All Saints Sunday

This weekend, we celebrate All Saints Sunday with these readings: All Saints. In preaching on this occasion before, I noted,

Saints aren’t people who get everything right. Saints aren’t people who live life without making mistakes. Saints are people, just plain old ordinary people like me and you, who do their best in their own time and their own place to follow Jesus’ teachings. So we don’t look to saints as an example of what we should do. We look through saints to see the example they followed. Saints become icons for God.

Icons are a tradition in art that has never been as popular here in the west as it is in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. In any Eastern Orthodox Church, there are icons lining the walls, like the icon cross or the icon that covers our reserved sacrament at King of Peace. The icons are not just a decoration. Icons are seen as windows. The Orthodox pray using the icons to help focus their meditation. The icons are not objects of devotion in their own right and they are certainly not idols. Icons are paintings to look through to see God. And one experiences the living God, not in the work of art, but beyond it. Orthodox Christians call icons “windows into heaven.” It is in that sense that the lives of saints are icons. Through the example of the saints, we see how the scripture took hold in another saint’s life. Through the example of saints, we learn not about the saint, but about the God the saint followed.

The full text of that sermon is here: Windows into Heaven.

In whom have you seen the light of Christ shining? Who has been a window into heaven for you? Or put differently, who have been the saints in your life?

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor