All Saints Sunday Year B

And the world will be a better place, for you and me, just wait and see.   Put a little love in your heart.

Every time I stood in the pulpit on All Saints Sunday, I felt a bit like the announcer on that Television Show of many years ago who used to say, THIS IS YOUR LIFE.

The feast of All Saints really is just as much about your life as it is about any other. It’s the feast of All Saints, not just a few saints.

You may have heard the definition of a saint given by a little girl who attended Grace Cathedral for worship every Sunday. Many of the Cathedral’s huge and colorful, stained-glass windows show the pictures of the heroes of the faith, and all of those calendar saints are lit in bright colors when the Sunday morning sun shines through them. The little girl didn’t understand everything that was going on in the liturgy, but she loved to look at those windows.

One All Saints Sunday, while on their way home from the cathedral, her mother asked her if she knew what a saint was. The little girl quickly answered:

Oh Yes, saints are people who let the light shine through.

I’ve always liked that definition because it means all of us can be saints. God can let the light shine through just about anybody. Whether you’re a picture perfect, creed-reciting Christian or a doubting Thomas, hear the words of our Lord Jesus Christ who said, YOU DID NOT CHOOSE ME, I CHOSE YOU!

Now the usual course for a sermon on All Saints Sunday, is to move into a dissertation on all those terrific heroes of the faith for whom chapters have been written in the Lives of the Saints. You know, those spiritual, over-achievers who somehow manage to conquer their humanness by living in some hole in the desert, or who managed to get stretched on the rack, or sent to the tower for stubbornly clinging to their beliefs. They deserve their red-letter days on the calendar, each of them! 

But my dear friends in Christ, most of our saintly people aren’t found in the Bible, or in Fox’s Book of Martyrs, or in the Episcopal book of Lesser Feasts and Fasts. Most of them don’t have their names printed on any calendar. There’s a hymn in our hymnal, that will be sung in many churches on All Saints. I’ll bet most of you are familiar with it. I think it puts what I’m trying to say here into perspective:

They lived not only in ages past, there are hundreds of thousands still.  The world is bright with the joyous saints who love to do Jesus’ will.

Every person anywhere in the world has the ability to reflect God’s light for others to see; each of them has the ability to do what saints do best!  Augustine once said, Love God, and then do as you please. He could say that because essentially loving your neighbor and loving God are inseparable.

One All Saints Sunday in a parish where I served, my congregation was just certain that I was one hamburger short of a happy meal when I asked the contemporary choir to sing, Put a Little Love in Your Heart as the Gospel Hymn.

How much love?  Just a LITTLE love. That should be GOOD NEWS for all of us. We don’t necessarily have to have the scary BIG love of a Francis of Assisi or a Theresa of Calcutta. Listen to that one-time top 40 ditty, There’s good theology in there:  

Think of your fellow man. Lend them a helping hand; put a little love in your heart.

If you want the world to know, we won’t let hatred grow; put a little love in your heart.

And the world will be a better place, for you and me, just wait and see.   Put a little love in your heart.

I am guessing each of you can remember a time or times when your mom would have been proud of you; when you may have even surprised yourself because you had every right to get mad, but something came over you, a moment when you made a decision to let God’s light shine through you, and it made a difference.

It wasn’t a situation that called you to solve world hunger, but Just to put a LITTLE love in your heart. And it’s the kind of thing that practice makes perfect!

Some time ago, I spent a long time trying to locate my fifth-grade teacher: Sister Mary Peyton. She was an energetic nun, probably in her twenties back then. I was one of those students who watched the clock until 3 p.m. when I could get home to play baseball in the street with my friends.   I rarely paid much attention to homework.

Most of my teachers had to swallow deeply trying to say anything positive about me, and usually it didn’t work. Sister Peyton always found a way to compliment me.  She gave me extra attention and even had me do my evening homework in the narthex of the convent one night when I was really behind, coming out, every once in a while, to check on my progress and offer me a little help.

Sr. Peyton always had a LITTLE LOVE IN HER HEART.

Some years ago, I tried to locate her, just to say thank you. I contacted the Los Angeles diocese, and the best I could get was,

We vaguely remember her, but don’t have a clue where she is now.

You see, Sr. Peyton will never have media attention or her name in the back of the Prayer Book.  Hardly anyone remembers her except perhaps a few children, now adults, whose lives were changed by that LITTLE love in her heart.

And one was a teacher, and one was a mother, and one was a father, and one was a brother or a sister or friend. Most of them don’t have their images etched in stained glass. Instead, most of their faces are found in fading family picture albums and old church pictorial directories, or in school Year Books and inside lockets worn over the heart.

Most of the names of saints aren’t printed in the index of the Dictionary of the Saints. No… They are printed in contact lists, telephone books and church rosters, and some are carved into headstones and grave markers.

And you can meet them in school, or in lanes or at sea, in church or in trains, or in shops or at tea, for the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too.