Homily for Friday, 1 November 2013– Solemnity of All Saints

Readings of the day: Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14; Psalm 24:1bc-2, 3-4ab, 5-6; 1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12a

When I was growing up in my home parish in Canada, we had a priest who, for several Sundays in a row, started his homilies by asking, “By a show of hands, who here is holy?”

The first time he asked this, almost nobody raised their hands. Gradually, awkward silence and sideways glances in the pews were replaced by raised hands. Eventually, almost everyone in the church raised their hands, even if tentatively.

But I’ll ask the same question of us here, because as awkward as it was in my parish at the time, this question reveals an important truth about us. So who among us is holy? (You don’t need to raise your hands, but just think about this question).

I believe that there is not one person here who is not holy or, put another way, who does not want to go to heaven. This statement is not a denial of sin, or of the reality that we are all sinners. We all act in ways that distance us from the love of God, both individually and socially, but let us turn especially to today’s Psalm response and make the Psalmist’s prayer our own on this Solemnity of All Saints. We said in our Psalm response: “Lord, this is the people that longs to see your face.”

If we were not a people that longed to see God’s face, there would be no reason for us to be here. There would be no purpose to this celebration of word and sacrament. There would be no purpose to this celebration of All Saints.

When we think of All Saints, perhaps we think of it as a celebration of those who have died in God’s grace; those whose names are attached to a feast day in our Church calendar; those in heaven by whose intercession direct our prayers to God for various causes. This is all true, but All Saints is a celebration of more than our named saints. Today, we celebrate saints named and unnamed; recognized and unrecognized.  Notably, we also celebrate our common calling from God to be saints; each and every one of us.

We celebrate that we are all holy; that God calls us all to be saints; that we are all sinners redeemed; that we are a people that longs to see God’s face.