THE FOURTH CHURCH PULPIT

For All The Saints

November 2, 1997
John M. Buchanan

What makes a saint? Extravagance. Excessive love, flagrant mercy, radical
affection, exorbitant charity, immoderate faith, intemperate hope, inordinate love.
None of which is an achievement, a badge to be earned or a trophy to be sought;
all are secondary by-products of the one thing that truly makes a saint, which is the
love of God, which is membership in the body of Christ, which is what all of us,
living and dead, remembered and forgotten, great souls and small, have in
common, Some of us may do more with that love than others and may find
ourselves able to reflect it in a way that causes others to call us saints, but the title
is one that has been given to us all by virtue of our baptisms.

Weavings
Barbara Brown Taylor

Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago
126 East Chestnut Street, Chicago, IL 60611-2094
(312) 787-4570

FOR ALL THE SAINTS
“_..we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses... ”

Hebrews 12:1

I confess I’ve always has a soft spot in my heart for Halloween. It has always been one of my favorite
holidays; carving the pumpkin or watching it done with artistic expertise, and then the mysterious face
flickering out of the darkness. Planning a suitable outfit in the days before you could, or would even if
you could, walk to the comer store and purchase a likeness of Batman or Spiderman or an astronaut:
managing to be out after dark with fellow conspirators to rain terror on the two elderly women who
would not allow us to retrieve stray baseballs from their lovingly cultured flower garden — by ringing
the doorbell and then hiding across the street to watch as they emerged and peered out into the dark
and yelled, “We know you’ re out there and we know who you are and we’re going to call your
parents.” It was high drama and adventure. Soaping windows was the ultimate terrorist activity,
strictly forbidden by my parents. I did it once and 1 still feel a little guilty about it. When we read
Psalm 25:7, “Do not remember the sins of my youth,” one of the incidents that crosses my mind is
soaping Miss Crick’s windows. And of course, legitimate parties with everybody feeling a little
foolish, wrapped in bed sheets with eye holes cut to see through, and our mother’s house dress or
father’s old hat.

And then it became a favorite again as I carved the pumpkin carefully and helped with the plans and
then escorted a ballerina, clown, nurse, cowboy and tiny tiger up and down dark streets with sacks
filling impressively with unimaginable treats — some of which parents enjoyed after the collectors were
asleep, or as a young pastor, promoting “Trick or Treat for UNICEF,” trying to convince local
members of the then prominent John Birch Society in northem Indiana that it was, in fact, an act of
Christian love, not treason, to put food in the mouths of Chinese and Cuban and East German children.
That too was an adventure.

Tlove it still, all of it, even more so now because the origins of the whole business have come into focus
for me. It all began as one of our holidays, and in its origins attempted to express one of the great
mysteries of our faith for which we have a descriptive phrase, “The Communion of Saints.”

Actually, the origins of Halloween pre-date Christianity, and are found in the ancient Celtic festival of
the dead, called Samhain. November marked the New Year in the Celtic world, when cattle and sheep
were moved to closer pastures, all the grain was stored and winter darkness was about to descend.
The Celts believed that the souls of all who had died during the year moved on Samhain, November 1,
to the otherworld. So, on the evening before, the souls, spirits, ghosts of the dead were out and about,
in transit, as it were. The Celts made it into a festival. Animals were sacrificed, fruits and vegetables
gathered and shared, great bonfires built to light the way for the dead. It was also a little frightening
with all those spirits and ghosts out and about.

When Christian missionaries came from Ireland to Scotland and the Celtic lands of Northem Europe,
they converted, or attempted to convert, cultural custom as well as individuals by absorbing, redefining
and renaming and so Samhain became All Saints Day, the occasion to remember and celebrate the lives
of the departed and to revere those special men and women who were recognized as saints by the

church. The night before All Saints was called All Hallow’s Eve and, obviously, Hallow’s Eve has
evolved into Halloween.

The conversion of Samhain didn’t actually work. It never does. We're still fighting an uphill battle to
reclaim Christmas from the pagan year-end celebration of the winter solstice and Easter from the pagan
fertility rites of spring, but that’s another story and at least two more sermons. Samhain went
underground and emerged centuries later as Halloween. All Saints became one of the seven feasts or
festivals of the Christian church and remains so for churches in the high or liturgical traditions and even
now, our own. But Halloween bumps along with much of the old Celtic intent intact.

Barbara Brown Taylor reflects: “The ancient customs survived for thousands of years for a reason and
the reason seems to have everything to do with our need to remember those who have died, to
acknowledge the gulf between the living and the dead but also to reach across it, at least this day of the
year, and to recognize those who have gone before us and whom we are certain to follow.” [“A Great
Cloud of Witnesses” in Weavings, Sept/Oct 1988. I am indebted to Taylor for the material on Samhain
and All Saints as well.]

The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews remembers and recognizes that need. In fact, he is writing to
people who, probably more than anyone else in history, needed some connection to and encouragement
from those who had gone before. Those Christian men and women in the last decades of the first
century faced a truly frightening future. There weren’t very many of them; they were small, weak,
powerless. Rome had decided that they were a threat to public order and the social fabric and already
the whole weight and might of the Empire was about to tu violently against them. Jesus was gone,
and now the apostles had all died. And so the writer remembers, for those frightened people, those
who have gone before, who have fought the fight, finished the race and are now a resource, an
inspiration, a hope. “Remember Noah and Abraham and Sarah and Samson and David .. . we are
surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses.”

Don’t you love the image of a “great cloud of witnesses?” That’s what the Communion of Saints
means. Those who have gone before us. “Everyone we ever loved and lost” is the way Frederick
Buechner puts-it. Everyone — our parents, grandparents, our teachers, models, mentors and
cheerleaders, “including the ones we didn’t know we loved until we lost them.”

_Thomas Lynch is a poet and essayist who is also a funeral director in Milford, Michigan. He has
written a wonderful book which is receiving a lot of critical attention,-and has-won the Heartland Book
Award. The title is The Undertaking and in it Lynch reflects with respect, affection and humor and
love on his profession, his community and his own family.

“Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople,” he writes [p. 3]. Lynch lives with a gentle
but very real awareness of his friends and neighbors he has buried. “For every home made memorable
by death, dozens are made memorable by the lives that were led there utterly unscrutinized by the
wider world — lives lived out at a pace quickened only by the ordinary triumphs of daily life: good
gladiolas, the well-shoveled walk, the mortgage payments made, the kids through college.” [p. 106]

Midway through the book, Lynch, who inherited the business from his father and who works with his
brother and sisters, discusses his parents’ deaths; his anger at God at his mother’s pain and suffering;
his respect and love for his father.

“My mother’s funeral was a sadness and a celebration. We wept and laughed and thanked God and
cursed God and asked God to make good on our mother’s faith laid claim to in her death. It was
Halloween the day we buried her — the eve of All Saints.” [p. 98]

On a recent trip back to Pennsylvania we did what most of us do when we go home. We visited the
cemetery: found the place, stood and looked at the inscriptions, that stunning experience of seeing your
parents’ names there and grandparents and aunts and uncles and some you didn’t know but who share
the name, the family, the Communion of Saints.

So I was engaged by Lynch’s reflection. “Whenever I have business at Holy Sepulcher, I stop in
section 24, where my mother and father are buried. He lived on after her for two more years ... I miss
them so ... sometimes I stand among the stones and wonder. Sometimes I laugh, sometimes I weep.
Sometimes nothing at all happens. Life goes on. The dead are everywhere.” [p. 98]

Have you noticed how your parents keep showing up in your life? A friend of mine, Gloria Wilson, is
the president of a board on which I am a member. Gloria is a professor and department head at the
University of Arizona, a very sophisticated woman. She opened a meeting recently by apologizing to
some members for having neglected to thank them properly for something they had done, and she
made a bigger deal of it than seemed appropriate. She explained, “My mother — may she rest in peace
~hagged at me all my life to say ‘thank you’.” She looked up and'said, “So, mother — you can relax
now, I’ve made amends and said thank you.” Everybody laughed because something like that happens
to all of us. —

Russell Baker, in his memoir, The Good Times, tells how, decades after her death, he can still hear his
mother saying, “If there’s anything I hate, it’s a quitter. Some day you might make something of
yourself, Russell.” [The Good Times, p. 344-351]

Have you noticed that you even say the same things your parents said? Have you surprised yourself, as
I have, having expressed an opinion about this or that and said to yourself, “why, I sound just like my
father.” My pariner tells me straight out, “You're sounding like Blanche now.”

And have you noticed the mystery that your relationship with those who have died somehow continues,
that you seek and enjoy your parents’ approval, or wonder what they might say about this or that, and

you actually have a kind of conversation with them? It is important, the psychologists tell us, to
continue working at issues that remain unresolved, sometimes very painfully so. It is important, and
possible, to forgive someone who is gone. In fact, accepting and forgiving a parent, a brother, a sister,
who died prematurely before there was a chance for the gradual process of mature acceptance and
reconciliation to happen, can be very important.

Who doesn’t in a sense know their parents better at the age of 40 or 50 or 60 than we did when we
were 15 or 20 or 30? Madeleine L’Engle describes how she learned to know and understand her father
far more after his death than during his life. She writes, “Here we are on the border of Christian
mystery. We are not meant to be separated as we have become from those who have gone before us
and those who will come after us.” [Walking on Water, p. 80]

In Presbyterianism and Protestantism generally there are no official saints. At the time of the
Reformation, the whole system of canonizing saints and venerating saints was abolished. The
Episcopalians have saints — 140 of them — and I think it’s time for the rest of us to reconsider. It was
the corruption of the system that prompted the strenuous objection of the Reformers. In fact, Luther
nailed his 95 Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg on the day before All Saints to
make his point. In 1516 All Saints in Wittenburg was a carnival. Frederick the Wise had put on
display 19,012 holy relics including a thom from Jesus’ crown, a tooth from St. Jerome, four hairs
from the head of the Virgin Mary. If you viewed all the relics and made a contribution, you received an
indulgence, worth a very significant reduction in the time you would otherwise spend in Purgatory —
1,902,207 years plus 270 days to be exact.” [Here I Stand, Roland Bainton, p. 53]

That’s what Luther objected to. That’s what he wanted to discuss in his Theses, and when it became
clear that there could and would be no reformation, no real discussion from within, and a new church,
Lutheran — Reformed, began to emerge, the entire system of saints was left behind.

Too bad, because in the process we gloss over and miss one of the most profound mysteries of our
faith. It’s time to recover the notion and bring it back into the church. The fact is we have saints. The
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has its saints. Fourth Presbyterian Church has its saints. Every church
does. I visited a different Presbyterian congregation every Sunday last year and in every one of them I
either met or saw a portrait on a wall, or heard a story about a saint. “I'd like you to meet Mr. Smith;
he’s one of our saints ... That picture is Mildred, superintendent of the Primary Department for 56
years: taught hundreds—thousands of children: one of the saints around this place.”

And you and I have saints, even if we don’t call them that. I learned a helpful metaphor for the
Communion of Saints years ago. I think about it a lot and I’ve included it in sermons before and I have
concluded that it ought to be told at least once a year. The metaphoric figure for the Communion of
Saints is “the balcony.” It came originally, I believe, from Carlyle Marney, a big, robust, delightful
Southem Baptist preacher, scholar and healer of broken ministers.

Marney used to say that your personhood, your personality, persona, is like a house, and it’s a fairly
elaborate and complex structure. Some are fancy. Some are sophisticated. Some are simple and
functional. Some are ostentatious. Some are modest. Each has a number of rooms: a formal parlor
for greeting guests, a family room, bedroom, kitchen. Mamey said each of us has in the structure of
our persona a basement where the plumbing is and the trash is stored. No need to spend your life
down there, Mamey used to say. Everybody has a basement. Come on up into the sunshine.
Sometimes we act as if the plumbing and trash bin are all there is to us, Marney observed.

And if you come upstairs and step outside onto the lawn and look up, you will see that the house that is
you has a spacious, gracious balcony. There are people up there on your balcony. Marney was a
Southerner, so his balcony was white wrought iron with wicker rocking chairs. There are people in the
rocking chairs on your balcony sipping iced tea or bourbon, depending on whether you are a Baptist or
Presbyterian, Marney used to say. The people on your balcony are the strong, positive influences in
your life. Your heroes and heroines. Your models and mentors. Your parents are probably up there ...
your grandparents. There are some folk up there you never met but they influenced and helped shape
you and there are some really big names up there: people whose lives inspired you from afar and
called deeper faith out of you and courage and stamina and love and discipline.

The people on your balcony are your saints. The way to observe All Saints Day is to walk out onto
your lawn, look up and greet them. Call the roll. Name them. Wave to them. Your saints — your dear
ones — the great ones and small ones: your mother and father maybe, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin
Luther King, your old coach, your piano teacher.

The very notion of the Communion of Saints makes more sense and becomes more precious the longer
you live. Life, many have observed and we have experienced, is an accumulation of losses and the
longer you live the more you accumulate; we joke about turning to obituaries first, but it’s true. “The
extraordinary rent you have to pay as long as you stay,” Annie Dillard puts it.

But the final and great mystery of our faith is that those who have gone before us are with God, that
“God will wipe all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow or crying ...
for the former things are passed away.” The final mystery of our faith is that in Jesus Christ whose
own death did not defeat him, but led to the victory of life over death, of love over hatred, of
forgiveness over revenge ... in Jesus Christ we know, although we do not have words adequate to say
it, that nothing of love is ever lost, that we can trust those we love to God’s care, that

“when the strife is fierce, the warfare long, steals on the ear the distant triumph song
and hearts are brave again, and arms are strong. Alleluia! Alleluia!”

In Jesus Christ we know, even though we do not have words big enough to say it that they are all there
that we too are part of that cloud of witnesses, that communion of saints, that great chorus singing
praises to God throughout etemity, that we add our voice to the chorus for awhile and when our voices
are silent, the mighty chorus singing before goes on after us, forever and ever. World without end.

3

Amen.

ok Ok

O God, we are grateful for those whose lives have given us life and strength, whose faithfulness
enabled us to have faith, whose love called deeper and better love out of us. Keep them, and us, in
your care forever, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.