The Feast of All Saints, 2005
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
It was around 3:30 in the afternoon when 10-year-old Josie and her mother arrived at the church for Josie’s acolyte training. Josie, encouraged by the parish, this priest and her family, was the youngest acolyte ever to be trained at Trinity Church. She was very excited, and so was I.
Her mother sat and watched from the front pew while the two of us walked up past the altar rail into the chancel, a place Josie had never been before. We sat down together on the acolyte’s bench, and the training began.
I started with some words about what it means to function upfront in the liturgy—that it’s more about a calm and centered presence on behalf of others than it is about performing a series of actions perfectly (though nothing’s wrong with doing things well).
Josie sat quietly acting as if she were listening, her eyes darting from one fascinating object to another in this her new liturgical domain.
We then began walking through what an acolyte does on a Sunday morning.
We started with what happens prior to the liturgy: vesting—and so Josie found the alb that was just her size and put it on—and the lighting of the candles.
I asked Josie to fetch the extinguisher from where it leaned near the acolyte’s pew. I then got a book of matches, and we began to work on how to light the wick.
It was then that something dawned on me. “Josie,” I asked her. “Have you ever struck a match before?”
“No” she answered.
“Well, let me show you what to do,” I said, “and then you can give it a try.”
Now when you have to teach a person who has never done it before, to strike a match from a book like this, you find out that it’s a complicated process.
It involves the following: Opening the book of matches, tearing the match out and closing the book by reinserting the cover; grasping the match and applying enough pressure so that it will ignite when struck, striking the match until it lights, and then quickly withdrawing the fingers away from the end of the lit match in order not to get burned while carefully holding onto it so that you don’t drop it.
This laborious process was what I explained and showed to Josie as she listened and watched.
“Are you ready to try it?” I asked.
She nodded yes, wiping away a few beads of perspiration that had appeared on her forehead.
Then she took the book of matches in her small hands that by then were shaking. She opened the book, tore a match out and closed the book, grasped the match, struck and lit it and then, in a flash, moved her fingers so as not to get burned while carefully holding onto the match so that it didn’t drop.
This little scene, this little icon of Josie lighting her first match in the context of a network of support—parish, family and priest—this little icon, has something to say to us about what we’re celebrating today on All Saints Sunday.
For All Saints’ Sunday is not just about people who show up on the Church calendar, people like St. Paul or St. Luke or St. Mary.
All Saint’s Sunday is about all of us—the baptized—God’s holy ones who are daily asked to do difficult, new things with small, shaky hands and with beads of perspiration on our foreheads. All Saints Sunday is about all of us, claimed by God in Baptism, asked to do difficult things but never asked to do these things in isolation or alone.
A slightly more famous saint, Rosa Parks, is a case in point. Parks, who refused to yield her seat to a white man on a bus on December 1, 1955, touched off the Montgomery bus boycott and spawned a movement that toppled state-approved racial segregation in this country. On that day in December when she was arrested, a day she called “the worst day of her life,” she did not act in isolation or alone. No, there was a living web of relationships that surrounded her.
For Parks was raised in the AME church, prayed with her family and read the Bible every day, having a special interest in the psalms, particularly Psalm 27. Before refusing to give up her bus seat, Parks had been active for twelve years in the local NAACP chapter, serving as its secretary. The summer before her arrest, she’d also attended a ten-day training session at Tennessee’s labor and civil rights organizing school, the Highlander Center, where she’d met and been influenced by an older generation of civil rights activists, like South Carolina teacher Septima Clark.
On that day in 1950, in that iconic moment, Rosa Parks did not make an isolated and spur of the moment decision any more than Josie did in lighting her first match. Marked as Christ’s own forever and grafted into the communion of saints, Parks took an action that was connected to actions before it and flowed into other actions after it, all working together to create a movement that brought justice to a people.
You and I are a part of this same communion of saints. Like Josie and Rosa, we belong to God and to one another. Our lives exist in a living web of God-given encouragement, challenge and support. And within that web, no act of mercy or perseverance or compassion or forgiveness or courage is a small action, because it has the capacity to deeply influence and affect others.
And so on the Feast of All Saints what I must tell you is this: what many of you are doing that you perhaps think is insignificant or just a bother is far more than that. It is the place where God’s good blessing is being poured out onto the world through you.
And so to take a page out of Jesus’ book:
Blessed are you who live in an empty handed way, for you hold the kingdom of heaven out in your hands to the rest of us.
Blessed are you who mourn, for you give us the courage to lament.
Blessed are you who are meek and gentle, for you show us what it is to receive the earth.
Blessed are you who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for you inspire us to seek justice,
Blessed are you who are merciful, for you help us forgive ourselves.
There’s an All Saints storytelling experience I used to do with children. It went like this:
I gathered the children together and showed them a large, flat, rectangular manila envelope I told them that in the envelope was an icon, a picture of a saint.
I then began to tell the story of this saint. I told them that God had been with this saint throughout the Saint’s life, that God was there in the darkness before birth, at birth itself, and in the water and the people gathered around at baptism. I told them that God, patient and attentive, was there no matter what happened in that Saint’s life, in the ordinary day to day times, in the times of happiness and in times of sadness. God was there.
After about five minutes of this, I asked the children if they would like to see the icon, the picture of the saint I was talking about. By this time they were frantic to do so. And so I told them I would take the picture out, and that one by one, each child by him or herself was to come up and to look at it.
What I took out of the manila envelope, and held up to each child’s face one at a time was a mirror, so that the icon each child saw was his or her own reflection.
I will never forget the faces of those children. For they saw that the saint I had been describing, the beloved one of God at every moment of life, was each of them, was all of them. Is each of us, is all of us.
Sources Consulted and Cited
Christianity Today, week of October 24, 2005 (reprint of Rosa Parks interview that appeared in the April 24, 1995 issue of Christianity Today)
“The Real Rosa Parks” by Paul Rogat Loeb, published on October 31, 2005, by www.CommonDreams.org
