Embracing the Path to Sainthood

Sub Dn. Timothy Grace delivers an inspiring sermon on the feast of All Saints, exploring the transformative power of the Holy Spirit and the journey towards sainthood. He emphasizes the blessings of the new covenant and the ongoing pursuit of spiritual growth, urging believers to strive for holiness and participate in the divine life.

Transcript

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. Blessed feast of all saints. Today we look at some lessons that we derive from this celebration in the light of the commemoration of Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit from last week. We remind ourselves that the Holy Spirit brings healing to people. In other words, the Holy Spirit makes saints.

We remind ourselves that the Holy Spirit is here to make us saintly too, to heal our natures one step at a time, leading us to our eventual full salvation or our glorification. And we are going to focus today on the reading from the epistle, the reading from the book of Hebrews. We start with this list of where the righteous of the Old Testament are commemorated for their faith, and I recommend that you go back and read the whole of Hebrews 11 to get the full sense of the list. We see their amazing feats, but St. Paul says this about them: he says that all these, though well attested by their faith, did not receive what was promised since God had foreseen something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect.

They did not have what we now have, living in the time after the first coming of Christ, the life in Christ with the Holy Spirit in our hearts. We have the new covenant, Christ himself. We have the Holy Spirit that has been poured into our very hearts, making us his dwelling place. We have the Eucharist, we have baptism and chrismation, and all of the sacraments. We have the revelation of the Holy Trinity.

So our first lesson today is to not take for granted the amazing blessings that God has given to us, to not take for granted the forgiveness of sins, the life of regeneration, the possibility of being united to Christ, things that holy men and women in past ages have not had. We have what they were looking forward to.

But we still have not got it all yet here in this life. We are also looking ahead. We have also not yet received the fullness. We haven't been fully saved. The world has not yet been healed. Not every knee has bowed before Christ, and not every tongue has confessed him as Lord. So, like the faithful of the Old Testament, though we experience a life of greater revelation, we share with them this: that we have also not yet received the totality of what has been promised. So what does this mean for us? It means that we keep looking ahead. We don't stop. We don't act as if we've reached some finish line. We continue to strive, knowing that the fullness is still before us.

It means that we don't get too caught up in the earthly details of our life. Think of the things that have occupied your mind and your time, that have caused you worry and anxiety over this past week or in recent times. Which of these things have had eternal significance and which are merely temporal, merely the things of this life?

So we live in the reality of a paradox that can be summed up in this succinct phrase: now but not yet. Because here's the thing: even though we cannot achieve the fullness, there is much that we can lay hold of in this life. The whole reality of saints in the Orthodox Church is that they, in this life, have laid hold of the things that most of us will only be able to get in the next life. This is where we see the Orthodox view of salvation as participation in the divine life of the Trinity, theosis or divinization.

This is something that we will share in the next life, but we don't believe in a hard divide between this life and the next. Rather, the reality of the kingdom does begin here. It bleeds into this life now, and this is why we start many of our services with the exclamation, "Blessed is the kingdom of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." The saints, therefore, are a kind of a witness to future realities or a sort of first fruits of coming blessings for those who are faithful to the Lord.

One of these accessible aspects that they achieve in this life is a state or a stage of theosis that we call dispassion. They have reached a place where the personal sins or the passions are not active in them. They have become a full human being. They are no longer in the red, so to speak. There is no lack, there is nothing missing, there is no hate, there is no pride, no ego, no insecurity, no love of money, no lust, no greed, no hidden vices. They are healed. All has been brought into subjection to Christ.

In the words of the Romanian nun Mother Siluana, they have no subconscious, they have no issues. Now, we find this hard to believe in the West because we are so used to hearing of our church or political leaders or figureheads fall into some or other sin or show us their human side. What a great thing it was for the Protestant church when it threw out the saints. Suddenly all their role models were only human rather than the human joined with the divine.

Can you imagine if our leaders and our politicians were actually dispassionate, and rather than self-interested, duplicitous, cowardly behaviors, we had nobility, courage, integrity? Imagine if our singers, our actors, our celebrities were actually dispassionate, rather than addictions and greed and vanity and lust, we had humility, generosity, self-restraint, and commitment to one marriage partner. Whether or not people are religious, we would all agree that it is actually best to have dispassionate people as our guides and our role models.

This is what we have in the Orthodox Church. The saints are our guides, they are our role models. We need people to show us how to live this kind of life and to remind us that this kind of life is in fact possible. It is in fact possible to live this type of life in the world now.

From this place of dispassion, the saints still make progress, but this progress is now in the green, so to speak. There is no longer any lack to make up; there is just more and more of God to experience onto eternity, onto the next life, onto further stages of divinization with no end.

Sometimes the saints lay hold of the visible effects of this divine life in this life too, proceeding beyond just this stage of having the passions quietened in them. This is when we see the saints fully cooperating with the Holy Spirit in their lives, healing people, raising the dead, foretelling the future, being able to read people's thoughts. These are things that we see Christ and the apostles do, so it's no wonder to us Orthodox when we see the saints do them too.

There are many instances in the lives of the saints. I think of St. Porphyrios, who, when he wanted to build a monastery, could sense in his spirit that there was water under the ground, so he was able to point out an exact location for a monastery to be built to access the water. I think of St. Simeon the New Theologian, who on a number of occasions was bathed in the uncreated light of Tabor, just like Christ in the transfiguration. I think of St. John of Kronstadt raising a dead child. I think of St. Mary of Egypt levitating off the ground as she prays, or this story from St. Paisios, one of my favorites from his biography, who, when a young man studying to be a priest came to visit him in his hut on Mount Athos, it was winter and there was snow. The elder, St. Paisios, realized that he had no food or drink to offer this young man in hospitality, so he grabs a handful of snow and forms it into a snowball. He hands it to this young man, and when the young man looks at what he's given, the snow has been turned into Turkish delight.

Or maybe since we're dealing with a Greek saint here, we should call it Greek delight or maybe Byzantine delight. This is just like Christ feeding the multitudes, isn't it? Miraculously, he is given this lucumi, I believe they call it in Greek, this sweet. It's kind of a touching story, but we see the saints live out this life in Christ where miracles are commonplace and where they are doing exactly what Christ did in his earthly ministry, things that the righteous of the Old Testament looked forward to.

What does this mean for us then? St. Paul in his writings from the book of Hebrews ends with this concluding statement: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfector of our faith."

Let's unpack these lines. We can access the beginning of this life of theosis here now too, and we do this firstly by laying aside every weight and sin which clings so closely. This is the first step, and this is what the church fathers say, that purification is the first thing that we do, looking closely to ourselves with ascetic effort, with fasting, with prayer, with repentance, with humility.

The next thing here is to run with perseverance. We understand that the spiritual life and making progress in the spiritual life is one where we put in effort over a prolonged period of time with much patience and much striving. This is our part, this is our part of the bargain. Then we see what Christ's part of the bargain is, where St. Paul says we look to Jesus, the pioneer and perfector of our faith. Firstly, Jesus is the pioneer. He's the one who's done it before. He's made the path. He's healed the connection between humanity and God, so he is our pioneer. He is also the perfector, so by the Holy Spirit, he will perfect this work in us, and it will be him who is actually bringing about the results, leading us further on this journey to theosis.

To finish up, at the end of the novel "The Power and the Glory" by the English writer Graham Greene, the main character, who is a priest persecuted in the anti-clerical purges of Mexico of the early 20th century, reflects just before he is executed at the end of the book that at the end there was only one thing that counted: to be a saint.

At the end for us, there is only one thing that counts too, and that is to be saints, to fulfill our destiny in Christ, to have our natures healed. We see today the delicate balance that we must keep in mind, that though this life is not the end and Christ's kingdom is not of this earth, we can still lay hold of his saving power to bring blessings to all of those around us and the entire created order in this life.

With the apostles' fast starting tomorrow, may God help us to focus on purifying ourselves, laying aside the sin that clings so closely by his grace, that we may attract the presence of the Holy Spirit to heal us. Christ is wondrous in his saints. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.