Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon: In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Happy feast day to all of you: the feast of All Saints, which is the patronal feast of this parish. 26 years ago before we had acquired this building and we were meeting—they called it the catacombs, I believe.

Man: Well, we have it… [Laughter]

Fr. Pat: Oh, I remember it well. I called and asked Fr. Nick Dahdal if I could come and attend your reception into the holy Church. He wanted to know who I was. I told him. “You say you’re an Antiochian priest?” “Yes.” Obvious he had never heard of me. [Laughter] I just… I’d been ordained I think the previous year. And I could pages turning; I could hear it over the phone: pages turning. He had looked me up in the directory to see if I was faking it. [Laughter] Then he says, “Yes, you may certainly come. I would like for you to help me do the chrismations.” And I did that. That was 26 years ago on this feast.

How many of you were in that group? May I have a show of hands? See how few? See how few. Everybody else has died. [Laughter] And let that be a lesson for you. [Laughter]

So this feast is always very special. Following a tradition which, as far as I can see, doesn’t go quite as far back as Moses, but it goes at least to Joshua. On this feast we always have an ice cream social. [Laughter]

The gospel at matins this morning was the great commission; at the end of Matthew: “Go forth and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” which is what we just did. We baptized them. We baptized in the Christian Church—well, we’ll talk about that in a separate context. But you saw, for those of you who haven’t seen one before, you saw an Orthodox baptism. Now, sometimes the people getting baptized are a little bit older than Elijah Michael. And, let’s see. You must have weighed at least 150 pounds when I baptized you, and we did it another… You wouldn’t have fit in that thing. [Laughter]

And one of my favorite photographs is right before I baptized you, Annie; that’s one of my favorite photographs. I’m kneeling down beside the baptistry and you’re in the baptistry and I had my arm around you, and I’m explaining to you that I’m not going to drown you. [Laughter] And the reason I like that photograph is that our eyes are locked, and for me that was the transmission of the faith: your receiving the faith, the grace that was given to me by the laying-on of hands that goes back to the apostles, in this one unbroken glance. And you were baptized. That’s one of my favorite photographs, besides the several pictures of my wife. [Laughter]

So let’s talk about holiness this morning, beloved; that’s what sanctus means: saint. I want to talk this morning about holiness as gift, perfection, and struggle. First of all, as gift. When we describe the Church as holy, as it goes in the Creed which we recited this morning and we’re going to recite again, when we describe the Church as holy, it’s right after describing the Church as one: “I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.” And I wonder about the word order. I’m wondering if the oneness of the Church is not the font and source of the holiness of the Church, because the font of the Church is the Messiah, Jesus; and God sent into this world his eternal Son who became flesh for us. There are so many mentions of that in the prayers of baptism.

We say to Christ the Lord, as we did this morning in the great doxology, “Thou alone art holy. Thou alone art holy.” The Messiah is man’s channel to holiness, because only he—only he—fulfills the injunction: “Thou shalt be holy, for the Lord thy God is holy.” He’s the only one who’s ever completely fulfilled that injunction. “Thou shalt be holy, for the Lord thy God is holy.” And remember how Jesus changes the words slightly, but they’re still essentially the same, in the Sermon on the Mount: “Thou shalt be holy, for thy Father in heaven is holy.”

Holiness is a gift. We receive holiness as a gift from God, received by our communion with Jesus Christ. Holiness is not merely moral improvement. The Dalai Lama has sort of taken on the title that’s normally reserved for the bishop of Rome: “Your Holiness.” Normally and traditionally that title’s reserved for the bishop of Rome, whose return to the Orthodox Church we eagerly await. He’s taken that on, but it has no connotation of holiness, because the only source of holiness is Christ our Lord. Holiness is not mere moral improvement. It is ontological, a psychological transformation in the Holy Spirit.

Holiness does not mean that we live merely differently. It means that we have a different principle of life. Holiness is not at root a lifestyle; it is a life. Consequently, holiness is first of all a gift from God. How do we get it? We get it by observing what we spoke about two weeks ago, the tabernacle, that ark of the covenant, which is Christ our Lord, that ark of the covenant which is the middle of the Church—remember, all Israel in the book of Numbers marches around toward the Holy Land, marches around the presence of God: the tribe of Judah, notice, always to the east; the tribe of Judah to the east. There’s a special reason for that.

We draw our holiness from the mystery that is at the center of the Church. We draw it from our handling of the holy things. Baptism: that was a holy thing we did this morning, a very holy thing. The anointing, in a little bit the holy Communion, the sacred Scriptures to God’s living word within us. So many things [that] are handed to the Christians are holy. When the Christian partakes of them, he either becomes holy by touching them or he defiles himself by touching them. Notice that the sternest warning that Paul ever gives to any Christians is in 1 Corinthians: “Be extremely careful,” he says, “when you approach to take the holy Communion, because if you do so in the wrong way, you eat and drink damnation to yourself.” It’s a holy thing. It’s alive. It’s vital. It’s full of the divine energies.

We constantly touch holy things. In the Creed we say that we believe in the koinonia hagion, best translated into our English as the communion of the saints. And that’s a worthy translation, but it’s not clear, because the masculine and the neuter genitive plural are identical. Plenty of the Fathers of the Church thought that meant the communion of the holy things. That’s one of the meanings. That is how we become holy, because God gives us the faith in which we enter into communion with him, in these holy things.

Second: perfection. Now here I’m going to be relying very much on the epistle to the Hebrews. We read the section from the end of Hebrews 11 through the first four verses of chapter 12, last night at vespers, and I sure wish that more of you had been at vespers last night, I must say. When I first came here, we had 58 people in the church, and we had a larger vespers attendance than we had last night. I just mention that in passing. But last night we talked about being surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses. “The saints” means this great cloud of witnesses, not just ourselves, but those who have gone before us. Those in Hebrews are called the spirits of just men made perfect.

When we come to God, we come to Mount Zion. We have not come to Sinai; we’re not getting a law again. We’re coming to God, we’re coming to Mt. Zion; we’re coming to the temple. We worship in the third temple, who is Christ our Lord. We come to Mt. Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and we come to the spirits of the just men made perfect. When we pray, this is where we come. It’s not just me and God. That is not the way it’s portrayed in the Bible. We come to the spirits of the just men made perfect. When we pray, we enter into the presence of the throne and those who surround the throne. So in the Creed we say we believe in the koinonia hagion; we believe in the communion of the holy people, the communion of the saints.

Now, why do we—and why have Christians from the very beginning invoked the saints? Because it’s darn silly not to! Because we’re standing in their presence. It’s very bad manners to ignore them! We are already with the saints in the heavenly places. St. Paul says that: We are already with the saints in the heavenly places. We already have access to the throne and those who stand in glory around the throne. We already stand with those who cast their crowns before the throne, beside the glassy sea; we’re already there.

We venerate the saints radically because we venerate one another. There’s no way that’s going to be killed off when we die. We venerate the saints because we venerate one another as saints. The sentiments we feel toward the saints are but extensions of the love we have for one another. The holiness of the saints is of the same nature as the holiness that all of us share. In heaven and on earth, the saints are all one because of the grace of the Holy Spirit. We seek the intercession of the saints in exactly the same way that we solicit the prayers of one another.

Death does not destroy that. To take somebody off the prayer list because of the circumstance they happen to die is to grant to death an authority it does not have, and that’s why the first 1500 years of Christian history, a millennium and half, one man—one single, solitary man—challenged that experience of believers. It was an African by the name of Tertullian. I did my doctoral work on Tertullian at Southern Baptist Seminary. I tell you, I do not want with Tertullian. I don’t want to stand with Tertullian and leave out the rest of the faithful.

Point three: Let’s again go to the epistle of the Hebrews. “Pursue that holiness without which no one shall see God.” Last chapter of Hebrews. “Pursue that holiness without which no one shall see God.” We’re not going to see God unless we are holy. As we’ve already considered, holiness is an imperative. You shall be holy. You shall be holy, in both common and biblical usage. The future tense can be stronger than the imperative. If my mother told me to do something and I didn’t do it, she shifted from the imperative mode to the future tense. It went from “Clean your room” to “You will clean your room.” [Laughter] So the future can be far more powerful. Did you ever try that? [Laughter] Notice that that’s what’s used most of the time in the Decalogue: “Thou shalt not.” Over and over again: “Thou shalt not.” It doesn’t say “Don’t”: “Thou shalt not.”

Holiness, beloved, is not an extra, an optional quality that a justified person does not really need to have: He’s justified because God declared him just, but if he gets holy or not, what difference does it make? What a silly notion! Because holiness is not by nature something different from justification. Both of them are the activities of God in the soul, and so we believe internal justification—God justifies a soul—he didn’t just declare it just; he justified the soul by the gift of his Holy Spirit received in faith. Hence it is not as though eternal life were possible without holiness.

“Pursue peace with all men,” says Hebrews. “holiness, without which no man shall see God.” It is difficult to see how this could have been said more clearly: Without holiness, we shall not see the Lord. Holiness is not something superfluous to our sanctification, and holiness—holiness can be acquired very quickly—not the perfection of holiness that Hebrews talks about. How quickly can you become holy?

How quickly can the grace of God enter your soul? Well, picture yourself hanging on a cross. You’ve spent your whole life as a malefactor. You’ve been a thief. You’re dying in punishment. Your whole life has been worthless. You’ve never done a good deed in your whole life. You’ve never kept the law; you’ve never done anything. But besides you hangs Someone who’s just forgiven his enemies, prayed for his enemies. At your side is clearly a servant of God, and you put your trust in him with the flimsiest of prayers. “Jesus,” he says, “keep me in mind when you come in your kingdom.” You see, one can become a saint that fast.

“Jesus, keep me in mind when you come in your kingdom.” We call him the Good Thief. He was a very good thief. [Laughter] He has minutes to live, and reaches out and seizes hold of eternal life—stole it, stole it right out of the jaws of death. Holiness is not something superfluous to our salvation. At that very second, the thief believed in Christ because of God’s grace that poured the Holy Spirit—he did not have time to get baptized! His baptism is his death.

Hebrews tells us to pursue holiness, even though holiness is a gift, it involves a measure of striving. We come back to our text from Hebrews 12: Surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, what do we do? We lay aside every weight that does so easily beset and the sin that so easily ensnares, and we run with endurance the race that is set before us. Most of the time we know exactly what the pursuit of holiness requires of us; most of the time. Our problem is not usually ignorance; our problem is usually spiritual laziness, a certain flabbiness of spirit.

This is the reason why the Bible uses athletic vocabulary to speak of the quest for holiness—not so much football vocabulary, more like track vocabulary: running, striving, training. Maybe some wrestling, because it does talk about wrestling with people’s spirits and so forth, but notice that the Bible uses athletic vocabulary to talk about the quest of holiness. In other words, it’s difficult and it’s a challenge, but that is not what is going to make us holy. Only the activity of God can make us holy; only the outpouring of the Holy Spirit can make us God’s children. Amen.