All Saints’ Day 2022

The United States is a famously religious country, especially when compared with the rest of the economically-developed world. And not just religious, but aggressively, visibly Christian, at least for a certain value of Christian.

It should be noted, however, that this is not uniformly true around the country.

I moved to England from Berkeley, California, which as home to the historically rebellious and counter-cultural University of California and neighbour to San Francisco, has as often as not rejected much of what many in my country would consider ‘normal’ or typical. And one of the many ways in which Berkeley specifically and the San Francisco Bay Area more generally diverges from whatever you might call the American Heartlands is that while visible religious practice can be seen all around, specifically Christian religious practice is widely suspect. The famously tolerant and open-minded people of Berkeley often find their limit at Christianity.

Why?

I think the answer is not unrelated to why Christianity specifically and religion more generally have been seen to decline in active participation not just here in the UK, but across Europe. As a result of the manifest evils done in the name of and on behalf of religion in general and Christianity most specifically, many have found themselves with little choice but to reject the whole idea.

The history of religious warfare in Europe and the routine revelation of scandal and worse in the Church could understandably make one a bit weary and a bit wary of a religion that preaches peace and generosity but seems so often to fail in its practice.

One of the results of the realisation of what had and has been done in the name of faith has led, at best, for many to insist that faith be confined to personal preference and interior practice. The risk of dire consequences for a more public role for faith are too great, many say.

This is certainly the case in Berkeley. The San Francisco Bay Area is a net exporter of personal growth schemes and self-actualisation clinics. Faith in this view becomes a matter of self-improvement with little or no public face or public influence.

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Our readings this evening both from Isaiah and from the letter to the Hebrews paint a very different picture indeed than either the wrongs done and violence endorsed by religion and the entirely quietistic, private faith of the self-help marketplace.

Neither writer could likely have imagined what could be meant by self-help or personal growth: for the religious imagination represented here, faith is a matter of the intersection of the individual, who is first and foremost a member of a community with inviolable social bonds and responsibilities, and the world at large, which is understood to be in the hands of a God who is working ever and always for peace, reconciliation, healing, and justice for the rejected and oppressed.

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Today, on the feast of All Saints, rather than recall the specific deeds and lives of particular people, we give thanks for the gift of holiness of life itself.

Saints are not, despite conventional wisdom and common parlance, miracle-workers and unrealistically-perfect human beings. By ancient tradition of the Church, when we speak of saints, or in latin sancti or holy ones, we speak of people whose lives, in one way or another, show us something of who God is and what God is doing in the world.

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After the fall of Jerusalem and the captivity of the Jewish elites in Babylon, the prophet Isaiah made a strange and startling theological move. Rather than concede that the gods of Babylon had defeated the God of Israel, as contemporary thinking would have assumed, he insisted that it had in fact been the God of Israel who had empowered Babylon to achieve its ends. Because, Isaiah insisted, the God of Israel was the only God.

And one consequence of this insight was the realisation that holiness does not reside simply within ‘our’ in-group, but rather in all people, created as we all are in the image and likeness of God. It is possible for any human being to shine with the light of the one who is drawing all of creation into the new heavens and the new earth, where life is full and long and peace is not the exception but rather the rule.

Whenever one works for peace in this way, this is what Isaiah might call holiness, what the writer of the letter to the Hebrews might call running the race that is set before us.

It is the great gift of Isaiah, for Christians brought to its most visible form and consummation in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, that we may see the holiness of God shining through any human life. And it is with these ordinary, wonderful people in mind, whose lives show this new world emerging, that we celebrate All Saints’ Day today, giving thanks for all the holy ones, showing us the way to God’s dream and vision of love.