A Sermon for the Locust Grove United Church of Christ of York, PA

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

All Saints’ Day • November 3, 2024

Isaiah 25:6-9, Matthew 25:31-40

For 11 years, I was the pastor of the United Congregational church, whose meeting house is one of those big, ornate buildings, with stained-glass windows and dark woodwork everywhere. One year, we held a special Good Friday service with the Roman Catholic diocese. We walked behind a cross and the Catholic Bishop preached in our pulpit. So we had a lot of Catholics there for the first time. One comment I heard afterward always stuck with me “It’s a pretty church and the people are nice but oh my God! They don’t have any statues at all! I don’t know how you have a church without any saints!” For Reformed people like us, it’s a pretty fancy place, but for this woman, brought up in the lush environment of Italian Catholic churches, it was plain and soul-less and more importantly, saintless. I imagine she’d say the same about this meeting house. Personally, I love its simple lines, the way the light floods in from the windows, how it sits embraced by the trees. But there are no statues of saints.

Of course, there are reasons we don’t have statues. The practice of venerating saints was a cash cow for the Medieval Catholic Church, and it had gotten out of hand; buying and selling religious relics including bits and pieces of the bodies of saints was a big business in 1500 AD. When the Reformers, including our own fathers and mothers in the faith, were cleaning out the closet of church practices, they wrinkled their nose over the whole business and tossed it in the trash box. So does it even make sense to have All Saints’ Day in a Reformed Church?

Maybe it helps if we understand just what the word saint means. It comes from the same root that gives us all the words like elect and election; just like we choose a candidate for office and give them a job. We elect them; we choose them. Saint is the English translation of the Greek word for ‘elect’. The original idea was that God chooses people here, right here, in this world, in this community, for a purpose;  They are elected, chosen, and the word for ‘elect’ is translated as ‘saint’. Everyone chosen by God is a saint. 

We’ve just come through Halloween, celebrated in our country by putting on a costume and pretending to be someone else. One year, one of my churches held a memorable Halloween party. Our hall was full, there were a hundred kids and their parents, most of them working hard at looking like someone they aren’t. We had a half dozen Spidermen, at least two Wizard of Oz Dorothies; we had Megatron and Bumble Bee, we had a nice selection of princesses, Barbie, and enough witches for a coven. Superman and Supergirl both attended. We had zombies and clowns; we had costumes whose identity wasn’t entirely clear but seemed assembled just to be different. It’s fun to pretend to be someone else for a while; it’s fun to get out of yourself and into a costume.

What wasn’t obvious is that we also had a lot of saints present. They were saints without halos, of course, but saints nevertheless. It took pretty much everyone from our church to host the party, and we were all tired at the end. But we were there doing God’s work. You see, the Halloween party wasn’t just a good time; it was also a day when we demonstrated  free grace, showing off how we believe God cares without price, without purchase. One of the parents said to me, “I think we’re supposed to pay for all of this somewhere, but I didn’t see where.” I said, “No, it’s free; just a good time.” I was taking pictures and printing them. He asked how much the picture would cost; I said, “Nothing, it’s free”—and when he asked how much for another one of the whole family I said again, “It’s free.” It puzzled him, it really puzzled him; God grace always does, free grace always stuns us when we encounter a little of it; we’re used to paying our own way. 

We have lots of visions of life with God but many of them look like the one we heard from Isaiah this morning. 

On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.  …Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces

Life with God looks like a party, in other words: a great, wonderful time of praise and joy and good things we all enjoy that God gives for free.The woman who said we didn’t have saints in our churches was wrong; we do have saints, but they are saints without halos. What is a saint? A saint is someone fulfilling God’s purpose. It isn’t hard to understand that purpose. When Jesus was asked what God wanted, he replied with the ancient teaching from Deuteronomy, “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, strength” and added, “love your neighbor as yourself.” This is our purpose; this is our mission. It’s a good thing for us to remember it, it’s a good thing for us to celebrate it. For the purpose of a church is to help us dress up in the costume of a saint, in the life of a saint. What I mean is, to learn to live like this, to live like this every day. When you do this, when I do, then we are saints. That’s right: Saint Linda, Saint Diane, Saint Sigmund, Saint fill in your own name.

We don’t have statues; we do have memories. In a few moments, we celebrate the memory of our friends who passed on this year, completing their mission. But celebrating all saints includes all the saints who are here. And it also includes some people we don’t always think about: al the ones who aren’t here yet. So today, right now, I thank God for all those saints who have gone home to God, for all of you saints who are here and for the ones I haven’t met yet. May God’s blessing flow

Amen.