Glory to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Today’s feast of all the saints is the result and goal of everything that has gone before it. The purpose of all the events in the life of Christ and the Church – from the Annunciation to the Resurrection, the Ascension and Pentecost – has been to unite the natures of God and man and to make saints. That is the purpose of the Church, its function in this world: to produce men and women who partake in the nature of God. Today’s feast commemorates the identity of the Church, her sacred purpose and destiny.
What is a Saint? The word means a “holy one.” A person who is set apart for a purpose, and made to participate in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4).
Understand that holiness means setting apart for a purpose. This gold chalice is made and consecrated for one use alone: To hold the Body and Blood of Christ. Should I take the cup that has been dedicated to holy use, and use it to drink coffee or beer? God forbid!
Now, we humans were made for a purpose as well; we were made for union with God. In baptism we entered into the death and resurrection of Christ, and we have risen as new creations, formed and destined for the purpose of being God-bearers.
First of all, we need to know that saints – holy men and women – are not born, they are made. We’re all born with the potential to become holy. We all have a high calling (Romans 1:7) and predestination (Romans 8:29-30) to be purified, illumined, conformed to the likeness of God the Son, and to walk in his divine wholeness, power, and love.
The difference between the saints, and us who are not saints, is that they are people who are continually picking themselves up after sinning, continually repenting until they attain holiness.
Isn’t that why God was able to say of King David, who committed adultery and murder, “I have found a man after my own heart”? (1 Samuel 13:14; Acts 13:22) — Because David knew how to repent, and his heart was always set on pilgrimage, to return and come and stand in the face of God. David wasn’t a man without sins, but he was made holy by the Lord.
In Romans 1:7 St Paul writes that we are all called to be saints. It’s our purpose and destiny. Over fifty times the New Testament calls Christian people “the saints,” naming us by what we are meant to be.
When you read the New Testament letters to the church at Corinth, you see that this church was in a state of disastrous moral confusion. But Saint Paul writes to the Corinthians that God has already accomplished their holiness: “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? …And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were made holy, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor 6:9-11).
We are here and now being made holy. To the Hebrews, the apostle writes: “For by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy” (Hebrews 10:14). This has already been accomplished, but it is not yet clearly seen. Like the Hebrew people entering the promised land, the holiness and purity of the sons of God is now our inheritance, but taking possession of it will require that we unite the abundant grace of God to intention and action on our part.
Matthew 11:12 in the King James says, “From the beginning until now, the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.” A better translation says, “the Kingdom of Heaven has been forcefully advancing, and with force people lay hold of it.”
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At our baptism, we were asked: “Do you renounce Satan, and all his works, and all his service, and all his pride?”
“I renounce him,” we responded three times. We made our repentance publicly before the Lord and the Church, turning once and for all from our sins to the living God.
But then, before the sun went down on the day of our new birth by water and the Spirit, what happened? We sinned. In word, or thought, or in action. And, having fallen, we got back up. Because while repentance may have a beginning, it is a continual turning back to God.
When you drive, your steering wheel is always in motion, correcting a little to the left or right. You can’t lock the wheel in place; you’ll keep moving straight only if you keep correcting your course. Going straight is actually constantly turning toward your goal.
In the 83rd Psalm, we read, “Blessed is the man whose help is from thee; he hath made ascents in his heart, in the vale of weeping, in the place which he hath appointed.” (Ps 83:6 LXX). Now sometimes the old-fashioned language in our Psalter is lovely and poetic, and sometimes it’s a little… opaque. Here’s that passage in a modern translation: “Blessed are those whose strength is in you, who have set their hearts on pilgrimage. As they pass through the Valley of Weeping, they make it a place of springs; the early rains cover it with pools” (Ps 84:5-6 MT).
What an image… They have set their hearts on pilgrimage. They are going up to Jerusalem to worship the Lord. They have determined to turn and keep on turning toward the Lord their hope. And their way leads through the valley of weeping, or “valley of Baca” in some Bibles. Bakha means weeping, but it’s also the name of a literal place: A barren, dry valley, full of thorns. And as the ones whose hearts are set on turning to God pass through the dry, exhausting Valley of Weeping, in their passing they turn it into a place of springs and early rains.
* * *
We live in a broken world. You can’t look at the news for even a moment without seeing the evidence of suffering and violence and corruption. Yet our God, when he created the world, called it good.
It is human sin that causes and increases the chaos and strife in the world.
For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration… in confident expectation that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies (Romans 8:19-23).
But not only is the disorder and destruction in the world caused by our sin. The reverse is also true: As we become partakers in the life and nature and wholeness of God, as our inner life and being begins to be set in order and at peace, our little corner of the world begins to be healed. Here and now, in one person, the kingdom of God has come, his will is done on earth as it is in heaven.
This is what Saint Seraphim meant when he said, “Acquire the Spirit of peace, and thousands around you will be saved.”
* * *
Since the fourth century, there have been groups of people who taught that Jesus Christ was not God; that maybe he was a hero or a demigod or some other created being. But as you read the letters of the Apostle John, you’ll note that this is not the problem he’s addressing; Saint John in his epistles is responding to people who didn’t believe the Lord was really human.
First-century Jews and Gentiles were scandalized by the Christian belief that the holy, good, uncreated, unapproachable and perfect God of heaven might have come down and taken a body made of meat and sweat and suffering. How gross! And unworthy of the honor of God.
For the same reason, the Greeks ridiculed the Christian hope of the resurrection. They taught that we are pure, heavenly spirits temporarily imprisoned in heavy, messy material bodies – so they thought of salvation as deliverance from life in a body. They sought salvation from incarnation.
But the Church continued to preach that the incarnation of Christ is our salvation. Uniting our souls and bodies to the uncreated God makes us heirs and participants in the life of eternity.
Most of us here today do believe that Christ is fully human. He is exactly what Adam was created to be: A person with a body and a life in this created world, in time and space and relationships, who is also deified, transfigured, and shining with the divine, unapproachable light of the resurrection.
That means that salvation is the process of our becoming fully human.
We read about saints who seemed to live with one foot in the kingdom come, to whom the laws of nature were sometimes optional. Miracles and healings happened around them because where they were was an outpost of paradise, and God’s will was being done on earth as it is in heaven.
And then we look at ourselves – achy, tired, grumpy, worried about the bills and the kids. Our attention is fragmented among our responsibilities and interruptions and the projects we never get around to – like our daily rule of prayer. It is hard to think about some fourth-century mystic hermit monk in the desert and say, “That’s what I’m supposed to become.”
That is one reason I am encouraged by the lives of saints like Luke the Surgeon, Archbishop of Simferopol. He graduated from art school, then studied medicine and became a doctor who wrote surgery textbooks that are still in use. When his wife died, he was ordained, and became a bishop, and underwent Communist persecution. He lived into the 1960s, and was familiar with technology, business, and politics – he was one of us. And in this world of technology, church-and-state issues, being arrested and interrogated by police, he was faithful to Christ and became a wise spiritual father, a wonderworker, and an intercessor.
Father Seraphim Rose, who reposed in 1982, is another person from our own time and generation, a son of the age of television and the sexual revolution, who came to faith, worked out his salvation, and has entered into the Holy of Holies; it’s a matter of time before he is added to our calendar of saints.
Mother Olga of Alaska is another saint whose glorification is planned. She was a native woman, married to the village postmaster, and she managed the general store in her town, where she was the midwife. Her husband was not a spiritual man, and they had a lot of trouble but Olga prayed for years, and in time he began attending church. He went on to study and was ordained in 1963. He traveled around the villages in the diocese, and she went with him, assisting women in childbirth and victims of domestic abuse. She and her husband had thirteen children – they lost five, but eight lived to adulthood. She sewed vestments, baked bread for church, and made boots, gloves and coats for parishioners – and more importantly she was known as a woman of peace and acquainted with grief, who listened to suffering people and gave wise counsel. In 1979, she was diagnosed with cancer, and that November she received Communion, crossed herself, and departed peacefully to Christ. Since her repose she has been active, doing miracles for people who ask her intercessions, and appearing in visions together with the Mother of God to encourage suffering people. Many of us remember what we were doing in 1979. This is not a story from a history-book, it is one of us, here and now, living in union with God.
Olga didn’t go on a great missionary journey, didn’t publish any theological books, didn’t become a nun or a monastic or a queen, she wasn’t martyred for the faith. She just lived out her faith, all her life, practicing the presence of Christ.
* * *
Some people seem to think that there are three kinds of people. The first class of people are the worst. Those are the ones who completely turn their backs on God, utterly reject the Gospel, and spend eternity in hell. The second group is the best people: The ones who are exalted in heaven as saints. Then the third class is the rest of us – just lazy, bumbling Christians who’ll never measure up to the high call of God in his saints. Hopefully we’ll manage to stumble into heaven somehow.
But in fact there is only one class of people. People who are set apart for a purpose, and made to participate in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). Called (Romans 1:7) and predestined (Romans 8:29-30) to be purified, illumined, conformed to the likeness of God the Son. Sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be holy, together with all who in every place call on the name of Jesus Christ our Lord (1 Corinthians 1:2).
And I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come shall separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:38-39).
“Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard — lest at any time we should let them slip. For how can we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation?” (Hebrews 2:1,3).
I pray that each one of us here today will fulfill the destiny for which God created us. May none of us neglect the grace of God; but “let us lay aside every encumbrance, and the sin which so easily entangles us; and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith” (Hebrews 12:1,2).
Through the prayers of our holy fathers, and of all the saints.
