All Saints - November 1, 2011

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Today’s feast finds its roots in the early fourth-century commemoration of “all the martyrs.” Later when Christians were free to worship according to their conscience, the Church gave homage to other evidence of sanctity. Today’s feast honors the obscure as well as the famous.

Saints teach us many things about faith and love and grace and mercy. They teach us about picking up personal crosses and following Jesus. They lived their faith in good times and in bad. They show us that our true worth comes from Jesus Christ and his unconditional love for us. They learned not to define themselves by their mistakes, but by God’s love and mercy. They demonstrate one of my favorite statements of hope: every saint had a past, every sinner a future.

We identify with our favorite saints for many reasons – our professions, similar struggles, experiences of grace and healing, and their intercession! For instance, I don’t know what I’d do without St. Anthony of Padua; I find great comfort in the frailty and misunderstanding of the Apostles who walked with Christ; I am challenged by the self-less and totally sacrificial love of St. Francis of Assisi and Blessed Mother Theresa of Calcutta. Jane de Chantal said it well. “We are called to a martyrdom of love. Blessed are those who know their need for salvation, who identify injustice and fight it with all their might, who show mercy to all, who live with an undivided heart, who struggle to make peace, not conflict, who suffer for the sake of the Gospel.” Don’t let the challenge to be saints overwhelm us. That is our call. We do that in our own ways, but not by ourselves. We need God’s grace not only to avoid sin, but to live the Gospel. Never underestimate the power to make a difference by the smallest things we do in the name of God, in love and mercy, for the sake of the Gospel.

I end today’s short homily with the words of Amy Welborn from a refection from Living Faith: “In this passage from Revelation, we meet the saints, wearing white robes. We wore those robes at our baptisms, signs of our new identity, being new creations in Christ. We wear the robes still, symbolically, because we are still on that disciple’s journey. There were moments in walks through the big city that my son being carried in a baby back carrier, got very, very heavy on my back. Perhaps we feel the same way about that identity as a disciple – it is heavier than we expected at times. But we continue on the journey, knowing that what we wear – inside and out – is a sign of hope.”