All Saints Sunday
by Rev. Scott Summerville

Those of us who are studying the book of Genesis are having a grand old time. For me pondering the Bible is one of the great pleasures of life, and there is no more fascinating book in the Bible than the book of Genesis. It begins with the grandeur of creation, proceeds as something like a soap opera complete with violent family feuding, and ends with an extraordinary scene of reconciliation.

In the second chapter of Genesis, after God created all the creatures of the earth, God does a most interesting thing. Instead of giving all these creatures names, God brings them one by one to the human being, and waits to see what the human being calls them.

[19] So out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the human to see what he would call them; and whatever the human being called every living creature, that was its name. [20] The human gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field.

This must have taken a very long time. By the way, that is the very first thing that human beings do in the Bible – the human names the creatures of the earth. There is something about names. We humans need to have names for things. And we need to have names for one another. We must name things in order to make sense of the world.

When we baptize a child, we ask: “What name is given to this child?” We baptize the child by name – by her or his name – and in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Our name becomes a part of our being.

On this day that we call All Saints Sunday, we read a list of names. Each name is so much more than a name. Each name is a living link through memory and spirit and love to those we see no more. With the name comes a flood of memories. With each name comes gratefulness for the inexpressible gift of life, the inexpressible gift of each of their lives.

Death and separation and grief are so universal, yet every loss is unique and personal and each human grief is unique and personal. For me and for Mary Ellen the list of the Saints now includes both of our fathers and Mary Ellen’s mother. For us as a congregation, the names added to this list in the past year include old and dear friends, people who were living treasures among us – Carl and Muriel, Rowena, and Josephine ….. These losses we take into our souls with a sigh and a tear, and we accept the dying of these old friends as part of the rhythm of life and nature and human mortality. For us as a congregation, other names added to our list of the saints since the reading of it a year ago are far more difficult to accept. The death this past summer of two beautiful young men, two brothers, Chris and Chad, still breaks our hearts.

The reading of these names of the saints – our parents, our children, our wives and husbands, our sisters and brothers in Christ – touches upon the whole spectrum of our emotions. We stand in awe of so much life, so much loss, and so much love.

Usually these days when we hear people referred to as saints, it is because they have lived lives of extraordinary compassion and sacrifice, but that is not the way the word is used in the Bible. You don’t need a halo to be a saint. The biblical word for saints is hagios. In the early church the hagios were the ordinary people who were drawn to the message of Jesus. At first they came together in one another’s homes to share their food and share the communion wine and to share what they called their new life in Christ. Sometimes they argued, often they made mistakes; they held different opinions; none of them was perfect, but they were saints anyway.

When we name the saints today, we are not holding anybody up on a pedestal – there are no perfect people on our list – each one lived and struggled and achieved and failed. What they all have in common is that they were and are loved. They were and they are held in the bond of human love and in the love of God. That invisible mixture of human and divine love is what we call the communion of the saints.

That means that we, too, are saints. You do not need to be perfect to be a saint. And you do not need to die to be a saint – not in the Biblical sense of the word. We are all saints – mortal, fallible, flesh and blood, confused and struggling creatures – yet we are saints by the grace of God.

In the United Methodist Book of Discipline there is a section on what it means to belong to the body of Christ and to be joined in the communion of saints:

Each member is called upon to be a witness for Christ in the world, a light and leaven in society, and a reconciler in a culture of conflict. Each member is to identify with the agony and suffering of the world and to radiate and exemplify the Christ of hope. (par. 219, 2000 Discipline)

We are ordinary human creatures, finite and mortal, but we have a very high calling here. If we were immortal beings, we would have forever to mend our hurting relationships. We would have forever to offer love and to receive love. Would have forever to forgive and to seek forgiveness.

If we were immortal beings, we could identify with those who suffer discrimination and injustice, hunger and homelessness; we could care about our neighbor, but as far as doing anything we could wait another century or two or three.

But we are not immortal, and because life is short the call to faithful discipleship is always an urgent invitation. It is an invitation for today, not tomorrow. The issues confronting us – the issues confronting humanity – are at present so urgent that we do not have the luxury of procrastination.

Each of us may be little mortal specks in the vastness of the universe; but in the brief time given to each of us we are called to high purpose. Each of us is called to a high purpose. Nothing less is asked of us than this:

in the present time
to identify with the suffering of the world
and to radiate
and exemplify the Christ of hope.

As we name the saints and claim our place among the saints we are called to live the remainder of our lives with high purpose: to be a living sign of hope for one another and for the world.