Solemnity of All Saints
Previous Years: 2017 || 2018 || 2020
Preached at Church of the Assumption in Bellingham, WA
Recording
https://moorejesus.podbean.com/e/sanctity-is-possible/
Transcript
538, which is a politics reporting website that tries to report on politics using data more than opinions, recently did a piece on a divide in American politics, specifically around the question of whether Christians are being persecuted in this country. And it was interesting. They didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know, and they didn’t come to any real conclusions. But you have two camps on that question.
You have people who say “No. Objectively, a majority of this country is still Christian and it’s very hard for a minority to oppress a majority. So objectively, Christians aren’t going to be persecuted. Plus, what does religious persecution even look like in this country? Is it really persecution just because you’re not winning as many votes as you used to or whatever else?”
But then the other side said, “No, Christians are in fact being persecuted. The ascendant political forces in the world today and in our country today are explicitly secular. There’s this large group of people called the nones who have more and more political power, and they are explicitly pushing for non-Christian priorities sometimes what certain Christians would consider anti-Christian priorities.”
I can’t resolve that debate for us. I can’t tell you objectively what persecution looks like and whether we’re being persecuted. But I can tell you, my own lived experience is that when I go out into the world, on the street, wherever I experience generic society, not in the bubble of our church, I certainly don’t feel like everybody agrees with me.
And if we were to use the Beatitudes as our metric, I mean, how many people today either are or value being poor in spirit, or mourning, or being meek, or being merciful, or being clean of heart, or being peacemakers, or being persecuted for the sake of righteousness?
If you’re following along in the red book, you’ll notice I did skip one. Hunger and thirst for righteousness. I think there is a great desire today for righteousness, that there are many people who do hunger and thirst for righteousness, but I think they do so apart from the rest of the Beatitudes. They think that their pursuit of righteousness justifies not being a peacemaker, not being meek, not being merciful. Basically, no holds barred as long as I’m working for justice.
But if I take the Beatitudes as a whole, doesn’t seem to be heavily valued today, not something that we’re all really striving for. And so, I can speak as an individual Christian, I often feel very alone. And this isn’t a political party thing. It’s not “I feel alone with one party and not the other.” I just feel alone in general. I feel like how many people today really care about holiness, really care about Jesus, really care about living that life close to God. They care about things and sometimes very important things, but not always the things that I care about.
And so more and more, whether I’m quote unquote persecuted or not, more and more, I do feel isolated. I feel alone. I feel put upon. And in the role that I have as the pastor of a parish, a lot of times I feel desperate. This is a word I’ve used multiple times when I talk about evangelization and my call to the priesthood, but I’m absolutely desperate because I don’t know how to make progress. I don’t know how to turn the ship around. The trajectory of our general society is not toward Christ, and that’s the worst possible thing I can imagine. And I can work on one life at a time, and that’s how I find my peace, but if I ever allow myself to think in societal terms, I don’t have a lot of hope.
But we have the Saints. And one of the incredible things about the Saints is that we are joined, no matter our circumstances, no matter our culture, no matter our era, no matter our struggles, we are joined to a communion of people who have lived that unity with God to the fullest in a way that is hard to truly imagine or get a sense of. But these saints, these holy men and women have lived incredible lives, and to read about their lives, to learn about their lives, is to tell us that we’re not alone and we’ve never been alone. No matter what we are looking toward or struggling with, there is a saint who has lived that virtue beautifully. And because they’ve lived it beautifully, they tell us that it’s possible for us. Whatever we desire, whatever we’re called to, whatever we want to see more of in the world, there are shining examples of that.
If we feel persecuted, if we feel somehow alienated or exiled from the wider society, well, we have 300 years of saints from the earliest church who lived in a society where it was illegal to be Christian. And yet you read about their lives and they didn’t respond like a trapped animal in a cage, just lashing out at everyone around them. They lived holy, peaceful, beautiful lives. You read the account of the ancient martyrs in Rome or Carthage, I was just reading about Saint Perpetua yesterday or two days ago. These men and women, they faced crucifixion, they faced disembowelment by animals in an arena with a smile on their face. They faced it saying how wonderful that I should be joined to my Lord Jesus Christ in His suffering. I can’t imagine doing that. But they did it. And they, like you and I, normal human beings. The only thing they had was a relationship with Jesus. Some were educated, some weren’t. Some had a great, easy upbringing. Some didn’t. Some had a loving family, some didn’t. They certainly didn’t have our current knowledge of psychology and everything that psychology says we need to be happy. But they had Jesus. And because they had Jesus, they could face incredible persecution with absolute peace. It’s amazing.
Or beyond them, once Christianity is legalized, we have saints who say “I feel the call of God to incredible holiness.” Saints who give their entire lives to the Lord in all sorts of different situations. For many eras we had the monks and the nuns. We had the monasteries where people would voluntarily remove themselves from the world to live a holy life, and the lay people who weren’t removed from the world, who would unite themselves to those monasteries taking care of the monks and the nuns and their needs, living out their spirituality in the world.
We have in our own church Saint Elizabeth of Portugal, a queen. She was the pinnacle of society, all of the resources that she needed, but she used those to serve the poor and the sick. Every situation we find ourselves in, there’s somebody who’s been in that situation, brought Jesus into that situation and lived a life that should inspire all of us. Historically, I don’t like Christian movies because I think the production value is low and they’re kind of cringe-y. So I’ve generally favored the big blockbusters and the Marvel movies and the superhero things, but I’m coming more and more to appreciate the true heroism of the saints. If you can get beyond the low production value stuff and read the accounts of their lives, read the books about them, read their biographies, it’s incredibly inspiring. It brings me to tears every time I read one of their biographies that a human being would be capable of that. Like I get, I suppose, that Jesus is capable of that. He’s God. And I get that Mary might be capable of these things, I mean, she’s without sin. But to have somebody who doesn’t have any of that going for them, who just has a relationship with Jesus, just like I have, to look at their life and to say, “truly, Lord, I could do that? I could have that level of courage? I can have that level of peace, that level of mercy, that level of forgiveness?” It would be impossible if it weren’t true. I’d read that and I’d say it’s fiction. It’s fantasy. Just like the Marvel stuff. I don’t have superpowers, but they didn’t either. These are real people. The books we read are true. They’re historically verifiable. There’s nothing fictional or fantastical about these people. They had a relationship with Jesus, and that meant everything, that made the entire difference. We can do that too. We can be those people.
The Holy Spirit is no different for them than He is for us. The grace of the sacraments were equally available then as now. Society changes, our context changes. We will probably have to be more like the ancient martyrs than like Saint Elizabeth of Portugal. We are going to be in a place where we have to stand up for our faith in the face of persecution, but the Lord says, blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me. That was true in the second century, it’s true now. It’s the same Jesus, the same church, the same Holy Spirit, the same sacraments. Whatever we see in the saints, we should see in ourselves. By the grace of God, He can bring us to that place. No matter what we face, no matter where we are, we can declare with the saints in heaven: “Salvation comes from our God who is seated on the throne and from the lamb.”
And we can say that from a very personal place. Not abstract salvation, not general salvation. My salvation.
My salvation comes from God who is seated on the throne and from the lamb. I am capable of nothing, but with God I am capable of sanctity. With the Lord Jesus I can join the company of the saints.
Fr. Moore 
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