All Saints Sunday
Category: Sundays after Pentecost
Speaker: The Rev. Shearon Sykes Wiliams
All Saints Sunday is about fullness - God’s fullness and the fullness of the life we share with God. This fullness encompasses past, present and future. Today we celebrate those who were faithful in the past, those who will be faithful in the future and the life we share in Christ in the here and now. And that vast, cosmic reality of the universal Church across time and space comes into sharp focus in a very particular way this morning as we baptize two beautiful children- Katherine at the 8:00 service and Liam at 10:30. We have the profound privilege of bringing them into the fullness of the communion of saints and giving them the inheritance of Christian faith that the Letter to the Ephesians describes so majestically.
That inheritance is a wonderful gift, a treasure. It is a gift freely given to Liam and Katherine today. And like every gift offered in love, it is meant to be unwrapped and cherished by the one who receives it. As young children, Katherine and Liam’s parents are making the choice for them to be brought up in Christian faith. They will come to church and experience our faith in community as Christians have from generation to generation. And through that experience, Katherine and Liam will grow into the “full stature of Christ.” (Book of Common Prayer, p. 302) When they are older, they will make the conscious choice to be confirmed and say for themselves what their parents and godparents choose for them today.
Each of us here today has received a great inheritance and we too have to make a conscious choice each day to claim our inheritance and make our faith our own. As each of us grows toward and into adulthood, we realize that life is often very ambiguous and complicated. Discerning how to make a faithful response to the world around us can be very challenging.
One of the things that we have been talking about in our Life, Community and Faith class is our particular Episcopal way of living our Christian faith. Episcopalians use a framework of Scripture, reason, tradition and experience to discern God’s will for us in the here and now. SCRIPTURE, REASON, TRADITION AND EXPERIENCE. This framework came out of the English Reformation, in the midst of the civil war between Protestants and Roman Catholics. Richard Hooker (whose feast day is this week) outlined a “Via Media,” a middle way approach to Christianity that created a “big tent” church. So this is our particular inheritance within the larger inheritance of Christianity. It is still a very vibrant, dynamic model for us today. When we are struggling with how to discern God’s will for us, we look at Scripture and interpret it in light of our God-given capacity for reason and our inherited tradition. Scripture is the life-giving Word of God and yet each book of our Bible has to be understood in light of its original social and historical context. We believe that the Holy Spirit helps us to interpret Scripture in our present age and brings us new understandings in a variety of ways, including scientific breakthroughs. That is how the Episcopal Church discerned a call to full inclusion of our LGBT brothers and sisters. Science has helped us understand the concept of sexual orientation that our forefathers and mothers did not understand. We now know that we human beings are much more richly diverse than we had previously imagined. We make these discernments not in SPITE of our faith but BECAUSE of our faith. That is how we understand the unity in Christ that Ephesians talks about. The unity we find in diversity. The unity in Christ that we share through our baptism. That is what brings us into God’s fullness- by taking our inheritance and interpreting it our own day and time and making it a lived, embodied experience in our relationship with others.
Our faith is not meant to be a “siloed” thing that we only practice on Sundays. Our faith is about continually “growing into the full stature of Christ,” bringing all of the pieces of our life together, becoming integrated human beings, living fully for God in the world, living the way that Jesus lived on earth.
When we baptize Liam and Katherine today, we baptize them into the mystical communion of saints who struggled to incorporate their faith in their day and age. They are here- all around us- right now. They are the original apostles who followed Jesus. They are the early Church fathers and mothers in the first 5 centuries of Christianity who gave us our foundational understanding of Christianity. For some of us, they are our own grandmothers and grandfathers, fathers and mothers, who took us to church when we were little and said prayers with us every night and showed us what faithfulness looks like. For others of us, they are the people who saw that we were seeking greater meaning in our lives and invited us to go to church with them. They are the English immigrants who founded Saint Georges at the turn of the 20th century and worshipped in the original chapel at the other end of our building that Spanish-speaking immigrants worship in today. They are the Saint Georgians who in 1952 built the nave we worship in this morning. So many people have gone before us to give us the inheritance that we have today. And they are here with us right now. They are seen and unseen. They line the aisles, they are singing in the choir, they surround the altar and they are all around the baptismal font, waiting, just waiting to welcome Katherine and Liam into their mystical fellowship. Through them we experience a fullness that cannot be bound by words-the fullness of life in Christ, the one who “fills all in all.”
All Saints Sunday is about fullness- God’s fullness and the fullness of the life we share with God. This fullness encompasses past, present and future. Today we celebrate those who were faithful in the past, those who will be faithful in the future and the life we share in Christ in the here and now. And that vast, cosmic reality of the universal Church across time and space comes into sharp focus in a very particular way this morning as we baptize two beautiful children- Katherine at the 8:00 service and Liam at 10:30. We have the profound privilege of bringing them into the fullness of the communion of saints and giving them the inheritance of Christian faith that the Letter to the Ephesians describes so majestically.
That inheritance is a wonderful gift, a treasure. It is a gift freely given to Liam and Katherine today. And like every gift offered in love, it is meant to be unwrapped and cherished by the one who receives it. As young children, Katherine and Liam’s parents are making the choice for them to be brought up in Christian faith. They will come to church and experience our faith in community as Christians have from generation to generation. And through that experience, Katherine and Liam will grow into the “full stature of Christ.” (Book of Common Prayer, p. 302) When they are older, they will make the conscious choice to be confirmed and say for themselves what their parents and godparents choose for them today.
Each of us here today has received a great inheritance and we too have to make a conscious choice each day to claim our inheritance and make our faith our own. As each of us grows toward and into adulthood, we realize that life is often very ambiguous and complicated. Discerning how to make a faithful response to the world around us can be very challenging.
One of the things that we have been talking about in our Life, Community and Faith class is our particular Episcopal way of living our Christian faith. Episcopalians use a framework of Scripture, reason, tradition and experience to discern God’s will for us in the here and now. SCRIPTURE, REASON, TRADITION AND EXPERIENCE. This framework came out of the English Reformation, in the midst of the civil war between Protestants and Roman Catholics. Richard Hooker (whose feast day is this week) outlined a “Via Media,” a middle way approach to Christianity that created a “big tent” church. So this is our particular inheritance within the larger inheritance of Christianity. It is still a very vibrant, dynamic model for us today. When we are struggling with how to discern God’s will for us, we look at Scripture and interpret it in light of our God-given capacity for reason and our inherited tradition. Scripture is the life-giving Word of God and yet each book of our Bible has to be understood in light of its original social and historical context. We believe that the Holy Spirit helps us to interpret Scripture in our present age and brings us new understandings in a variety of ways, including scientific breakthroughs. That is how the Episcopal Church discerned a call to full inclusion of our LGBT brothers and sisters. Science has helped us understand the concept of sexual orientation that our forefathers and mothers did not understand. We now know that we human beings are much more richly diverse than we had previously imagined. We make these discernments not in SPITE of our faith but BECAUSE of our faith. That is how we understand the unity in Christ that Ephesians talks about. The unity we find in diversity. The unity in Christ that we share through our baptism. That is what brings us into God’s fullness- by taking our inheritance and interpreting it our own day and time and making it a lived, embodied experience in our relationship with others.
Our faith is not meant to be a “siloed” thing that we only practice on Sundays. Our faith is about continually “growing into the full stature of Christ,” bringing all of the pieces of our life together, becoming integrated human beings, living fully for God in the world, living the way that Jesus lived on earth.
When we baptize Liam and Katherine today, we baptize them into the mystical communion of saints who struggled to incorporate their faith in their day and age. They are here- all around us- right now. They are the original apostles who followed Jesus. They are the early Church fathers and mothers in the first 5 centuries of Christianity who gave us our foundational understanding of Christianity. For some of us, they are our own grandmothers and grandfathers, fathers and mothers, who took us to church when we were little and said prayers with us every night and showed us what faithfulness looks like. For others of us, they are the people who saw that we were seeking greater meaning in our lives and invited us to go to church with them. They are the English immigrants who founded Saint Georges at the turn of the 20th century and worshipped in the original chapel at the other end of our building that Spanish-speaking immigrants worship in today. They are the Saint Georgians who in 1952 built the nave we worship in this morning. So many people have gone before us to give us the inheritance that we have today. And they are here with us right now. They are seen and unseen. They line the aisles, they are singing in the choir, they surround the altar and they are all around the baptismal font, waiting, just waiting to welcome Katherine and Liam into their mystical fellowship. Through them we experience a fullness that cannot be bound by words-the fullness of life in Christ, the one who “fills all in all.”