Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost: November 2, 2025 | The Rev. McKenzi Roberson
All Saints/All Souls Readings : Daniel 7:1-3,15-18 | Psalm 149 | Ephesians 1:11-23 | Luke 6:20-31
The Rev. McKenzi Roberson
Happy feasts of All Saints and All Souls! We are doing a lot today, combining celebrations in this one day. On All Saints the church commemorates the people we revere as saints, people like Peter and Paul, Mary and Elizabeth, Benedict of Nursia and Teresa of Avila just to name a few, and ancient ones at that. On All Souls, or the Feast of All the Faithful Departed, we commemorate all those we love but see no more. Our loved ones, our mentors in the faith, might have died but we believe they are still with us, surrounding us in the great cloud of witnesses.
It might seem a little odd to celebrate these two feasts together. What does Saint Patrick have to do with my grandmother who I loved with my whole heart and remains my definition of Christian hospitality and generosity, but who, if I’m honest, also had her tendency towards gossip?
Thomas Merton tells a story that might help to bridge the gap. Merton was a Trappist monk and author who lived in the mid-20th century. In his autobiography Seven Storey Mountain, Merton relates a time he was a student at Columbia, walking with his friend Bob Lax down the streets of Greenwich Village on a spring evening. Lax had asked Merton what he wanted to be, but Lax was not impressed by Merton’s answer. Meteron shares Lax’s response:
““What you should say” – [Lax] told me – “what you should say is that you want to be a saint.”
A saint! The thought struck me as a little weird. I said:
“How do you expect me to become a saint?”
“By wanting to,” said Lax, simply.
“I can't be a saint,” I said, “I can’t be a saint.” And my mind darkened with a confusion of realities and unrealities; the knowledge of my own sins, and the false humility which makes men say that they cannot do the things that they must do, cannot reach the level that they must reach: the cowardice that says: “I am satisfied to save my soul, to keep out of mortal sin,” but which means, by those words: I do not want to give up my sins and my attachments.”
But Lax said: “No. All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. Don’t you believe that God will make you what He created you to be, if you will consent to let Him do it? All you have to do is desire it.”
A long time ago, St. Thomas Aquinas had said the same thing – and it is something that is obvious to everybody who ever understood the Gospels. After Lax was gone, I thought about it, and it became obvious to me.
The next day I told Mark Van Doren:
“Lax is going around saying that all a man needs to be a saint is to want to be one.”
“Of course,” said Mark.
All these people were much better Christians than I.”
“All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one.”
Are you all familiar with the concept of enthusiastic consent? It’s this idea that for some situations in life, it is not enough to passively allow something to happen. All the people involved in the situation must be fully on board with what’s happening in order for it to be ethical. God making us saints requires our enthusiastic consent. God has all the power to turn us into saints whenever God wants, but that forcing is not the kind of relationship God wants to have with us. We get to say yes or no to God’s invitation, and we are assured that our yes will always be met by God’s yes. If we want to be a saint, God will make it so. It might not look the way you expect, and it is the work of a lifetime, but God will lead you into a holy life.
The thing that ties it all together, the big hall of fame type saints, the beloved, maybe even saintly, people in our lives, and our own potential sainthood is our baptism. God does a powerful work in us when we are baptized. The opening of our reading from Ephesians begins to explain it, “In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance.” When we are washed in the waters of baptism we are united with Christ in his death and resurrection. We are all swept up into God through Jesus, and we receive the responsibilities and privileges of that inheritance.
We belong to God, this is our privilege. Nothing can separate us from God’s love, not even death. This is how we can talk about something like the communion of saints and the great cloud of witnesses. Death is real, and the grief we experience when a loved one dies is real, but death is not more real than God. The dead are already in the Kingdom of God, but that’s not to say they’re far off in some distant realm that requires weeks on horseback and crossing choppy seas to reach. The Kingdom of God is a reality layered right over ours. When we have those moments of feeling like our loved ones are right here with us even though their bodies are buried, those are moments when the Kingdom of God draws near. Love transcends death, and the bonds of baptism draw us even closer together.
But being in Christ has its responsibilities, too. The sentence in Ephesians about receiving an inheritance ends with “so that we…might live for the praise of God’s glory.” We are tasked with praising God, to borrow from the daily office, not only with our lips but in our lives. We do need to praise God with our lips, in our worship at church and (perhaps especially as Episcopalians who tend to resist this) in our conversations with our friends. I promise you there is a time and a place to talk about your faith. It does exist, even if we are aware of all the times and places it might not be as helpful as we want it to be.
And alongside those moments of explicitly claiming our faith and our hope, we are called to proclaim our faith with our actions. Luke gives us a nice list of actions that fit the bill: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” These are not easy things, and they are not always obvious. Doing good to those who hate you is not the same as staying in an abusive relationship. Loving your enemies might look like being curious enough about them to discover what actually feels like love to them and not just doing what we think is best.
We are tasked with uniting our minds, hearts, and wills towards the effort of living in the way that God has called us to live. We are unlikely to do this perfectly, but what we are called to do is live it faithfully. This reality is acknowledged and validated each time we make and renew our baptismal vows: Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord? Not if you fall into sin, but whenever. The question remains: whenever you step away from the path God has laid before you, will you set your mind, heart and will towards whatever has tempted you away or will you reset your focus on God?
To be clear, God is rooting for all of us in this effort. God isn’t waiting for us to fail. It is a hard road that we are called to walk, a long game in a world of instant gratification. God knows our suffering and our struggles, and God knows that the challenge of faithful living is worth it, the only way truly worth living. And if that gets a little too esoteric to grasp, then we have our community to more tangibly offer support along the way, and the lives of those who have gone before us to model the way for us.
So today we praise God for the communion of saints, finding comfort in their presence and support as we continually strive towards saintly lives to the honor and glory of God.