Saints Without Names

This past Thursday was the feast of All Saints, and the church celebrates this great commemoration of all who have preceded us in this life on the Sunday following. So tonight the hymns we sing and the scripture readings call to mind the saints of God in every generation from the dawn of time to the present day, sine nomine - saints without names.

In the letter to the Hebrews, the writer says we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. This is something I have always been aware of due in large part to the prominent place saints played in my Roman Catholic boyhood. For a Roman Catholic child of the 1950s and 60s, there were saints for everything - patron saints, saints associated with particular concerns such as the poor or with virtues such as humility. Images of saints and references to saints were everywhere. My grandmother's house was full of statues and pictures of various saints to the extent that my younger brother refused to go to the bathroom at grandma's house because he was intimidated by the steady gaze of the Virgin Mary whose picture hung on the bathroom wall. From this I took it for granted that the great men and women of our common heritage are very present to us as witnesses to a steadfast faith in God and to a new life after this one that will last forever.

The Protestant Reformation rejected what had become by the late medieval period a cult of saints that was associated with many abuses. So saints fell out of favor in the reformed churches. In our own Episcopal calendar the only persons who bear the title of "saint" are those specifically mentioned in the New Testament such as St. Mary the Virgin, St. Luke, St. Mary Magdalene, and, my own personal favorite, St. Stephen. Other worthy persons in our calendar are celebrated but are not referred to officially as saints. Custom dictates, however, that we refer to some post Apostolic persons as saints such as St. Benedict and St. Francis of Assisi - because if people like that aren't saints, there's not much hope for the rest of us.

But this cloud of witnesses that surrounds us and inspires us with the truth of God is comprised of more than just those persons whose names are written in books. The first reading we heard tonight exhorts us: "Let us now sing the praises of famous men, our ancestors in their generations." It goes on to recite those who are famous and who did great deeds known to many people. And then it reminds us that "...of others there is no memory; they have perished as though they have never existed... their bodies are buried in peace, but their name lives on generation after generation."

All Saints' Day is the time for us to remember those women and men who came before us and whose names are forgotten to the world. The reason we celebrate these people is that we must remember that as Christians we are not abandoned to the moment. We are not alone. We are not left adrift in this world with no past and with no future. We are all connected to one another, living and dead, through Christ.

This has a practical implication for us. It means that we don't have to make things up for ourselves. We don't have to re-invent our faith and our traditions in each generation. We don't have to make it up as we go along. That great cloud of witnesses shows us the way to God.

It is amazing to me how our culture seems to have forgotten this simple truth. There are posters around campus this week about a workshop on meditation. One gets the impression that meditation is something new or that some new and revolutionary approach to meditation has recently been discovered. This "New Age" pseudo-religion that celebrates the self, living in the present moment is a lame attempt to invent something out of nothing, to make up a faith or a spirituality that is unconnected to any tradition, to any sense of appreciation of those who have come before us in their attempt to know God. Indeed, it is disconnected even from God.

Professor John Fleming, speaking in another context, might have been talking about this New Age lack of connection with those who have come before us when he said, "This is not so much re-inventing the wheel as it is re-inventing the flat tire." For a handbook on meditation we can do a lot better than looking in the "New Age" section of the book store. There is, to cite one of many examples, a book called The Cloud of Unknowing, written by an anonymous 14th century English monk that is a profoundly simple approach to gaining a greater appreciation of what God is by meditating on what God is not. That monk, whose name is known only to God is part of the great cloud of witnesses we celebrate today.

There are other saints whom each of you could name and tell the rest of us about whose names are not known by many others outside of your family and circle of freinds. I'm thinking here, for example, of the mother of a member of the class of 2001 who died just before Thanksgiving last year. She would have turned 50 yesterday, and her three children and her friends remember her as a loving person whose life connected them to an experience of God's love in this life. For them she is a saint to be remembered today.

I'm thinking, too, of my own grandmother - the one with all the pictures of saints in her home - whose rock solid faith in eternal life with Christ and with her beloved husband who died 37 years before she died shaped my own firm and steadfast conviction that we shall never die, but that we will live forever. This article of faith is proclaimed by many named saints like St. Paul, but it was not Paul but my grandmother - St. Antoinette - who firmly implanted that belief in me.

Who are the great saints in your lives? Who have you known who inherited the kingdom of heaven by being poor in spirit? Who have you learned from who mourned and now is comforted? Who have you known who hungered for righteousness and now is filled, or who was merciful and now has received mercy?

Tonight the church asks you to think about those you have known who now are face to face with God because they were pure in heart in this life, or who are children of God because they were peacemakers.

In the past weeks of terror at home and abroad it has been easy to think of evil drowning out goodness and holiness. Yet the images of virtues lyrically recounted by Matthew in the Beatitudes remind us that our own eyes have seen mourners being comforted, and our own eyes have seen mercy being shown, and we have seen peacemakers rise up among us. And the poetic words of Jesus remind us that the meek rather than the violent are the true heirs of God's gifts to us.

Jesus' Beatitudes are our instruction manual on sainthood, our guide book to a godly life. The historian Barbara Tuchman wrote, "Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible." We have a cloud of witnesses - saints living and dead - who show us that Tuchman was as wrong as she could be.

At the candlelight vigil we had on McCosh Green the evening of September 11, each candle reminded us that our way through suffering and darkness has been guided by good and holy people, named and unnamed, in every generation including our own, who have been beacons of hope and whose lives can instruct our own lives. In our society that places so much emphasis on the contemporary, on the "here and now," this idea may seem absurd that those people called blessed by Jesus are signs for us that the forces of evil, the agents of despair, do not have the final word in our lives.

So let us now sing the praises of famous men and women. Let us sing the praises of holy women and men known to just a few of us, or to none of us - those great saints of God and those humble and unknown saints who form a great cloud of witnesses that guides us in our lives and gives hope to all people for life everlasting in the presence of God. Amen.