Fr. Robert Miclean
Holy Archangels Orthodox Church
Sunday of All Saints
June 10, 2012
This Sunday of All Saints confronts us head-on with this particularly humbling truth: God created us to be Saints, “haggioi,” ‘holy ones.’ St. David says of man, “For You have made him a little lower than the angels, And You have crowned him with glory and honor” (Ps. 8:5). St. Paul speaks of our vocation in Christ, saying we’re called to “adoptions as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself” that we may know “the glory of His inheritance in the saints” (Eph. 1:4-5, 18).
So allow this truth to sink in; it so grips us, humbles us to such an extent it can seem unreal to us because we often feel so far from this calling. And yet, here it is: God has purposed us for eternal life with Him—not some subservient existence, not a Master-slave relationship, but to adoption as sons and daughters, co-heirs with Christ, participants in His divine life.
Two errors are often made with regard to this calling: The first is to assume that Sainthood is some far off, intangible ideal that we could never hope to achieve, even with God’s help. This error assumes that Saints are a relic of some distant and legendary past: more myth than reality. We look in us and around us and in our judging spirit we can be convinced that this must be the case, we find ourselves giving up even before we’ve even started in earnest to cooperate with the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, to learn God’s love, to struggle to grow and to heal.
The second error is to make the opposite assumption and presume on God’s grace with the thinking that no matter, we’re already Saints and that our work of cooperating with the Holy Spirit is already done—or, at least, far advanced. In other words, we’ve already ‘arrived.’ Things are ‘comfortable’ the way they are. Both errors are tragic in that they distort the truth of what Sainthood really means and its absolute relevance for our own lives, here and now.
God makes no mistakes. Though we are unworthy of His love and mercy, God, like a true but perfect parent, loves us with a pure love, always willing and desiring our reclamation. Even we who are imperfect but God-fearing parents know how to encourage our children when they fail, when they fall, when they get frustrated and disobey. We don’t give up on them. How much more persistent is God’s love in His desire to see us persevere in our calling to adoption?
God desires our transformation into the near angelic beings He created us to be, so that we can commune with Him who is Himself holy and be glorified through relationship with Him. Only those willing to change and be transformed into His likeness can participate in the life of holy God. And this is what He offers us, the tools, the means, to change. We never ‘arrive’. Instead, our pilgrimage of transformation is itself the journey of salvation, life with Him.
The Saints are those who’ve struggled and cooperated with the work of the Holy Spirit to such an extent, that they’ve experienced a great healing over their sin-sickness and passions. Their love for God becomes everything to them. They’ve fought the good fight of faith, taken up their cross, and persevered in the struggle against their passions—whatever threatens to keep them from the fullness of life with God—so they can advance to become God’s ‘holy ones.’
In our Orthodox worship, we’re reminded of countless ordinary sinners turned into the most extraordinary of Saints, and these examples encourage, strengthen, and spur us on in our own struggles. They serve as examples to us of the historic reality that God is indeed glorified in His Saints, that He delights in adding us to the icons, to that “great cloud of witnesses,” made up of every rank, race, class, place, and time since the world began.
We remember modern Saints too this day: St. John the Wonderworker, Elder Cleopa, St. Xenia of St. Petersburg, St. Tikhon, St. Hermann of Alaska, and Pr. Gheorghe Calciu—some of whom we and our generation have been blessed to know. There are sinners being made Saints right now. Every one of us struggling to submit our lives to Christ and His Church in obedience, casting out fearful pride, desiring humility, is on that journey, further up and further in.
These Saints testify to the reality of God’s work of healing, of salvation, the reality of this calling at work not just in the past, but now, in this present hour—at work in you and in me—to make us each into the fullness of the godly man or godly woman, adopted children, He’s called us to be.
Today we examine our own lives and ask ourselves where we are on this journey, this pilgrimage. Have we let anything come between us and that holy calling, any worldly preoccupations? Are we satisfied with giving God worship once a week for a couple hours? How strong is our daily prayer life? How hard are we struggling with our passions? Do we submit ourselves to Christ and His Church? Are we regularly availing ourselves of opportunities for confession, prioritizing our life in God the Holy Trinity above all else? Our change, our transformation, begins and advances with our simple but heartfelt desire for life with God above all else, the desire to grow in holiness as God is holy, to make the focus of our life glorify God, that we may be glorified in Him, as St. Silouan puts it (paraphrased).
If we’re to receive our crown, Christ admonishes us today to love and confess Him before all others. If we are to find ourselves in full communion with God in that life, we begin now. We make our life with God, our worship of Him, our steady progress in healing and growth in the knowledge and love of Him, our chief aim.
There’s no one here too ‘hard-wired’ to receive healing and growth, to conquer sin with God’s help. We can’t afford to give ourselves or others that excuse. There are no victims here: all are called. Our own honest and earnest prayers for healing from our sin-sickness and passions never go unanswered. God desires our salvation even more than we do.
St. Paul gives us this roadmap to our Sainthood in today’s Epistle, urging us first to, “lay aside… the sin which so easily ensnares us.” In other words, recognize and confess our sins, give them over to Christ. And then, he urges us to persevere, saying: “…Run with endurance the race that is set before us.” We discern with God’s help, often through Confession, those negative objects of repentance that we need to turn away from: vices, passions, patterns of behavior—all that “ensnares us.” We may need to actively pray against them and confess them for years, but with that cross comes healing, growth–victory. We grow closer to God in His love and truth as we “run with endurance” this race of faith, “looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.”
Keeping our focus on Jesus Christ and submitting ourselves to Him in His Church, we gain the courage to stay the course. Through our perseverance, we grow and heal to attain our crown and become those co-heirs with Christ He made us and calls us to be. Christ promises us: “Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands, for My name’s sake, shall receive a hundredfold, and inherit everlasting life.”
Here’s part of what that means: if we want to love those near and dear to us, we learn to love God first, we ‘own’ our calling to sainthood. As we are schooled in God’s love, we learn how to love our family, friends, neighbors, even our enemies. As we learn to love God above all, we find ourselves desiring life with Him more than everything else this world offers, we desire to become the Saints He’s graciously called us to be. We are transfigured step by step, growing closer to God. In turn, those around us are enabled to grow and change with us. And so, we see the “great cloud of witnesses” at work. Holy Saints of God, pray for us sinners!
