All Saints

We had lovely church yesterday. 

On Saturday morning, we stopped by to set up for the weekend services, setting out sandboxes and candles for people to light in memory of loved ones, and counting out the blue votives for those beloved who have died this year and the white votives for those newly baptized.

Then, yesterday, after we sang "Behold the Host" and "For All the Saints," we came forward to light our candles, with Jo grabbing as many as her little hand would hold and then saying, "I want to do more!"  The sanctuary glowed in the gloom of a November day.

On the way home, I told Jonathan that though I know Easter is the Queen of Feasts, and Christmas is such a marvelous celebration in the church year, I think All Saints may just be my favorite.  I proposed that we should have an All Saints Season (at least so we could sing more of the fantastic hymns; that we sing "For All the Saints" only once a year is a terrible shame), beginning at November 1 and running until Christ the King Sunday, preparing us for the eschatological visions of Advent.

I propose this because we are too rarely reminded of the Communion of Saints--the comingling of the Church Triumphant and the Church Militant; we are too rarely reminded that we are all, even now, set apart for the work of God's kingdom which is every moment breaking in around us; we are too rarely reminded that the communion we share in the Communion of Saints is, indeed, the communion of the body of Christ--we ourselves are part of the sacrament that binds us together; we are too rarely reminded that sainthood is an ordinary calling that is part of the dailiness of our lives, not some rarified, exotic, and unreachable aspiration.

The witness of all saints is the proclamation most of us received as our entry point into the life of faith.  We hear stories, listen to prayers, sing songs with people around us; we recognize love and compassion, joy in the midst of suffering, and perseverance in hope.  Most of us receive the gift of faith not because of some startling event or dramatic cataclysm in our lives, but we bear witness to the hope that is in us because of ordinary gifts of time, laughter, food, tears, and pain.

And in the memory of those whose lives now continue as the great cloud of witnesses surrounding us, we affirm our own hope in the now-present-end (how's that for a paradox?) of God's dwelling place among his people.

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away."  Revelation 21.3-4