Sermon for the Feast of All Saints, Choral Evensong
admin | 1 November 2015“And he opened his mouth and taught them”
It is, to be sure, “that time of year… when yellow leaves or none or few/ do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold/ bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang,” as Shakespeare puts it. And yet in the season of scattered leaves and in the culture of scattered souls, there is a gathering, a great and profound gathering. Christ the King strides across the barren fields of our humanity to gather us into glory. It is the glory of the Communion of Saints. It is his gathering, a kind of collecting together of all that is scattered and lost.
The image of human lives as scattered leaves goes back to the Sibylline Oracles of Roman Antiquity conveyed most wonderfully by Vergil and then used by Dante even more wondrously to capture our being gathered together into the Communion of Saints. The whole human story belongs to one book, divinely written, to be sure, but scattered about on the wind; the leaves of the pages, like the leaves of the trees, are scattered and blown about. But by God’s grace the scattered leaves are gathered together into one volume; the leaves of the autumn likened to the pages – the leaves – of a book.
It is a powerful image and one where the ancient culture speaks profoundly to our contemporary world. We are the culture of the scattered, the disconnected and the distracted. Nothing speaks more profoundly to the loneliness and the despair, the desperation and fears of our contemporary world than the idea of the Communion of Saints. We are reminded in the strongest way possible that we are part of something larger than ourselves, that we are not alone but belong to a company beyond number, a spiritual company.
All Saints’ Day recalls us to the vocation of our humanity. We are not called to heroic pretension and presumption but to holiness. We are called to the Communion of Saints. An article of Faith, the lovely vision of the City of God imaged in the Book of Revelation is nothing less than a vision of our redeemed humanity. It signals what God seeks and wills for us and reminds us that our life in Faith always places us in a community. But what kind of community?
All of the readings for All Saints show us that it is a spiritual community. Tonight’s lesson from Ecclesiasticus inaugurates a wonderful vision of the gathering up of the scattered leaves of holy lives in the Jewish Scriptures. “Let us now praise famous men,” it famously begins, highlighting kings and rulers in their power and counsel, learned scholars who were “wise in their words of instruction,” musicians and poets “who composed musical tunes” and “set forth verses in writing,” such as what we have heard tonight from the choir in Willan’s Faux Bourdons for the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis, not to mention Tye’s wonderful motet, Hail glorious spirits. And then there are rich men “furnished with resources and living peaceably in their habitations.” All honoured in their generation, the glory of their times, some of whom, Sirach says, left a name – some, he says, therefore, not all.
But then the argument shifts ever so slightly and yet profoundly. “There are those” he says, “who have no memorial, who have perished as though they had not lived.” Yet they are said to be “men of mercy whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten.” They, too, are to be celebrated and remembered though nameless and unnumbered it seems. “Peoples will declare their wisdom, and the congregation proclaims their praise.”
How can that be? Because they are known to God and known to us in him, in the wonder and the glory of the Communion of Saints.
The rest of The Book of Ecclesiasticus is like the gathering up of the scattered leaves not of the Sibylline oracles but of the Old Testament through a pageant of names: Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Phinehas, Joshua and Caleb, “the judges also with their respective names” (though their names are not given), Prophets like Samuel, and Nathan, Kings like David and Solomon, and Josiah, more prophets like Elijah and Elisha, like Isaiah and Ezekiel. The list does not hide the shortcomings and even the sins of many of those who are remembered. It gathers up a parade of figures belonging to the Old Testament. This, too, is part of our All Saints’ celebrations and carries over into the later tradition of All Souls’ to which your Cathedral Chapel is a rare and outstanding witness, a witness to the richer meaning and fullness of All Saints. The thread of glory which weaves through the lives of the saints winds through all the graves of human lives. That thread of glory is the life of Christ who goes through “the valley of the shadow of death” for us and with us. Such is the meaning of the radical gathering of All Saints.
For All Saints is about remembering the communion to which we belong and in which we find our vocation as “the sanctified in Christ,” “as called to be saints,” as called into “the fellowship of God by his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord,” as Paul so strongly reminds us in this evening’s second lesson from 1st Corinthians.
We are gathered into the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. That is the weight and meaning of the great Gospel reading for All Saints, the Beatitudes of Christ. The point is that the Beatitudes are the teachings that belong to the revelation of God to us in the witness of the Scriptures. They are at the heart of the communion of saints. They are at the heart of our life with Christ and in Christ.
2015 marks the 30th anniversary of The Book of Alternative Services here in Canada and in some sense the anniversary of the founding of The Prayer Book Society of Canada. The conjunction of the two is at once necessary and unfortunate. What is unfortunate is that the Prayer Book Society has had a hard time shaking off the image of being a reaction to institutional authority; understandably so given the inexcusable actions of many a bishop in the Canadian Church who abused their office and authority in an attempt to ram the new book down people’s throats and impose their will over and against the constitutional principles of the Anglican Church of Canada.
There is no need to rehearse that sad and pathetic spectacle nor the understandable but equally lamentable reaction by many supporters of the Prayer Book whose secret or not so secret desire was for the bishops to repent in rochet and chimere, if not cope and mitre, on their knees while casting the wretched Green Book into the fire, having repented of maligning what Archbishop Garnsworthy of Toronto famously called the Red Monster. Lively times, to be sure. And here in our diocese there was the decade long spectacle of a Bishop utterly unable to understand the difference in the power of his office between commanding and commending; it was one thing and a proper thing however misinformed and misguided to commend the BAS; quite another thing to try to command its use. The BAS was, in some ways, a good thing; it corralled the wildness of liturgical experimentation for one thing. It was, of course, an alternative not a substitute or a replacement for the Prayer Book. Yet even that rather obvious point was a struggle.
In the light of such sad remembrances, one might just begin to see the glimmer of the deeper question. It is the failure to understand the nature of Revelation and the way in which that Revelation is mediated to us first in the Scriptures themselves and second in the pattern of reading based upon nothing less than a philosophical reading and understanding of the Scriptures. The BAS did not arise out of a vacuum. In many ways, it was shaped and formed by several impulses: ecumenism, liturgical experimentation, and most of all, so-called modern biblical theology which thought to transcend the denominational differences and tensions between the churches especially of the West.
Nothing of those impulses remain in any real sense apart from a general and unthinking acceptance of the premises of so-called biblical theology. While the confluence of these three strands held great promise in the decades of the sixties and the seventies, the dominant influence practically speaking was the liturgical expression of the reforms of the Vatican II counsel of the Roman Catholic Church which came to the light in 1968. The central plank of those reforms liturgically was the Roman Catholic Church’s embrace of the assumptions of modern biblical theology. What were those assumptions? Simply put, the jettisoning of the metaphysical and philosophical character and content of the classical and, as it turned out, the only real ecumenical lectionary of the Western Church which was developed out of the creedal traditions that shaped catholic orthodoxy; jettisoned in favour of a supposedly historical reading of the Scriptures which is utterly incapable of saying what the Scriptures are, having jettisoned the philosophical logic upon which such a determination can only be made. Instead of the theology of Revelation, there is only historical relativism.
Ironically, this has led to the spectacle of a complete fragmentation of the corporate reading of the Scriptures, to a scattering of the mind rather than its being gathered to Christ. For what was lost to the Roman Catholic Church was also lost by every other Church in the Protestant world. In a profound way, the only hold-out was the Book of Common Prayer but only in parishes and places which didn’t substitute its lectionary – the readings for the Eucharist – with the new lectionaries. I have to stress lectionaries. For there are a plethora of them; there is no unity. There was more unity in terms of a somewhat common creedal way of reading the Scriptures before this mid-century scattering of the pages of Scripture like the leaves of the Sibylline oracles than what came after it. There was need for a Prayer Book Society long before the appearance of the BAS and there is a need for it still today.
We await a gathering. And perhaps, just perhaps, that remains the true vocation of the Prayer Book Society and for parishes that remain committed to its catholic orthodoxy. Here is the gathering. It is about our being gathered by the one who opens his mouth and teaches us what belongs to the truth and dignity of his Word and Will. It is found in Revelation, the revelation of God to Man which challenges us to think more deeply about our humanity. It is found in our literary and philosophical appreciation of the God who gathers us to himself in love through his Word proclaimed and his Sacraments celebrated.
Nowhere is that gathering more profoundly set before us than in the Beatitudes. They are counter-culture both with respect to ancient and contemporary culture. They counter our self-absorption, the narcissism and the nihilism that surround us and defeat us. They challenge us precisely because the Beatitudes place our lives upon the foundation of heavenly grace. They do so in the awareness of the limits of human life and experience considered in itself.
The Beatitudes are the Christian manifesto of holiness. Blessedness is something substantial and objective in contrast to the passing forms of happiness which, as the word itself suggests, is all rather haphazard and chancy. Happiness comes and goes on the whims of our emotions and feelings, like leaves scattered on the wind. Blessedness is something else, something secure and sure and something which ultimately we have to be taught.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peace-makers, and those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake. A remarkable parade of qualities, they have a kind of eloquent power and completeness to them. They are all about the qualities of Christ’s grace at work in human lives. The ninth follows as the application of the eighth to us even more directly and intensely. “And blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.”
That, I am afraid, is the condition of Christian witness in our contemporary culture and even in our own Church. Yet the point of the gathering of All Saints is wonderfully clear. We are part of a much larger company of souls who have suffered and in their suffering have learned the joy of Christ, his blessedness defining them and us. And all because of what has been opened out before us.
“And he opened his mouth and taught them”
Fr. David Curry
Choral Evensong
Feast of All Saints’
St. Peter’s Charlottetown, PEI
November 1st, 2015