All Saints Day 2023
My campus minister was once asked the question “what does it take to be a saint?”
He answered baptism, and death. That simple answer was met with stunned silence followed by a rush of questions and challenges. He stood by his answer, and all these years later I find it still resonates with me and challenges me.
In the earliest communities of Christ-followers, that second part about death wasn’t even considered necessary yet. Paul addressed all the members of the churches as saints, as did the author of the Book of Acts. Following that tradition, in many congregations today living and active members of the baptized community are called saints as both a title and a term of endearment. By virtue of our baptism into the body of Christ, we are in fact all saints. It’s a pretty simple concept, a way of naming our belonging.
Sainthood did not stay simple after the first and second generation of Christians went on to Glory. As the Christian community began to organize itself, identify new leaders and formalize hierarchies, becoming a saint became more than just being baptized. We humans love systems, we love rules and processes and definitions, they help us understand the world and one another. Our concept of sainthood has been no exception to our need for a process. In the Roman Catholic Church, the canonization process, the process of deciding that someone has earned saintly status, is very complicated and involves miracles, investigations, lots of scholarship and discussion. In the Episcopal Church, sainthood is complicated in a different way- there’s still scholarship involved, and lots of discussion, but ultimately, it’s a democratic process- we vote to approve the addition of certain people or groups to our calendar of holy people. Being added to the calendar means you get a feast day, a special prayer written about you, and a set of readings from scripture that a lot of smart people decided captures some aspect of your life and ministry. To become a recognized saint in the Episcopal Church, a group of people must be so impacted by your life and your witness that they petition the highest governing bodies of our denomination in your name. If they make a good enough case, every Episcopal Church in the world can celebrate and remember and learn from you every year with scripture readings, prayers, and communion. Your legacy becomes entwined with the legacy of the Church, and your memory becomes a part of the collective memory of people you never met in this life.
So that’s a little more complicated than get baptized and then die when your time comes, right? That all sounds very official and onerous and I can tell you from experience that there is a lot of arguing and bureaucracy involved. But if you think about it for a moment, if you could look closely at the process, you’ll see something pretty familiar. When you zoom in close to the question of “how does someone become a saint?”, regardless of the specifics, you’ll find one thing. Loss. Grief. The death of someone who made a difference in someone’s life. Those passionate arguments in favor of adding one name or another to the calendar may be based in research and reading and prayer and contemplation, but first there was someone who lived a life, someone who was loved, and that person died. And people did what people do when we lose someone. They got together and told stories. Stories of that person’s life, of how they lived and who they loved and what mattered to them and what they did that drove everyone crazy. Someone wrote those stories down, so that they wouldn’t get lost, and those writings were shared and passed down and handed on to others who found them meaningful. Someone was so impacted by what they heard or saw or read that they told someone else, and ultimately that collected memory found itself being shared with the world as an example of Christian life.
Saints are people who were first loved by the people who knew them, and by their Creator, and in the process of all that loving and living, those people teach us something about God. I think all of us could think of at least one person in our own lives who fits that definition. Many of those people are among the names we will read at the Eucharist, the people we love and see no longer who taught us in their own imperfect ways what a life of faith can look like. So I would add something to my campus minister’s definition, if I could be bold. To become a saint, the necessary ingredients are baptism, love, and loss. Like our early ancestors in faith, we join the family through our baptisms. Like our God teaches us, we love and are beloved, whether our hearts only beat once or we live a long and full life. And like all the saints who have gone before, we experience the separation of death, with the promise that death is not the end of our relationships with God and one another. Our saints are the people we remember, the stories we tell over and over. That is what we are here to do, on this feast of All Saints. We remember ours, and we pray that we can be like them for one another, to the glory of God. Amen.
Mother A Writes 