A Sermon for the FEAST OF ALL SAINTS and the
Commemoration of ALL SOULS OF THE FAITHFUL DEPARTED
1^st November 2009, at All Souls Church, Oklahoma City

You have probably seen them somewhere – images taken from altars long ago and ranged upon museum walls like postage stamps in
an album, or hanging still above vacant altars where tourists take each other’s photographs but do not pray:  saints whose names are
forgotten or not recognized. Serenely they bear the instruments of their own torture and death:  Catherine and her spiked wheel,
Sebastian pierced with many arrows, Bartholomew and his own flayed skin, the Baptist’s headless carcass squirting blood in eerily
accurate arcs; Stephen and James and Peter and Paul, Andrew and Ignatius, Polycarp and Justin, Perpetua and Felicitas, the litany of saints, a river whose streams make glad the city of God, now swelling now subsiding but always flowing and in our own time not least of all.  In the past few months in Somalia a 46-year old woman was shot dead after a Bible was found in her shack; a 69-year old man killed after he was found with 25 Bibles in a bag; and two boys, aged 11 and 12, beheaded after their father refused to divulge information about an underground church.  

“Unto you it is given in the behalf of Christ, not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for his sake” (Philippians 1:29).  Indeed, “rejoice, and be exceeding glad:  for great is your reward in heaven”.  Today we pronounce blessed the meek and the merciful and the makers of peace, those who have mourned and hungered and purified their hearts, and been persecuted for righteousness’ sake, the noble army of martyrs and confessors, the souls of just men made perfect in suffering, the saints, the holy ones.  And we rejoice in their consolation:  “they shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat.  For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them” – shall be their shepherd – “and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters:  and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes”.

            The consolation of the saints is the theme of our praise of God today:  and so to praise God as adequately as we can we must say first what this consolation is, that makes up for the sufferings on his behalf; and second how the holiness of the saints leads them to this happiness; and third how suffering contributes to holiness.  And in these three questions, what about us, who are not conspicuous in holiness?  How do we follow the saints and make their consolation our own?  Consolation; Holiness; Suffering; and the way that leads all souls from this dark wood to the celestial paradise.  

First, we begin then with an objection.  Consolation always has the sound of “second best”:  in modern parlance, the consolation prize is the one that goes to the losers.  Consolation is what the bereaved have left after their lives have been turned bleak and grey by death.  Consolation is what mitigates but does not end pain.    For bitter suffering can there be a consolation?  And can there be a consolation that is worthy suffering for?    Why suffer for the sake of God, when God permits us to suffer so much already?

            The answer of the saints is this:  there is no earthly misery, however hideous, worse than the misery of being separated from God eternally.  That is the worm that does not die, the fire that does not cease, the outer darkness of wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Nor is there any earthly joy, like the joy of communion with God in his glory.  The joy of heaven is in a category all by itself:  it is the enjoyment of an infinite good, “the unspeakable joys” to which Cranmer’s collect apophatically directs us.    That is to say, we know it best by its negations:  it is that which no finite good can adequately image, precisely because it is not finite, not exhaustible, its pleasures cannot stale, its satisfactions cannot grow old.  As an infinite good, it has the power which no finite good has:  the power to redeem all suffering, to make evil itself, though evil, the means of good.  Thus it turns sorrow into joy, and swallows up death in victory.  “God himself shall wipe away all tears from their eyes”.  Our problem is not that we ask too much; but that want too little:  the saints teach us to hope for nothing less than an infinite good. 

            But that brings us to the second question:  why is this consolation reserved to the saints, to the souls of just men made perfect in holiness?   How does holiness bring us to happiness?  We must answer that holiness is nothing else than a capacity for happiness, a capacity for the enjoyment of the highest good:  for it is by knowing and willing that highest good, that we participate it.  “Blessed are the pure in heart” says the Lord, “for they shall see God”.  To be a saint is to will the pure and simple and perfect good, which is God:  to love God with all the heart, and all the soul, and all the mind, and all the strength, in and through all things, all circumstances, unconfusedly, undistractedly, and in that perspective, to lone one’s neighour as oneself.  That is purity of heart:  which as Kierkegaard explains, “is to will one thing”:  it is to will the good which God wills; and in that love to be united to him:  to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever. 

 The “virtuous and godly living” in which we hope to follow the saints into the attainment of “unspeakable joys” promised to those who “unfeignedly love him”:  these are the dispositions and habits of heart and mind which support and sustain us in this steadfast willing of the good.  They are not always much prized by the world.  But perhaps they are just what this world needs.  Poverty of spirit, or humility, rather than self-assertion; the mourning of penitence, instead of defiance; meekness, instead of wrath; hunger and thirst after righteousness, in place of moral complacency; mercifulness instead of self-interest; purity of heart, instead of voracious consumerism; peacemaking, instead of estrangement; the fortitude to endure persecution for righteousness sake, instead of cowardice. 

            No doubt the beatitudes rebuke our complacency:  we are not saints.  Sin clouds our minds, divides and enfeebles the will, and we respond like Pavlov’s dogs to the world’s bait; blind and crippled we set out on the race that is set before us, not really sure we want to attain the unspeakable joys which are promised to the pure in heart, not really sure that God can indeed bring us to them.  How long the road from desolation to consolation, how high the mountain of our purification, how great a gulf separates our dark wood from the celestial paradise and the vision of God!  There is no doubt that when we leave this world, our sanctification is at best a work in progress; and the Roman doctrine of Purgatory is an attempt to think through what that progress toward sanctification after death would look like.  Nevertheless, I think with the Reformers, we must insist that here and now, not safely postponed to a vague future, we are called to the purification of our hearts, the ordering of our loves towards the highest good. 

And in that perspective, as the Reformers emphatically taught, the disappointments, griefs and sorrows of this life, are our purgatory, shaking the fixations of desire upon finite goods, demonstrating to us the futility of worldly idols. For those who can receive it thus, suffering and grief can be the means by which our hearts are weaned from worldly loves and set upon God. 

Many a blow and biting sculpture

                        Polished well those stones elect

                        In their places now compacted

                        By the heavenly architect….

 “Earth has no sorrows, that heaven cannot heal”:  and perhaps without earthly sorrows which earth cannot heal, we should never learn to look to heaven. 

            What is the mysterious alchemy that purifies the heart in the fires of suffering?  What is the philosopher’s stone that transmutes sinners into saints?  The saints all tell us, that it is prayer, the willing of God’s will, the willing of the pure and perfect good steadfastly, perseveringly, in and through all the circumstances of our lives, in every thing that we do or suffer.    If you want to follow the saints, listen to George Herbert:
Prayer the Church’s banquet, Angels’ age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth;
Engine against the Almighty, sinners’ tower,
 Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
|The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices, something understood.

May the saints pray for us, who praise God for them; and may we pray God for the faithful departed, that we with them, and they wit
us, knit together in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of his Son, may attain to those unspeakable joys, which are prepared for those who unfeignedly love him.  Amen.