Sadly, I will be with St Cuthbert’s Youth this evening, so I won’t be home to greet any children who appear dressed as Spiderman or a princess (or a Spiderman Princess) to demand lollies and chocolate. I confess I have a pure, dinky-di, visceral distaste for Halloween, which is odd because I have an equally pure, visceral passion for sugary treats. What I do l like about Halloween and its pagan predecessor Samhain (pronounced Sowin) is that it is a night of the year about fear, darkness, death and the end of the world. When Samhain was co-opted by European Christianity as All Hallows Eve, it kept all the delicious spooky parts as a precursor to the more sedate feast day of All Hallows Day, which falls tomorrow but which we observe today. The lectionary has blessed us with a first reading about the end of the world and a second reading about death and mortality. Just the cheery topic for a nice spring day in the hills.
Throughout the year, the Christians calendar designates days to remember certain saints. There is no universally agreed calendar, and there are local and national variations. But on All Saints Day the specific becomes the general and we give thanks for the communion of saints, living and departed. We remember all saints and we give thanks that we are all saints. It is a day when Great Aunt Deirdre is just important as Hilda of Whitby, when the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Ecumenical Patriarch are no more or less vital to proceedings than the child baptised this morning. All the saints - role models and rascals, institutional heavy hitters and quiet achievers - get an equal hearing.
So what is a saint? The English word saint is an attempt to translate the Greek hagios, which means something like ‘holy ones’ or those set apart. The Greek scriptures, like Colossians and first Corinthians and Ephesians, use hagios as a catch-all term for all the believers. Paul writes to the ekklesia of hagios, the gathering of those set apart, which we translate (somewhat less helpfully) as the church of saints.
All this holiness and setting apart and gathering together might easily create the impression of a higher status. Like being picked in the rep squad for state hockey, or getting in to WAAPA or being placed in the special class for kids who can multiply large numbers in their heads. If we didn’t read the scriptures or know anything about Jesus, we might well think that sainthood conferred some sort of special authority or privilege.
Of course, throughout history, Christians have sometimes behaved as if sainthood – being a baptised, believing member of the church - conferred the right to do anything you damn please, especially to unbelievers. The whole colonial enterprise, including the vile treatment of Noongar people on this land, was founded on a sense of superiority, which provided a quasi-theological justification for white supremacy and the extinction of whole cultures.
So today’s readings about death and the end of the world provide a much-needed antidote to our delusions of high status and unassailable importance. Lazarus has died and he’s been in the ground long enough that he starts to stink. Jesus raises him from the dead as an act of compassion, but we sometimes forget that Lazarus will die again and be put back into the ground and his body will start to stink all over again, just as yours and mine will one day. And in the book of Revelation, that book of apocalyptic poetry, though we hear of a vision of a new heaven and a new earth, and of every tear wiped away, the triumphant Christ comes with judgement and wrath for our actions. And though the saints are tasked with praising God, they are not exempt from God’s wrath. Wrath which is not merely irrational anger, but a righteous indignation at our sin, and a deep and compassionate desire for our transformation.
The ekklesia of hagios – the gathering of the holy ones (which we call the church) is not granted special rights to demand privilege or status. When we are admitted to the church through baptism and at that moment become a saint, we don’t suddenly become one of the popular kids, lording it over others from our ivory tower of privilege. For the saints, the true privilege is the service of others, the death of ego and selfishness, the sacrifice of position and praise and the embrace of humility. When you hear of an inspirational saint, or occasionally meet one, they are never those with the tidiest house or the most followers on Instagram. The truly inspirational saint embodies the good news, and lives with a constant awareness of their own mortality and judgement.
To be a saint is to be no better or worse than anyone else, but to have an entirely different relationship with death and the end of the world. Because we know how our story ends and how the story of this world ends, we inhabit our bodies and our surroundings differently. Because death is our constant companion, we do not fear it, and life can flourish if only we give it room.
The Lord Be With You