All Saints Day
November 1st is All Saints Day, a day when we remember and honour saints, both the famous and the unknown, the celebrated and the personal. And in our gathering today, we also reflect on the saintliness within our own muddled and often what appear to be, less than saintly lives.
The Gospel reading for All Saints Day is Mathew’s Beatitudes. We find Jesus beginning his Sermon on the Mount by breaking away from the set patterns of his faith, finding people exactly where they are in their lives, and calling them into a new narrative of their lives.
Jesus is looking out and seeing all those who need healing and seeing their very real trouble, and understanding, as only he can understand, that they do not need to do anything in particular to gain God’s favour, because just as they are, they live in God’s grace.
We have this mistaken idea that we need to rid ourselves of our evil intent, our slothfulness, our depression, our addictions, our whatever we see as offensive to God. And then, when we, on our own, have cleaned ourselves up, we can stand before God.
This is the pattern Jesus intends to break.
Our Pastoral Prayer, from Nancy Hastings Sehested, with some minor tweaking
Thank you, gracious one, for the shaping from the saints in our lives…for the foolish and the wise ones, the serious and the silly ones, the reserve and the overbearing ones, the mischievous and the obedient ones . . . lives whose presence have broadened and enriched our own.
Free us from regrets by your grace.
Strengthen us by the witness of your hope-bearing and love-embracing saints before us.
May these days make saints of all of us in perseverance in the struggles, in resistance to evil, in reliance on your Spirit.
May we continue feeding the hungry, teaching and tending the children, listening to the lonely, comforting the broken hearted, healing the sick, raising all those who are dead and disheartened in spirit.
May we be found among that countless number who still practice the politics of praise for your creation, and who have always made art of your divine deal of reconciliation.
May we be counted among that number who still lives for your great dreams for humanity again and again and again . . . bolstered by the resolve that we are stronger together when we sacrifice together for the common wealth, the common good, the common cause of justice and peace.
May you still find us with Jesus, walking unafraid, unfaltering . . . undone only by your Spirit swirling in and around us all.
May we be convinced more deeply than ever that nothing, neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation can separate us from your love.
Through the Christ of love, we pray and pray and pray. Amen.
Nancy Hastings Sehested is an American Baptist minister with a long history working in congregational settings as well as a prison chaplain. I know her only through her writing which I find on the most wonderful of sites - PRAYERS AND POLITIKS. The site is written, assembled, and curated by Nancy’s husband, Ken Sehested. It never fails to offer a plethora of gathered goodies for all of us trying to live in the wide embrace of God - while staying well engaged with the world. I am deeply grateful for their collective ministry on line, and their generosity in sharing their resources with others. Here below are several quotes Ken gathered for All Saints Day. Go to their website for the longer list.
“The world is waiting for new saints, ecstatic men and women who are so deeply rooted in the love of God that they are free to imagine a new international order. . . . Most people despair that [it] is possible. They cling to old ways and prefer the security of their misery to the insecurity of their joy. But the few who dare to sing a new song of peace are the new St. Francises of our time, offering a glimpse of a new order that is being born out of the ruin of the old.”
“A saint is simply a human being whose soul has . . . grown up to its full stature, by full and generous response to its environment, God.”
“I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.”
“There is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future.” ”
