On Wednesday mornings we hold a Eucharist in the chapel, and most weeks we commemorate a different saint. Some of the saints are the Biblical saints: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Paul, Phoebe, Lydia. Some of the saints are the great historic saints: Aidan, Cuthbert, Patrick, Francis, Brigid, Hilda, Claire, Theresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich. And sometimes we have more modern saints, people who lived in the last hundred years: Dr. King, Pauli Murray. These different kinds of saints get a special day of commemoration.
These are the famous saints, famous enough that they got into a calendar to be commemorated. Sometimes we think of these saints as the superheroes of the faith. We might even think of them as perfect. Sometimes we use the word saint to be a synonym for being perfect. I think it does a great disservice to these saints, because if you read about their lives or their histories, you learn they were anything but perfect. They were real people like you and me, who had all kinds of challenges and struggles and doubts in their faith.
But they were something else. There is a great prayer that sometimes gets appointed on these Wednesday mornings services that says that the saints are the lights of their generation. I think that is a much better way to think about the saints. They were not people who were perfect, they were not faith superheroes, they were the lights of their generation. They shined light in the midst of the darkness that the people faced. There is much darkness in the past, if we look at history. The people faced all kinds of plagues and wars and falling of empires, all kinds of illnesses and economic collapse. The last two thousand years have been rough. The saints in the midst of all that darkness are lights.
Those are the famous saints, but it is not all the saints. They are just the ones that became famous enough to be commemorated. There are all kinds of other saints. I call these the not-so-famous saints. They, too, were lights in their generation. The famous ones might be lights in our generation, hundreds of thousands of years later, but the not-so-famous saints were lights just in that moment. Lights for a small community, perhaps lights for just a few people, but they, too, were saints. They were the lights in their generation.
I see many of those saints on the wall around us. As I was taking a moment on Friday to walk around and look at the names, I saw so many names of people I had known over the years here at St. Mary’s who were a light to me. And I suspect they were a light to the person who wrote their name. I suspect they are still a light to that person.
The light that all these saints are shining is not their own light. It is the light of Christ. That is what they are shining forth and how it is that they lived their life in the ways that they touch our lives. It is the light of Christ.
So whatever darkness you are facing, whether we are talking about the great darknesses of this world, the wars, violence, and divisions, systems falling apart, whether nationally, internationally, communally. And the personal darknesses we all feel, the grief over the loss of a loved one, a job that is lost, marriages falling apart, a cancer diagnosis. Whether it is a big darkness or a very personal one, in the midst of it there is a light, the light of Christ. We can look to the saints, the famous ones and the not-so-famous ones, to shine the light of Christ in the midst of it for us.
On the Feast of All Saints we are celebrating all the saints. On Wednesday we get one or two, but today we get all the saints. That is a whole lot of light that is shining in our lives if we just look to them, the famous saints, and the not-so-famous saints.
There is a third category of saints. These are the ones that Paul refers to in the Epistle reading today. Paul is not talking about people who have died when he talks about the saints in this Epistle. He is talking about people who were very much alive in that community, people who were faithfully trying to follow Jesus as perfect or imperfect as they were, shining the light of Christ to people in darkness. The saints are all around us. They are here in this room. I reckon they are even in you. You too, can be a saint. You can shine light for the people who are struggling.
On this Feast of All Saints, I encourage you to commemorate all the saints, all the great ones and all the lesser ones of the past, and all the ones that are here today. Look to their light and let it help guide you, and share that light with people who need it.
AMEN.
