Saints and the (not-so) Faithful Departed

Warning: what follows really rambles and may never settle down in a reasoned direction!!

Well, Saturday I did get going on tidying my bedroom and kitchen, and finished doing laundry. It was truly satisfying.

Saturday was the feast of All Saints. In the more traditional churches, there's a distinction between All Saints and All Souls. I'm not sure I'm quite comfortable with such a distinction. I guess I think that God's grace is for all, and who cares whether other human beings notice the work of grace in a person's life or not?

I mention All Saints because, in the Communion of Saints are my two grandmothers and my mother, all of whom had in this life gifts of organizing and perseverance that I may never have, unless the "continual growth in [God's] love and service" that our Anglican prayer asks for those who have died results in my acquiring them for some heavenly purpose. I felt like those august ladies prayed for and encouraged me Saturday. Each had enormous flaws. But what formidable saints they are?/will be?? when Christ's transforming power is fully evident in their lives!

So today as I am preparing to preach next Sunday I find myself continuing to think about two ends of an important spectrum along whose entirety, I expect, God is present. That is the spectrum that has "Grace showered on the undeserving" on one end, and, perhaps, "The intrinsic rewards of becoming the good person God intends" on the other. (Note: Good beyond our imagining on each end of the spectrum!)

People who make a sharp distinction between All Saints and All Souls recognize that there are, for our learning and encouragement, people whose lives were lived with such profound integrity and courage and joy and goodness that they are rightly examples for the rest of us.

People who resist the distinction between All Saints and All Souls recognize that there are dangers to imagining that anyone deserves God's grace, that it is always given freely and fully; and that we all are so utterly dependent upon the reconciling power of God's forgiveness that any distinction between a "good" person and a "bad" person is really rather trivial. For them the great divide is between "Redeemer" and "Redeemed".

This may sound like a line of thought that pertains to last Sunday's lessons. But I think that the reading for next Sunday, about the Sensible and Silly Girls, begs for us to consider that same spectrum. One the one hand, there are behaviors that amount to ignoring what's inevitably coming; and those behaviors are foolish or silly. And there are behaviors that amount to being sensibly prepared. There are three parables in Matthew 25, and I think they're mutually reinforcing. The third parable, the one about the sheep and the goats, makes it clear that there are behaviors resulting from compassion and a vision of being able change the plight of the hungry, thirsty, sick, and imprisoned. These behaviors are praiseworthy. Yet People don't do it because they think God will like it and praise them. They do it because it is the right thing.

What troubles me about each of these parables of judgment is the possibility of exclusion. The door is shut and the Silly Girls are on the outside; the buried talent is taken away and given to someone more deserving; the clueless and self-centered are not harmless, but are confined to "eternal punishment." Perhaps the possibility has to be there (even if, please God! the set of those on the outside is the null set) in order for the loveliness of grace to be apparent.

I wish we were reading these parables in the context of St. Paul's ruminations on grace in his letter to the Romans.