Rev. Stephen E. Stults
St. Paul’s Anglican Church
Feast of All Saints, 2014
Please consider these two
selections of Holy Scripture for our consideration today of the Feast of All
Saints:
First, from our Epistle for the
day, Revelation 7:9-10: 9 “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;
10 And cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God
which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb.”
And, from the book of Hebrews:
Hebrews 12:1 “Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses,
let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us,
and let us run with patience the race that is set before us,”
Both of
these passages of Holy Writ have bearing on what we observe today.
Today we celebrate a great day in the life of the Church,
the Feast of All Saints. Today is a
special day, for today we commemorate all of the Saints of God: those for whom God has opened the gates of
larger life in the Church Expectant; those who are present now in the Church
Militant on earth, and for all of those Christians,
we included, looking for the complete and eternal glorification in the Church
Triumphant. Let us briefly consider each
group and what they have to teach us about being saints.
Sometimes it seems as if we only focus
on a certain group of Saints, whether it be those great Prophets of the Old
Testament, or those Apostles of the New.
Perhaps, you may, as I do from time to time, muse upon the various great
figures of the Bible with considerable envy.
“Oh” say I, “if only I had the wisdom of a Solomon, or the patience of a
Job, or the leadership qualities of a Moses, or even the tenacious persistence
of a Paul! How blessed I would be!”
These are valid thoughts, I believe. It is true that we who are in the historic Church and who believe in
the primacy of Holy Scripture have a unique and wonderful perspective when we
look back on the history of the Church. Quoting Sir Isaac Newton in a letter to
his rival Robert Hooke, in 1676: “If I have seen a little further it is by
standing on the shoulders of Giants."[1] We in the historic Church have indeed stood
upon the shoulders of Giants. The great
men and women of the Church have and do serve as examples to us. We are indeed
blessed to have their godly examples before us as we seek to emulate them. These are people that God blessed with a
great portion of His spirit and thus shine with
light perpetual throughout the ages.
Again, Thank God for them.
Yet,
when we do look back with wondering hearts and eyes, we may have a certain
temptation to say or think: “That was
then…this is now. Surely saints like that don’t exist anymore. After all, these are figures in the Bible. Things like that don’t happen now.” There actually is some truth to that
statement. In our modern faithless
society, God may not pour out His Spirit in exactly the same way that He did in
the Book of Acts, where St. Peter’s shadow could heal the sick, or when St. Paul
Maybe
those were signs for the Church that don’t necessarily apply to the Church
today. Perhaps. Perhaps those were signs meant for the
building up of the 1st century Church. That could be.
Yet,
that does not excuse you or me from being what God in Christ has called us to
be. Just because we don’t or can’t work
great miracles doesn’t mean that we can’t be great saints. Just because we don’t speak in tongues
doesn’t mean that we are not “saved”, as some ultra-fundamentalist groups
believe. In short, just because we don’t
exhibit the externalia of the Spirit doesn’t give any indication of our
spiritual condition, or more importantly, our standing with God.
Usually,
the work of the Spirit is usually a quiet thing, growing inside us, sanctifying
us, making us holier than we were this time last year. Along this line, recall the classic Anglican
belief about salvation: “I am saved;
I am being saved; I hope to be saved.” That is, my salvation is an accomplished fact
through Jesus Christ; my continued sanctification is an on-going work of the
Holy Spirit; and my eventual glorification in Heaven is my hope, the thing to
which I look forward. Not “hope” in the
sense that I might not get it, but “hope” in the sense of something eagerly
awaited. In the words of St. Paul
This
realization is critical to us here in the Church Militant on earth: we are called to be saints. We, here and now,
are called to be saints to all those around us. Our speech, our actions, and
our demeanor should bespeak our condition as the elect of God. Not in some dour, “holier-than-thou” attitude
of “spiritual one-upmanship”, but in a genuine, overwhelming sharing of our joy
and love based on the reality of our salvation.
Our foremost calling is to love God with all
of our hearts, with all of our minds, and with all our strength; then to love
our neighbor as ourselves. When we
approach our ideal, we will be saints indeed.
It
is my firm conviction that those who have left a church building or a church
structure, or something warm and familiar for the sake of truth, are
saints. Those who have preferred the
sharp, clear, sometimes uncomfortable brilliance of truth over the fuzzy
opaque-ness of heterodoxy, not matter how comfortable, are saints. Finally, those who have loved their Lord
Jesus Christ to the exclusion of being with the “right” crowd are saints. It
may be uncomfortable, it may be inconvenient.
It is certainly not easy.
We
come here each Sunday to celebrate something.
On the surface, it seems as if we are just preserving some 17th
century ritual or liturgy. It seems like
we are just preserving the old and accustomed, as opposed to the new and
adventurous, the progressive, the modern.
“How could you do that, the world exclaims? The language is so funny!”
Well,
to the uninitiated, the language is funny, the actions quaint and
un-modern. But, beloved in the Lord,
this is not why we do this. True, we all
think that the liturgy is the time-honored way to worship, dating from the
primitive church. True, we think that reading
the Scriptures each Sunday is the best way to ground our worship in the Word of
God. It is true, also, that we think that liturgical prayer is the most
powerful way to pray, focusing all of our prayer efforts in a single, condensed
direction.
Yet,
for all of these advantages, this is not the reason we gather here each
Sunday. The reason that we gather here
each Sunday is that we put forth and celebrate the Truth. That truth is Jesus Christ, and Him
crucified. That truth is so profound and so self-evident that it offends the
world around us, which prefers to rest its hope in moral equivalency, or even
moral ambivalence.
That
is, the world looks at us askance, even aghast and says, “How can you claim to
have the truth? How dare you to make
such a claim!”
We
make this claim for several reasons, first, because the Church throughout the
ages has given us her testimony. Simply,
it is what the Church Militant does. It
is our job to bear witness to the truth.
In that vein, millions of saints have gone before us, worshipping and
testifying to the saving grace of Jesus Christ.
Second, we have the Word of God to comfort us, strengthen us, and to
guide us. When we read the Holy Word of
God with faith, His Spirit is always there to support and defend us with His
almighty power. Third, when we come
together to celebrate the historic Eucharist, we invoke the power of God upon
us. Not bringing Christ down to us, as
the medieval church believed, but rather the lifting up of our hearts and
spirits to God. In faith, we have a tiny glimpse of the glories of heaven each
Sunday in the Holy Eucharist as we celebrate the Holy Mysteries. We say:” Therefore with Angels and
Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy
glorious Name; evermore praising thee and saying Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of
hosts, Heaven and earth are full of thy glory: Glory be to thee, O Lord most
high.” Who can say those words with
faith and not be moved? This is what the
Church Militant on earth does: it actively, vigorously celebrates the mystery
of Christ in the Eucharist and in our lives.
Someday,
beloved, all of us will move through the constriction of this limited life
through the gates of larger life. There, with the redeemed in Christ, we will
await our final glorification with the Church Expectant. What the nature of this intermediate state
is, we do not know. True, all of us will
stand before the judgment seat of Christ someday, but blessed be to God, our
judgment will not be as those who have not trusted in Christ for their
salvation.
We
who have been washed white in the Blood of the Lamb will not come under
judgment, that is to say, condemnation, but rather will pass from death unto
life. We who hold up Christ as our only justification for salvation will
enter into life everlasting. We will join that great “cloud of witnesses”,
beholding all events both in heaven and earth.
The
last stage of our eternal journey is our final glorification as the Church
Triumphant. That will be that great day
when all enemies of Christ, including Satan and all his evil angels, will be
bound under the feet of Christ in abject submission. In that great day, no evil will rear its ugly
head, no rebellion will be uttered, but all things will be in order under the
rule of Christ. We who have trusted in
Christ will have completed our journey from earthbound, fallen creatures to our
eternal destiny as sons and daughters of the living God. Washed in the waters of Holy Baptism, nurtured
by God’s Holy Word , and fed by the Body and Blood of Christ, we will be
carried by our ark of salvation, the Church, to our final and blessed home.
We
celebrate that journey today. With all
Christians, past, present and future, we affirm the truth of our
inheritance. Above all, we give thanks
to God, the author and finisher of our faith, confessing this: “Holy God, we
praise thy Name; Lord Almighty, we confess thee; All the earth doth thee
acclaim and in awe and wonder bless thee; Thou who wast before all time, Art
eternal, high, sublime.”[2]
AMEN
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