The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
November 4, 2007

Sunday after All Saints’ Day – 2007
Ecclesiasticus 44:1-10, 13-14
Revelation 7:2-4, 9-17
Matthew 5:1-12

“Every human being is like a single letter in a sentence,” offers an old Jewish proverb. “Standing alone a single character is meaningless; as part of a sentence it carries great meaning.” And that’s what being a saint of God is like. Standing alone, we human beings have little to boast about, but as part of God’s own design for his world, we carry divine significance.

Fred Craddock tells about preaching a sermon on the ways we human beings deny Jesus. He tells about how, when he was a student in the 1960s, he witnessed a grievous act of discrimination against a black man in a local Nashville, Tennessee, diner, and about how, not protesting, he sat silent during the incident, saying nothing. “Sitting there eating my hamburger in the privacy of my booth,” Craddock confessed, “I heard the cock crow.”

Afterwards, a young man in his early thirties asked Craddock, “What is this about a rooster crowing in Nashville in the middle of the night? I didn’t know they allowed chickens inside the city limits anymore.” Unfamiliar with the Scriptures, unfamiliar with the story of Peter’s denial of Jesus before Pilate, the young man simply had no way to appreciate how Craddock had met Jesus in a Nashville diner in the 1960s the way Peter met Jesus in the high priest’s courtyard that night long ago.

So how are we able to appreciate it, while that young man was not? Why, when we hear Craddock’s story, are we able to hear the cock crow and see the sad eyes of Jesus, while that young man was not?

We are able to hear the cock crow because of all the saints. It’s because of the legacy they’ve left us. It’s because of those who’ve gone before us who knew that meaning lies not in the shape or size of any particular letter, but in the whole of the sentence. It’s because of those saints today who know that the legacy they have to share is not human, but divine. It’s because of the saints who know that life lies not in the greatness of the deeds we do, but in the deeds of God, in the meaning of God’ s holy history.

We can hear our story in Craddock’s story because of all the saints who have made sure we’ve heard the story of Jesus. Like Timothy, who heard the story from his mother Eunice and from his grandmother Lois, we have had people in our lives – grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, teachers and friends – who have made sure that we have heard the story of salvation history. Because of their witness we know the story that Craddock is talking about, and we recognize that the story is not just any story, but our story. Because of them we understand that it’s not just a story about something that happened long ago to Peter, but about something that happens to us.

And our parents and grandparents, our aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters and teachers and friends – all these learned the story the same way we learned the story. They, too, had parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters and teachers and friends who made sure they heard the story.

And all of us, of course, are indebted to prophets and evangelists and apostles who passed the story down in days long past, and indebted to all the scholars and scribes and monks who have kept the story alive in monasteries, and to all the priests and pastors and teachers who have kept it alive in churches down through the centuries, including all the parents and grandparents and teachers and friends who continue to keep the story alive in this parish church in Colorado Springs today, not only in word, but also in deed, in the ways we continue to tell the story and live our lives. And that’s what All Saints’ Day is all about.

We celebrate All Saints’ Day so that we won’t forget, so that we won’t forget that not all saints are crucified upside down like Peter or broiled on a griddle like Laurence. All Saints’ Day is our day of judgment, our opportunity to remember that when we honor the saints, we treasure many more than Abraham and Moses and David and Zechariah and Elizabeth, more than Isaiah and Amos, more than James and Laurence, more than Peter and Paul and Matthew and Mark and Luke and John. On All Saints Day we remember all the saints, all those to whom, in their generations, the Lord assigned great glory, some as counselors of prophetic power, some as composers of music or writers of poetry, and some as faithful mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and friends, some of whom left a name behind them, and many who did not, but all of them people true to their faith, men and women who kept the story alive for us and the world, so that, though their bodies are now buried in peace, their lives and their place in God’s covenant of love are not forgotten.

Some lived long ago, some not so long ago. Some of you here today are old enough to remember the saints whose love and commitment gifted us with this particular community of faith, some of whom are now buried in peace and some of whom are still alive: saints with names like Frantz and Allen and Creel; and Sterling, Guthrie, Burnette, and Wilbur; Simmons and Tjostem and Thomson; Jelley and Might and Stich; Ross and Dunn and Keene and Davis. All these, and more, are here with us today, saints whose lives and faith are part of our hearing and knowing the story of Jesus, and therefore part of our becoming and being part of the meaning of God’s holy history.

Several years ago Father Richardson shared with us the story Walter Wangerin told about his young son, a little saint named Matthew who ran away from home, and from dad, after dad had been unkind to him one day, Wangerin’s story about how little Matthew later came home and told his dad he loved him, and forgave him, and, in doing so, showed him Jesus.

Well, after hearing that story I bought some of Wangerin’s books, books in which Wangerin does his own part to keep the story of Jesus alive. And in his little book about Advent, Preparing for Jesus, I found the point of this sermon for All Saints’ Day:

“Every present moment is well rooted in the past,” Wangerin reminds us. “Nothing happens in pure isolation. No human is so alienated that he has no history or so lonesome that she cannot find lifelines through which her person has emerged. We are never only I. We are always, somehow, we.

“Even the miracles of God, so sudden-seeming, have been nurtured in love through the ages to the moment of their appearing. But it may be only in the appearing that God’s careful tending of this thing is made clear to us.

“God, you see, is God of history: weaving its past and its future together; designing the times by overseeing the intricate patterns of human events [like letters and words in a sentence]; granting meaning to the whole of humankind, and thereby making any single moment [and any single person], also, incandescent with meaning.

“Even so did God prepare for the entrance of the Savior into the world. Even so, in Luke, do few verses about one humble old man indicate [not only the meaning of his particular life, but also the meaning of] the past, [the meaning of] the entire past of human need and divine desire [that ] is spiraling into Judea to produce [the] drama of the coming of the infant Jesus. Jesus! – who shall himself illuminate the whole history of humankind with a fearful and beautiful meaning.

“–– For the old man’s name is Zechariah – and he is scarcely the first to bear that name in Israel. Scripture records thirty Zechariahs before him, kings and prophets and priests and Levites. He is the fruit of an ancient family tree, himself a priest, his wife a Levite.

“–– For the old man’s name itself means: Yahweh remembers. God is remembering his people, yes. But the divine act of remembering is in fact the containing of all things past in God’s awareness, shaping the past presently, in this present calling to mind. God remembers now, and all that was [and all the saints who ever were] exist even now in [God’s] mind.

“–– For God is remembering, too, [remembering] his promises, his most ancient promises. And this is signified in the circumstances of Zechariah and his wife, Elizabeth; for [Zechariah and Elizabeth] cause our first parents, Abraham and Sarah, to be present again. Zechariah and Elizabeth [are, once again], that ancient couple unto whom God promised: ‘In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’

“In all of Scripture, these are the only couples both childless and too old to bear children; and in only these two cases does God announce the improbable birth not to the mother, but to the father. Therefore, [as] Abraham and Sarah once introduced a fresh covenant between God and the earth, so Zechariah and Elizabeth now introduce the final covenant of grace, and the lines between them run unbroken – for no other reason than that the love of God did not break against human sin!

“You see? All history, like a woman in labor, is concentrating on this single, central event: the coming of the Son of God among us.

“–– For now, now the “remembering” of [God’s] promises means also that God is keeping [his promises], [keeping them] physically in human time and human space, and in the sight of every people.

“So here you are, my friend – this year, this day, this particular moment – [here you are] bowed down in meditations [this morning] and preparing for the coming of the Lord [today]. This tick in your Advent clock: how insignificant it seems in the order of things, yes?

“But it is not – and you are not – insignificant at all! Surely you have taken the lesson of [Zechariah and Elizabeth and of this All Saints’ Day]: how vast and complex is the history that has brought you to this moment! How countless the divine preparations that presently shape your meditation! Not only do you, your personhood, your self derive from the bloodlines of your ancestors; not only does the more immediate history of your culture shape your days and ways; but the flower of this moment has a root as deep in antiquity as the time when God spoke promises to Abraham and Sarah. And its sunshine is Christ! For the birth of that Light into the world (an event midway between Abraham and you) illumines all our human history, making this particular moment, too, incandescent with meaning.”

And that is why all the faithful, including those who names are not remembered by us because they left no names for us to know, are among the saints of God. Because God has not forgotten them. God does know their names. They are precious to God, indispensable links in the great divine story of salvation that history is. So here is the point of this and every All Saints’ Day sermon, the point of this day: God loves you. You matter to God, and your mattering to God, God’s holy love for you, is the reason you are God’s saint.

“Did you think you were little in the universe? Ah, but look how God has used the universe to bring you here. Like any miracle of God, you have been nurtured in love through all the ages unto this instant, this breath you now are drawing, this present beating of your heart, this thought, this faith, this prayer:

Catch us up, O Lord, like Zechariah [and all your saints], in the whirl of your holy history. We seem to be but particles in the wind. But you, [ Lord,] declare each of us to be a particular person, spokes in the great wheel of your covenant-loving of the world.

Therefore, let us be meek in your kingdom, but not abject; humble, not self-pitiful; obedient, [but] not obsequious; servants, not servile; childlike, not childish; yours in love and willingness, and then our smallness shall be your greatness indeed, [the blessedness of the saints in your kingdom].”

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.