Sunday of all Saints

Bishop Seraphim : Homily
Who is holy ?
Sunday of All Saints
1st Sunday after Pentecost
26 June, 2005
Hebrews 11:33-12:2 ; Matthew 10:32-33, 37-38 ; 19:27-30


In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Long ago at the beginning of our existence as human beings, God said : “‘You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy’” (3 Moses [Leviticus] 19:2). What does that mean ? It means that we should be holy, because God is holy. Holiness is the main characteristic of our relationship of love, and this love is between ourselves and God. Those whom we love, we always try to emulate. That is a standard human principle. I remember that from my childhood. I remember that from when I was five, there were beautiful, older people whom I wanted to be like. They were so wonderful, so full of love, so caring about a silly little kid like I was. Not only was I silly, but I was rather unrestrainable because I was so high-spirited. I was very independent-minded, and a daredevil, which is why my mother got grey hair early.

Be that as it may, it is a human way always that if we love someone, we try to imitate that person. How much more is this the case when it comes to our relationship with God our Creator. He wants us to live in this relationship of perfect love with Him. He wants us to be like Him, because to be like Him means to be alive, truly alive. When we are not like Him, we are caricatures ; we are twisted caricatures – we are actually like zombies, the “living dead” walking around. To be like Him means to be alive, to be free.

Power, life – that is what He wants for us. He created us to be full of power and life. He does not want anything less for us. If anything less happens to us, it is because we choose it. It is because we are afraid of His love. It is because we do not dare to approach this love. We run away from love out of fear. It is because of this that we become twisted caricatures and paralysed zombies. The Saviour wants us to live in Him, to have life, and to have it “more abundantly” (see John 10:10). Let us not forget that the Saviour’s love for us is not limited to the time immediately after the Incarnation. After all, He is the Word that spoke everything into being. There are saints who come from far before the Incarnation, even from the time of our first parents, Adam and Eve. These Old Testament persons are saints of our Church, too. The Body of Christ is not limited only by the point-in-time of the Incarnation. The Body of Christ encompasses all God’s creation. Therefore, when the Apostle Paul today is speaking about all those people who suffered such horrible things, he was trying to impress on us that they suffered for the sake of their love for God and their trust in His Promise. They suffered in the Saviour who was yet to come whom they had never seen, and would not see in their lifetime. Ultimately, they only saw Him face-to-face, when, after He was crucified, our Lord descended into Hades and preached to them. They recognised Him and He lifted them up with Adam and Eve.

Before the Incarnation, these people trusted God’s love, lived in accordance with it, and did “crazy” things (like Abraham). For no apparent reason (except that God said : “Do it”), Abraham got up and moved himself and his whole household, and became a nomad, wandering all over the place on land that did not belong to him. He was not the most welcome person in this foreign territory. Besides this, what about all the other people from the Old Testament who did weird things (according to the standards of the people around them) ? There is no point in my going into that whole list right now. We can read the Old Testament for ourself, or listen to it (there are all sorts of ways). There are very interesting people for us to learn about and understand. These people did all these weird and strange things because of their love for God, so that God, through them, would speak to His people who were lost in their “zombiness”, in their selfishness, in their stubbornness and self-preoccupation. The Lord wanted to wake up His children, and He used people like Abraham, and all sorts of others . Very often the people were just so obstinate that they did not listen at all (at least not the principal ones). However, others listened and were touched.

Nowadays, at the beginning of the 21st century, all sorts of people have the idea that to be a saint is like being some sort of “professional Christian”, some sort of Christian guru, super-specialist, super-example. They suppose that one comes to be called a saint because one gets all these “brownie points”, and that designated committees examine all these points and say : “This person is a good person to be a saint, and so we will make that person a saint”. That is not at all how it is. In fact, today, we are remembering all the saints. There are many saints whose names are not even known. In fact, there are many people who are martyrs in the Church, and they are known only to us as one of thousands of martyrs, such as those 14,000 babies in the area of Bethlehem. There are 40,000 martyrs here, and 100,000 there. All those people who were burned to death on Christmas Day in Nicomedia – we only know that there were about 20,000 of them. We only know their number. However, they are all saints ; they are all holy people – people who gave their lives for the love of Jesus Christ.

In North America, we have glorified saints. There are holy people who are well- recognised by the whole Church. It very odd that we, of all people, we who have freedom to understand things, seem to be the most guilty about thinking that in order to be declared officially to be a holy person, someone must fulfil the requirements of a point-system. We tend not to look around us. We leave it to some bishop somewhere to say that this or that person will become a saint. That is not how the Church works, not at all how the Church works. It has always been that the Lord Himself tells us who is a holy person, and to whom we should be turning in order to have encouragement and intercession and support. It is the Lord who tells us and shows us. A holy person of the past may somehow appear to us and say : “Straighten out your life”. “Do this or do that”. “Correct your life”. “Repent. Turn about, and follow Christ”. People will realise what is happening, and say : “Aha, the Lord is speaking to me through this person. This person has been sent by God to be my helper. I should remember this”.

Sometimes people are healed by the intercessions of those who have gone before, and it is through that that we can recognise who is a saint. How does all this come about ? It comes about through our normal Christian life. There is, for instance, the custom that we have to pray regularly for people who have reposed. Sometimes those persons, after their repose, come to us and correct us. God shows to us these persons who have been gathered into His bosom. They are messengers of His to us in order to correct us. Sometimes these persons are used so many times, and so many wonders come about, that the faithful people recognise that this is a person who is holy. Then it is the people who tell the bishop that this person should be a saint and recognised officially. There are many people in the Orthodox world who are not even recognised officially by any bishop, and yet who are recognised by the faithful people to be holy. They are holy. People pray to them. People go to their tombs. God answers their prayers. It is not necessarily only the ones who are on the official Church list of saints who are holy. Who is holy ? It is the person who loves God, and tries to be like Him. That is all. A saint is not some sort of “professional person” on a list.

I have been researching a list of names of saints for the sake of our people who tend not to know who the saints are, and also who do not know what a variety of names there are. Christian people have usually named their children after the saints : i.e. “George”, “Anne”, “Sophia”, and the like. However, there are so many other names of saints as well. The oldest custom about how to name people is to open The Synaxarion to the day on which the child was born, and see which saints are remembered on or near that day. The child is then named after one of those saints that seems to be appropriate for that child. This requires prayerful discernment. There is a large selection per day. For example, that is how we have people named Barsanuphius (in some parts of the world, there are people called that, and not only monks).

We, like the saints, must grow in the love of Jesus Christ. We are meant to put nothing between ourselves and God. That is what our Saviour is saying in the Gospel reading today : “‘He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me’”. Why is He saying that ? He is saying that because if I put any human being or any picture between myself and Him, I have made that thing into God. Instead of God, I have put it between myself and God. I have made it into an idol, in fact. It can be anyone or anything. It can be money or a car or anything else. That is what the Lord is speaking about in the Ten Commandments. Whatever or whoever it may be that comes between the Lord and me, between me and the Lord, has therefore become an idol to me, and usurps the rightful place of the Lord. That is why the Lord would say that the person who has done this, is not worthy of Him. If I have done such a thing, if I have put anyone or anything between me and the Lord, I have to repent, fix up my life, and put the Lord first again. No matter how much I love someone, that person has always to come after the Lord. No-one can come before the Lord in my life if I am going to be a lover of God.

The Lord wants you and me to be this sort of person who truly loves, because, as I said in the beginning, such a person is free ; such a person has a true sense of himself or herself, has peace, has joy, has a sense of direction, and does not have to have a particular job or profession. This person knows that it is because of the Lord’s loving concern and care that he or she has been called to this or that situation in order to demonstrate concern about particular persons. That is truly the purpose of life. The purpose of our life has not to do with one’s profession, or success or money. Rather, the purpose of your life and my life is to become a person who loves. All the rest is an aftermath. If I do not love people, if I do not care for them, then I am empty. Then I cannot truly call myself a Christian because I am not bearing Christ in my life, and I am not demonstrating His love to people around me. That is what it means to live a Christian life – to reveal Christ’s love to people around me, and let them have a little bit of hope.

In Canada these days, where so many people are so very lost, our responsibility is great : to live this love, to reveal and share our joy and our hope to people around us, to give people hope. We do not have to go preaching. We just have to live. We have to do this love. Let us not merely talk about it. Let us do it. That is what our Lord wants. “Do My love”, the Saviour says to you and to me. “Show your love for Me by doing it. Love each other as I love you”. That is what He wants. Then we will be becoming hope, ourselves, when we do these things. Therefore, let us take confidence in the witness, the service, the example of all the saints (both known and unknown, recognised and unrecognised) that we are remembering today, who love Jesus Christ, who are alive in Jesus Christ, and let us, ourselves, follow Him. Let us do our best to be like Him as the saints are like Him, and live in Him. By our love, let us help other people around us to find Him who loves them, and to glorify our Saviour, Jesus Christ, together with the unoriginate Father, and the all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages.