Sermon Audio
The Feast of All Saints
Who is Able to Stand
Daniel 7:23-27, Psalm 1, Revelation 7:2-4, 9-17, St. Matthew 5:1-12
John Henry Newman was a prominent English churchman who was a key figure in the 19th-century Oxford Movement, which agitated for re-instituting much pre-Reformation Roman Catholic ritual in the worship of the Church of England.
With Edward Bouverie Pusey and John Keble, Newman was a leader of the Tractarians, who published pamphlets, or tracts, advocating Anglo-Catholic practice. This movement came close to achieving its ends, but fell short. The others swallowed their disappointment and remained in the Church of England; Newman bolted.
He rose to even greater heights as a cardinal in the Catholic Church in England and remains a respected theologian to this day. Newman used the occasion of the Feast of All Saints to lambaste English Christians – he seems to have made no distinction here between Anglican and Catholic – for their failure to properly observe saints’ days.
The problem arose centuries earlier, he explained, when so many saints’ days crowded the calendar that believers effectively tuned out. If you’re going to pause for another solemn observance every time you turn around, when will you ever get the crops in?
Newman felt they should have found a way. In his sermon, he called such complaints “an excuse for idleness.”
But that’s not the worst of it. Sometimes the remedy is worse than the disease. Newman wrote, “Nay, worse still, by a great and almost incredible perverseness, instead of glorifying God in His Saints, Christians began to pay them an honor approaching to Divine worship.”
Something had to be done, so the medieval church bundled the saints’ days into one. The apostles and a few others still had their own days, to be sure, but most of the saints down through the ages had to be content with one church-wide shout-out once a year.
Alas, that didn’t fix things, either. The pendulum swung back and by Newman’s day, “men go into the contrary extreme. These Holydays, few though they be, are not duly observed. Such is the way of mankind, ever contriving to slip by their duty, and fall into one or other extreme of error.
“Idle or busy, they are in both cases wrong: idle, and so neglecting their duties towards man; busy, and so neglecting their duties towards God.”
The good thing about a calendar loaded with feast days, Newman continued, was that, “The institutions of the Church were impressed upon the face of society. Dates were reckoned not so much by months and seasons, as by sacred Festivals.
“The world kept pace with the Gospel; the arrangements of legal and commercial business were regulated by a Christian rule.”
As Britain became more attached to the profit motive, Newman lamented, it took on an increasingly secular focus. St. Anselm’s Day? Who could say? Just another square on the calendar.
In his predictable conceit, man was fervently slapping himself on the back for the inventions and innovations of modernity when he should have been looking to the past, where much wisdom resided, not least in the lives and thoughts of the saints.
“Now it is a most salutary thing,” Newman went on, “under this temptation to self-conceit to be reminded, that in all the highest qualifications of human excellence, we have been far outdone by men who lived centuries ago; that a standard of truth and holiness was then set up which we are not likely to reach, and that, as for thinking to become wiser or better, or more acceptable to God than they were, it is a mere dream . . .
“Would that St. Paul or St. John could rise from the dead! How would the minute philosophers who now consider intellect and enlightened virtue all their own, shrink into nothing before those well-tempered, sharp-edged weapons of the Lord!”
And now you know what Rev. Newman thought about the observance of All Saints Day. I think the first lesson to take from his words is that I’ve been going way too easy on you folks.
But seriously . . . if we’re going to concede that he has a point – and I don’t see how we can avoid it – surely we must go on to confess that 21st-century America has taken the ball a far piece down the field from 19th-century England in terms of seeking first the kingdom of man and reserving only a little corner of our lives for the kingdom of God.
This very weekend, we have a vivid demonstration of the cultural slide. Even in the churches, little will be said this morning about All Saints Day. Last night, however, across this city and this nation much was made of the eve of All Saints, also known as All Hallows Eve.
People, some of whom appear rational the rest of the year, dress up in costumes to celebrate “ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night.” Americans spend $7 billion each year on Halloween, with more money going to costumes for adults than for children. I am not an anti-Halloween crusader; I merely remark what we have done to the church calendar.
It was not meant to be this way. Like a good pickup truck, we were built to stand.
I should point out that it has not escaped my notice that this very church takes its name from this day we are celebrating. I recall asking early on how the founders settled on this name and learning that after deep study and theological reflection it was chosen because it would put you at the top of the listings in the phone book. So, enough said about that.
The first feast in honor of all the saints took place early in the fourth century, commemorating "all the martyrs." After waves of invaders plundered the catacombs, Pope Boniface IV, early in the seventh century, collected 28 wagonloads of bones and reinterred them beneath the Roman temple called the Pantheon, literally “all the gods.”
The pope rededicated the shrine as a Christian church. The Venerable Bede – an English saint, by the way -- wrote that the pope acted "that the memory of all the saints might in the future be honored in the place which had formerly been dedicated to the worship not of gods but of demons" (On the Calculation of Time).
Don’t miss the reversal: in Boniface’s day, from celebration of demons to Christian saints; in our own, from celebration of Christian saints to demons.
While the feast originally honored only martyrs, the church would go on to confer sainthood on others who had served with distinction but had not died for the faith. Way back, the primary criterion was popular acclaim. It remained so even when the bishop's approval became the final step in placing a commemoration on the calendar. The first papal canonization occurred in 993. The long and involved process now in place in the Roman church took shape over the last 500 years.
Anglicans continue to venerate – not to worship -- the saints Rome canonized before the Church of England went her own way and the Church of England has added some of her own – not all English or Anglicans, by the way – though far fewer and using different criteria.
Some Anglicans today worship in churches that bear the name of St. Thomas of Canterbury.
We need not have any doubt about how we are to approach this holy day. In our collect for today we prayed, “Grant us grace so to follow thy blessed Saints in all virtuous and godly living. . .”
By their faith, they became exemplars, giving us models of the sanctified life to admire and to emulate. That is not to say they were so bathed in grace that they never fell into error. They made mistakes, we might say, of biblical proportions.
But in the end they did not fall. They stood.
Thomas Cranmer himself, St. Thomas of Canterbury, archbishop of the English church at her separation from Rome, traveled a dark back alley on his route to martyrdom and sainthood. When young King Edward died and Queen Mary took the throne in short order, Cranmer found himself not only removed from office but imprisoned.
He spent three years in the big house. The Catholic Mary demanded he recant his Protestant convictions and, in time, he did, signing a sworn statement to that effect. Even then, Mary would not spare his life; she ordered him burned at the stake.
She allowed him to preach a final sermon at the site of his burning, the better to proclaim his renunciation of the Reformed faith. In a masterly speech he repented of all his sins, ending with the final one – recanting of his Protestant principles.
In the ensuing hullabaloo he was whisked to the fiery stake, but he was able to pause before it long enough for one final act of contrition. Perhaps he was hearing an echo of our Lord’s words in Matthew 5:29: "If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.”
Thrusting his hand into the flames, Cranmer said, "As my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall first be punished."
In the end, Thomas Cranmer stood.
We would be naïve, even deluded, to believe murder and mayhem traveled a one-way street. John Donne is remembered best as a stellar poet, but there’s more to a man than his verse.
Sixteen years after Cranmer’s martyrdom, Donne was born in London into a Roman Catholic family. By this time the Protestant Elizabeth sat on the throne and Catholicism was illegal.
Donne began studies at Oxford at age 11 and after three years there spent three more at Cambridge. He could receive a degree from neither, however, because, as a Catholic, he could not swear allegiance to the Protestant queen.
Nevertheless, he became a lawyer. His brother Henry was arrested for harboring a Catholic priest, whom he betrayed under torture. The authorities tortured the priest on the rack, hanged him until he was almost dead and then disemboweled him. Henry died in Newgate Prison of bubonic plague.
John Donne began to question the wisdom of remaining a Catholic. While his motive for recanting his Catholic faith may have been survival, he appears to have become a sincere Anglican over time. He published two polemics against the Church of Rome.
He also went on to a distinguished career as a diplomat and then a member of Parliament. At the insistence of King James, who succeeded Elizabeth, Donne entered holy orders. He would rise to the position of dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral and write many prayers and meditations. Among the latter was one containing the lines “no man is an island” and “for whom the bell tolls.”
From his Holy Sonnet X, “Death Be Not Proud,” come the famous lines:
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.
Not long before his death he rose from his sickbed to preach the “Death’s Duel Sermon,” his most famous, which portrays life as a steady descent to suffering and death, yet sees hope in salvation and immortality through an embrace of God, Christ and the resurrection.
As a young man, he spent much of his considerable inheritance on women and whimsy and much of his early poetry was of an erotic nature. Later, he wrote copiously on true religion, a subject to which he devoted much thought.
In the end, John Donne stood.
Josephine Elizabeth Butler was a middle-class wife and mother in 19th-century England who lost her only daughter when the child died from a fall down a staircase. Mrs. Butler responded by devoting herself to helping people more unfortunate than she.
A visit to a Liverpool workhouse brought her into contact with prostitutes and, deploring their plight, she went on to set up a rest home for them. She campaigned for higher education for women as well but her keenest passion was always for prostitutes.
A devout Christian, she deplored their sins. But she also saw the women as exploited victims of male oppression and she attacked the double standard of sexual morality.
In 1869 she began a long campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts, which had been instituted as a form of state regulation of prostitution, to control the spread of venereal diseases, especially in the British Army and the Royal Navy.
The law granted magistrates the authority to order a genital examination of prostitutes for symptoms of VD and detain infected women in a locked hospital for three months to be cured. Mrs. Butler referred to the procedure as “surgical rape.”
An accusation of prostitution by a police officer was grounds to order the exam. A woman who refused it went to prison. Women who came under accusation often lost their livelihoods and, in one famous case, a woman committed suicide.
The law originally applied only in ports and garrison towns but an effort in 1869 to expand it nationwide set off waves of protest. Christians made common cause with feminists and civil libertarians. Two organizations dedicated to stopping the expansion and repealing the existing laws formed.
Mrs. Butler headed one of them, the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act. She persevered through verbal abuse and even occasional physical assault. Seventeen years later the movement at last prevailed and the acts were repealed.
She crusaded in various countries on the European continent and as far away as British India against similar laws and had a hand in the fight against child prostitution. She and her group succeeded in getting the age of sexual consent in England raised from 13 to 16.
She was almost as passionate about feminist causes of her day as about her faith. “God and one woman,” she said, “make a majority.” Some who came later put strategies she developed to use in winning the vote for women.
In the end – and throughout her life – Josephine Elizabeth Butler stood.
Like the more renowned Cranmer and Donne, she is a saint of the Church of England. We may certainly venerate them as uncommon people but we might equally call them people God equipped and used in uncommon ways.
For in the end, whatever their earlier missteps, they did what God calls us to do. They stood in the judgment. A few minutes ago we read from the Psalter, “the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.”
Our lesson from Revelation 7 provides the answer to the question posed in the final verse of the preceding chapter: “For the great day of His wrath has come, and who is able to stand?”
Those who are able to stand are the 144,000 from the 12 tribes who are sealed for preservation during the tribulation to come. They represent all those who, after the tribulation, will remain standing after the unrighteous have fallen. The great multitude of all nations, tribes, peoples and tongues arrayed around God’s throne are those who wear white robes that have been washed in the blood of the Lamb.
This chapter serves as a joyful interlude between the breaking of the sixth and seventh seals. Finally, One who is worthy has appeared, and in the opening verse of chapter 8 He opens that seventh seal, and “there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.”
Now, I want to go on record here and now. I do not hold with that school of theology that embraces the “partial rapture theory,” which states that this verse means all the men will be raptured together and then all the women 30 minutes later.
I can’t, you see, because there is no rapture.
Beloved, like those deeply flawed Bible characters from Abraham to Rahab to David to Paul, like all the unlikely saints down through all the centuries of the Christian Church, we are called, simply, to stand.
If we interpret correctly the signs of the times, perhaps we and certainly our near descendants will be tested in ways American Christians have never known. For those who would pay heed to the words of John Henry Newman and seek inspiration and instruction in the lives of the saints, sooner is better than later.
It’s time to stand. Amen.
Who is Able to Stand
Daniel 7:23-27, Psalm 1, Revelation 7:2-4, 9-17, St. Matthew 5:1-12
John Henry Newman was a prominent English churchman who was a key figure in the 19th-century Oxford Movement, which agitated for re-instituting much pre-Reformation Roman Catholic ritual in the worship of the Church of England.
With Edward Bouverie Pusey and John Keble, Newman was a leader of the Tractarians, who published pamphlets, or tracts, advocating Anglo-Catholic practice. This movement came close to achieving its ends, but fell short. The others swallowed their disappointment and remained in the Church of England; Newman bolted.
He rose to even greater heights as a cardinal in the Catholic Church in England and remains a respected theologian to this day. Newman used the occasion of the Feast of All Saints to lambaste English Christians – he seems to have made no distinction here between Anglican and Catholic – for their failure to properly observe saints’ days.
The problem arose centuries earlier, he explained, when so many saints’ days crowded the calendar that believers effectively tuned out. If you’re going to pause for another solemn observance every time you turn around, when will you ever get the crops in?
Newman felt they should have found a way. In his sermon, he called such complaints “an excuse for idleness.”
But that’s not the worst of it. Sometimes the remedy is worse than the disease. Newman wrote, “Nay, worse still, by a great and almost incredible perverseness, instead of glorifying God in His Saints, Christians began to pay them an honor approaching to Divine worship.”
Something had to be done, so the medieval church bundled the saints’ days into one. The apostles and a few others still had their own days, to be sure, but most of the saints down through the ages had to be content with one church-wide shout-out once a year.
Alas, that didn’t fix things, either. The pendulum swung back and by Newman’s day, “men go into the contrary extreme. These Holydays, few though they be, are not duly observed. Such is the way of mankind, ever contriving to slip by their duty, and fall into one or other extreme of error.
“Idle or busy, they are in both cases wrong: idle, and so neglecting their duties towards man; busy, and so neglecting their duties towards God.”
The good thing about a calendar loaded with feast days, Newman continued, was that, “The institutions of the Church were impressed upon the face of society. Dates were reckoned not so much by months and seasons, as by sacred Festivals.
“The world kept pace with the Gospel; the arrangements of legal and commercial business were regulated by a Christian rule.”
As Britain became more attached to the profit motive, Newman lamented, it took on an increasingly secular focus. St. Anselm’s Day? Who could say? Just another square on the calendar.
In his predictable conceit, man was fervently slapping himself on the back for the inventions and innovations of modernity when he should have been looking to the past, where much wisdom resided, not least in the lives and thoughts of the saints.
“Now it is a most salutary thing,” Newman went on, “under this temptation to self-conceit to be reminded, that in all the highest qualifications of human excellence, we have been far outdone by men who lived centuries ago; that a standard of truth and holiness was then set up which we are not likely to reach, and that, as for thinking to become wiser or better, or more acceptable to God than they were, it is a mere dream . . .
“Would that St. Paul or St. John could rise from the dead! How would the minute philosophers who now consider intellect and enlightened virtue all their own, shrink into nothing before those well-tempered, sharp-edged weapons of the Lord!”
And now you know what Rev. Newman thought about the observance of All Saints Day. I think the first lesson to take from his words is that I’ve been going way too easy on you folks.
But seriously . . . if we’re going to concede that he has a point – and I don’t see how we can avoid it – surely we must go on to confess that 21st-century America has taken the ball a far piece down the field from 19th-century England in terms of seeking first the kingdom of man and reserving only a little corner of our lives for the kingdom of God.
This very weekend, we have a vivid demonstration of the cultural slide. Even in the churches, little will be said this morning about All Saints Day. Last night, however, across this city and this nation much was made of the eve of All Saints, also known as All Hallows Eve.
People, some of whom appear rational the rest of the year, dress up in costumes to celebrate “ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night.” Americans spend $7 billion each year on Halloween, with more money going to costumes for adults than for children. I am not an anti-Halloween crusader; I merely remark what we have done to the church calendar.
It was not meant to be this way. Like a good pickup truck, we were built to stand.
I should point out that it has not escaped my notice that this very church takes its name from this day we are celebrating. I recall asking early on how the founders settled on this name and learning that after deep study and theological reflection it was chosen because it would put you at the top of the listings in the phone book. So, enough said about that.
The first feast in honor of all the saints took place early in the fourth century, commemorating "all the martyrs." After waves of invaders plundered the catacombs, Pope Boniface IV, early in the seventh century, collected 28 wagonloads of bones and reinterred them beneath the Roman temple called the Pantheon, literally “all the gods.”
The pope rededicated the shrine as a Christian church. The Venerable Bede – an English saint, by the way -- wrote that the pope acted "that the memory of all the saints might in the future be honored in the place which had formerly been dedicated to the worship not of gods but of demons" (On the Calculation of Time).
Don’t miss the reversal: in Boniface’s day, from celebration of demons to Christian saints; in our own, from celebration of Christian saints to demons.
While the feast originally honored only martyrs, the church would go on to confer sainthood on others who had served with distinction but had not died for the faith. Way back, the primary criterion was popular acclaim. It remained so even when the bishop's approval became the final step in placing a commemoration on the calendar. The first papal canonization occurred in 993. The long and involved process now in place in the Roman church took shape over the last 500 years.
Anglicans continue to venerate – not to worship -- the saints Rome canonized before the Church of England went her own way and the Church of England has added some of her own – not all English or Anglicans, by the way – though far fewer and using different criteria.
Some Anglicans today worship in churches that bear the name of St. Thomas of Canterbury.
We need not have any doubt about how we are to approach this holy day. In our collect for today we prayed, “Grant us grace so to follow thy blessed Saints in all virtuous and godly living. . .”
By their faith, they became exemplars, giving us models of the sanctified life to admire and to emulate. That is not to say they were so bathed in grace that they never fell into error. They made mistakes, we might say, of biblical proportions.
But in the end they did not fall. They stood.
Thomas Cranmer himself, St. Thomas of Canterbury, archbishop of the English church at her separation from Rome, traveled a dark back alley on his route to martyrdom and sainthood. When young King Edward died and Queen Mary took the throne in short order, Cranmer found himself not only removed from office but imprisoned.
He spent three years in the big house. The Catholic Mary demanded he recant his Protestant convictions and, in time, he did, signing a sworn statement to that effect. Even then, Mary would not spare his life; she ordered him burned at the stake.
She allowed him to preach a final sermon at the site of his burning, the better to proclaim his renunciation of the Reformed faith. In a masterly speech he repented of all his sins, ending with the final one – recanting of his Protestant principles.
In the ensuing hullabaloo he was whisked to the fiery stake, but he was able to pause before it long enough for one final act of contrition. Perhaps he was hearing an echo of our Lord’s words in Matthew 5:29: "If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.”
Thrusting his hand into the flames, Cranmer said, "As my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall first be punished."
In the end, Thomas Cranmer stood.
We would be naïve, even deluded, to believe murder and mayhem traveled a one-way street. John Donne is remembered best as a stellar poet, but there’s more to a man than his verse.
Sixteen years after Cranmer’s martyrdom, Donne was born in London into a Roman Catholic family. By this time the Protestant Elizabeth sat on the throne and Catholicism was illegal.
Donne began studies at Oxford at age 11 and after three years there spent three more at Cambridge. He could receive a degree from neither, however, because, as a Catholic, he could not swear allegiance to the Protestant queen.
Nevertheless, he became a lawyer. His brother Henry was arrested for harboring a Catholic priest, whom he betrayed under torture. The authorities tortured the priest on the rack, hanged him until he was almost dead and then disemboweled him. Henry died in Newgate Prison of bubonic plague.
John Donne began to question the wisdom of remaining a Catholic. While his motive for recanting his Catholic faith may have been survival, he appears to have become a sincere Anglican over time. He published two polemics against the Church of Rome.
He also went on to a distinguished career as a diplomat and then a member of Parliament. At the insistence of King James, who succeeded Elizabeth, Donne entered holy orders. He would rise to the position of dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral and write many prayers and meditations. Among the latter was one containing the lines “no man is an island” and “for whom the bell tolls.”
From his Holy Sonnet X, “Death Be Not Proud,” come the famous lines:
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.
Not long before his death he rose from his sickbed to preach the “Death’s Duel Sermon,” his most famous, which portrays life as a steady descent to suffering and death, yet sees hope in salvation and immortality through an embrace of God, Christ and the resurrection.
As a young man, he spent much of his considerable inheritance on women and whimsy and much of his early poetry was of an erotic nature. Later, he wrote copiously on true religion, a subject to which he devoted much thought.
In the end, John Donne stood.
Josephine Elizabeth Butler was a middle-class wife and mother in 19th-century England who lost her only daughter when the child died from a fall down a staircase. Mrs. Butler responded by devoting herself to helping people more unfortunate than she.
A visit to a Liverpool workhouse brought her into contact with prostitutes and, deploring their plight, she went on to set up a rest home for them. She campaigned for higher education for women as well but her keenest passion was always for prostitutes.
A devout Christian, she deplored their sins. But she also saw the women as exploited victims of male oppression and she attacked the double standard of sexual morality.
In 1869 she began a long campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts, which had been instituted as a form of state regulation of prostitution, to control the spread of venereal diseases, especially in the British Army and the Royal Navy.
The law granted magistrates the authority to order a genital examination of prostitutes for symptoms of VD and detain infected women in a locked hospital for three months to be cured. Mrs. Butler referred to the procedure as “surgical rape.”
An accusation of prostitution by a police officer was grounds to order the exam. A woman who refused it went to prison. Women who came under accusation often lost their livelihoods and, in one famous case, a woman committed suicide.
The law originally applied only in ports and garrison towns but an effort in 1869 to expand it nationwide set off waves of protest. Christians made common cause with feminists and civil libertarians. Two organizations dedicated to stopping the expansion and repealing the existing laws formed.
Mrs. Butler headed one of them, the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act. She persevered through verbal abuse and even occasional physical assault. Seventeen years later the movement at last prevailed and the acts were repealed.
She crusaded in various countries on the European continent and as far away as British India against similar laws and had a hand in the fight against child prostitution. She and her group succeeded in getting the age of sexual consent in England raised from 13 to 16.
She was almost as passionate about feminist causes of her day as about her faith. “God and one woman,” she said, “make a majority.” Some who came later put strategies she developed to use in winning the vote for women.
In the end – and throughout her life – Josephine Elizabeth Butler stood.
Like the more renowned Cranmer and Donne, she is a saint of the Church of England. We may certainly venerate them as uncommon people but we might equally call them people God equipped and used in uncommon ways.
For in the end, whatever their earlier missteps, they did what God calls us to do. They stood in the judgment. A few minutes ago we read from the Psalter, “the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.”
Our lesson from Revelation 7 provides the answer to the question posed in the final verse of the preceding chapter: “For the great day of His wrath has come, and who is able to stand?”
Those who are able to stand are the 144,000 from the 12 tribes who are sealed for preservation during the tribulation to come. They represent all those who, after the tribulation, will remain standing after the unrighteous have fallen. The great multitude of all nations, tribes, peoples and tongues arrayed around God’s throne are those who wear white robes that have been washed in the blood of the Lamb.
This chapter serves as a joyful interlude between the breaking of the sixth and seventh seals. Finally, One who is worthy has appeared, and in the opening verse of chapter 8 He opens that seventh seal, and “there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.”
Now, I want to go on record here and now. I do not hold with that school of theology that embraces the “partial rapture theory,” which states that this verse means all the men will be raptured together and then all the women 30 minutes later.
I can’t, you see, because there is no rapture.
Beloved, like those deeply flawed Bible characters from Abraham to Rahab to David to Paul, like all the unlikely saints down through all the centuries of the Christian Church, we are called, simply, to stand.
If we interpret correctly the signs of the times, perhaps we and certainly our near descendants will be tested in ways American Christians have never known. For those who would pay heed to the words of John Henry Newman and seek inspiration and instruction in the lives of the saints, sooner is better than later.
It’s time to stand. Amen.