TRINITY XXI

Let us pray:

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable unto thee, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

From the Collect: “O Almighty God, who hast knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of thy Son Christ our Lord.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Today we celebrate with great joy the Feast of All Saints.

A little history may help us to better appreciate and understand what we are doing.

We begin with the earliest history of the Church.

It became customary in many places to celebrate the Heavenly birthdays of those members of the local congregation who had suffered martyrdom for the Faith.

Often, notable martyrs, such as Peter and Paul, were celebrated not only in their local congregations but in many places.

Once the era of martyrdom ended, people began to celebrate the Heavenly birthdays of men and women who had displayed great holiness in their manner of living or in their teaching.

To distinguish these from the martyrs, these other saintly people were called “confessors.”

Eventually, the many local calendars of saints began to cause a great deal of confusion, with saints being celebrated on different days in different places, even in some cases causing people of dubious saintliness to be celebrated, and so the Church began the process of establishing a canon, or approved list of saints, to be celebrated by the universal church.

The complex and exhaustive process by which a candidate is enrolled on this list is known as canonization, and it is still very carefully practiced by the Roman Church.

By the ninth century, the Church realized that the process of canonization was necessarily incomplete.

There would be many saintly people who simply would not ever be included on the official list.

In our Epistle for today, we heard, “After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands; And cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb.” (Revelation 7:9-10 KJV)

If no man can number the saints, the list must necessarily be incomplete.

And so, the Feast of All Saints was instituted on November 1st, to include all the saints of God, not just those on the Canonical list.

Perhaps confusingly, a bit later there was another day established on the very following day, November 2nd, to offer prayers for the souls of all the Faithful departed, known as All Soul’s Day.

In some places both days are still observed, but many places the function of All Souls Day has been taken into All Saints Day, as is our custom, here.

There is a perfectly good justification for this combination, for reasons I will explain later.

Before we move on, it is worth taking a moment to consider what sorts of prayers were offered in these celebrations.

They can be divided into two sorts.

First, there are prayers of thanksgiving and emulation.

In these we thank God for the good qualities of the saint being celebrated and ask Him to grant to us the grace to imitate those good qualities.

The second sort is prayers of invocation.

In these prayers, we ask the saint to pray to God for us.

On the face of it there is nothing wrong with this sort of prayer.

After all, there is absolutely nothing wrong with asking another member of the body of Christ to pray for us, and beyond the shadow of a doubt, the saints are most definitely still members of the body of Christ.

To be sure, it is not at all unreasonable to believe that the prayers of the saints can be very efficacious, given their closeness to the throne of Grace.

As Saint James assures us, “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.” (James 5:16 KJV)

As a matter of historical fact, many notable miracles were attributed to such prayers of invocation of the saints, so much so that in the Roman practice of canonization, bona fide reports the occurrence of miracles as the result of prayers addressed to the candidate are a necessary part of the process.

Theoretically, all of this is fine.

As a practical matter, popular piety, particularly in the middle ages, raised the level of devotion to the Saints to the point where it sometimes seemed to compete with the worship of God and Christ, particularly amongst simple people.

As the result of this, at the time of the Reformation, some of the Protestant reformers decided to do away with the whole business of the Saints.

The Anglican reformers, typically, endeavored to find another way, not wanting to throw out the baby with the bath water.

First, they reduced the number of prescribed feast days drastically, restricting those to be celebrated in all places to the few we find in our Prayer Book, all of which are the celebration of New Testament Saints.

They did also retain All Saints Day, and made provision for observing other Saints’ days at the discretion of the clergy.

If you will turn to the very next page in the Prayer Book, p. 258, you will find “A Saints Day” which can be used to celebrate any Saint whatsoever, Saint Patrick, for example.

In fact, there have been published some very nice supplements to the Prayer Book which provide lessons and collects for other Saints’ days, such as Lesser Feasts and Fasts.

An interesting sidelight is that since we Anglicans lack the elaborate machinery to canonize Saints, we refer to our uniquely Anglican Saints as “Anglican Worthies” and call them “Blessed” rather than Saint; for example, in Lesser Feasts and Fasts you will find proper lessons for the Feast of Blessed John and Charles Wesley.

Far more significant was the change in the prayers themselves.

Prayers asking for the intercession of the Saints were replaced with prayers asking for grace to follow their good examples.

The Collect for All Saints is typical: “Grant us grace so to follow thy blessed Saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those unspeakable joys which thou hast prepared for those who unfeignedly love thee.”

This does not mean that your private prayers asking for the intercession of saints are prohibited, simply that they ought not to be a part of the public worship of the church.

Many Anglicans do maintain a serious personal devotion to the Saints, but such devotions do not form a part of our public worship.

This leaves one very significant question to be examined.

Simply put, that question is, “who are the saints we celebrate today?”

To examine this question, we must, as is so often the case, go back to the Greek.

Our word, “saint,” translates the Greek word “haggios.”

“Haggios,” means literally, “holy.”

For God Himself, holiness is an innate characteristic, but created things are made holy by being set apart for divine use.

A chalice, for example, is just a piece of metal until it is consecrated for use in the divine liturgy.

Thereafter it ought not be used for any other purpose.

If you want to see the consequences of desecrating holy things, look at Daniel 5, wherein King Belshazzar had a cocktail party making use of the sacred vessels which his father, Nebuchadnezzer, had taken from the temple in Jerusalem.

People, too, are made holy in just the same way.

When we were baptized, our lives were set apart for God, made holy.

Thus, all baptized Christians are holy people, saints.

That wonderful children’s hymn, I sing a song of the Saints of God, has it just right, “the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too.”

The issue is not whether we are holy people, saints, we are.

In fact, the Scriptures, with one possible exception, always refer to believers as saints, never as sinners.

This is very important.

If we were sinners, then it would be our nature to sin, but since we are saints, when we do sin, we are acting contrary to our true nature.

The issue is not whether we are saints, we are, by our Baptism, but rather whether we live according to our true nature.

Of course, we live as saints in a fallen world.

As such, we need all the help we can get to live as befits our nature and status as saints.

In just a bit, we will be offering prayers for those saints we love who have gone before us.

We truly and rightly believe that our prayers will be effectual for their growth in grace.

This belief is expressed in the Prayer for the Whole State, “And we also bless thy holy Name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear; beseeching thee to grant them continual growth in thy love and service, and to give us grace so to follow their good examples, that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom.”

If, however, you want to ask the Lord to have them pray for you, too, there is nothing wrong with that at all.

Or, perhaps, in as much as we will shortly be worshiping with “Angels and Archangels and all the company of Heaven,” you could just ask them yourself.

Amen.