A Homily for the Feast of All Saints

A sermon preached by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on November 5, 2023, the Feast of All Saints (Transferred).

Kobayashi Isaa (1763-1828) the Japanese poet whose work is marked by tender attentiveness bats, cats, spiders, mosquitos and the incorrigible foibles of human behavior has a famous haiku–

Even poorly planted rice

slowly, slowly

becomes green

It would be easy to assume, I suppose, that on this Feast of All Saints–white vestments, starched and pressed baptismal towels, flowers at the font where we will soon baptize, and everyone arrayed in their Sunday best–that baptism and sanctity are all about purity. But all we need to hear is that we are, “washed… white in the blood of the Lamb,” for us to recognize that if this is about purity, it is about a very different kind of purity than what we normally associate with the antiseptic sterility of the surgical theatre, or heroic feats of self-purification. “Even poorly planted rice/slowly, slowly/becomes green.”

Rowan Williams likes to remind us that when we are baptized in the River Jordan, we can expect a great deal of mud to be stirred up. Baptism washes us into solidarity with all those with whom Jesus keeps company–the meek and mournful, the hungry and thirsty, the persecuted and reviled. We keep our eye on the bandaged place, standing in Jesus’ transparency to the Father with the broken-hearted. Not because we’re good, or trying to make it all better, but because in the noncalculative release of being-with something other than the mind and heart and spirit that created the problem has an opportunity to emerge, to burble up. 

Blessedness–”ineffable joy” as our collect calls it–is actually first forsaking all efforts to make the mess tidy by our own efforts. Blessedness and ineffable joy come from entering the muddy places and there, too, discovering God’s greening, God at work. Blessedness is inviting God into our stuck places… something that only finally happens it seems, when we’ve exhausted all our efforts to get unstuck by ourselves. God binds up the broken-hearted and we participate in God’s work not by chirpily explaining away the suffering and the pain, but in entering whatever haunt of jackals, whatever “poorly-planted” place life presents and tenderly feeling our way open into God’s greening: “Even poorly planted rice/slowly, slowly/becomes green.”

What goes (ritually at least) under the water in baptism is the life with I, me, mine at the center that brings only suffering, lack, and hunger to ourselves and others. Habits of self-enclosure, self-absorption, and prideful forgetfulness die hard, of course, but the process of weaning ourselves from the self and its compulsion to secure its identity by its own efforts is set in motion. We slowly, slowly–daily office by daily office, eucharist by eucharist, offered box of food by offered box of food–come to be sourced in, greened by, the inexhaustible waters of God’s mercy and loving-kindness. Power, prestige, and possessions–any created thing upon which we rely for ultimate security–fail to sustain us. We usually have to learn this the hard way, but baptism enacts this reality for us, in us, from the start. Baptism shows us where the indwelling living waters are to be found, even if we continue to seek that water externally in futile strategies of management and control.

Despite what all the kooks who populate the staticky outer reaches of the AM radio band might say, the Book of Revelation is not prognostication, but perhaps best read as descriptive of the process by which the Christian comes to seat the crucified and risen Christ–the slain and standing lion-lamb–on the throne of the heart. Unconditional love in the person of Christ Jesus is standing at the door and knocking, desirous to come in and eat with us, to share his very life with us. And yet, like young lions thoroughly convinced of our self-sufficient invulnerablility, we prowl about–deluded kings of our petty jungles–consuming those in our path, eating others, instead of feeding them. 

Sourced in the love of God that doesn’t come and go like everything else in our life, we realize and come to embody a settled, entrusting, faithful stability in which even when hungry, even when thirsty, even when the blazing sun and scorching heat are beating down on us as they inevitably do, we hunger and thirst no more. We are sourced in the springs of the water of life. Christ Jesus, seated on the throne of the heart, irrigating the parched places of our lives and communities as bread to feed, water to wash, oil to heal, and wine to wet a dried up throat.

Sourced in the love of God, in those inexhaustible springs of the water of life that is truly life, all those troubling, terrifying ways we’ve sought our peace, our happiness, our joy apart from God come tumbling down. We taste and see that the Lord is good. And praise and thanksgiving flow from our stunned and stuttering lips. Who? Me? Here? Like this? Yes you, here, like that, just as you are, just as you are. Just as you are. “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.” Jesus’ experience of his Abba, Poppa, Daddy’s love at his own baptism by John in the River Jordan–just as you are, just as you are–comes to be the fountain and source of who and whose we are. 

For longer than I can remember, I’ve had a love affair with those lines from 1 John, “Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.” And for many years, decades, I had no idea why I found them to be such a comfort. But recently I realized that the world, other people, institutions, governments, corporations, television and social media are constantly trying to tell me who I am, whose I am. I couldn’t figure out, after spending a recess locked in a locker, why “What I will be has yet to be revealed,” rang in my boxed ears, until it became clear that who I really am, despite all worldly claims to know me, to name me, to possess and own me, “is a child of God, NOW.” No wonder Luther used to say each morning–“Martin! Remember you are baptized!” No one except the greening God can name us–poorly planted rice that we are. Saints unabashedly live this… often to the shock and horror of the rest of us trapped in being nice and good, comfortably wedded to the name the world has named us with and eager to maintain it.

Encompassed by God’s abundant, provisioning, providential care, that I am beloved came to be seen as the only true thing about me. And when I am re-membered, recollected, when I find myself gathered and renewed in that truth, and sourced in those waters, everything else is relativized. Cuts and scrapes, bumps and bruises to be sure. But something irrevocable and indominable indwelling it all, something blessing the messiness of daily life. Something in the stranger’s face flickers with Christ’s–you visited me–visage. “Let us exalt his Name together.”

So this purity we enact today, is a purity found in, manifesting as, the mud of our ordinary lives as exactly the place, exactly the way God comes to us. Purification, if we want to call it that, is something God does in God’s own time in us, on us. Too often, in our contemporary purity culture we try to do the purifying ourselves. We take the pruning shears to parts of the vine we’d rather not see, or be with, or acknowledge. We fashion a blowtorch of the refiner’s fire and try to scorch away in ourselves and others what we think is dirty, bad, immoral, unacceptable, impure in the eyes of our imagined idolatrous God. 

But the purifying, greening, work of God is found in relationship with Jesus. And it is in relationship with Jesus that the Beatitudes–those saintly manifestations of what love looks like in our lives–are enacted. Human beings, by their own efforts, cannot live the beatitudes. That’s pretty much the whole point. If you think if you just try harder–really buckle down this time around and get your act together–then we’ll succeed in living the beatitudes, we’re seriously deluded. Like young lions. Approached that way–as ethical high bars we can never reach–we know only lack.

There is only one person who has not walked in the way of the wicked (Psalm 1): Jesus. There is only one person who can live the beatitudes: Jesus. He is the spring of the water of life. He is the lion-lamb slain-and-standing who shepherds, shields, and wipes away every tear. Only Jesus is pure. And we forgiven sinners, foolish and forgetful beings that we are, are made pure through our surrendered, vulnerable, honest, relationship with him as our Lord. It is in our poverty of spirit, our receptivity, our yieldness, our capacity for letting go, letting be and letting through that his purity comes to inhabit the mud of our lives as ineffable joy.

The great paradox of the Christian life is that in realizing that we are loved just as we are, accepting our acceptance, we are made, by greening grace, a little more like he is. The way to so-called purity is in the full embrace of our imperfections. The way up is the way down. It is in letting the light of the just-as-you-are encompassing God of love in, that our stuck places, our captivities are touched, healed, and transfigured. Saints are simply those who let that healing light through. Never perfectly. Never completely unhinderedly. But enough that sometimes when we look at them in some parts of their lives, we see that they are like him: curiously, startlingly, like Jesus. His love has purified them of their egoistical efforts to perfect themselves, their misguided attempts to win a saintliness of their own devising, under their own steam, and some of Christ’s life now lives, shines, in them.

Dig deep enough under the surface of any saint’s life and you’ll find that many (most?) are failed young lion perfectionists whose throw in the towel collapse opened them finally to a power and grace they never knew existed. Saints are those curious folk even whose imperfections are offered to God as humble little gifts–in the way a small child brings us a delightfull haphazard bouquet of crumpled dandelions and spurge weed. “Perfect!” says the God of love who takes our weedy offering into Godself and gives them back to us bread for the world. Surrounded by all this lace, and white linen, please don’t waste time trying to purify yourself. Instead offer yourself, just as you are, to the light of God’s presence. Bring it all–your dandelions, spurge weed, bottle caps, and pocket lint–and place it on the altar. See what saint is waiting to be born when you finally stop trying to fix yourself–slowly slowly becoming green.

Amen.