The Rev. Canon Todd Smlser
12:15 Eucharist
November 1, 2006

Last evening was, of course, Halloween, All Hallow’s Eve.  Many popular Halloween customs date back to the pre-Christian Druids in Ireland and Britain.  These customs come to us through the filter of many Christian centuries.  Christ has conquered the powers of darkness.  The once fearful aspects of this season have become playful, as we watch our children and grandchildren dress up and trick or treat their neighbors.  The once fearful aspects of this season have become playful.

Halloween has been baptized by our culture.  It has become All Saint’s Eve in more than name alone.  Both occasions address the same themes.  Both occasions are concerned with the hope of life beyond the grave, choosing the side of the angels, and finding courage in a scary world.  And while Halloween deals with  them through mischievous humor, All Saint’s approaches these themes with triumphant joy.

The Feast of All Saint’s, with triumphant music and colorful vestments, is the sunny side of Halloween.  The saints we honor this day, a vast, innumerable crowd, are but graduates of the school of grace and struggle.  The saints are those who are wise enough to face their fears and accept the help of God as naturally as a small child walking in the dark accepts a parent’s hand.

Saints are people who take God seriously, at his word, while everything and everyone else, including themselves, they regard lightly.  Saints are people who are not afraid to struggle with the great division between good and evil, life and death, heaven and hell.  What makes them the saints they are?  Barbara Brown Taylor offers a list of upsetting characteristics for them:  immoderate faith, intemperate hope and inordinate love.”  They put on these characteristics like the outlandish costumes of Halloween, and never take them off.

Today we remember those who have gone before, and pray that we may follow after.  Many of you are here today for this service, because a loved one in your life died in the past year—a spouse or child, a grandparent or close friend.  We are here to hear again Jesus’ words of promise, “I am Resurrection and I am Life, says the Lord.  Whoever has faith in me shall have life, even though he die….As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives and that at the last he will stand upon the earth.”  The saints massed in their glorious ranks are a promise of our happy return home, with hearts glad and eyes open to the wonder of God.  We also remember today all of those service men and women who have been killed this past year in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in other places of conflict in the world.  We pray for their souls, and for their families, and we continue to pray for peace throughout the world.

As on Halloween night, when children were everywhere in outlandish attire, so every day of the year saints are everywhere, in heaven and on earth, known to us and unknown, children of God living by love and delight, all of them with one common home where the feast has no ending.

Using words from the priest and poet John Donne, let us pray to join the saints in that one common home:

“Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening into the house and gate of heaven, to enter into that gate and dwell in that house, where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music; no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession; no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity in the habitations of thy glory and dominion world without end. Amen