Remembrance Sunday -- Sermon at the 10 am Mass

Today’s Old Testament reading offers us a glimpse of the future reign of peace in the Kingdom of God. “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

The Church at its best has always held up this vision of universal peace as the goal and end of human history. Yet the sad reality is that our world is not at peace. Throughout recorded history, up to the present day, nations have continued to wage wars with one another—and have continued to experience within themselves civil unrest, revolutions, and violent political upheavals.

As Christians, we find ourselves caught between our ideal of peace and the reality of the world we inhabit. We live in the tension between the already and the not yet—between our proclamation of a future reign of peace on earth and life in a world that still falls far short of that promise.

Throughout history, Christians have attempted to resolve this tension in various ways. The great church historian Roland Bainton once wrote a book called Christian Attitudes to War and Peace, which outlines three principal traditions of thought on the question.

The earliest Christians were pacifists. They taught that once you were baptized, you were called to leave the ways of the fallen world behind and start living according to the standards of God’s Kingdom. And that meant you could not be a soldier, bear arms, or even assume a position in government that might involve sending others into battle. Such occupations were off limits to members of the earliest Church.

Although pacifism eventually became the minority position within Christianity, it nonetheless remains a position to which many Christians believe themselves called to this day. Christian pacifists argue eloquently that the Gospel requires us to bear witness to the coming reign of God by being peacemakers in the present age; and that this witness entails the refusal to participate in or support war in any form.

While the Church honors the pacifist witness as the vocation of some of its members, however, it has consistently refused to require this witness of all of its members. Since at least the fourth century, the Church has recognized that some Christians have the alternative vocation to take responsibility for the safety and well-being of others in ways that might require bearing arms and even fighting in wars.

In Bainton’s scheme of Christian attitudes towards war and peace, the very opposite of pacifism is the approach known as the crusade or holy war. The crusading mentality glorifies war as an activity undertaken in obedience to God’s will. One characteristic belief of this approach is that peace on earth can only come about when God’s enemies have been defeated; and it’s our job to defeat them. The world is divided into spheres of light versus darkness, good versus evil, truth versus falsehood. There are no shades of gray. And when you’re convinced that God is on your side, and that your enemies are God’s enemies, then all kinds of atrocities and crimes against humanity become possible.

Very different from either pacifism or the crusading mentality is a third Christian approach known as the Just War tradition. This approach takes as its starting point the doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin. One of the earliest exponents of the Chrsitian Just War tradition was Saint Augustine of Hippo, who came to the conclusion that in a fallen and dangerous world, Christians are sometimes morally compelled to take actions on behalf of others and the common good that they would never undertake on their own behalf. Saint Augustine believed that killing in self-defense is wrong; in his view it is morally preferable to give up one’s own life than to incur the guilt of taking another human life, even in self-defense. And such was the standard pacifist view of the early Church. But, he went on to argue, those who are entrusted with the public welfare – such as soldiers, police, judges, and executioners – may be required to take life not on their own behalf but to protect and defend the innocent.

From this fundamental insight, the Church’s Just War tradition evolved down through the centuries to specify detailed lists of criteria to aid in the evaluation of whether undertaking a particular war is morally justified—just cause, lawful authority, right intention, last resort, reasonable chance of success, and so forth.

The tradition also came to articulate moral criteria for the conduct of war – such as noncombatant immunity -- to try to minimize the suffering and destruction caused by war. The Christian Just War tradition had enormous influence on secular political thought from the Renaissance on, and in particular has left its imprint in the development of international law.

Such, then, are the three principal Christian attitudes to war and peace as summarized by Roland Bainton: pacifism, crusade, and the just war. In the end, Bainton ended up endorsing pacifism as the Church’s most authentic witness to the Gospel. But different Christians find themselves in different place on the spectrum of these various attitudes.

For my part, as I’ve reflected on these questions over the years, I’ve come more and more to understand Christian ethics as involving what I like to call “default positions” that in some cases may admit of exceptions under certain well-defined circumstances.

Thus, for example, the Christian default position on marriage is in favor of lifelong marriage and against divorce and remarriage. But the default position admits certain exceptions; and in the Episcopal Church the bishop can approve remarriage after divorce on a case-by-case basis. In other words, the default position holds up the Gospel ideal; and even when we admit exceptions that doesn’t mean we’ve given up on the ideal.

Likewise, it seems to me that on matters of war and peace the Church’s default position has to be pacifism. Peace is the Christian standard and ideal; and the Just War tradition functions as a way of specifying the circumstances that may permit possible exceptions to that default position. This understanding allows us to honor both those Christians who fight and die for their country in war, and also those Christians who discern a vocation to pacifist witness both within the Church and in the wider society. Whether we agree or disagree with the stand taken by pacifists against any particular conflict, they nonetheless remind us that the Church’s default position must always be in favor of peace; and that going to war can only ever be justified when it’s absolutely necessary and completely unavoidable.

Today, then, as we pray for those who have given their lives in war, we pray also for the coming of God’s kingdom and peace on earth. And we do well to resolve never to ask our young men and young women to take up arms and sacrifice their lives when other policy options remain open.

Proper 27, Year B -- Sermon at the 8 am Mass

Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17
Hebrews 9:24-28
Mark 12:38-44

An interesting coincidence in today’s readings is that the Old Testament and the Gospel both mention widows. I say “coincidence” because it really is that: In the cycle of the Revised Common Lectionary that we’re now using, the Old Testament readings are selected to follow their own sequence, and not to match themes in the Gospel readings for the same Sunday.

Both last Sunday and today, the Old Testament readings have been taken from the Book of Ruth, one of the most delightful stories of the Bible. During a famine in the time of the Judges, an Israelite family from Bethlehem – consisting of Elimelech, his wife Naomi, and their sons Mahlon and Chilion – emigrate to the country of Moab, in what is present-day Jordan. There, Elimelech dies. The sons marry two Moabite women: Mahlon marries Ruth; and Chilion marries Orpah.

Then the two sons of Naomi themselves die. So Naomi decides to return to Bethlehem. She tells her daughters-in-law to return to their own families and remarry. Orpah reluctantly departs, but Ruth pleads with her: "Entreat me not to leave you or to return from following you; for where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God; where you die I will die, and there will I be buried."

So Naomi brings Ruth with her back to Bethlehem. And today’s reading tells how Ruth goes to the barley field of Naomi’s kinsman Boaz, and there becomes his wife. What the reading does not tell us is that by levirate law Boaz is obliged to marry Ruth in order to carry on Mahlon’s family line. So the pair get married and have a son, Obed, who in turn becomes the father of Jesse, the Father of David, and hence an ancestor of Jesus.

Now the Book of Ruth was probably written after the Jews’ return from the Babylonian Exile as a protest against the prohibition against taking foreign wives by the leaders Ezra and Nehemiah. But in the context of our readings for today, the point of significance is the vulnerable position in which Naomi finds herself as a widow bereft of a husband and sons to take care of her. Presumably too old to remarry herself, she is dependent on her widowed daughter-in-law Ruth to take a husband so that she herself will have a home as the mother-in-law. Otherwise, she would be left without any means of support. The position of widows in biblical times was precarious, to say the least.

Our Gospel reading likewise centers on a widow. Jesus is sitting in the Temple precincts opposite the treasury. Here, thirteen large receptacles shaped like horns or trumpets are set up to receive the people’s offerings for the upkeep of the Temple. As people walk by they toss in their coins. A sound of clanging reverberates as the pieces hit the insides of the receptacles and roll down to the bottom. The bigger, heavier, and more numerous the coins you throw in, the more noise they make; so the louder the clanging, the greater the charity announced by the noise.

But then Jesus notices a poor widow shuffle up to one of the horns and carefully drop in two lepta—the smallest coins in circulation, each worth only 1/64th of a denarius, the day’s wage of an unskilled laborer. These small, light coins make hardly any noise at all. Yet, perhaps supernaturally, Jesus intuits the depth of the widow’s sacrifice.

He calls his disciples and points out the contrast: she has given more than all who are giving to the treasury. For they gave out of their surplus; but she has given everything she has. The point is not to criticize or belittle the larger offerings of the better off, but simply to observe that she has given more in her complete generosity and trust in God to provide for all her needs.

Notice that in the Old Testament reading, Ruth’s loyalty to Naomi requires the same sort of trust in God to provide. Naomi’s advice to her two daughters-in-law to return to their families is the more realistic counsel. But when Ruth replies, “Your God shall be my God,” she implicitly puts her trust in the God of Israel to provide for both of them as they return to Bethlehem.

To return to the Gospel, however, perhaps the reason why Jesus notices the poor widow’s offering is that he’s all too well aware of the complete and total self-offering that he himself must soon make. For this episode is talking place during the final week of his life. In just a few days, he shall be betrayed, arrested, tried, and sent to die on a cross.

And this is where the epistle reading from Hebrews ties in. This passage contrasts the Levitical priesthood of the Jerusalem Temple with the eternal priesthood of Christ. Where the Temple priests offer to God the blood of sacrifices not their own, Christ has offered to God the sacrifice of his own blood. Christ’s sacrifice on the cross costs him everything: complete and total self-surrender to God.

From time to time, the Christian life involves sacrifices. In many parts of the world today, just doing what we’re doing here, coming to church and participating in the Mass, are activities by which people risk their lives. In this part of the world, following Christ is unlikely to entail having to sacrifice our lives, or even to give up everything we have like the poor widow in today’s Gospel.

But fulfilling our Christian duties and obligations sometimes requires us to do things that we’d rather not do, or to incur costs that we think we can’t afford. It’s a sacrifice to get up and come to Mass on Sunday morning when we’ve been out late Saturday evening and would rather stay in bed. It’s a sacrifice to pledge an amount to the church that requires us to give up something else that we’d rather spend the money on instead. It’s a sacrifice to take a public stand on some issue on behalf of the faith that brings scorn, ridicule, and hostility down upon our heads. 

When we find ourselves called upon to make such sacrifices, we need to remember, first, the complete generosity and self-offering of the widow in today’s Gospel; second, the complete trust in God that alone makes such generosity possible; and, third, the supreme self-sacrifice of Christ for our salvation. On the cross, he offers up everything for us. How then can we withhold anything that he may ask of us in return?

Proper 26, Year B -- Sermon at the 8 am Mass

Mark 12:28-34

(Note: The text of the sermon preached at the 10 am Solemn High Mass can be found here.)

In this morning’s Gospel, we have Mark’s version of the Great Commandment. A scribe asks our Lord: “Which Commandment is the first of all?” It was a common question among the rabbis of the time: which one of all the hundreds of commandments stands first in importance as summing up and interpreting the meaning of the rest?

In his response, our Lord gives not one text from the Torah but two. First, he quotes the text from Deuteronomy 6:5 known as the Shema, recited twice daily by pious Jews, “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” And to this he joins a second text from Leviticus 19:18, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

According to some commentators, this answer differed significantly from many other answers given by various priests, scribes, and rabbis of the time. Some argued that keeping the Sabbath was the most important commandment; others that it was circumcision; others that it was the offering of the Temple sacrifices.

Yet at least some teachers gave answers similar to that of Jesus. The great rabbi Hillel the Elder, who lived in the first century BC, was once asked to sum up the entire Torah concisely to a gentile who wanted to become a Jew, and he answered: “What is hateful to thee, do not do unto thy fellow man: this is the whole Law, the rest is commentary; go and learn.” Likewise, the rabbi Akiva ben Joseph, who lived in the late first and early second centuries, called “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” the most important principle of Judaism.

The great genius of our Lord’s response, however, was to join the two verses together: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God …” and “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” To my knowledge, none of the other Jewish teachers of the time made this move. And together, these two commandments passed into the Christian tradition as the Summary of the Law, Matthew’s version of which we recite in the Episcopal Church at the beginning of every Rite I Mass.

As any of the kids who’ve been through my Confirmation class can tell you, the Summary of the Law furnishes the two headings under which the Ten Commandments are arranged. Commandments 1 through 4 tell us what it means to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength: You shall have no other Gods before me; you shall not worship idols; you shall not take the Lord’s name in vain; keep holy the Sabbath day.

And Commandments 5 through 10 explain what’s involved in loving your neighbor as yourself: Honor your father and mother; Do not commit murder; Do not commit adultery; Do not steal; Do not bear false witness; Do not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor.

And of course under the subheadings of each of the Ten Commandments, Christian ethicists have extrapolated many more principles, rules, and precepts of moral behavior. But in the end they all fall under the wide umbrella of our Lord’s Summary of the Law: Love the Lord your God; Love your neighbor as yourself.

A key message for us is that the way of Christian discipleship isn’t ultimately about obeying rules: It is rather about love; or, more precisely, about learning to love the right things; and learning to love them rightly. Love is at the heart of the Gospel. As Saint John says, “God is love.” In his life, death, and resurrection, Christ reveals and manifests the depth of God’s love for us. Through baptism, and participation in the liturgical and sacramental life of the Church, we are engrafted into Christ’s Body and his life becomes our life; we live in him and he lives in us. And it follows that his life becomes manifest in us precisely insofar as we learn to love as he loves. Indeed, it is Christ alone who has perfectly fulfilled his own commandments: loving God with all his heart, mind, soul, and strength; and loving his neighbor as himself. In John’s Gospel, Jesus makes his command explicit: “Love one another, as I have loved you.”

And so, when we’re contemplating the ethics of one course of action versus another, a key question is whether the action under consideration adequately expresses our love for God and our love for our neighbor. Or does it place, say, the love of self or of some created commodity in place of both? It’s a fairly simple test; and a question that we can all benefit from asking ourselves periodically.

The Jewish rabbis whose sayings are recorded in the Mishnah and the Talmud agreed that we love God by behaving in such a way that brings honor to God in the sight of all our fellow creatures. And one way in which we express our love for both God and our neighbor is by regular attendance at worship. Even before we kneel down and say our prayers, the very effort of getting up and getting here to Mass is a visible expression of our love for God, a public testimony to God’s place in our lives. Moreover, it is an expression of our love for our neighbor, because believe it or not, when you come to Mass you give encouragement and support to your fellow parishioners, many of whom are glad to see you, and conversely are disappointed when they don’t see you.

The genius of our Lord’s Summary of the Law is the joining together of two commandments that really are inseparable. We cannot love God adequately without loving our neighbor. But neither can we love our neighbor adequately without loving God. Some years ago, a couple told me they were stopping coming to church because they felt that their time and money would be better spent helping those in need, for example, by contributing to the Rhode Island food bank. On reflection, it seems that they got only half of the Summary of the Law, but at least they got it right: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Still, they were missing the first half: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. As Christians, we’re not given the option of picking one or the other. We’re called to do both.

All Souls Day -- Homily at Mass

More than twelve years ago, when I first entered this church building, I immediately noticed the various memorials around the walls of the nave. How very English! For the interior walls of cathedrals and parish churches in England are typically plastered with busts and statues, reliefs and inscriptions, extolling the virtues and accomplishments of deceased parishioners.

The erection of monuments is part of a wider pattern of offerings and gifts to memorialize the departed. As in many other parishes, here at S. Stephen’s we have lots of memorials – items given in memory of departed loved ones: from the Webster Memorial Guild House, to the Goddard Organ, to the stain glass windows, to individual Prayer Books and Hymnals in the pews, to flowers on the altar. In the narthex you can see the book in which these memorials are lovingly recorded.

On this All Souls Day, then, it seems appropriate to reflect on this natural human impulse to memorialize the departed. Why do we do it? Such memorial offerings fulfill some deep-seated human needs.

For example, they express the human emotions of sorrow and mourning. Particularly in England, many of the Victorian monuments adorning the churches and graveyards feature weeping angels, winged hourglasses, broken vases, and other symbols of loss and desolation. One gets the impression that such monuments serve to memorialize the grief of the living as much as the memory of the dead.

Such memorial offerings also express thanksgiving for the deceased person’s life. This is particularly true of monuments erected to public figures, such as the Washington Monument and the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials in Washington DC. And here in Church people likewise offer memorial gifts in thanksgiving for the ways in which the departed enriched the lives of family, friends, parish, and community.

Most of all, perhaps, these memorial offerings express the natural human desire to ensure that the deceased person will be remembered and not forgotten. The literal meaning of the word “memorial,” after all, is an aid to memory, a reminder, a stimulus to remembrance: lest we forget. We offer these memorials so that those who them they will remember the ones in whose memory they were given.

Sometimes it works, even for generations: the name of the Webster Memorial Guildhouse still calls to mind the young curate of this parish who drowned at sea in the year 1898. The Waterman Communion vessels still remind us of the fifth rector of this parish who presided over the construction of this church building in the early 1860s.

So, the impulse to offer memorial gifts responds to the human need to express in tangible form our mourning and grief, our gratitude for the life of the deceased, and our desire to keep their memory alive for generations to come. All this is perfectly natural and entirely good. And yet – everything I’ve described so far can be done just as well by atheists and agnostics as by people of faith.

All Souls Day reminds us that as members of the Church we have the opportunity to do something more. In addition to memorializing the dead we also pray for them. This practice hinges on the conviction that even though the departed are no longer with us, nonetheless they are alive in Christ.

The doctrine of the Communion of the Saints teaches us that in Christ we have fellowship with both the living and the dead. Just we pray for each other here on earth, so the saints in heaven pray for us; and both they and we pray for the souls of the faithful departed. We have the assurance that somehow in God’s providence our prayers really do benefit and help the departed in their continuing heavenward journey. And we have the hope that just as we pray for the dead, so too, after our time comes, the members of the Church on earth will pray for us as well.

Bereavement, the loss of a loved one, is a painful ordeal. When someone in our community loses someone, it’s often difficult to know what to say. We want to say something lest it seem that we don’t care; yet I’ve noticed that here in New England especially we’re also reluctant to say anything too intrusive. Our therapeutic culture responds to almost every life event in terms of how we feel about it and how it makes us feel. But people who’ve been recently bereaved often tell me that the last thing they need is well-meaning people prying into how they’re processing their feelings about their loss, or worse, telling them how they must or should be feeling.

The good news is that the Christian tradition gives us a language for speaking of death and bereavement very different from the language of our therapeutic culture. When we encounter someone who’s just lost a loved one, above and beyond such conventional sentiments as “I’m very sorry for your loss,” we can also say something like, “I will pray for her; and I will pray for you as well.” That is not a sanctimonious platitude – provided that we follow through and actually say the prayers that we promise! In my experience, ninety-nine per cent of the time, people are touched, grateful, and even comforted to be told that we’re praying for their departed loved ones, no matter what their religious beliefs or lack thereof may be.

Now, of course, we pray for the departed not so that we can have something comforting to say to the bereaved, but because we believe that such prayers are intrinsically worthwhile. My point is simply that if we take seriously the Church’s teaching and practice on prayer for the departed, we gain a whole new language for responding to death, loss, and bereavement that is clearly counter-cultural, but that can also be remarkably effective in offering solace and comfort as well.

While I’m on the subject, I want to put in a word for the Guild of All Souls: the international Anglican devotional society that prays every day of the year for the departed on the anniversaries of their deaths. By enrolling in the Guild, you ensure that after you die, the Guild’s members will pray for you in perpetuity. And if you want to memorialize someone who has died, one option is to enroll that person in the Guild posthumously, thus adding his or name to the list of those who are prayed for every year on their year’s mind. I cannot think of a more touching memorial.

This evening, then, we gather to offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass for all the faithful departed. All Souls Day reminds us that as Christians we’re called not only to memorialize the dead, but also to pray for them. And, throughout the year, whenever we encounter a memorial gift given in loving memory of someone departed this life – even something as simple as flowers at the altar – we do well always to remember to say a prayer for that person’s soul.

Feast of All Saints -- Sermon at Mass

The Feast of All Saints commemorates those Christians, known to us and unknown, who having completed the course of this earthly life, have entered into heaven and attained the beatific vision. Collectively, the Saints in heaven are sometimes called the Church Triumphant.

The commemoration of saints figures prominently in the Church’s daily round of worship. At the weekday Mass here at S. Stephen’s, we often celebrate the life of the saint whose day in the calendar it is. Some of these saints are very ancient and obscure figures, such as Crispin and Crispianian, martyrs in fourth century Gaul. Others are much more recent figures whose lives are better documented and better known to us, such as Therese of Lisieux in nineteenth-century France.

But one aspect of the commemoration of the saints that has caught my attention and captured my imagination more and more over the past year or so is what I like to call its geographical dimension. What I mean is that a particular holy person often becomes an important figure in the Church calendar not only because of the intrinsic merits of his or her earthly life, but also because of the specific communities and places where that saint has become known as a living presence in the years and even centuries after his or her death.

When we trace the posthumous careers of various saints through the different communities that have honored them, down to the cathedrals, basilicas, and shrines dedicated to them today, we gradually build up a working knowledge of the sacred geography of the Christian world. For example, whether or nor Saint James the Apostle ever visited Spain, what are claimed to be his relics are certainly enshrined at the cathedral in Santiago de Compostella – a destination for millions of pilgrims down through the centuries since the Middle Ages.

Moreover, the doctrine of the Communion of Saints teaches, among other things, that the saint in heaven watches over and intercedes for the communities and places where he or she is venerated on earth. Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple once wrote that on account of the Incarnation, Christianity is the most materialistic of the world’s great religions. For this reason, physical tokens and reminders of a saint’s earthly life are not unimportant. For example, Saint Augustine of Hippo wrote in his great work The City of God of the many miracles that accompanied the arrival of some relics of our patron saint Stephen in North Africa in the fifth century. When we invoke a saint in the presence of his relics on earth, he explained, the saint in heaven prays for us in turn with powerful effect.

What, then, can we say about the Feast of All Saints? In the early centuries of Church history, Christians visited the tombs of their local martyrs on the anniversaries of their deaths. In this practice lie the origins of the Church’s calendar of saints. As the numbers of martyrs multiplied, however, especially in the third and fourth centuries, the practice developed in some places of setting aside a day to commemorate all the martyrs, so that none would be overlooked. By the fifth century or so, several of the Eastern Churches had designated such a commemoration on May 13.

Then, in the early seventh century, the Byzantine Emperor gave the building in Rome known as the Pantheon into the care of Pope Boniface IV. The Pantheon had been built in the first century by the Emperor Agrippa as a temple to all the gods and goddesses. So, at its consecration as a church on May 13, 609, Boniface decided to undo its former pagan dedication by rededicating it to Saint Mary and all the Martyrs. And as part of the consecration ceremony, cartloads of bones of the martyrs were brought from the catacombs and deposited under the high altar. This event apparently marked several firsts: the first time that a former pagan temple was converted into a church, that relics of the saints were translated from the catacombs to a church in Rome, and that a church was dedicated not just to one martyr saint but to all of them. Incidentally, being made into a church ensured that the Pantheon became one of the few Roman architectural masterworks that did not fall into ruin.

Subsequently, in about the year 732, Pope Gregory III dedicated a chapel in the old Saint Peter’s Basilica to All the Saints on November 1. The date may already have been kept as a feast of all the saints in the Frankish Empire, so that Gregory picked it as a suitable date for dedicating his chapel; or the celebration of All Saints on November 1 may arise as the keeping of the anniversary of the dedication of Gregory’s chapel. We’re not sure.

Either way, Gregory’s reasons for dedicating this chapel were enormously significant. In the East, the Iconoclastic heresy had just gained the ascendancy in the Byzantine Empire. And the Iconoclasts not only disputed the validity of the use of images of Christ and the saints in Christian worship, but they also attacked the invocation of the saints and the veneration of relics. Not only did they smash icons but they also broke open shrines and burned the bodies of saints or threw their relics into the sea. In addition to condemning these sacrileges, Pope Gregory made a point of paying special honor to both images and relics of the saints. In Saint Peter’s, he had an iconostasis or icon-screen installed; and he had the aforementioned chapel constructed to house a number of saints’ relics. The chapel itself did not survive the rebuilding of Saint Peter’s in the sixteenth century, but ever since its dedication November 1 has been the established date of the feast of All Saints in the West.

In the Eastern Church, the Iconoclastic heresy was condemned by the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787, and finally suppressed in 842. Later in the ninth century, the Byzantine Emperor Leo VI built the first Church dedicated to All Saints in Constantinople. The Churches of the East celebrate All Saints not on November 1, however, but in the Spring, on the first Sunday after Pentecost.

The point I want to make, then, is that the Church’s solemn celebration of the Feast of All Saints is not the result of some clever abstract speculation on the part of some monk or theologian in his free time. Instead, the feast gained traction and grew in importance precisely because it upheld crucial principles, doctrines, and practices that were under attack – particularly concerning the place of images, relics, and the invocation of the saints in the life of the Church. As we continue the celebration of the Feast of All Saints in our own day, we do well to consider the place of these same principles, doctrines, and practices in our own life in Christ.