Sermon for Feast of All Saints / Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity
Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for All Saints’/Trinity 21
“And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying, Blessed…”
There is a nugget of truth in every form of nonsense, even a nugget in the nonsense of Halloween in our contemporary culture however far removed from its pagan and Christian origins. The nugget lies in the very idea of dressing up in masks and costumes which are about a kind of playful imagination about the self, about who you are. At the very least, it presupposes that you are a self, a person, a ‘you’ that is more than the forms of appearance that you might present. And as we saw last week, in considering the ways in which God calls us to account both in terms of the marriage-feast of the only-begotten and the story of Cain and Abel, we are taught the great lessons of an ethical understanding at the heart of which lies the insight that self-knowledge and the knowledge of God are inseparable and belong to the nature of our fraternity and life together in the body of Christ.
In that time of year when leaves lie scattered on the ground in heaps of burnished gold, and in the culture of scattered souls and minds, we are recalled to the wonderful vision of the unity of the spiritual community of our humanity. Who we are is seen in what we are called to be. We are called to the Communion of Saints, to who we are in the will of God. Here is the great redemptive vision of our humanity, the counter and the corrective to all of the fearful divisions and uncertainties of our confused world endlessly caught in division and animosity precisely through the assertions of diversity at the expense of unity.
Halloween means the Eve of All Hallows’, all the Saints, “a great multitude which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues,” as John the Divine tells us in his marvellous vision. We are part of that great company in and through our liturgy and life in Christ. This feast provides the true spiritual ground for our human freedoms and rights, our freedoms and rights as persons irrespective of the assertions of identities and particularities of race, religion, gender, whatever. Ultimately, there is a greater truth and unity to our humanity expressed in and through the diversities of personality but not because of the competing identity claims of contemporary culture. The true sense of self is found in our life in God and with one another in the communion of saints which includes those who have gone before us with the mind of Christ. In some places we have a visual reminder of this in churches situated in a churchyard. The original Christ Church, for instance, was placed within what is now known as the Old Parish Burying Ground. The churchyard reminds us of the greater community of spirit to which we belong.
