All Saints Sunday

All Saints Day is one of the liturgical days that don’t get much attention in many Protestant churches. Not too surprising as it is one of the ones tied to a secular calendar date which makes difficult to get it in. There are two ways to deal with these special days, one is to ignore them, the other is to celebrate them on the Sunday closest to them. This is the Sunday we ended up talking about saints, All Saints Day, and what a saint might be.

I came across an interesting quotation, which I sent out to my little list of daily quotation recipients on November 1 this year. “All of the places of our lives are sanctuaries; some of them just happen to have steeples. And all of the people in our lives are saints; it is just that some of them have day jobs and most will never have feast days named for them.” (Robert Benson) I like this for several reasons, not least of which is it helps us get past the notion that “Saint” only applies to especially holy people who have been dead for a while. When we look for uses of “saint” in scripture it is most often directed to people who are alive and what is more, seem to be just like you and me.

What I was trying for in today’s sermons was to help us see that being a saint isn’t a special calling to some of God’s people but rather a description of God’s people . . . and then what that might mean for us.