Imagine a November morning in Minnesota, on a wheat farm, flat and wintry, and a small white house standing all alone on the prairie. The wind is blowing, but this early in winter, no snow has fallen yet. The year is 1918, and a world away, men are huddled in trenches in France, but here in Minnesota, another drama is unfolding.
A man is carefully and gingerly helping his wife up into a wagon. They are bundled up against the winter chill, and she is weak, so that he almost has to lift her into the seat. The man is taking his wife to town, where he will put her on a train to Rochester, Minnesota, where she go to the Mayo Clinic to be treated for cancer. He would like to go with her, but someone must return home to be with the three boys, age 12, 10, and 4, and the little girl, Adeline, age 7.
The children wave as the wagon drives off, and their mother turns to wave back at them, and gives one last special smile to her little girl. Late that afternoon, the winter wind changes and begins blowing hard, from a different direction. A blizzard blows up. The father is still not home. The two older boys go out to the barn and do the evening chores. Little Adeline takes out some food from the pantry and serves a cold dinner to her brothers. The children eat and, not knowing when their father can return home in this blizzard, put themselves to bed.
In the night, the blizzard dies down, and in the morning a neighbor comes to their farm. This neighbor is richer than they are, and so he has a telephone. The children’s father has called him to tell him his wife died before he could get her on the train. In the blizzard, he was unable to come home to care for his children, so the neighbor takes them to his house. Quietly, they absorb the news of their mother’s death, and wait for their father to come home.
That little girl, Adeline, never forgot what it meant to have a mother. She grew up, married, had four girls of her own, and devoted her life to caring for her family. She helped her husband run a farm in Oklahoma, taught her children to read and to love each other and take care of their own families, and cared for her father in his old age. Her steady, calm, kind wisdom was the foundation of her family’s life.
Adeline was my grandmother. She taught my own mother how to be a mother, and my mother taught me. My grandmother Adeline died last year at the age of 97, still steady, calm and kind as always. She was a saint of God.
This All Saints weekend is a time when we remember those saints who have gone before us: the famous saints like martyrs Stephen and Agnes, evangelists Paul and Patrick, people who changed the world like Mary, mother of God, and Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King Jr. But this weekend is also a time to remember the ordinary saints who didn’t work miracles but who lived courageously, living out the ordinary virtues of care and concern for others and following Christ in their daily lives. It’s a time to remember the ones who have gone before us. And it is a time to remember that Christ promises us that death does not have the final word: the final word of life belongs to God.
This whole weekend, from Halloween through the Nov. 2 feast of All Souls, is a celebration of the triumph of life over death. Like many Christian holidays, Halloween was originally a pagan holiday that has been baptized – the ancient Celts celebrated a Day of the Dead, when they believed that the spirits of departed loved ones wandered free in the world, often returning to their ancestral homes and visiting descendants.
In celebrating a Day of the Dead, these ancient pagan people recognized the basic, most fundamental questions of human existence: what happens to us when we die? Where have the people gone whom we have loved? Can they still have a relationship with us? Will they live again? Recognizing one basic truth of human life, they knew that their ancestors left more than memories behind – they left whole ways of being and acting, family dynamics, habits of love – they believed that they still had relationships with those who had died. So they would leave doors and windows open for the friendly spirits, leaving fires burning and food out for the spirits to eat – the origin of trick-or-treating.
Early Christians brought Christian faith to bear on this custom, showing a genius for relating God’s truth in the gospel to local customs which, they believed, showed that God’s influence had been at work before them. They followed the Celtic Day of the Dead with a day to celebrate All Saints, the faithful baptized people, famous and not, whose souls rest in hands of God: a day to remember the ones who have made us what we are, to celebrate the love they have given us, and to give thanks for God’s promise of eternal life.
Which is why I got a kick out of the latest from televangelist Pat Robertson. The website of the Christian Broadcasting Network had an article by one Kimberly Daniels, who asserts that demons sneak into bags of Halloween candy at grocery stores. “[M]ost of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches,” Daniels wrote. “I do not buy candy during the Halloween season. Curses are sent through the tricks and treats of the innocent whether they get it by going door to door or by purchasing it from the local grocery store. The demons cannot tell the difference.”
“Halloween is much more than a holiday filled with fun and tricks or treats,” she wrote. “It is a time for the gathering of evil that masquerades behind the fictitious characters of Dracula, werewolves, mummies and witches on brooms. The truth is that these demons that have been presented as scary cartoons actually exist. I have prayed for witches who are addicted to drinking blood and howling at the moon.” Well ... if I knew people like that, I would pray for them too.
OK, time to take a deep breath – let’s calm down about Halloween. Far from a day for demons and werewolves, the feast of All Saints, including the eve of All Saints, Halloween, celebrates the greatest Christian hope. We believe that in Jesus Christ, God has overcome death with life; that Jesus’ own resurrection was the sign of that victory; and that the resurrection of Lazarus demonstrates that resurrection was not just something that happened long ago and far away to the Son of God, but it is something promised to every saint of God, every member of Christ’s Body, to you and to me. The original Halloween sight must have been the sight of the body of Lazarus, wrapped in grave clothes, emerging from the tomb, blinking in the sunlight, to the wails and astonishment of all those who loved him. But Lazarus was no zombie, no demon, no walking creature of horror. Lazarus was a person, called from death into life by God’s cry of love.
Our scriptures tell us that Lazarus’ story is our story too. Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans that we are baptized into Christ’s death – as we entered the baptismal waters, we died with him, and as we emerged, dripping, into the sunlight, we were also raised with him. We have already been reborn into the promise of eternal life. We are already saints, baptized people who live in truth of Christ’s salvation.
And so on All Saints’ weekend, we remember those heroes of the faith, heroes of history and heroes in our own personal lives, whose souls are already in the hands of God. In their stories, we celebrate our own origins, the things that have made us who we are, like a young motherless girl who never forgot what it meant to have and be a mother, and passed that knowledge down through generations.
And we celebrate the fact that the ordinary and extraordinary saints of our past have made us their heirs – we celebrate the fact that we are saints too. In the rather quaint words of our closing hymn today, “You can meet them in shops, or in lanes, or at tea … and I mean to be one too.” In our baptism, we are raised with Christ, and in our baptismal covenant, we make promises about how we will act because of that salvation. We will renew our baptismal covenant in a moment, and you will have a chance to see those promises we have all made. What those promises tell us is that in Christ, we are all saints – baptized members of the body of Christ who promise to live according to Christ’s call.
My grandmother Adeline is with God now, along with the communion of saints, and I remember and honor her today. In their stories, the famous ones we have heard of and the not-so-famous ones we have loved, we remember our past. But in their stories, we also celebrate our destiny – not just things past or things present, but things yet to come. In Jesus, God makes us a promise that is eternal. Our Christian faith gives us a hope beyond hope, and a promise beyond promises. Lazarus was only the first to rise from the dead – but we will rise also. And if this is true, then there is nothing left to fear. Halloween is a time to laugh, because Jesus has already entered into death and conquered it. And All Saints is a time to celebrate the joy of eternal life, through Jesus Christ.
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