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Imagine you’re in serious danger and we’ve devised a strategy to connect you with a guide who’ll get you to safety quickly and securely. To make that connection, I need to tell you where and when to meet your rescuer, and how to recognize him or her. I might even dash out a sketch for reference: “Keep an eye out for this.”
Today is All Saints’ Day, and the Gospel, which we’ve just heard, works something like a sketch, describing what we need to know to recognize the saints:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
We need to look to the saints, to recognize the shape of their lives, because the more clearly we see them, the nearer we come to what God is doing in us and around us, and the readier we are to cooperate with it. Without seeing the saints, we can’t see Jesus. That’s how he’s arranged it. And if we can’t see him, we can’t be who we’re called to be. The Beatitudes tell us what we need to know: the saints are located where Christ’s rule is coming into being, and they are recognized by the blessing they bring to those most desperately in need of that rule.
It’s important to distinguish between the saints we already know as saints because the church identifies them for us, and the saints who have not yet been so recognized—including some, no doubt, who are living among us now. This is counterintuitive, but St Paul says we know more about the saints than we know about ourselves. Our lives, for now, are, he says, “hidden with Christ in God.” And it is only when Christ, who is our life, is revealed that we will be truly known and truly know ourselves (Col. 3:3-4). The saints, whether they are canonized or not, are already revealed in Christ. They have died and been raised to a share in his glory. Their work, like his, is finished, completed. Exactly so, they are positioned (so to speak) to intercede for us, supporting us in whatever ways the Spirit wills, identifiable and imitable.
In the heat (or chill) of the moment, we rarely see the saints rightly, however. Indeed, the closer they are to us, the harder they are to see. And nothing is nearer than heaven! Remember what we heard in today’s first reading:
After this I, John, looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands… (Rev. 7:9)
Notice, John is able to see these saints, this great company of martyrs, only after he is told that they are present: “And I heard the number of those who were sealed, one hundred forty-four thousand, sealed out of every tribe of the people of Israel” (Rev. 7:4). When one of the priests in the heavenly sanctuary asks if he can identify the multitude, John, like Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones, knows better than to answer:
Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” I said to him, “Sir, you are the one that knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Rev. 7:14).
The martyrs were already present, of course. But John could not see them until he heard they were present. What was said to him opened his eyes to what had already been present. And when he does see the martyrs, finally, the seventh seal is broken—all heaven breaks loose.
As for him, so for us. The Gospel awakens us to the presence of those who have lived faithfully and received their reward. And that awareness graces us, empowering us to approach our lives with supreme confidence—the God who has asked us to partner with him always completes (and is always completing) the good work he has started. So, today, on this day the church has set aside to honor all saints, we can pray knowing we are indeed surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses—this space is theirs even more that it is ours— whose lives bear hard, sensible witness to the glad creativity, gentle presence, and quiet determination that is the source, guide, and goal of all things.
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This point really can’t be overstated: we need the saints. Their lives do what nothing else can do: they show us that Christ’s faithfulness is not something we’ve invented. As Karl Rahner says, the church cannot simply claim that there is a history of salvation “without it being known exactly where it takes place with real, final success.” We must have a cloud of witnesses we can point to. And we must be able to call at least some of those witnesses by name. “See? This is what Jesus makes possible. This is what real, final success looks like.”
We are not all saints, not yet. What distinguishes the saints from the rest of us, even the righteous, is that they not only see needs and see to them, they recognize the needy as Christ, and in that way become his recognizability. Like Christ, in and with him, they share both the experience of the poor and the experience of God. They are meek and merciful. They mourn. They long for justice. They suffer persecution. But they also comfort those who mourn and fill the hungry with good things. They know both how to abound and how to be abased. And just in this way, they bless us and draw us into blessing.
Rowan Williams has suggested that the saints are the only true apologetics, “the only persuasive argument for the existence of God.” As Ben Myers explains in Christ the Stranger, his introduction to Williams’ theology,
Much of what we call “God” is fantasy, a self-protective projection of our own wishes and anxieties. But the anguish with which these “holy neurotics” stand before God, the traumatic reshaping of their identities, the appalling purgation of their loves and desires—all this shows that their God could not possibly be just another instance of Freudian wish fulfilment. “If they take God that seriously, at least this isn’t some cosy made-up way of making yourself feel better.”
Make no mistake, some of the saints are hard to take. They do not always provide us a sense of comfort or easy consolation. But they do always witness to the wisdom and goodness and power of God. That is their gift to us: “they let God in.”
Our religiosity often conspires to make God quite incredible, a God accessible only to the insiders or elite. But the saint, Williams writes, makes God credible and available; the saint “takes responsibility for God’s believability.” In a world of darkness, the saint throws open the windows and lets God in.
In a sense, the saints are windows—church windows. “Brittle, crazy glass,” as George Herbert put it. In and of themselves, the saints are, no less than the rest of us, stained, opaque, fractured, “pieced together.” But in the light of God, they become gorgeously, terribly resplendent.
A perfectly transparent window lets through most if not all of the light. But the saints are not perfectly transparent. As stained and “brittle, crazy glass,” the light moves through them in ways that refract some of its peculiar glories, allowing us to see a beauty otherwise invisible. The saints are not perfect. But their flaws and limitations are held to the light so the pure light is made apparent for us.
The saints are also screens—rood-screens, we might say. They do, as Protestants have been led to fear, come “between us and God”—but only exactly as a rood-screen does: veiling the heavenly, marking the separation between us and the real, just in order to draw us closer to the real, to prepare us to receive the gifts of the God for the people of God.
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When Moses sent the twelve spies into Canaan, one from each of the tribes, they spent 40 days reconnoitering the land. By the end, ten of the twelve are completely disheartened, overwhelmed with fear. On their return, they give “an evil report”: “The land that we have gone through as spies is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great size” (Num. 13:32). Caleb, however, offers a different report: “But Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said, ‘Let us go up at once and occupy it, for we are well able to overcome it’” (Num. 13:30).
The ancient Jewish sages, reading this story, noticed an odd detail in the text—a singular pronoun where they expected a plural—and found in it the clue to Caleb’s resilience. Sensing that the other scouts were intimidated and dispirited, he had stolen away to the Cave of Macphelah in Hebron so he could pray at the grave of his ancestors—Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah. There, according to the Talmud, he implored his mothers and fathers to intercede on his behalf, so that by the Lord's mercy he would remain strong in the face of disbelief.
God, needless to say, is present everywhere. He does not need us to pray at particular times or places, and he does not give preference to prayers prayed by holy persons. But we are rarely if ever truly present God, and our prayers are more truly prayerful when our attention has been gathered and focused by nearness to the sacred, the sanctified. Thus, we need days like today. They teach us how to be present to the mystery, so that at other times, times of great need, we can, like Caleb, steal away from the evil report of intimidated spies to pray.
We need to make this a daily habit, escaping from the clamor of anxious voices, crying out to God in the hearing of those who have proven how true God is. Before we watch the news, before we engage in any online back-and-forth, “weighing in” with our opinion on this or that controversy or scandal, before we get carried away by propaganda and rhetoric, before we let our fears get the better of us, we need to get as close as we can to our ancestors—all the crazy, convention-breaking women and men who embodied and enacted God’s Word for us despite every resistance. Contemplating the effects and outcomes of their lives, our faith begins to come more and more fully alive. In and through their stained, brittle witness, we see how Jesus Christ is indeed the same yesterday, today, and forever (Heb. 13:8) and can just begin to believe that we really do not have anything to fear.
Here are some resources you may find helpful:
Anglican Compass: The Calendar of Saints
Anglican Church of Canada: For All the Saints
Lutheran: Commemoration Biographies
Roman Catholic: Saint of the Day
Greek Orthodox: Saint of the Day