Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on All Saints' Day 2024

His steps were slow, careful, precarious. But John Robert Lewis knew the way, and his gaze was steady. It was a Sunday in March 2020 on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, not unlike that first, fabled Bloody Sunday, fifty-five years before. Now as then, the breeze was cool, the late-winter sun soft, and the water below brown and swirling. And he was back again, walking the old path.

No one said it, but everyone knew it: John Lewis was dying, the victim of a cancer that would kill him within months. Yet here he was, just weeks after his 80th birthday, standing once more above the Alabama River. He was handed a microphone. His body was weak, but his voice was strong.  ‘On this bridge just a few short years ago a few of the children of God started on a journey,’ he said. They’d been there because of Martin Luther King Jr, and because of ‘the saints of old.’  ‘We were beaten,’ he said. ‘Tear-gassed. Bullwhipped. On this bridge, some of us gave a little blood to help redeem the soul of America.’

John Lewis—not a saint of old, but a saint of our time—summoned the nation he loved to be what it had long said it would be but had failed to become. He was a saintly man. Willing to die for the Gospel; open to grace; an example of conviction, of courage, and of love in the face of hate.

This is All Saints’ Day. In Greek, sainthood is derived from a word meaning ‘to set apart’ or to ‘make holy.’  And here we are, you and me, gathered in the expectation that our obedience to Jesus’s command to ‘do this in remembrance of me’ will bring some measure of order in a conflicted, troubled and divided world; some measure of hope in a maelstrom of despair; some measure of light in a world given to darkness.

We’re in a good place to think on these things. The architecture of this Abbey church seeks to illuminate a path not only upward but forward—forward to a world where grace and truth contend against hatred and injustice. Yet we often fail in the well-fought fight. That’s why tonight we must be open to the saints, who call to us not because we are perfect, not even because we are good, but because we are human. Because, in a fundamental sense, we are all Lazarus—vulnerable, bound and mortal.

The gospel story of the raising of Lazarus is, like saintliness, compelling but remote. Jesus raises a man from the dead. He reverses the order of things. And he does so with a word - ‘Lazarus, come out,’ and Lazarus comes out—out from the dust, out from the rot, back into the world of the living.

From this evening’s second reading the Revelation of St John the Divine (21: 1–6a), we can see the resurrection of Lazarus as a signal of what is to come: ‘Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.’ Such is the great promise, the ultimate hope, of our Christian faith—that ‘death will be no more’. A promise made to saints and sinners alike.

More than half a century ago, Martin Luther King Jr observed that “the arc of a moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Bends, not swerves—but what we can miss in this cold-eyed vision of history is that the arc won’t even bend without devoted individuals pressing for the swerve.

That’s why saints are so vital. Unlike most of us, saints reject the tragedies of life and human history. They walk with Jesus himself. As the reading from the Book of Wisdom (3: 1–9) has indicated, the path for the righteous is not smooth but rough; not comfortable but rugged. Yet the injunction of the gospel, is to take up one’s cross, not just to take life as it comes. Saints insist that a moderate course is no course at all, only a continuation of the same. Saints understand sin but choose to see the injustices and the imperfections of the world not as something to be accepted but as something to be fought—for the redemption of the soul of humanity.

In Hebrew and in Greek, the word “soul” also means ‘breath’ or ‘life’. The soul is what makes us us, whether we’re speaking of a person or of a nation. John Lewis knew that. He lived that. He risked everything for that. He believed that tomorrow could be better than today, and that tomorrow was but the prelude to a yet more glorious day to come.

We need not be saints to follow him across that bridge in Selma, Alabama, and into the light of a yet more glorious day. But follow we must. Journey we must, however slowly, however carefully, however precariously. And if we do, and—in obedience to our Lord’s command, when we do—then perhaps we too will see what is to come—the holy city, the new Jerusalem, come down out of heaven from God, where death will be no more and God himself will dwell among us and wipe away every tear from our eyes.