November 4, 2007
All Saints Sunday
We’re celebrating the feast of All Saints today, but its official day was Thursday, November 1. And this past Wednesday, on All Saints Eve, the day school canceled its weekly morning chapel to make room for its annual Halloween parade and songfest. The little kids probably wouldn’t have made it through two gatherings in the chapel, having to sit still and behave themselves twice. But I still found it a little ironic that church was cancelled to make room for Halloween. Don’t get me wrong – I love Halloween; I’ve always loved it. My friends and I trick-or-treated until people started giving us dirty looks. And now I love that having kids legitimates my dressing up and going door-to-door again on Halloween. I think pretending and wearing costumes is good and healthy for kids’ imaginations, plus trick-or-treating is one of the rare opportunities to actually connect in person with our neighbors.
And the two events, Halloween and All Saints Day, are not unconnected. The word “Halloween” actually derives from All Hallows Eve, All Hallows Day being the original name for All Saints Day. But the truth is, like many of the holidays we celebrate, Halloween began as a pagan festival. For whatever reason, October 31 was thought to be a time when the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead overlapped, and the deceased could come back to life and cause havoc. Many of our beloved Halloween customs date back, in some form, to those pagan beginnings. Ghosts and witches and the idea of using a threat to get candy. So on first impression, there’s a lot about Halloween that seems to clash with our Christian sensibilities.
And yet, in an important way, Halloween and All Saints Day are two sides of the same coin. They both deal with death and with life beyond the grave.
Halloween deals with death with mischievous humor; we’ve transformed those pagan customs so that we can laugh at the scary stuff. Behind the masks and costumes are laughing children. Inside the houses, decorated with spider webs and sometimes menacing pumpkins, are friendly and generous neighbors. Children go out into the neighborhood and face their fears, and they return home safe.
All Saints Day approaches death with triumphant joy. This feast day has a long and interesting history. In the early Church, Christians would celebrate the anniversary of a martyr's death by celebrating the Eucharist over their tomb or the place where they died. At some point, the number of people that died because of their faith became so great that a separate day couldn’t be assigned to each one of them, and so the Church appointed a common day for all of them. A few hundred years later, the day was expanded to include all the saints, whether martyrs or not, and whether known or not.
And so, today we remember all those saints that have gone before, we celebrate their entering into the joy of God’s presence, and we pray that we may one day follow after them.
When I lived in Atlanta, I actually went to a big, old, beautiful Episcopal church called All Saints. Because the feast of All Saints was its name day, that church had a huge celebration that day. People came all decked out. The flowers were incredible, with huge arrangements hanging on wires from the high ceiling. The choir was even bigger and more magnificent than usual. With all our energy we sang out those joyous, triumphant, saint-filled hymns that we don’t get to sing very often. There were always a lot of baptisms on All Saints Sunday and the families would process in with their baptismal banners held high. What I remember most vividly from those celebrations was the joy, the beauty and power, the triumph. But I thought about All Saints Day in terms of the saints of old – the apostles and martyrs, the great historical Christians.
And then one year I lost [my mom and had a miscarriage] in the span of 4 months. And suddenly All Saints Day took on a whole different meaning. I began thinking of it in terms of my loved ones, my saints. It became a day for remembering and honoring them, and celebrating their being with God. An occasion more comforting, perhaps, than festal.
Now I’m far enough away from that dreadful year to see how my two experiences of All Saints Day fit together.
As Christians, we talk about the “communion of saints,” which is a way of expressing that although we may be physically separated from those that have gone before by the barrier of death, we nonetheless remain united to each other as the One Church (with a capital C). This idea is all over our liturgy. Most versions of the Prayers of the People praise God for the saints who have entered into joy, and ask that “we may also come to share in God’s eternal kingdom.” And each week, as part of our eucharistic prayer before communion, we “praise [God], joining our voices with … all the company of heaven.” That company of heaven includes both the saints of old and our more recently departed loved ones. All of them joined together in a place where the book of Revelation promises that “death is no more; neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain, any more.”
My loved ones are with saints Mary and Paul and Francis and Aidan and Anne Frank and Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa. And they’re also with Nancy Lexo and Bill Darnell and Kay Burns and Leigh Ebbert and Eleanor Kennedy and Allan Clark. All of them partakers in God’s triumph over death.
I think the reason we are able to make a celebration out of All Saints Day is the same reason it’s possible for us to enjoy Halloween. Both the joy of All Saints Day and the humor of Halloween are possible because Christ has conquered the powers of darkness and revealed our old fears to be nothing.
Because of God’s triumph over death, because of the good news of the resurrection, we are able to laugh at the witches and ghosts of Halloween. And because of that triumph, we are able to celebrate our saints from every generation and have hope; the sting of death is gone, even in the midst of mourning. As our Gospel today promises: “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.”
I was talking to another mother I know about my new-found theology of Halloween, and how I’d decided that maybe Halloween and All Saints Day are actually good and holy companions. And she added another aspect to it. She told me that when she carves pumpkins with her kids, she uses the pumpkins as an illustration of how we are made “new creations” by our faith in Jesus Christ. Just as we reach into those pumpkins and clear out the seeds and the goop, God clears away our sins and fears and offers us a clean start. And just as those pumpkins radiate the warm glow of the candles inside, the light of Christ flows into our hearts and shines through us.
Her pumpkin metaphor reminded me of a story I heard as part of an All Saints Day sermon years ago. The story goes that a mother was telling her child about the stained glass windows in the church. [I realize that this is a little hard for us to relate to at St. Aidan’s, but use your imagination.] The windows showed martyrs, bishops, priests, nuns, artists, poets and politicians. The mother explained that the people pictured in those windows were saints. And the little boy responded, “Oh, I get it. Saints are people that the light shines through.”
The saints we celebrate today are people throughout the generations that the light of God shines through. I think most of the time they weren’t even aware of their own glow, but those around them could see it -- in the way they loved and cared for people, in their humor or their patience or their hope or their gentleness or their strength, or in the way they envisioned God’s kingdom or saw the best in the world or fought for justice or peace.
And there’s hope for us too. As my favorite All Saints hymn that we sung a few minutes ago puts it:
They lived not only in ages past,
there are hundreds of thousands still,
the world is bright with the joyous saints
who love to do Jesus’ will.
You can meet them in school,
or in lanes, or at sea,
in church, or in trains,
or in shops, or at tea,
for the saints of God are just folks like me,
and I mean to be one too.Amen.
ER