Many churches throughout mainline Protestant Christianity will celebrate All Saints’ Sunday this week. (The actual celebration is on Friday, November 1st, but the Episcopal Church also encourages celebrating this occasion on the following Sunday.) The collect for All Saints’ Day captivates my attention and my imagination because of the descriptive language associated with God, the important role of all the saints, and the aim (or telos) of us as followers of Christ. Before going any further though, here’s the collect in its entirety:
Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord: Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen. (The Book of Common Prayer, 245).
Taking a look at the descriptive language in this prayer, we discover God’s intimate role in the lives of the saints. After the opening address, “Almighty God,” which provides a powerful portrayal of the Divine, the collect turns to a much softer active verb to depict God’s role in tying the saints together. “You have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship…” (italics added for emphasis), the collect says. Here I imagine the Thursday knitting group, which meets here at All Saints, as they make prayer shawls that will be taken to sick babies, worried parents, and aging parishioners alike. God as Creator is not bringing us, the saints, together via thunderbolt and lightening (very, very frightening), but instead through calmly weaving us into a pattern beyond our comprehension. What’s the pattern? Our Almighty Knitter binds us together such that we actually become the Body of Christ. To borrow one of my liturgy professor’s favorite questions, “Isn’t that RAD?!”
This form that God weaves us into has the shape of the Mystical Body of Christ, but we see this pattern not only in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, but also in the lives of all the saints. Our collect does us a disservice when it says, “Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living.” Why is this a disservice? Well, when we describe the saints as blessed and when we say that they live godly and virtuous lives we mistakenly discount our own experiences as saints.
Recently I’ve been on a tear trying to hear as many parishioners’ stories as I can. Using Mary Parmer’s Invite Welcome Connect model as inspiration, I’ve been asking people what brought them to God or the Church, or when they have felt welcomed or like they belong (either in the Church or elsewhere). The powerful responses in the form of life-altering stories help me to see the shape of Jesus’ life and the shape of the Saints’ lives in the lives of everyday, ordinary people. I believe this is true precisely because the capital S Saints “are just folk like me” and you, to borrow a line from Lesbia Scott’s famous hymn. Virtuous and godly living then is not something that was only aspired to by people who lived a long time ago or those who currently reside in a hermitage, but rather as we become students or disciples of Jesus, we learn that we too can walk this way (talk this way) of love. We too are called to journey with Christ, Saints, and saints into abundant life, what we sometimes call the life eternal.
Finally, the collect provides us who pray these words with an aim for our lives. Virtuous living simply put is rightly aimed living. The way we find our aim is by living together in community, studying Holy Scripture and other texts, worshipping God by participating in Holy Sacraments and sacramental rites, and by allowing God’s grace to penetrate even into the most broken parts of our existence. When we take part in communities that work, pray, study, eat, and worship together, then one beautiful outgrowth we receive is values by which we can live our best life (a phrase that has seeped into the parlance of social media).
Within the All Saints (Sun)Day collect we discover that the aim of us the pray-er is to be knit into the Mystical Body of Christ (full stop). The mechanism through which this happens is God’s grace—God unconditionally loving us first. And, our response is to follow the pattern of the Saints who followed the pattern of Jesus the Christ. We follow this pattern best by becoming part of a community with virtues that align with the life of Christ and the lives of the Saints (and the saints). The by-products of this type of living, according to the collect, are ineffable joys and a full life prepared by God. (These joys by the way are unexplainable happiness, not something else, like was thought on an episode of How I Met Your Mother). So, you may be wondering though, what’s the catch?
It’s easy to read this collect and feel a bit inspired. Still, there’s the reality that, as the saying goes, the devil is in the details. So, how do we get this life with indescribable happiness? How do we become like the Saints? How do we model our lives in the form of Christ? How? Well, I do not know for sure, but I do know two things. First, the good news is that God loves us first. There’s no way to opt out of God loving us. God's love is unconditional, all-encompassing, limitless, timeless, and beyond measure. Second, our response is to do to God and neighbor exactly what God does to us—love without limit. This second part can be tough though, and this is where the saints come into the picture.
The Saints of the Church and the saints in your church are folk just like you and me. And, they didn’t always get loving God and neighbor right. What matters is that we continue to practice. When we mess up we turn back to God and reconcile (when possible) with our neighbor. But, just because we mess up it doesn’t mean we stop loving. For God who loves us completely inspires us through the lives of each other and on All Saints Sunday we are reminded that each one of us is a saint to someone else. So, don’t ever give up. Don’t ever stop receiving and giving the love of God because our Almighty Knitter is always weaving us together through the fabric of Christ’s self-giving love.
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