For All the Saints 2021 B

 

For All the Saints 2021

November 1^st, transferred to today, is All Saints Day. We pray, “Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you.”

 

Yes, we are meant to follow Jesus who calls us o’er the tumult of our life’s wild, restless sea. When we are still and listen, we can still hear his voice calling out, “Follow me.” The Saints we are to remember on this Feast of All Saints are a diverse and often unusual group of those who in the days of decision did follow Jesus.

 

One of the earliest died in Rome on August 10^th, 258 ce, at the age of 32. He was a deacon for the Pope Sixtus II in Rome. He was archdeacon in charge of the treasury and to care for the indigent and poor of the city. When a Roman prelate ordered him to turn over the treasury, he spent several days distributing all of it to those in need, then gathered his poor, widows, orphans and indigent charges and presented them to the authorities saying, "Behold in these poor persons the treasures which I promised to show you; to which I will add pearls and precious stones, those widows and consecrated virgins, which are the Church's crown." For his Christ-like care for others and defiance in the face of injustice, Laurence was ordered to be tortured and killed.

 

Another of our Saints once said, “Slavery is the next thing to hell… I grew up like a neglected weed, – ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it. Then I was not happy or contented … When I found I had crossed that [Mason-Dixon] line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven … I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say — I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”

 

That, of course, was Maryland’s very own Harriet Tubman (1822-1913), included in our calendar of Saints. She risked her life to save the lives of countless others from the very hell in which she grew up. All the while singing songs which have become familiar staples of American Spirituals such as Follow the Drinking Gourd, Steal Away and Wade in the Water – songs which conveyed coded information to those slaves attempting to escape to Freedom as they remembered that Moses had done for the slaves escaping Pharaoh’s Egypt. Herself a deeply religious Christian, Ms. Tubman was often referred to as “Moses” by those who survived their own journey to Freedom.

 

Our next Saint lived during the reign of Richard I, who said of the then Bishop of Lincoln, “Truly, if all the prelates of the Church were like him, there is not a king in Christendom who would dare to raise his head in the presence of a bishop.” Lincoln was the largest diocese in England at the time, and Hugh (1140-1200), a Carthusian monk, was not eager to become bishop. Yet, once appointed he arranged for a number of well-educated monks to handle the day-to-day church affairs while he tirelessly traveled around the bounds of Lincoln attending to the diocese’s most needy people. He would risk his own life in the streets to protect the Jewish population from the anti-Semitic riots that sought to destroy them, their homes and their businesses. He was one of the few who would minister to and touch the growing population of lepers. Of his work among them Hugh said, “St Martin’s kiss cleansed the leper’s body, but the leper’s kiss cleans my soul.” He had the courage to confront and rebuke King Richard  I, no doubt due to his Carthusian training whose motto is, “The Cross stands whilst the world revolves.” Canonized quickly in 1220, Hugh of Lincoln became the patron saint of sick children, sick people, shoemakers and swans.

 

“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have

ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”

 

These are the words Sojourner Truth spoke at an early Women’s Rights convention in Akron, Ohio, 1851. She had escaped to freedom with her baby daughter in her arms in 1826. In 1828, she became the first African-American woman to successfully sue a white man to secure the freedom of her son. Born Isabella Baumfree, on the Day of Pentecost, 1843, she became a Methodist and changed her name to Sojourner Truth because she heard the Spirit of God calling her to preach the truth. She preached and spoke out for the rights of women and African-Americans for the rest of her life until she died November 26, 1883 (aged 86). She is the first African-American woman to have her statue in the U.S Capitol, and in 2014 the Smithsonian magazine listed her among the “100 Most Significant Americans of All Time.”

 

These are just a few of the Saints that God almighty has “knit together … in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of his Son Christ our Lord.” May we, by your grace dear Lord, always follow you as they have “in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you.” Amen.