Since being an adult the Season of Hallowtide (All Hallow’s Eve, All Saints Day and All Souls’ Day) has been a particularly special time in the Church year for me. I find as I age, it gets even more so. The strange thing about being middle-aged is that you are old enough to remember a generation that has vanished; see a generation before you rising to old age; see your own generation building families and businesses; and see a generation just being born. Personally, I was given the great gift of meeting six great-grandparents and knew all of my grandparents well. (I have one who is still alive!)
I am also greatly blessed that each one of my deceased grandparents knew and walked with Jesus in this world. Their day and calling was different than mine. I grew up with stories of the Great Depression and WWII. I heard of late 40s college mixers, the Space Race and Cold War, starting churches in the 60s and fighting to preserve the church and family through tumultuous times. These are just the stories of my family and their quest for holiness. But these stories and connections make us who we are as families and as individuals.
As Christians we have something similar and even richer; over two-thousand years of noble saints and martyrs inspire us by what God did in their lives. Any yet, All Saints’ Day is not for those we know about but about those we don’t know about. All Saints’ Day is about the countless martyrs who are unsung heroes - whose deaths are precious in the eyes of God (Psalm 116:15). While the stories of these holy men and women cannot inspire us, the fruit of their Faith is something we can see, for it exists in the legacy of the Church. If the Church depended solely on the deeds of the saints that we commemorate with days, the ministry of the Church would be small indeed. It does not. For thousands of years men and women from king to slave faithfully served God according to His call for their lives.
And then All Souls’ Day comes calling us to give prayers of thanks and commendation for those faithfully departed that we did know - some of whom we knew very dearly indeed. Classmate and teachers, priests and pastors, parents and sibling and, sadly, even children compose theses dear ones. Those who we know as part of our natural and spiritual family are those who we pray for on All Souls’ Day, because death cannot sever us from them in Christ Jesus. We are reminded of the call and purpose God has for our lives - to be sinners transformed into saints in our own time. We knew the Faithful Departed as living models whom we loved and prayed with in the Church. We knew them warts and all. Sinners saved by God’s own grace.
What keeps us from being saints? Many things from the world, the flesh and the devil. We are made righteous by Jesus through baptism instantaneously, but we are called to be and made holy more slowly for the remainder of our days here on earth and glorified afterwards.
Righteousness and holiness are both part of salvation but they are different. On Sunday I quoted theologian Francis Hall who makes a helpful distinction and then speaks of the importance of the Church.
“Righteousness is a quality of moral conduct and moral character. Holiness is a distinct thing. It describes a special and supernatural relation to our creator, a relation in which righteousness attains transfigured glory…The holiness of the Church’s members develops in proportion to their assimilation to it, for its holiness is inherent and is the immediate organic source of theirs…apart from her, the organic basis of covenant is wanting, and apart from faithfulness to her the continuance of the basis for them is impossible.” (Anglican Dogmatics, 357-358)
The sins and spiritual illnesses of Arrogance and Acedia are both get in the way of our sanctification. Arrogance soothes the Christian with the lie that transformation is not needed lulling the Christian into a cheap grace. Acedia beats down the spirit of the Christian and short-sells the power of God’s grace. The saints help us see that God’s grace is powerful in the face of persecution from the outside world as well as the internal struggles of the soul. This week we ought to continue to remember the Saints and the Faithful, resolve to repent of those sins that keep us from our own call and ask for grace to be saints in our own day. The entire sermon from All Saints’ Sunday is posted below. I pray as the years go by that Hallowtide is a source of inspiration and connection for you too!