Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity in the Octave of All Saints’.
When “golden October decline[s] into sombre November” bringing us ultimately through these times of endings to new beginnings in Advent, then, as T.S. Eliot puts it in his play, Murder in the Cathedral, “who has stretched out his hand to the fire and remembered the Saints at All Hallows, remembered the martyrs and saints who wait?” Somehow there is a significance about the Octave of All Saints that is meant to remain with us. Yet we so easily forget the glory of All Saints and its meaning for us in the pilgrimage of our souls. The Octave of All Saints is the strong reminder to us of our true citizenship in heaven which is the pattern of our lives in faith.
“For here have we no continuing city”, Hebrews reminds us (Heb. 13.14) and in the Octave’s commemoration of “Founders, Benefactors, and Missionaries” (BCP, p. 302), the powerful lesson from Hebrews about the community of faith reminds us that “they”, reaching back to the saints of the Old Testament, we might say, as well as the great pageant of souls over the centuries who have gone before us, “seek a country”, indeed, “they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly”. Paul, building upon such an understanding reminds us that “our citizenship is in heaven”.
But that does not mean a flight from the world nor does it mean its contrary, collapsing the things of God into our world. It is more about how we participate now in heavenly things through our desire and longing for what is everlasting. November, in all of the fading glory of nature, reminds us of what does not pass away. All Saints’ recalls us to who we are with God in the Communion of Saints. Such is the true dignity and freedom of our souls. We are freed to God.
That freedom does not mean ignoring the constraints and laws that belong to the various forms of the human community; constraints, laws and regulations which are often arbitrary, annoying, inconsistent, questionable and even prejudicial. There are and have always been bad laws. There can be no doubt about the anti-Christian bias in some sectors of our country. But we don’t get to be anti-nominians, those who reject law. Rather it means tolerating all manner of things precisely because they are limited and finite. To put it in the language of today’s Gospel, Caesar is not God; worldly powers are not omnipotent however much they presume to such pretensions. Jesus says to Caesar’s man in Jerusalem at the time of his capture and passion and in response to such pretensions to absolute power that “thou couldst have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above” (Jn 19.11).
Our prayers for those in authority over us is always that they not abuse their power in the overreach of authority or in the attempts to coerce our thinking. Our actions may be constrained out of some sense of the common good; that is one thing. It is quite another to require us to think only in a certain way, to try to compel our thinking by proscribing the use of language, and to demand not our toleration but our celebration of the agendas of identity politics and policies that are inherently divisive. That is intolerable and runs the risk of rendering unto Caesar the things of God.
Tuesday, November 9th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting
Thursday, November 11th, Remembrance Day
Windsor Cenotaph & KES Cenotaph
Sunday, November 14th, Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
The collect for today, the Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O GOD, our refuge and strength, who art the author of all godliness: Be ready, we beseech thee, to hear the devout prayers of thy Church; and grant that those things which we ask faithfully we may obtain effectually; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: Philippians 3:17-21
The Gospel: St Matthew 22:15-22
Artwork: Jacob Adriaensz Backer, The Tribute Money, c. 1630-40. Oil on canvas, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.
“Golden October declin[es] into sombre November”, T.S. Eliot suggests in ‘Murder in the Cathedral’. Yet the Beatitudes of the Gospel of All Saints’ Day open us out to a profound form of thinking about the radical nature of human freedom and human nature. It is central to the Christian idea of the Communion of Saints which embraces the whole of humanity in the vision of its unity and perfection, a vision which is universal. “The great multitude whom no one could number” are those “who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb”, an image of redemption that challenges and counters the various dystopias of our times.
The point is fairly simple: we are not defined simply by the things that happen to us in the ups and downs of human life, let alone the fickleness and chaos of human experience and the human heart. This is nothing new, of course, but how we think and face them is another matter. That is where the Beatitudes come so strongly to the fore. It is not just that they turn the world upon its head, which they do, but that they speak to the more radical idea of the perfection and redemption of our desires. In that sense, it is about a sense of homecoming, a sense of belonging that recalls us to who we are. The Greek word for truth is aletheia which literally means an unforgetting, in short, a remembering, albeit one which happens in and through the awareness of our forgetting. We forget who we are in the sight of God and that carries over into our forgetting of the nature of our companionship and communion with one another.
All Saints in both its sacred and secular forms is about a kind of homecoming of the spirit in which we rediscover the necessity and the significance of our commitments to one another. It is really all about the realization that we are part of a community that is far greater than we are. It is really all about the realization that we are more though not less than our bodies and worldly experiences. To recall who we are in the sight of God is to grasp the principle of freedom and purpose in our lives as agents, but only within the greater agency of God.
For that is the point about All Saints and All Souls. We are part of a community far greater than ourselves, a company no one could number, as John the Divine puts it in his marvelous vision of what we seek and to which we belong. Learning to act out of the vision of the Communion of Saints means being attentive to the primacy of the ethical, to the idea of the Good and the struggle to let that live and move in us. One of the great lessons of the Beatitudes has to do with the strength of inwardness that they highlight over and against outward things, the things that belong to circumstance, the things that happen to us. The Beatitudes highlight the fact that these spiritual qualities of soul are what define us rather than the events of our world and day.
The collect for today, The Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, commonly called All Souls’ Day (source):
Everlasting God, our maker and redeemer,
grant us, with all the faithful departed,
the sure benefits of thy Son’s saving passion
and glorious resurrection,
that, in the last day,
when thou dost gather up all things in Christ,
we may with them enjoy the fullness of thy promises;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Epistle: 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
The Gospel: St. John 5:24-27
Artwork: Mattia Preti, Christ in Glory with Saints, 1660-61. Oil on canvas, Prado.
The collect for today, the commemoration of Richard Hooker (1554-1600), Priest, Anglican Apologist, Teacher of the Faith (source):
O God of peace, the bond of all love,
who in thy Son Jesus Christ hast made for all people thine inseparable dwelling place:
give us grace that,
after the example of thy servant Richard Hooker,
we thy servants may ever rejoice
in the true inheritance of thine adopted children
and show forth thy praises now and for ever;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 2:6-10, 13-16
The Gospel: St. John 17:18-23
Golden October declines into sombre November, a T.S. Eliot puts it (Murder in the Cathedral) but it does so in such a gentle way on this glorious day, a day made far more glorious by the Feast of All Saints, the vision of the glory of redeemed humanity. The wonder and the glory lie in what is seen and taught as presented by John in the lesson from Revelation and by the Beatitudes from Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount.
It can only be seen and taught. The vision and the teaching speak to the end and purpose of our humanity as belonging to the Communion of Saints and to our participation in that Communion by having “come out of great tribulation”. In other words, the glory only comes through the experience of the miseries of our fallen humanity in its sinfulness. Redemption is accomplished, not in flight from the world, but through its radical transformation by grace perfecting nature.
In this sense, the Beatitudes do not simply turn the world on its head, as I am fond of saying, but signal the much more profound idea of the redemption of the world and the perfection of our desires. The Beatitude about hungering and thirsting after righteousness “for they shall be satisfied” complements the theme of those who have come out of great tribulation, for “they shall hunger nor more, neither thirst any more”. They shall be fed by the Lamb “in the midst of the throne” and be led “unto living fountains of waters”, and, as if to sum up the theme of redemptive love, “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.” The vision and the teaching are one.
Such is revelation, to be sure, but it has to be taught and seen. Such is the significance of All Saints’ Day and why it has an octave, an eight day period of meditation and reflection on the transitory nature of human life and of our end in glory. The whole focus and emphasis is on the spiritual community of which we are integral parts. In other words, we find the truth of ourselves as selves because of an awareness and a respect for others without whom we cannot truly be ourselves. To think about the radical nature of this spiritual community takes us beyond ourselves in our immediate concerns and preoccupations; we are made aware not of the “unreal city” of human presumption but of the real city of God, the kingdom of heaven which is at once the promise for “the poor-in-spirit”, the humble ones, and for those “persecuted for righteousness’ sake” in the first and last Beatitude. We are more though not less than the circumstances and happenings of our world and day.
To be reminded of this is comforting strength precisely in the face of the persecutions that confront the contemporary churches and in a culture of division and enmity. It will do no good to be defensive. The challenge is to be the confessing church, confessing at once our shortcomings and failings, on the one hand, and the wonder and glory of God, on the other hand, in which we find the true communion of our humanity united in the praise of God. The Beatitudes complement Revelation by showing us how God’s grace lives and moves us in the true realization and perfection of our desires, the true redemption of our humanity. But it has to seen as in the vision of John and it has to be taught as in the Beatitudes.
Fr. David Curry
All Saints’, 2021
The collect for today, All Saints’ Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O ALMIGHTY God, who hast knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of thy Son Christ our Lord: Grant us grace so to follow thy blessed Saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those unspeakable joys, which thou hast prepared for them that unfeignedly love thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Lesson: Revelation 7:9-17
The Gospel: St. Matthew 5:1-12
Artwork: Master of San Lucchese (attrib.), Madonna and Child with Saints (The Sterbini Triptych), c. 1435. Tempera and gold leaf on panel, Saint Louis Art Museum.
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity.