ALL SAINTS SUNDAY

 

 This sermon was preached on All Saints Sunday, November 6, 2005, by The Rev. Canon William L. Wipfler

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Although some of you may not believe it, I ‘m old enough to remember an earlier period when the octave of All Saints turned our eyes and aspirations toward what can be.  “All Saints” was the name of my first mission in the Dominican Republic and what a festival we had each year. It was a time to celebrate human destiny. Blessed Mary, the Apostles, Augustine and Monica, Francis and Benedict, Felicity and Perpetua were paraded before us. And since then there have been many more names added to the list.

Today we commemorate someone being considered for inclusion in our Calendar of Lesser Feasts and Fasts, in one sense, our process for lifting up exemplary lives. He is James Theodore Augustus Holly.  A convert from Roman Catholicism, Holly was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1852 with the express goal of becoming a missionary to Haiti.  He spent a brief time here in Western New York, at St. Phillip’s Church, Buffalo, seeking Black men and women from Canada and locally, who might join him in establishing a community in Haiti. The hurdles he faced were many.  But in 1861 he departed for Haiti with almost 150 persons seeking a free and independent life. 

In spite of a warm welcome and a land grant from the Haitian President Geffrard, in a short time the group was struck by tragedy.  Yellow fever killed 43, including 6 of Holly’s 9 family members. In spite of that, the work continued, establishing chapels, schools and medical clinics across the republic.  The church grew in leaps and bounds even in the face of Roman Catholic and Voodoo opposition.  In 1872, at the request of the Haitian church, Bishop Arthur Coxe, of Western NY, was sent by the General Convention to consider their petition for their own bishop.  Bishop Coxe’s recommendation was glowing, and included the name of Holly as the best candidate. On November 8, 1874, James Theodore Holly was consecrated as the first Bishop of Haiti, and the first Black Bishop in the American line of Succession.  Holly’s continued work until his death in 1911, made the Episcopal Church the second largest Christian community in Haiti, which it remains until today.

Bishop Holly’s heroic mission efforts were and are a testimony to what God can do in each of us who is grafted into the Communion of Saints, faithful to Jesus.  We want to be, we are going to be, we already are … SAINTS.  There is an old Baptist hymn that captures a sense of that for me.  I’m not sure if any of you are familiar with it.  I sang it when I attended a Baptist Church with.Herschel Perkins, the farmer who employed me as a teenage summer helper in Petersburg, NY. 

Lord, I hear of showers of blessing                               Let some drops now fall on me, 

Thou art scattering full and free                         Even me, Lord, even me.

Showers, the thirsty souls refreshing                          Let some drops now fall on me.

                       

Today we celebrate that long line of saints who: “Thee, by faith, before the world confessed.” They are those on whom the showers of blessing have been scattered throughout the ages. These are the people of God, whose lives and eternal victory give us an assurance that God has great things in store for all of us if we faithfully do our best and let God do the rest. 

       Even you Al,  and you Martha,  you Jim, and even me, Lord, even me!

Most Christian traditions point to the Book of Revelation for reflection during this All Saints’ season.  Unfortunately, in the popular mind - and perhaps in some of our minds - that gem is wrapped in Hollywood packaging.  Revelation’s images are thought to be characteristic of doom and gloom and destruction.  And what is worse, many current TV and radio evangelists, and popular writers like Tim LeHaye and his “Left Behind Series” offer us dark images with their preaching and writing about end times.

The wonderful images of Revelation should scatter the fears we may have about our eternal lives.  Those images help us to drop our gaze earthward for the promise of our destiny. Revelation assures us that whatever the future, whatever our future may hold, we are already sealed and marked by the Living God in Baptism as God’s forever.  The faithful are the possession of the Father through our Lord who seeks to save us all.

  Even you Sharon, even you George, you Zelma, and even me, Lord, even me!

There are those who try to play arithmetic with Scripture in order to exclude many from God’s love and grace who don’t believe as they do. Revelation reaches out to embrace.  The vision of St. John is that of: “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.”  And even when numbers are used they are the great symbolic numbers of Jewish mysticism:  144,000 to be saved:  12-the perfect number-times 12 again, and then multiplied by 1,000, a number signifying the infinite.  The multitude God draws to Himself is not the least conceivable but the greatest imaginable.

     Even you Roland, even you Sarah, you Charlie! And even me Lord! Even me!

And there is another image: it is of that infinite number of the saints all dressed in robes made white in the blood of the Lamb.  Blood – a symbol in our generation of disaster and destruction.  But for the author of Revelation blood represents the essence of life. It is the sacrificial blood of Christ that made each of our baptismal garments glisten. And the life-giving Lamb of God drenches our life-soiled baptismal garments with forgiveness – if we let Him – and again makes them white,ready for the feast of heaven.

                                                Vine of heaven, vine of heaven

                                                Let thy blood atone for me,

                                                Even me, Lord, even me.

This holy season of All Saints assures us of the victory of living by faith.  Though we consider ourselves least, we too are caught up among the saints.  They are a blessed assurance that we are “sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own for ever.”

                                           Even we Lord! Even we!  Amen!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 We are in the Octave of All Saints, a brief but very significant celebration in our Christian Year.   In our time, we don’t hear very much about sainthood, except to think of the Christian heroes of the past, or when someone like Mother Theresa appears on the scene.  And so we hardly ever talk about human destiny and our call to be saints.  We are, after all, “only human.”  Today, for many people, the heart’s desire has turned to the immediate.  We have computers and Nintendo, Disneyworld, hybrid cars, digital TVs, instant meals, and we even had Alan Greenspan to keep economic concerns on an even keel.  Why look further?