One day a parishioner from a nearby parish cornered me in my office on All Saints Day and asked, in all sincerity, “Why do we pray for the dead?” I was taken aback. And mumbled something like, “Because they are no longer dead, but alive in Christ. And they pray for us.” He was unimpressed and unmoved.
All Saints Day is part of at three-day Christian festival and mediation on death and new life. It begins with All Hallows Eve, with little munchkins demanding treats, feigning tricks, and giving us ample permission to laugh at that which we try so hard to forget and transcend. Death. The one certainty like taxes we all must face. As when Saul, fearing death, sought refuge with the Witch at Endor. She was scared since the king sought to put an end to her kind. Yet, here he was, asking her to help him to speak to the dead. Surprisingly, she knows what he really needs: care, in the form of rest and food – hospitality, or what the Bible calls love of neighbor – even the most unlikely of neighbors. It’s a story meant to remind us that God is never far from us at such times. It has been suggested that fear is that singular point of vulnerability through which God actually reaches us, touches us, to transform our fear into hope.
Hallows Day, or All Saints Day, then arrives and presents itself as a time to look back at those who in our tradition have experienced that presence and touch of God in difficult time, and allow their experiences to fuel our collective imagination to move us beyond our greatest fears to believe that a hopeful future is real, and even within our reach! Perhaps the first example of a saint as we think of them would be Miriam, sister of Moses, who celebrates after the great escape from bondage in Pharaoh’s Empire of endless toil to a newfound, and unimaginable future with God as she gets the sisters together with their tambourines to dance and sing their way forward with God: Then the prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand, and all the women went out after her with tambourines and with dancing. And Miriam sang to them: “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” [i]
Try to picture that moment? Imagine the relief, the joy, the laughter, the singing, the dancing The end of generations of darkness into a new world of light. A world, as Psalm 24 declares, is God’s world, not ours: The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it, the world and all who dwell therein. This world does not belong to the endless number of Pharaohs and their empires of bondage and toil for all but a handful of elites. This is God’s world, where wonders never cease – only if we refuse to let our remembrance of things past and our prophetic imaginations dwindle and fade.
This is why we recall the words of that prophet of the exile, Isaiah and his companions, who though God’s people had been swept away to yet another faraway empire, a long way from home, imagined a great homecoming as a feast: “a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.” The death dealing of Babylon and Pharaoh shall be swept away forever. “Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken.” [ii] And it is the imagination of Isaiah that envisions that one day the God of Israel would make straight a highway from Persia back to Jerusalem, the City of Peace, and once again the people would dance and sing their way home once again.
In the midst of yet another occupation under yet another brutal empire, comes another man of the Lord to reinforce the prophetic imagination among an exhausted, lonely, and beaten-down people. He was good friends with sisters Martha and Mary. They called for him when their brother Lazarus was dying. After a delay of several days, word comes to them that Jesus is at the edge of town. The sisters are sitting shiva, the days of mourning. Martha, ever the more practical of the two, marches out to the edge of town and lets Jesus know her frustration that he had not come when they called. “Our brother might still be alive!” she shouts at him. “He will live again,” he says. “Do you believe this?” She says, “I know he will rise again on the Last Day, the day of resurrection, but we want him now.” Says Jesus, “I am resurrection, and I am life. Do you believe this?” That’s when it happens. Martha is transformed on the spot. She forgets all her anger and her fears, “Yes, Lord, I believe you are the Christ coming into the world.”
Mary joins them. The crowd at the house sitting shiva comes
along. At the tomb Jesus weeps. The crowd murmurs, “See how he loves him!”
Yet, others complain in the midst of his weeping. Jesus prays to his father. Jesus
calls Lazarus to come out. Out he comes, wrapped in the funeral cloths, not
unlike Jesus was wrapped in swaddling-cloths “in the beginning.” “Unbind
him, and set him free!” Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty Lazarus
and we are free at last. No doubt they remembered that first Mary, Miram and
the sisters, dancing and singing the people into a new reality, a new world, a
new life. [iii]
All Saints reminds us that there have been others. There is an out-of-date list in our Book of Common Prayer of others who have shed God’s light in the darkness of later times. Even in our own times. Baltimore’s own Thurgood Marshall and Pauli Murray are on that list today, who like Martin King issued a new call for their people to be “unbound and set free.” We remember them all on All Saints so that we too might follow in the Way of Christ as they once did.
Another woman is in consideration for sainthood in the Catholic Church. Were she alive, I have no doubt she would tell them to stop it! Dorothy Day, a lay woman who cared for the working man and woman, who founded a series of houses for those in need of shelter across the country, and who founded a newspaper in the midst of the Depression, The Catholic Worker, which fearlessly advocates hope for a better future for America’s working class. She worked tirelessly for a more just society, inspired by people like Miriam, Isaiah, Jesus, and others. She wrote this in her autobiography: “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”
I wish I had known this when I faced my questioner in my office. We have all known the long loneliness, the long darkness, the long days of war, the fear of others, fear of the future, fear of one another. I might have said to him, “The only solution is love, and love comes with community.” Community with one another. Community with those Saints have gone before. Community with Christ, Miriam, Isaiah, Martha, Mary, Thurgood, Pauli, Martin, and that most imaginative of all biblical writers, John the Revelator who declares, “And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’ Also he said, ‘Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.’ Then he said to me, ‘It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.’” [iv] For this and for all the saints we give thanks! Amen.
[iv] Revelation 21:1-6a