This week's homily...

All Saint’s Sunday 2007

Do you have to have a miracle attributed to you in to be considered a Saint in the Orthodox Church?

The answer is no. Although it often does happen it’s not required to be considered a Saint.

Are Bishops the only ones who decide which people are glorified as Saints in the Orthodox Church?

Again, the answer is no. While Bishops make the final decisions most people venerated as Saints in the Orthodox Church are first venerated by the faithful.

We Orthodox live in a world also inhabited by Saints, luminaries of Christ whose lives serve as model, teacher, and encouragement in our own journey of faith. We name our parishes after them. We name ourselves after them. We read their stories and venerate their images. We ask them to pray for us and cherish the evidences of divine intervention in response.

But what does it mean to be a saint?

First it’s crucially important to understand that being a saint is the normal state of all Christians. The Scripture identifies all the baptized with the title “saint” and at its core the word implies one set apart by God, which all of us were at the time we were baptized and chrismated. Because we venerate saints we often think saintliness is for someone else, for monastics or clergy or some other kind of person on whom some kind of magic has fallen. But living a life of holiness is the call on everyone who names the name of Christ.

And although for a small number of people the living out of that life of saintliness is within the context of a monastery or some other kind of institution away from the larger flow of the world for most Orthodox the everyday world is where our holiness is realized. Christians sometimes speak of two different realms the sacred and the secular. For Orthodox Christians that distinction does not exist. By grace every aspect of our lives can be filled with holiness and the Christian life can be lived in saintliness and transform every righteous vocation of a person into something godly. It is quite possible for a person to be a holy saint of a plumber, a homemaker, or even a lawyer. When people seek to know the will of God for their lives they often believe that it must be some kind of great challenge but most often the answer is “Be a faithful and holy person right where you are and in doing so you will save yourself and others.” In other words be a saint.

So all who are baptized and chrismated are called saints, and called to be saints, and in a certain way this day, All Saint’s Day, is your day because it calls to mind not just those Saints who are commemorated by the Church in some official way but also all of us who live our call to saintliness in the hustle and bustle of the everyday world, and even those whose virtue is known only to God.

Yet from the beginning of the Church she has called to mind and venerated the memory of notable Christians, persons from many different walks of life who by the grace of God exemplified the highest qualities of those called by the Holy Spirit to follow Christ.

In the earliest days of the Church these were largely the Apostles, the Mother of God, those around them and those who had given their life for the faith, the martyrs. Later pious clergy who defended the faith were venerated, and then holy people from all walks of life. Even in the very dawn of the Church the lives of holy Christians were remembered by the faithful, their prayers were coveted and their bodies and graves cherished. The story of the martyrdom of St. Polycarp in the middle of the 2nd century records the local authorities desecrating his body in their misunderstanding that the Christians would worship his remains. Many of the earliest churches gathered where holy men and women were buried or used their graves as an altar for the liturgy a practice we continue by placing a relic of a Saint in our own altars at their consecration.

As the Church grew and eventually became a legal entity and then the State Church of the Roman Empire the procedures and the formalities changed but the basic core of reverence for holy people and exemplary Christians remained. In the West detailed procedures were developed for the cause of notable Christians to be declared Saints. There is paperwork to be done, various stages of inquiry, and public proclamations in regards to the person as they progress through a process which may take decades and whose final determination lies in Rome. In fact we get the word “devil’s advocate” from the person whose job it was, in the Western Church, to formally look for inconsistencies in the evidence presented for the cause of a person presented to the Church for canonization.

In the East the process is less formal. The canonization of a Saint (which we in the East call glorification) begins, as it did in the earliest days of the Church, with the faithful venerating the memory of a holy person. In time the accounts and evidences of the holiness of the person venerated by the faithful are examined by local hierarchs who, if they believe the person to be both Orthodox in faith and holy in life, present the evidence to whatever Synod or structure may be in place for final approval. The criteria is simple. The person must have been faithful to the Orthodox faith and possessed of a life of obvious holiness.

Unlike the Western Church where three miracles related to the person are often required no supernatural evidence is demanded to declare a person a Saint in the East. The holiness of life is a miracle in itself and can be deemed sufficient even though the lives of holy people often are interwoven with miracles. Yet it is not uncommon for signs of the person’ holiness including such things as apparitions related to the person, miracles at their grave or via objects blessed by contact with the person, the absence of the normal decomposition of their body over time, or a fragrance coming from their relics. Again, although these things happen they are not required for a formal finding that the person is surely in the presence of Christ, that is glorified.

When this happens a final memorial service is held with occasionally the moving and reburial of the holy person’s body. During the vigils and services which follow formal proclamation is made of the person’s status as a capital “S” Saint, their icon is unveiled, and various hymns to and about the new Saint are sung. We Orthodox do not have a central office, as it were, to keep the whole process in order, we simply accept the decisions of other groups of canonical Orthodox and practice a kind of local diversity in the Saints we venerate. We also share with the Roman Catholic Church all those Saints who were venerated before the 11th century. So, for example we venerate St. Patrick, Apostle and Bishop of Ireland, but do not venerate Francis of Assisi or any saint of any other church who lived after the Great Schism.

As a side point it’s interesting to note that although the Orthodox Church keeps a hagiography, that is the stores and accounts of the lives of Saints, those whom it believes are certainly with God in heaven, it does not have a list of the damned, those who are certain to be away from the presence of God in hell. We believe that the manifestation of holy people is a gift to us from God but never presume that any person is permanently lost from God.

But while knowing a bit of the process of identifying and glorifying Saints is a good thing, the true value of the Saints lies in something much more important. You, I, and we, are called to be saints as well.

In the Epistle reading the author of Hebrews recounts the great deeds of saints past but never leaves the readers with the accounts for their own sake. The author tells the stories of these people as an encouragement for those now living the life of faith to live holy lives as well.

It is good to venerate the Saints but an Orthodox Christian may kiss an icon a thousand times and if they do not emulate the virtues, the life of Christ that made that person holy, in their own lives the kiss is an empty gesture. Lighting a candle before an icon makes little difference if the person kindling the flame does not also kindle a flame within themselves to imitate this Saint as they imitated Christ. The truest form of veneration is imitation and while we ask for the intercessions of the saints we are also called to act as saints ourselves in the here and now.

In this world that sometimes seems like it’s tearing apart at the seams the truth is that we don’t need more police, or soldiers, or politicians, social workers, or even preachers. What this world needs is more saints, more people who choose to live for God first, foremost, and always. That means you, and I, and we together need to live the lives we were called by God to live, endure the costs, and share the glory. When we do we save ourselves and change the world.