcopal Church has a calendar of saints and here at Trinity Church, we commemorate them on Wednesdays at our Noon Eucharist. Saints like Anselm of Canterbury, the theologian; 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, named saints have been added to our calendar like Martin Luther King, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyrs, and Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement.

We commemorate many saints alongside our Roman Catholic 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 one of God's saints. Now how can that be?

According to St. Paul what makes a saint a saint is Baptism. Being a person who believes in Jesus and says so out loud, and who participates in Christian community is a saint. In John’s heavenly vision in Revelation,

“… (he) heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them…’"

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, who not only lived and walked among us and still dwells in the midst of His people. That presence permeates the entire community of faith.

Five years ago, the Episcopal Church got a new Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry of North Carolina was installed at the National Cathedral in Washington on the feast of All Saints. Before his election, he said:

God came among us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth to change the world, to change it from the nightmare it often can be into the dream that God intends. He came to change the world, and we have been baptized into the Triune God and summoned to be disciples and followers of this Jesus and to participate in God’s work, God’s mission of changing and transforming this world. We are the Jesus Movement now….

…We are part of the Jesus Movement, and he has summoned us to make disciples and followers of all nations and transform this world by the power of the Good News, the gospel of Jesus.

What makes God's people holy is His presence with and in us. 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 recently saw 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 for the 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.

Recently, our siblings in the Roman Catholic Church have been moving Dorothy Day through the process to make her a saint in their church. Which is ironic because she very firmly stated that she did not wish to be called a saint, lest she be trivialized. Jesuit priest Fr. James Martin wrote about this strained relationship:

"Dorothy’s own relationship with saints was anything but cynical. Both her daily speech and her writings were filled with references to St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Teresa of Avila. She treasured their stories. For Dorothy these were not idealized super-humans, but her constant companions and daily guides in the imitation of Christ. She relished the human details of their struggles to be faithful, realizing full well that in their own time they were often regarded as eccentrics or dangerous troublemakers."

“We are all called to be saints,” Day wrote. “We might as well get over our bourgeois fear of the name. We might also get used to recognizing the fact that there is some of the saint in all of us. Inasmuch as we are growing, putting off the old man and putting on Christ, there is some of the saint, the holy, the divine right there.” In other words, Dorothy Day regarded sanctity as the ordinary vocation of every Christian—not just the goal of a chosen few.

At a sermon I preached a few years ago I said that we were holy vessels disguised as cracked coffee mugs or jelly jars. Thinking of Dorothy Day’s lesson, I want to amend that. Once, we were common mugs. Simple, functional, practical, and good people. We had a capacity to hold good things. But with our baptisms, when Christ entered our lives, we became much more. We became Chalices. We started to hold divinity Himself within our hearts. Now that we have held the Body of Christ within our bodies, we are no longer common, but rather extraordinary, even as we live in an everyday world.

One of the things I have learned about how to “do” and “be” church in 2020 is that for all the improvisation, re-learning, limitations, and new habits we’ve taken on, we are being taught valuable lessons in everyday sainthood.

We are discovering how we are being changed on the inside and how that changes how we are with each other. So now we don’t just care about our own health or own prerogatives, but when we choose to wear a mask and wash our hands, we are learning to care for our neighbor—even ones we’ve hardly or never met! We’ve learned this year that not being prejudiced is enough to heal the centuries-old wounds of our society, but we are learning to be actively, and practically, anti-racist. We’re discovering (God willing!) that our politics is not just about giving into our fears but how we as a society looks out for each other and brings us together.

I remember a children’s sermon I heard as a kid, and which I’ve repeated a few times in this parish. You and me and all the saints are just like these windows: we are people through whom the light shines. 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.

The Odd Three Days

If the period from Maundy Thursday through Good Friday to the Great Vigil of Easter can be called "The Great Three Days," then maybe the series of observances from All Hallow's Eve, going through All Saints Day, and then ending with All Soul's Day (or Faithful Departed), might be "The Odd Three Days."

Look at the arc of the story. It starts with ghosties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties and things that show up on your doorstep asking for candy, and then it ends with two feasts focused on the dead: All Saint's, remembering all those holy people who don't get their own holy day; and, All Soul's or All Faithful Departed, where (depending on where you land on the universalist spectrum) we remember all the faithful (baptized) who have died, even if they weren't all that saintly, or everyone who has died regardless of their fitness for the Kingdom.

At any rate, what we are doing is recalling those who have died while at the same time thumbing our noses at death.

Back on April Foole's Day, we made fun of Kings, Queens, Bishops and other clergy, the wealthy and the celebrity, and anyone who thinks themselves important.

Yesterday, on Halloween, we made fun of devils, demons, ghosts, goblins, and monsters. We looked death in the face and laughed.

Halloween stores and parties aside, secular society does this very nervously. That's because most people don't get the joke.

The reason that we followers of Jesus can put on make-up and join the mockery is that by reason of Jesus' incarnation, death, and resurrection God has defeated and put to flight the ultimate power that sin, death, and the grave have over us. Our bodies may die, but the spiritual power of death no longer has any hold over us.

We might be tempted to think that when are praying for our deceased loved ones that we are pleading that God might give them a break from the torments of purgatory or hell. This kind of fear, combined with clever fund-raising, is one of the things that sparked the Reformation 500 years ago. But, in fact, what we are doing is joining with all those everyday saints and souls from all time and every place who, as we heard in today's reading from Revelation, have gathered around the throne of the Lamb and together we sing "Alleluia."

During this Lesser Triduum, these Three Odd Days, we look at the expanse of the church year now winding down, gear ourselves up for how God will wrap up history and fill all things, reflect on the coming of winter, and remember all the ways that God has shown up in the lives of ordinary people--especially in the ones we love but see no longer-- and we discover once again that God in Christ has swallowed up death forever.

The saints and souls we pray for, those near and dear to us, and those known to us only in name and story, are--just like us-- going from strength to strength in the life of perfect service.

These "three odd days," this lesser triduum, may seem like we are whistling past the graveyard, but why settle for whistling when we can sing?

We are able to sing as the Apostle Paul did to the Corinthians; "Where, O death, is your sting...? ...Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!"

We are, in fact, living in a new creation where the power of death, the power to separate us from God, each other, and creation, has been defeated forever in Christ's life, death, and resurrection.

Homily for The Feast of All Saints, November 1, 2017 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Easton, PA.