Is it All Saints Day? We began our worship singing that glorious All Saints Day hymn, “For all the saints who from their labor rest….” Then our sequence hymn, the between the New Testament lesson and Gospel, called us to rejoice with the saints and angels. So is it All Saints Day? Yes and no.
No, it is not All Saints Day, which traditionally falls on November 1st. This year we observed the day by welcoming Haven Rose into the Body of Christ through baptism. But also yes. The Revised Common Lectionary, which gives us all our Scripture readings for our three-year cycle of readings, recognizes that most people will not observe a feast of the church that falls on a weekday, even a major feast such as All Saints. So the RCL allows us to celebrate the Sunday following November 1st as All Saints Sunday, which we have done in previous years.
So why is it important to keep All Saints day in some form? Why not just bypass it and read what’s appointed for the 25th Sunday after Pentocost? One reason we keep All Saints Sunday is that All Saints was traditionally the end of the liturgical calendar, especially in the English church. And you can see why. We have come full circle through the two cycles of the liturgical year. First we had the cycle from the birth of Jesus through his resurrection, i.e., Christmas through Easter, what’s called the incarnation cycle. Then came the long season following Pentecost, which emphasizes deepening our understanding of God and God’s purposes and strengthening our Christian community, including mini-communities like this parish.
On All Saints we celebrate the culmination of all that growth in the lives of real people. This includes all the people officially on the calendar of the church before the Reformation: the martyrs, teachers, and theologians of the early church and the medieval saints and mystics. We also remember those, since the Reformation, who especially modelled the holy life for us, and especially those in the English and American churches. But we also remember on this day all those whose lives are known to us and God alone, those who showed us more clearly what a holy life might look like. Hear a few lines of a litany by priest and writer Barbara Crafton, that gives us a glimpse of some of those people:
O Rosa Parks and Thurgood Marshall, pray for us. O Oscar Romero and Raoul Wallenberg, O Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Medgar Evers, O William Wilberforce, pray for us. O all you whose names we do not know, who lived your lives or gave your lives in the struggle for freedom and justice, pray for us that we will be worthy of your sacrifice.
O Thomas Merton and Dame Julian, O Father Damien and Mother Theresa, O Thomas Beckett and Li Tim-Oi, pray for us. Blessed Augustine of Hippo, pray for us. Blessed Paul pray for us and help us to pray.
After mentioning authors, musicians, artists, and scientists, Crafton then comes to her own family: O Mom and Dad, O David, and O my little David who never saw the sun, pray for us. And we could all add the names of those saints who have blessed our own lives, as we pray with Crafton,
We give you thanks, O God, for setting us among the community of the saints, and for allowing the grace they showed in their lives to continue in ours – for in your kingdom, nothing is ever completely lost.
So All Saints is important, even if, in most years, we have to observe it on Sunday. But guess what: today is also the first Sunday in Advent. And why, you might wonder, are we starting the new season so soon? On All Saints we are essentially looking back. We see what God has done in Jesus, in the church, and in the lives of real people. After All Saints, it’s as if the church turns around and begins to look ahead. The readings for the last three Sundays of the traditional liturgical year, i.e., the next three Sundays, have an eschatological focus. That is, they focus on the end times, on the fulfillment of God’s promises and the coming of God’s reign. This focus continues into the next liturgical year in the traditional calendar, until the Sunday before Christmas, when we begin to look forward to the birth of Jesus and the beginning once again of the incarnation cycle.
Since our readings already call us to look ahead, we have elected to join the Advent Project. Along with other parishes in this diocese and elsewhere – with the bishop’s permission – we are bringing together the two parts of the focus on end times into a single season, a seven-week Advent. In doing this, we are not trying to compete with cultural Christmas, which in most of our stores has already begun. And we are not sourpusses, who adamantly refuse to be part of the “Christmas season.” Rather, we are taking the time to focus on God’s promises to us and, through our worship, to express our hope that God will speedily bring in God’s reign.
So what will change? Not our appointed Scripture readings, which already look ahead. However, our sermons may reflect more clearly our hope for the coming of the reign of God. Our paraments, the colored hangings in the church, and our vestments, next week will change to blue, the color for Advent. The collect of the day and the prayers of the people will be different. The service music will be a little different, and we’ll chant the opening of the Great Thanksgiving, which we’ll practice right after the announcements. And we’ll put up the new Advent wreath. See if you observe any other changes, as we move through this longer Advent.
And what might change for us personally in this longer Advent season? Despite what the stores and web sites tell us, it’s not Christmas yet. It’s not even Thanksgiving! Actually, as twenty-first century Christians, we live in what one German theologian called, “das Mittel der Zeit,” in the mid-times, the in-between time. We live in between the time frames of All Saints and Advent, between the past of what God has done and the saints have modelled for us, and the future of what we hope for and pray for when the “eyes of our hearts” are open. We live in the already-not yet.
As we hope and pray for the fulfillment of God’s reign, we seek to continue to grow in our relationship with the Holy One. We seek to more visibly reflect our commitment to Christ through the way we live. And we seek to continue working for justice and peace, so that the reign of God might at last be fully realized.
This week we stand at a decisive moment in the history of our nation. As followers of Jesus who embrace the Anglican tradition, we know that it is always appropriate to pray for the leaders of our nation. Indeed, on page 822, the Book of Common Prayer gives us a prayer for an election. And as you know, every week in the prayers of the people, we pray for our nation and its leaders. And so, as we exercise our right to choose our nation’s leaders and our elected representatives, we pray for all who vote. We pray that all who vote on Tuesday will do so thoughtfully and wisely.
In the end, in this Advent season, we continue to remember the hope to which we press. We remember that we are citizens not only of the United States but also, and more importantly, we are citizens of God’s realm. Even so, for many of us, this has been a more difficult election season than we have seen in many years. And so, remembering whose we are, and whose kingdom we yearn to see fulfilled, I offer you another litany, this one by historian and theologian Diana Butler Bass. Join me in saying, “May it be so,” after each petition.
I believe God creates the world and therein good, even very good, no matter how far from that goodness human beings wander; may it be so.
I believe Love casts out fear, and that living with compassion is the path to joy;
I believe Gratitude threads all of the connections in the web of life;
I believe Wisdom dwells among us, embodying both divine insight and human intellect;
I believe Hope banishes cynicism, always drawing us toward a creative future;
I believe Awe opens us to an awakened life that reaches out to the world to restore and save;
I believe Justice flows all around us, like a healing river;
I believe All Shall be Well. May it be so.
No comments:
Post a Comment