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Episcopal Church on Edisto

November 2, 2014
Matthew 5:1-12

All Saints
Happy All Saints Day, even though, by the calendar, it was yesterday. Today, November
2nd, is All Souls Day - everyones day, every soul whos passed on that is. Many
churches will transfer its observation to tomorrow, November 3rd, in order to have the
customary All Saints celebration on the Sunday following November 1st - today. And of
course November 1st always follows what seems destined to soon rival Christmas as
the greatest festive observation of all - Halloween. Oy!
Ill leave it to you to determine if what Im about to say is better suited to All Saints or All
Souls or possibly even Halloween. I want to evoke the memory of someone who, except
for Sue, is the best friend Ive ever had. Im sorely tempted to call him St. Daniel,
because I know that if hes up there somewhere listening in, hell be rolling on his cloud
laughing at that sobriquet, and he had a great laugh - a laugh that, like so much else
about him, I miss terribly. In fact, rarely a day in my life goes by without thoughts of Dan.
Dan died of liver cirrhosis a little over 6 years ago. I gather cirrhosis isnt always a
product of alcohol abuse, but in Dans case theres no doubt it was. Until his liver sent
him to the hospital, I doubt if Dan ever spent an adult day without consuming copious
amounts of alcohol and/or marijuana. Among numerous vocations, a brilliant Euro-bond
trader, hed landed and lost so many jobs his resume was thicker than a dictionary. A
skilled do-it-yourselfer who could fix almost anything, his house in upstate New York had
more half repaired old cars, trucks, tractors, boats and junk scattered around than a
Kentucky hillbilly. Probably the best golfer Ive ever known, he still hit way too many
horrible shots, and more than once I watched him walking the fairways of some of the
most exclusive courses in England casually toking on a joint. If he was invited to a 7
oclock sit-down dinner, you might expect him to come breezing in around 9:30. For just
about everyone who ever knew him, however else you chose to describe him, youd
start with the obvious - although rarely if ever a mean one, he was a drunk.
When I finally got sober, Id hoped that I could bring Dan along the same path, but the
intervention I helped organize didnt last more than 5 disastrous minutes. It wasnt until
the final 6 months or so of his life, following a couple of harrowing hospitalizations and

the growing realization that he likely wasnt going to make it, that Dan finally got around
to accepting the spiritual principles that have led many millions of lost souls into sobriety.
And even though Im almost positive he stopped drinking and smoking dope for those
last months, I had my doubts that if hed ever received the liver transplant he sought,
hed have stuck to the straight and narrow.
Theres so much more I could say, but I hope Ive said enough to cause you to wonder
why in the world am I referring to this reprobate as St. Dan. What could possibly qualify
him for sainthood?
Well, although many of them would raise their eyebrows at any notion of sainthood
landing on Dan, there are hundreds of people walking around whod gladly tell you that
theyd rarely seen anyone who embraced life so fully . . . and that their lives were not
only entertained but enriched by their relationship with him. Every one of them would
agree that, if nothing else, Dan was an almost inexhaustible source of fun. There was no
gathering he couldnt enliven, few down moods he failed to bring up. And although he
could sling his share of b.s., he somehow managed to do it without pretension or
offense. In fact in an unusual way, he was a particularly honorable soul. Throughout
innumerable ordeals, firings, foreclosures, and relocations to other countries as the bill
collectors closed in, he never lost his sense of humor . . . and never stopped being a
superb if unconventional single parent. Today his two daughters are happy,
accomplished young women who love and miss their dad even more than Sue and I do.
Dan was my daughters godfather, and he might as well have been my sons. He was
pretty terrible about things like remembering their birthdays or formally sponsoring their
faith, but they both always adored him and are grateful to carry his memory.
Im getting lost here in all the things I want you to know about Dan - the prayer he
proudly wrote to commemorate his commission in the army - the joy he got from lending
his beautiful tenor voice to the choir of the American Cathedral in Paris - but I think its
past time to leave his biography to move on to what his character might say not only
about his unlikely sainthood but all saints.
So let me start with the difficult to grasp concept so absolutely central to our faith - life
after death. There are countless different ways of defining saints, but perhaps the one
consistent characteristic of everyones notion is that they live on. Saints are the
descendants of the resurrection. Whether or not we believe that theyre embodied in a
place called heaven, their very appellation as saints ensures that they live on in our

hearts and minds . . . in our hopes, our longing . . . our wonder at the mysteries of
a boundless creation. Ive turned to the memory of my friend Dan today because more
than anyone, more than my long deceased mother and father, more than the great
figures who Ive been blessed to have touched my life, people who embody the virtuous
and godly living the Collect for All Saints Day evokes . . . more than anyone else,
Dan has etched himself forever into my memory. More than anyone, I hope some day to
be reunited with him. Sometimes the sense of imagining the things I want to tell him, or
what hed likely say to me, is palpable. Maybe something like that hope is where the
whole idea of praying to God through the intercession of a saint originates.
Speaking of God, what about the religious dimension of sainthood? Are saints by
definition religious? If so, Im happy to say that I think Dan may still squeak under the
wire. He was at least sometimes an enthusiastic church goer, as good an Episcopalian
as many others - just like any number of people we know, perhaps just like some of us.
But when we think of the communion of saints, when we think of all saints, are we
thinking only of Christians? If we are, that would disqualify many of our hall of fame
saints like Mary and Peter and the rest of the disciples, since they were all Jewish - and
it would equally disqualify all the prophets from John the Baptist back to every other
hero of the Old Testament.
And what about other people whose Godliness and virtuous living apparently meets the
standards of inspirational figures like St. Francis or martyrs like Dietrich Bonhoeffer or
Martin Luther King? What about Mahatma Gandhi or the Dalai Lama or even secularists
like Dag Hammerskold or Nelson Mandela or, for that matter, Albert Einstein? Do you
ever think of them as saints? My impression is that many people do . . . that
upholding strict standards of the faith may matter at the lofty levels of some hierarchies,
but for us huddled masses, saints are pretty much whoever we deem them to be.
Who or what is a saint in your estimation? Is it a good Christian now united with our
Lord in heaven? Or is it, perhaps a holy person of any stripe, an icon of spirituality who
transcends sectarian divisions? Maybe its someone less religious, less
extraordinary . . . someone whose connection with us isnt defined by an agreed upon
set of criteria but by a personal relationship. My own answer is another question - does
it matter? Cant a saint be pretty much whoever you want it to be? Youve probably
gathered by now that I think it can . . . more or less. If you want to hold up a Charles
Manson or an Osama bin Laden as a saint, we may need to have a long and perhaps
not entirely cordial conversation.

What I find appealing about the communion of saints is not unlike what I love about the
beatitudes we heard this morning. Both defy convention. Both speak to the heart as
much or more than to the head . . . to the hopes and memories and sensations that lie
deep within us. Whos in your communion of saints? Id guess that for many if not most
of you, while a historical or biblical figure may have some prominence, your most vivid
notion of sainthood intersects with those people in your life, now gone, that you most
deeply long to be reunited with.
Still, the reasons Ive held up a maddeningly unreliable, lifelong drunk as a saint springs
from the starting point that no matter who your saints may be, they, like you and I, have
feet of clay. None of us is Christ. We are in fact, from the best of us to the worst, united
in our sinfulness, our humanity, our separation from God and Godliness, even though
the degree of our separation undoubtedly varies considerably. My point here is only that,
once we liberate ourselves from any cartoonish notion of saintly perfect or near perfect
virtue, we might be liberated and enlightened by punching through some of the
traditional notions of sainthood to look both more forgivingly at the many foibles of
others (and ourselves) and more openly into the depths of our hearts, where so much of
the meaning of our lives is caught up in the relationships weve had and cherished.
As with just about everything else connected with our faith, and in fact just about
everything else that truly matters in life, the bottom line about All Saints has everything
to do with love. Love is what binds us, unites us, each to the other, and the living to the
dead.
Amen.