The saints beckon us to come deeper into the reality of God

All Saints: November 2, 2014

Ecclesiasticus 44:1-10 

Psalm 149

Revelation 7:2-4, 9-17

Matthew 5:1-12

There is a danger to All Saints Day. The danger is we look too often and too longingly to the past. “One was a soldier, one was a priest, one was slain by a fierce wild beast,” a pre-Raphaelite past of a romantic, medieval England, or the distant past of late Antiquity, of Christian martyrs slain by lions in the Roman coliseum. Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury through the 1960s and early 1970s put it this way:

One consequence of the mystery of Christ is that Christian people don’t stand, so to say, on the ground of the present moment and view past generations, or their comrades in paradise, as people some distance away from them. No, we see the present moment more clearly and bravely because our stance is within the Communion of Saints. How closely, how lovingly, they are praying with us today.

If the lives of the saints have any meaning for us – indeed, if we believe they are praying for us – then All Saints Day cannot be a celebration of the past. This day is about who we are in the present, and what legacy we are leaving for the future – for those saints who, inevitably, will come after us.

As might be appropriate in this election season – and this day of incessant polling – I remember a book George Gallup published in 1992: The Saints Among Us: How the Spiritually Committed Are Changing Our World. Gallup and his pollsters wanted to find “Americans for whom ‘God is a vibrant reality,’ and for whom ‘Christian commitment makes a difference in how they actually live.’” The pollsters asked probing question over long interviews – I don’t think just those quickie things we get on the phone at this time of year – and they came up with results that will help us, in the words of Michael Ramsey, “to see the present moment more clearly and bravely.” This little book – very American and very modern – tells us something about what for two thousand years we have called “The Communion of Saints.” It is just a glimpse, of course, but there is something to it.

These “saints” Gallup found – and he called them “saints among us” expressed a faith that came from their insides, “a direct experience of God that continued to be a vital part of their daily life.” For these saints, prayer is not a laundry list of concerns, nor is God a being found only in church, or in a crisis, or in relation to their own needs. What these saints can show us is that God is always accessible to us, always close at hand, in the ground beneath their feet and in the air they breathe. These saints pay attention to the reality of the divine in the world around them.

These saints – and Gallup estimated they are about 13 percent of the population – live out a deeper level of commitment to God than do their neighbors, and they do it by how they respond to the needs of the people around them. No surprise there, of course, for have not the saints over the centuries been the ones who have built hospitals and rescued the dying? Have they not been the ones who stood with their communities to make them better places, brought hope and opened the doors for justice and peace?

Gallup found that these saints threw themselves into this work – into God’s work in the world – without prejudice – or rather through the work they did for God, they learned to serve without prejudice. The saints Gallup found are not perfect; he noted that only 84 percent of the saints “would not object to a person of another race moving in next door. … not a ‘perfect score’ [Gallup noted] but [one that] surpasses that of the spiritually uncommitted by 20 points.” I think that reflects that when we actually do something with people in need – when we stand in solidarity with people like those we have never met before, that it changes us, and with the help of God that simple service and solidarity moves us further along toward the lives of the saints.

Surprisingly, part of the benefits of these saintly lives is happiness, abiding joy, joy tested through

difficulty. I think part of that happiness comes from a simplicity of life, a shedding of things that just don’t matter because you have experienced so much more deeply the things that do. These saints that George Gallup encountered were generally not wealthy or powerful, not necessarily highly educated nor accustomed to walking the corridors of power. “They stand close enough to daily needs – at home, at work, in their neighborhoods – to be in touch with the pain that is in their midst.” It is a fact that charitable giving in poor neighborhoods – even giving by those who may not always be so saintly – is much higher, proportionately, than it is in neighborhoods like ours. Saints stand in solidarity with those in need, moving further and further from their own comfort zone as they do so.

All Saints Day, then, is to stand, as Michael Ramsey, says, within the Communion of Saints. They beckon us to come deeper into the reality they live, deeper into their prayers, deeper into their challenges, deeper into their joys.